After a last bout of cliffhanging suspense, we eventually boarded the plane, a Twin Otter, around 21.30 Thursday night. After a four and a half hour flight, interrupted by a complete surreal fuel stop in what seemed (and what definitely is!) the middle of nowhere, being a landing strip with a collection of Jet A1 fuel drums, we were 'delivered' to the far side of the world, being Dome C, aka Concordia station.
The sensation of infinity is almost uncomfortable, as if one could dissolve if not paying attention. The equivalent hypoxia of 4000 m above sea level is quite literally breathtaking, and one could easily suffer a Stendhalian kind of sensory overflow in this strangely empty landscape. The freezing cold (-32deg C) at our arrival was blown away by the exceedingly warm welcome. We were guided into the station, our luggage taken care of, we were fed, and repeatedly told it was entirely normal to feel light-headed, slightly dizzy and completely inadequate.
Unwritten rules at the station give you two days off upon arrival, to get acclimatized and make sure you allow for the timely detection of more severe symptoms of acute mountain sickness, beyond the 'normal' tiredness and slight headache. However, having eventually gotten the box of the experimental hardware here without opening it just seemed like suddenly putting off Christmas with a couple of days. So Eoin (who is the MD staying for the whole campaign here to perform the life science experiments, I'll get him to write a blog tomorrow, to introduce himself!) and I started quite gently with an inventory, which then evolved to a bona fide testing of all hardware and software. We encountered the expected problems, some of which we've already solved, and others which will be in a near future :-) the usual field science?
One element of the experiment wasn't foreseen, and we're still waiting for the definite answer of the technical service. One of the measurements of the protocol involves a 24hrs recording of core temperature. This is achieved through an ingestable sensor, which takes approximately 24hrs to travel through the participant's digestive system, in the meantime transmitting the temperature data to a recorder box. For obvious reasons, the sensor 'pills' are not reusable, and are thus supposed to be eliminated with the human waste. However, this being Antarctica, bathroom matters do reach beyond the usual "don't ask don't tell" policy. Indeed, human waste is incinerated here in what is very aptly called the 'incinolets'. And this of course raises the question of how the 'disposed' temperature sensors will behave in the more or less 500deg C of the incinerator. We are not exactly keen to make a name in science as the guys who blew up Concordia, and through its excrement incinerators that is! Field science it is?
