Recipe for making water at Davis

Reverse osmosis at work

This week at Davis we saw the fruits of our winter labour spring to life with the firing up of our reverse osmosis (RO) plant.

Back in October we spent many a long day pumping seawater into the then frozen station tarn, and as the summer approached, the tarn melted and now conditons are ripe for making water to ensure the incoming winter team at Davis can enjoy clean fresh drinking water. Overall the RO plant will need to desalinate nearly 1.2m litres of water (0.5 olympic swimming pools).

With just weeks to go until we handover, many expeditioners have cleaned out their rooms and packed up their effects for the voyage home. There have even been some clean cut faces seen around town, replacing the winter beards and scruffy hair-dos.

A panoramic of the melted water in the tarn with a short jetty and pipes leading in to it.
Two expeditioners standing on the frozen water with pipes and equipment
An expeditioner standing at the end of the pontoon looking at the camera
One expeditioner on a pontoon helping another who is waste deep in the water to clip the sections together
One expeditioner in a shed full of machines looking at a screen. Another is on a landline phone looking to camera.
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