TRASH & STORMS
We make trash in our floating city. A lot of it gets burned in the incinerator (think napkins to broken hair ties- anything you’d normally chuck in a bin at home). But our lab waste is much trickier to manage, and we’re very careful to let absolutely nothing get into the environment. When we use bleach to clean instruments, we catch extra bleach in a big tub and the tubs get dumped into big barrels onboard. Any lab glass that may have had chemicals on it gets put into a lab glass bin that gets dumped into big containers onboard. You get the idea.
These big storage bins have to be stored very carefully and our lab technicians actually walk around the ship to inspect them every day. Containers for some chemicals are required to be stored outside since they’re flammable and others have to be stored inside since they’re dangerous if they freeze. Some chemicals have to be stored on opposite sides of the ship from one another, to make sure not even a single drop accidentally mixes with dangerous results.
All the waste that isn’t incinerated is classed as hazardous, glass, electronic, batteries, etc. Some of it gets taken to one of the US stations on the continent for processing and repackaging first. Eventually, all of it gets shipped back to the US to enter our waste streams. The whole process, from use to disposal, can take up to 2 years!
Your questions:
- “How much daylight do you have now?” The sun rises around 10:30 (WEIRD) and sets around 5:30 ship time, but it’s hard to tell because of the clouds the past few days. The thing I’ve noticed lately is the height of the sun- it feels like about 4:30pm all day long because it’s so low in the sky.
- “Is it snowing on the main deck we see in your videos?” Yes. We had snow the first day we got down here, and since then it’s gotten packed down and melted/frozen into a craggy ice layer on the bow especially. The back deck, where we do our science stuff, is heated- you can see what looks like a thin layer of ice over the whole deck, but there’s a grid of ice-free lines through it.
We’ve got some new people in the group- welcome! For info on who we are and basics about our research (to learn about Antarctic nematode worms in an area nobody studies!), read our first few messages, archived here: https://www.hollybik.com/nbb2303whatsapp-1. We’ll eventually archive all these messages on that page, but our internet is so slow right now we can’t update the website. You can follow our ship’s position live at https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/shipid:426075/zoom:13
🗑️ Virginia
Your question: “Was the storm mostly wind or was there precipitation also?” There was a lot of wind but it came with little icy snow pellets. Of all the snow we’ve had down here, only one snowfall has been thick and fluffy- the rest is icy and not great for playing in (we've tried).
Here’s what the big storm was like- we couldn’t see much during the day, but look what not seeing much means at night! The pilots, who are absolute champions, called this a "whiteout" storm. Winds were sustained around 60 mph (50 knots) and gusting higher than that.
Don't watch with earbuds in! I left you the sound of the wind howling, so you could get the full apocalypse experience.