Day 1

It's been an eventful day. Yesterday I rested all afternoon to acclimatize to the 10,000 ft elevation despite being so excited to be here. I think it payed off. The real altitude of South Pole is something like 9600 ft, but when you take the lower pressure into account, it's usually around 10,200 ft. At this altitude, there is much less oxygen, and it takes a few days for your body to get used to that.

I felt much better today, and went out to help deploy an IceCube string. My job was to help feed the signal cables down, and take a photo of each Digital Optical Module (DOM) so that we have a record of which one went where and where the cables are. The IceCube drill site is about a mile away from the Station where we are staying. We took a shuttle bus out, and came back on a sled pulled behind a snowmobile. Fun!

There was also a group photo op for decommissioning of the old South Pole Dome. That's the dome that's in all the photos. The Dome was the old station, it was almost completely buried in the snow that is accumulating every year. They have almost completely taken it apart,
with just a few panels left. We took a photo in front of it.

As if that's not enough, BBC's Sir David Attenborough is filming BBC's frozen planet. They were flying a twin otter to try to get some nice shots, and flew over the dome photo shoot. Afterwards, I saw him in the Station so I asked him how it went. He said he was glad that the weather didn't cooperate and they weren't able to get what they wanted. This meant that he *had* to stay overnight at the Station and he was excited about that. What a day!

I will need a better satellite connection to upload photos: hopefully I can do that in the next couple of days. For now, here I am in front of the ceremonial geographic South Pole. The real geographic south pole is a few meters away, and shifts every year. There is another marker there, with markers designed by the winterovers from the previous year.