Off the back of last week’s Icy News article about the journey to Mawson so far, this week I'll give a brief insight on what station life is like.
The work day begins with a trade pre-start meeting where we get a weather update fresh from our friends at the BOM (Bureau of Meteorology), discuss any issues that have arisen and what works we have planned and coming up. We have a good safety culture on station and try our absolute best to not give our full-time doctor and a small lay surgical team, made up of our fellow expeditioners, any further work in the medical suite.
From there, the plumbers usually split off to attend to the morning daily tasks – pumping water and Warren.
We get our drinking water supply by melting a hole into the ice sheet at the back of station and lowering a copper 'melt bell' into the ice. The melt bell has hot water constantly circulating through it therefore melting the ice and forming a large cavern of water. Then through a series of valves, we start pumping water from the melt bell into the water storage tanks in the tank house building. From there the water is filtered to remove any sediment and pumped around station via the above ground pipe work network called 'site services'. At capacity, Mawson can store 210,000L of water, which is both for drinking and fire fighting, an Olympic sized swimming pool in comparison holds 2.5 million litres, luckily for us we're not swimming. We do try to conserve water where we can and strongly advise showers to be three minutes or less when required. A reliable fresh water supply has always been an issue at I'd say most, if not all stations in Antarctica. Melting ice uses a lot of energy as does reverse osmosis.
Warren is the name of the engineering company that made the incinerators that are at the stations. Davis has had an upgrade and it's called Neil, again the name of the manufacturer brand. All food waste, hydroponics waste, human solid waste (no. 2s) from field trips, medical waste, scrap timber and cardboard packaging is burnt through Warren. During summer with more people on station, we are burning every 2 - 4 days depending on how much gets delivered on the gash run (rubbish run). Part of heading to Antarctica as an expeditioner for the first time is getting used to the terminology, eg. "Take the slushy ute to do a gash run to Warren before heading to the green store to get some things for Woollies". (Take the ute with the rubbish to the incinerator, then head to the green store to get products such as toothpaste, shampoo, toilet paper etc for the storage cupboard we call Woollies) The remaining burnt ash from Warren is stored in old 200 litre drums to return to Australia for processing. There are no refunds once things enter into Warren!
Some days we don't spend the whole day in our primary role, we'll help other trades where required. We could be lucky enough to head out with the scientists to assist them, like the Auster trip I wrote about last week, or we'll be in the kitchen helping the chef on slushy. The slushy is the kitchen hand/cleaner who also gets to choose the music in the kitchen for the day. This season there is a strong country and western feel (yep both types of music) although I'm trying to impose some 90s and 2000s rock.
After work many people like to relax in the wallow (another name for relaxy area) play darts or 8-ball or show off their musical skills in the Dog Room with the instruments on station. The Dog Room houses memorabilia from a bygone era of when the huskies were here pulling sleds to explore the greater area. Harnesses, a sled, photos of the huskies in action and many other treasures are featured. The views aren't half bad either I might add. Then dinner is at 6pm! ding ding!
Darryl Seidel (Ferret, summer plumber Mawson 24/25)
