Antarctic Web Journal for Ken Mankoff 2008-07-23T19:15:39Z Ken Mankoff Copyright 2008, Ken Mankoff SPHPBLOG ANDRILL in Google Earth
The KML (download here) is a very small network access file, so load it once, save it in the Google Earth sidebar, and all updates will be immediately available to you. There is also a ChangeLog so you can see what is new. You need the latest Google Earth to run this.

This will be presented at the SCAR IASC conference in St. Petersburg, Russia, July 8-11, 2008. The abstract follows.


An ANDRILL SMS ARISE Educational Software Package: From a microscopic view of Antarctica 20 Ma to a global overview 100 years in the future

Mankoff, K. D.(1) and the SMS Science Team(2)

(1) Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Columbia University, New York, NY 10025 USA, mankoff@giss.nasa.gov.
(2) http://andrill.org/projects/sms/team.html

We present an education software product (Google Earth Layer) that allows exploration of the ANDRILL SMS project. The geospatial, micro-to-macro, and multi-layering capabilities of Google Earth are used to allow viewers to tie together concepts from a microscopic view to a global overview. The journey begins with a microscopic view of diatoms in a borehole under the sea under the ice in Antarctica, and ends with a global overview of what the climate might look like in the year 2100 as calculated by the GISS Model II GCM from EdGCM. Paleo, present, and future GCM scenarios are available for users to explore more on their own using EdGCM.]]> http://pace.edgcm.columbia.edu/index.php?entry=entry080508-070637 2008-05-08T00:00:00Z 2008-05-08T00:00:00Z Off the Ice
Unfortunately, there are also cell phones and advertisements. Traffic lights and cars. Commerce and industry.

My trip with ANDRILL is done. My work with ANDRILL is not quite done. But this blog is about ANDRILL, so I won't post much more. Future ANDRILL work that will show up here include a software release, a trip to Lincoln, NE in late January / early February, and an April trip to Tallahassee, Florida for a post-ice team meeting.

Thank you for following along on this journey. If you have questions feel free to email me. I'll host a slideshow and story time once I'm back in New York. I'll incorporate this trip into my talks on climate change. I'll post here if I ever decide to keep a journal about something else, and I'll post any remaining ANDRILL topics here.]]> http://pace.edgcm.columbia.edu/index.php?entry=entry071204-191218 2007-12-05T00:00:00Z 2007-12-05T00:00:00Z Departure the Pole, I returned to McMurdo at 3AM. Ten hours later (eat, shower, sleep, say goodbye) I leave McMurdo. Waiting at the runway, Erebus is smoking quietly behind us, rising 12,500 feet above the temporary frozen ocean on which we are standing and crazy enough to land a multi-ton plane.


While waiting, a C-130 returning from the pole flies overhead. (The toys on this continent are amazing: Helicopters and military planes and drills and robots swimming under the ice and telescope dishes cryogenically cooled to a quarter of a degree above absolute zero and much much more.)

Watching the last mountains of the continent recede behind the plane is a sad view. I will miss it here. I might return someday but I have no idea if or when.

A Glacier Tongue protruding into the breaking sea ice

My colleague, Robin, wrote a moving post about our departure here.
]]> http://pace.edgcm.columbia.edu/index.php?entry=entry071204-083115 2007-12-04T00:00:00Z 2007-12-04T00:00:00Z 12 Hours at the South Pole
Yesterday morning I woke up and boarded a C-130. This plane has skis, not wheels, and we took off from the sea ice runway at around 8AM. We landed 3 hours later at 90 degrees South latitude, 9301ft altitude. Even though the South Pole is only at 9301 feet it 'physiologically' at around 11,000 feet because there is so little atmosphere there. I felt it instantly, with a pounding heart and a racing pulse and difficulty climbing a flight of stairs.

The nothingness of the South Pole is breathtakingly beautiful. It is white and flat (except for a few structures) as far as you can see in every direction. It is more than 9,000 feet of ice under your feet, with nothing else between you and the bedrock that lies near sea level, and sometimes even below sea level.

From South Pole

I spent most of my time touring all the labs and buildings and science experiments happening there. An amazing caliber of science occurs at the South Pole. One of my favorite experiments is IceCube, an array of neutrino detectors buried in the ice. These detectors cover a space 1km x 1km x 1km (hence the name) buried with the top starting 1.4km down.

After a full afternoon of visiting the base, I ate dinner, gave my talk, waited in the South Pole International PAX Terminal for 30 minutes, and then caught a flight home to McMurdo. There were four passengers on the return flight and I got to spend most of it, including the landing, sitting in the cockpit.

It was a whirlwind 12 hour visit, 18 hour trip. It happened so fast and was so amazing and surreal and overwhelming that it is already starting to fade to a snapshot memory and feel like a dream. Fortunately I took a few hundred photos.]]> http://pace.edgcm.columbia.edu/index.php?entry=entry071203-170000 2007-12-03T00:00:00Z 2007-12-03T00:00:00Z Head, meet foot.
When I first met a penguin I thought it was an awkward animal. I'd love to see them in their liquid habitat as they are much better adapted to motion in that medium. It tuns out even on land they move quite well on their bellies, and to my surprise can do some amazing yoga poses.

I did not attempt to replicate this pose.

]]> http://pace.edgcm.columbia.edu/index.php?entry=entry071201-150925 2007-12-01T00:00:00Z 2007-12-01T00:00:00Z South Pole (Yes?) South Pole Station is still interested in having me lecture there. So, I'm now scheduled for a day trip, McMurdo to Pole Monday morning, talk Monday evening, and Pole to McMurdo Monday night landing 3AM Tuesday. My flight from McMurdo north to Christchurch, NZ is scheduled for 11AM Tuesday. If I don't make it back in time there is a flight on Friday.

I got really excited when I was supposed to go south a few days ago, but it didn't work out. Weather here is fickle. Due to my schedule and pending departure I figured it just wouldn't happen. Now it might. But the weather here is fickle. I'm going to just be honored that I even have an invitation to speak at the South Pole, and expect nothing more until I feel the wheels skis leave the ground ice.]]> http://pace.edgcm.columbia.edu/index.php?entry=entry071130-190345 2007-12-01T00:00:00Z 2007-12-01T00:00:00Z Me imitating Penguin
From Antarctica
]]> http://pace.edgcm.columbia.edu/index.php?entry=entry071130-101922 2007-11-30T00:00:00Z 2007-11-30T00:00:00Z South Pole (No!)
There are no flights until Monday, and I was supposed to give a talk on Sunday and fly back Monday and north on Tuesday. So, no South Pole for me.

I'm sad :(.]]> http://pace.edgcm.columbia.edu/index.php?entry=entry071129-224718 2007-11-30T00:00:00Z 2007-11-30T00:00:00Z Water water everywhere... Do they ever melt snow or ice for water? Then, they wouldn't need to desalinate it. Any idea how the energy required to melt ice compares with the energy needed to desalinate it?
All McMurdo water is from the sound, not from the local snow/ice. The energy for desalination v. melting is left as an exercise to the reader, but I expect a quick internet search would provide some rough numbers.

Complicating collection from local ice/snow would be the following: McMurdo does get fairly muddy and snow/ice free in the late summer. The ice runway is being moved this weekend from right in front of town to Pegasus Field, an airport a few miles farther away where the 'permanent' ice shelf is located. In a month McMurdo will be a sea port with boats docked at the edge of town. So the snow/ice would have to be transported, which cannot be done as efficiently as water transport, unless the melting plant was located out of town.

Field camps melt snow. When I was out in the field, we had to take the snow mobile a few km away to a glacier, where we would shovel snow into garbage bags and cans, drive it back to the camp, and melt it. We could not melt the ice under us because it was sea ice and tasted salty. Even the snow on the ice tasted salty. So ice melted near McMurdo (near the sea) might need to be desalinated anyway.

South Pole? They melt it all. I'm going there tomorrow (weather permitting) and here is the relevant passage from the South Pole Station Guide:
Energy requirements for heating snow and the water storage capacity at the South Pole make water a precious resource here. We are limited to TWO showers per week and TWO minutes of running water per shower. The easiest way to do this is to turn the water off while you’re soaping/shampooing, then turn the water on again to rinse.
]]> http://pace.edgcm.columbia.edu/index.php?entry=entry071129-105732 2007-11-29T00:00:00Z 2007-11-29T00:00:00Z More Videos Granite Harbor helping a seismic survey for a future drilling project, and my first month in McMurdo was working with smear slides for the diatom team to help date various depths of the core.

They aren't on YouTube yet so I cannot embed them in this page, but you can view them on the ANDRILL site.

Video #4: Selecting Where to Drill
How are scientists able to decide where to drill? Why is ANDRILL drilling again? Will there be future drilling projects? Why? What do seismic surveys look like? What can they tell us? What are gravity surveys? What do they tell us?

Video #5: Telling Time
How do scientists know which are the oldest rocks? How can they interpret the age of the rocks? How specific are these dates? Which techniques are the most effective? How have these interpretation processes changed over time?

Videos here: http://andrill.org/iceberg/videos/2007/index.html]]> http://pace.edgcm.columbia.edu/index.php?entry=entry071128-234210 2007-11-29T00:00:00Z 2007-11-29T00:00:00Z South Pole An Inconvenient Truth.

I met Al Gore almost one year ago, in January 2007, when I was trained by him to present his movie. He gave me all of the slides from the movie, several hundred more, and instructed me to help him educate people, change their behaviors, and help reduce the impacts and effects we are creating on our planet.



That meeting has led to an incredible and diverse set of circumstances. I have spoken in the U.N. General Assembly Room (twice) and to heads of international banks, spent an evening with Gwenyth Paltrow and Jade Jagger, made some new and unique friendships, and was invited to Egypt, New Zealand, Thailand, and Lincoln, Nebraska, among many other places*. My work with The Climate Project helped get me to Antarctica with ANDRILL ARISE, and now I've been invited to the South Pole.

I'm really excited to go to the Pole because it is the edge of the map. Being a computer scientist we are trained to look at "edge cases" as that is where the bugs most often occur. All sorts of strange things can happen when you approach an edge. For example, I can stand in all the different time zones at the same time. I can walk "around the Earth" so to speak too. Anyone can do that anywhere, but usually it'll take a few years and a few pairs of shoes. I can also walk North for 10m, East for 10m, South for 10m, and end up right where I started! In EdGCM the two poles require a lot of special code and cases for the software to simulate climate physics in and across those grid boxes. I can do a hand-stand, have someone take a picture, rotate the picture 180 degrees, and it'll look like I'm hanging off the bottom of the planet. Oh the possibilities! They are limitless.

* I've turned down many travel requests and instead recommended local speakers in order to reduce my travel carbon footprint (and due to time constraints and scheduling conflicts).
]]> http://pace.edgcm.columbia.edu/index.php?entry=entry071128-174125 2007-11-28T00:00:00Z 2007-11-28T00:00:00Z What a waste...
All the water we need is sucked in from the nearby McMurdo Sound and desalinated, cleaned, filtered, and then used. All the water we use is flushed down a drain somewhere, sent to the water treatment plant, cleaned, filtered, radiated, and sent back out into the sound. The wastewater outlet pipe is 1/4th of a mile from the water intake pipe, so it is a pretty safe bet that a lot of the liquid makes the trip two or more times.

What surprises me about this base is how good it is at recycling and the tiny amount of solid waste produced by 1000+ people. We fill a 4x4x4 foot box every three to four days. That is all. Left alone for a few days, tomato and other plants would start growing. Instead it is shipped back to the U.S. where it is burned or buried. It is not used as fertilizer because it has seeds from NZ in it since people fly through NZ to get here.

Until a few years ago there was no waste treatment plant, and the raw sewage was dumped into the sound. This evening I attended a science lecture on the environmental monitoring that is done around McMurdo. At this point our footprint is growing very very slowly. There is a large footprint due to behaviors between 1950 and 1975 when the base was built and grew, but there is not much increase any more.


Image courtesy of Joanna Hubbard
]]> http://pace.edgcm.columbia.edu/index.php?entry=entry071128-050940 2007-11-28T00:00:00Z 2007-11-28T00:00:00Z Werner Herzog in Antarctica Encounters at the End of the World. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a well made movie is worth a thousand pictures. If you have enjoyed reading anything on this site I urge you to see this movie when it is released.

I'll hold a screening in my apartment in NYC for anyone who wants to attend.]]> http://pace.edgcm.columbia.edu/index.php?entry=entry071125-132239 2007-11-25T00:00:00Z 2007-11-25T00:00:00Z Bananas
So, today for lunch we had a bowl of bananas to pick from, in addition to the regular fare. They cut them in half to ration them, as I guess some of the other objects on the plane were deemed more important than everyone on base having a whole banana.

Last week I got one large juicy chunk of melon (the orange kind, not the pale green kind (I always mix up the names)). I had a physical reaction to it. Censored for this blog I could say I had a religious experience, although those weren't the words I used at the time.

There are situations uniquely Antarctican, like when you see a group of people listening raptly to the description of a peach, or bargaining over an avocado. People flying down on these flights later in the season know to bring "freshies" as they are a currency here worth they weight in gold.

I long for greens.
I'd like the salad appetizer, a plate of spinach and broccoli, and a side of spinach, please.
]]> http://pace.edgcm.columbia.edu/index.php?entry=entry071123-011233 2007-11-23T00:00:00Z 2007-11-23T00:00:00Z