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Homepage for the Mount Erebus Volcano Observatory. This project is run by New Mexico Tech of Socorro, NM. The core group includes Phil Kyle, Rick Aster (co-PI's), Bill McIntosh, Nelia Dunbar, and Rich Esser. Between them, this group has decades and decades of Antarctic experience. The various aspects of their Erebus work are outlined here. Members of the group do seismology, vulcanology, geochronology, geochemistry, and many other studies. There are also movies and pictures of the mountain here, as well as live video of the crater itself. Actually, the crater camera is down for the winter as of this writing...but it is generally operational during the summer months and well into the winter. But there are still some great movies of eruptions to be found on their site. My responsibilities on this project are to maintain the receiving stations and seismic data acquisition systems at McMurdo, and occasionally do work at the field sites (when helicopters are flying). The group will visit Ross Island each year and perform maintenance of the existing systems, installation of new systems, and other scientific observations. There is another link with actual real-time seismic data from the new broadband stations on the mountain here.

This is the homepage for the University of Maryland's Upper Atmosphere Physics experiments operating in Antarctica. They oversee a research program involving several institutions. At McMurdo, instruments from U. of Maryland, Augsburg College, and Bell Labs are operated. Maryland is responsible for various riometers and auroral photometers, Augsburg runs a micropulsation magnetometer, and Bell Labs runs the fluxgate magnetometer. These instruments are all located at Arrival Heights, which is a Site of Special Scientific Interest specifically set aside for delicate geophysical and astrophysical experiments like these. The overall focus of these studies is the interaction of the sun with the earth...."space weather". Magnetic field fluctuations, ionospheric disturbances, and the aurora australis are all manifestations of the sun's influence on the earth, and these phenomena are observed by this set of instruments. I spent a day at UMD with Ted Rosenberg and Dan Detrick training on their systems before coming down here. The three experiments associated with this project are probably the lowest-maintenance of all my systems. Their instruments and data recording systems work very well and do not require much attention. There are always little things to do, but so far there hasn't been anything more complicated than re-leveling a magnetometer and installing a new fan on an overheating computer! On this website is information about the science and technology involved, as well as links to recent data from the various sensors.
Biospherical Instruments of San Diego is subcontracted by Raytheon to run the NSF's UV monitoring network. This network consists of 6 stations (McMurdo, Pole, Palmer, San Diego, Barrow Alaska, and Ushuaia Argentina) which study ozone loss by measuring the intensity of solar radiation. Jim Ehramjian and Germar Bernhard are the two primary guys for these systems, and I spent a week training with them in San Diego last August. The McMurdo system is at Arrival Heights, and operates when there is a reasonable amount of solar radiation. Currently, it is in 'idle' mode for the dark winter months. Incidentally, the ozone hole this past year was unusually small and UV radiation levels at McMurdo were relatively low for most of the summer season.
As part of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, a worldwide network of sensors has been installed to detect nuclear blasts. They use four measurement techniques: seismic, infrasound, hydroacoustics, and radionuclide sampling. One of the infrasound stations is located 15 miles from McMurdo on the Ross Ice Shelf at a place called Windless Bight. It is an array of very sensitive low frequency microphones which picks up infrasound signals from up to thousands of miles away. There are many sources of infrasound - ocean storms, icebergs calving off, space shuttle launches, and yes, nuclear blasts. Even Mount Erebus is sometimes heard by this system. Various signals have recognizable signatures, especially nuclear events. The Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks has experts in the field of infrasonics, and they were awarded a contract to install and operate three infrasound systems: one at Fairbanks and two in Antarctica (a similar system is scheculed to be installed at Palmer in the coming years). This one was built in 2000-2001, and is actually the second generation infrasound system at Windless Bight (the same group had a system out there in the 70's and 80's). Dan Osborne and Buck Wilson PI's on this project, with Kay Lawson, Jay Helmericks, and John Olson also in the core group. I got to know the infrasound group during training at Fairbanks, and I worked with them during their annual site visit when they spent a month or so down here this summer. From Windless Bight, the data is transmitted back to McMurdo where it is sent out to various recipients, including the CTBT organization in Vienna. I've gone out to Windless Bight 6 times so far this year to do various tasks, and bringing a few people along from around station generally makes for a nice road trip. There is a more detailed page about Windless Bight here.
The guys at the Bartol Research Institute (part of the U. of Delaware) are involved in cosmic ray research. Among other things, they operate several permanent neutron monitor stations around the globe....including one right here at McMurdo. The McMurdo Cosmic Ray Observatory (see photo tour here) is one of the oldest, if not the oldest continuously running experiments in Antarctica. These measurements have been ongoing since 1960, and similar studies were even done during the IGY in 1957-58. I visited Delaware for a day last September and met Len Shulman and Roger Pyle, two members of the Cosray group. Len came down this year to work on the McMurdo and South Pole systems. This website has lots of good info about the neutron monitor program, and you can even see near-real-time neutron count data from McMurdo!
There are 5 separate GPS systems that I operate, and this is one of them. The Internet-Based Global Differential GPS network (or IGDG for short...don't you love embedded acronyms?) is a worldwide positioning system which uses a differential technique to get much more accurate location data than can be obtained by the raw GPS signals themselves. This info is then delivered to the network's customers over the internet in almost real time. The McMurdo site is designated MCMZ, and is located in the Radarsat building (see here). In fact, the background for my McMurdo Ground Station page shows the GPS antenna used by MCMZ. Anyway, the network is operated by JPL, and the link to the left is their site for the IGDG. Real-time monitoring for all stations, including MCMZ, is available from this page. Usually, this is an extremely low-maintenance system for the science tech to handle. However, this year I have ended up doing quite a bit of work to identify and eliminate a troublesome interference problem. As it turned out, the source of the problems was a new system that was installed near MCMZ during the summer. But it's fixed now and MCMZ is a happy GPS station again....
The MCM4 GPS station is located right next to MCMZ, and in fact they share the same antenna. However, the MCM4 system is part of another worldwide network. The GPS data from this station is sent back to the International GPS Service (IGS) and along with 357 other such sites around the world, is used to create a variety of data products for a wide range of uses. Here is the IGS homepage.
Another project run by the IGS is IGLOS: the International GLONASS Service pilot project. The GLONASS network is the Russian equivalent of the US GPS network, and by using data from both systems, greater coverage and accuracy can be obtained. However, as you might guess, the two types of satellites communicate very differently. Under the IGLOS project, the technology to track GPS and GLONASS satellites with a single receiver has been developed and demonstrated. There are two IGLOS stations in Antarctica: station CRAR in the Crary lab and station DAVR at the Australian base Davis.
This is the homepage for polar weather at the U. of Wyoming at Laramie. Terry Deshler has been running balloon launch projects at McMurdo (and the Arctic) for years. These are generally concerned with the ozone hole and chemical processes which contribute to the destruction of ozone in the polar regions. This winter, there is a multinational effort underway which involves synchronized balloon launches from 9 different Antarctic research stations. It is the biggest one ever for McMurdo, and it has required hiring a second science tech for the winter for the first time ever (this is Olivia Billett's main job here). So we're going to be launching lots and lots of these things starting in June. It is tweaky business, this balloon-launching stuff. Imagine the Long Duration Balloon process (see here), only much much smaller and much more frequent. Overall, the same concerns are present - wind speed and direction, correct payload preparation and telemetry checks, and good launch techniques. There are about 50 little things that can go wrong during a balloon launch, and we have 35-40 of them to do. But I think we're in pretty good shape....
Stanford runs an ELF/VLF radiometer project at McMurdo station (Arrival Heights). There are pics of this system on my Arrival Heights page (here), however there is no real internet page for the McMurdo system. So here is a link containing info about their other installations - primarily the similar one at Palmer Station.
The University Navstar Consortium (UNAVCO) was formerly a branch of UCAR in Boulder, but is now a separate entity. They support all sorts of GPS applications worldwide. They have the equipment, personnel, and expertise to perform just about any GPS task at any place in the world...including Antarctica. They do quite a bit here for many different projects, including biology and ecology groups, seismic and geology studies (including the Mount Erebus Volcano Observatory crew), and many others. Here is a link to UNAVCO's website. The main UNAVCO projects I support are the Differential GPS systems at McMurdo and the Dry Valleys, and the Mount Erebus GPS stations (which actually measure deformations of the mountain itself!). UNAVCO is also involved with the MCMZ/MCM4 GPS stations.
Here is the official research prospectus for the Crary Lab. The history of the facility is here, along with various details and specifications. By all accounts, it's one of the better designed buildings on station. This is in stark contrast to the new JSOC building, which is an absolute nightmare according to all parties involved in the ongoing construction saga!
This is the same thing for Arrival Heights: the official prospectus for people wishing to do research there. It's kinda neat. For my page on this hut, click here.
Ditto for the Cosray building. For a more detailed tour of Cosray, click here
After I finished the year as McMurdo science tech, a new page was made for the Italian LIDAR project. This project involves CNR (Consiglio Nazionale delle Recerche) and ISAC (Istituto di Scienze dell'Atmosfera e del Clima). The LIDAR activities themselves fall under the SAMBA project, or Strumentazione e Analisi per la Media e Bassa Atmosfera. It seems Italians like acronyms as much as Americans do! We ran the McMurdo LIDAR instrument in Crary all winter, and as it turns out, that was the last season for the old system. Marcel Snels is currently at McMurdo (Feb 2004) installing a new and improved system. Paola Massoli was at McMurdo twice during my time as scitech, for a few weeks in February and a few weeks in August 2003. There is a little power point file on this site to satisfy your burning desires to see pics of the McMurdo LIDAR scene.