Let’s start with the food. Last week at the Pole, they were frying up donuts—using a Paul Hollywood recipe from “The Great British Bake Off.” They made almost 70 (!) of them, because, you know…donuts. During the week, the IceCube detector had been fairly quiet. The winterovers take turns getting paged to deal with detector issues. But still, when the detector is quiet for most of a week and then you get paged just four short minutes before the system switches to your partner (as it did for Martin last week), you might feel a bit shortchanged. (Maybe Martin got some extra donuts for that one.)
Also last week, the winterovers made some visits to other South Pole buildings, like the Atmospheric Research Observatory (ARO), to help take ozone and other measurements, and to the Balloon Inflation Facility (BIF), also called Cryo, to haul back a Dewar, a specialized type of vacuum flask, filled with liquid nitrogen that is used in maintaining the camera domes on the station roof. The image below shows where ARO’s LIDAR beam fires into the sky from its frosty outdoor environment. The following images show Josh removing the hose from the filled Dewar and then hauling it back to the station. A full moon was out providing some lighting for the outdoor images.
