McMurdo Station is built too close to a volcano. More accurately, McMurdo Station is built too close to a large mountain. Mt. Erebus is a large and tall volcanic mountain. McMurdo Station lies to the South of this mountain, however is close enough to it that the mountain blocks all satellite connections. This is a problem when all communication with the rest of the world is done through satellites. In order to work around this issue a small communications camp was built just across the sea, called Black Island. All communications coming to/from McMurdo are sent to Black Island where they are relayed to McMurdo or up to satellites.
Black Island is a small camp. It consists of one building and a bunkhouse. Two people run the facility during the Austral summer season and it is operated remotely, from McMurdo, during the winter season. I was given the incredible chance to spend a weekend at Black Island.
I was scheduled to fly to the island on a Saturday morning. I was excited and pumped up, until I found out the trip was delayed a week. A storm had rolled into the area and most of the available helicopters on station were being put on standby to assist in a search and rescue operation taking place on the continent. A week went by and this time the weather held. I gathered up a few things to take with me and dressed up in my ECW (extreme cold weather) gear, which is mandatory to wear for almost all air travel. The helo pad is a short 10 minute walk from my dorm so I carried my things there. After arriving I checked in with helo operations and when the group was together we went through a short briefing on helo safety. We then walked out to the helicopter for our ride over to Black Island. Riding in a helicopter is WAY more fun than flying in a plane! It was a brief flight, 15 minutes, over the Ross Sea. We flew over the Pegasus Ice runway and saw the old Pegasus crash site. In 1970 a plane crashed in bad weather right near the current Pegasus Ice Runway. No one was hurt in that crash and parts of the plane are still visible, sticking out of the snow.
We approached Black Island and did a quick loop around it before landing at the camp. After hopping out of the helicopter we met our host for the weekend, Tony. He began coming down to Antarctica in 1987 and has been the camp manager at Black Island since the 90's. He was quite a character and had no trouble filling the weekend with stories of his time in Antarctica. I took a few pictures and videos of the place....enjoy!!!!
Videos = Click these lines:
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| Gary and Amy, in the helicopter |
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| Black Island facility, from the air |
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| Chillaxin' |
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| Alicia, Justin and Gary |
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| After getting back to McMurdo I saw these two skua dive bomb that guy for his food then fight each other for it.....IT. WAS. AWESOME. But sucks about the food, man. |
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