Wisconsin Public Television University Place  Ice Cube: Winterover in the South Pole  Freija Descamps  5/8/13 UP874  cc >> Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen. I work at the UW Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our other sponsors, Wisconsin Public Television, Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW Madison Science Alliance, thanks for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight's a real special event because tonight we get to hear about IceCube. It's a splendid facility at the South Pole. When I wrote speeches for the director of the National Science Foundation, I think the South Pole facilities is one of the things that he was very most proud of that the NSF had been funding, and IceCube is part of the facilities there at the South Pole. And with that, I'd like to introduce to you Jim Madsen with IceCube who will introduce our speaker. [APPLAUSE]  >> I want to welcome everyone also. 

This event is part of our efforts to reach out to the public to make you aware of some of the amazing science that's going on around the country and around the world. And so this is truly an international project. There's about 38 institutions involved, about half in the US and then we have partners in Belgium, Sweden, Germany, the UK, Switzerland, New Zealand, Australia, and Japan. I hope I didn't leave anyone out because I always will hear about that. But tonight I want to introduce our speaker. It's a real pleasure to have Dr. Freija Descamps here. She did her undergraduate and graduate work at the University at Ghent in Belgium. During that time, she had the opportunity to take four trips down to the South Pole and liked it so much as soon as she finished her PhD she went directly to a 13-month position down at the South Pole as what we refer to as a winterover for the IceCube project. Since completing that, she's gone on to a position at the University of California, Berkeley where she works on another neutrino experiment of a much smaller scale but equally exotic in the sense that she says she gets to go down about two kilometers below the surface of the Earth to get to her lab there. So it's a real pleasure to have her here, and I think you're going to really enjoy both the pictures and her descriptions of the experience of what it's like to spend almost half the year totally isolated down at the South Pole with just a few of your favorite friends. 

Right, Freija? [APPLAUSE]  >> Thank you for the introduction. I'm delighted to be here. I want to thank IceCube for inviting me back to talk about my experiences as a winterover. Here you can see a picture of the IceCube lab. That's what my life evolved around for about 13 months in 2011. I want to start with a very, I know these are text slides. Everything else is going to be pictures, but this is the actual job opening. So if you're considering applying for the position, it's important to notice a couple of words which I conveniently highlighted for you. [LAUGHTER] Before you apply for this position, you want to know it's in fact at the South Pole. And when they say South Pole, they mean the geographical South Pole at the bottom of the Earth. 

If you have a globe, that's where the pin in the bottom goes through. So it's quite isolated. And it's not just for a day; it's for 12 to 13 months. They don't actually know how long because the flights are not always on time. There's no possibility of leaving during the winter, so you can't go home. It's a small community. So Jim said your closest friends, but you don't get to pick them. Something to consider. You also have to train. It's not only taking care of IceCube. 

A large part of your job is also being part of the team at the South Pole. You have to be part of the trauma team, of the fire response team. We don't have any firefighters. We all have to do it ourselves. So you get trained for that. You have to help in the kitchen, do cleaning, and on top of that, if you do decide, after you know all this, to apply, it's not up to you. You'll go through some physical and psychological testing before they actually hire you. And it's maybe a bit bizarre, but I decided to do this, and I just passed the testing which is probably even more bizarre. And so I'll start, kind of the talk is about the experience. If you are considering doing it, then there's some things you might want to know. 

So, here we go. Your schedule. So this is my schedule. It varies but roughly what happens is IceCube sends you a congratulations email, you've got the job, you're supposed to show up in Madison for some training to get familiar with the detector, with the computers. So there's about two-three months training. Then they send you to fire school, which is also trauma team school, and that's also where you get to meet the rest of the team. You get to work in team building exercises, and go through the psychological testing right there, in Denver for me. And then they ship you off to McMurdo. McMurdo is the first step. A while after that, you'll arrive at the South Pole. 

I'm going to discuss all of this in more detail. But as you see, I arrived at the South Pole November 2nd of 2010, and I left November 12th. There is a small section of R&R in New Zealand in between so don't feel too bad. So, let's look at a map. I did a lot of traveling for this job. The first thing was the winterover training in Madison. Oh, and I forgot to mention one thing. There's always two IceCube winterovers. So I present to you my dear friend and colleague Jens Dreyer, who was also elected to be the IceCube winterover in 2011. And this is us here in Madison with some of the IceCube test systems. 

And we're looking very confident. This is the office that we had in Madison, downtown center. This is me massacring a server. And we also enjoyed the lake, and we did a lot of sailing while we were here. After that, they sent us to Denver, Colorado, to do the ERT, emergency response team training. So, as I said, there's no firefighters. So the firefighters in the station are actual people who work in the station. This is really fun. You get to go to fire school for a week. I'll show you some pictures. 

And then also trauma. So there is a doctor and a nurse, but they need help so in case of a, imagine there's a mass casualty, you need to have a team that can respond to this and know how to use the equipment. So there's a one week training of that. This is some pictures of the wilderness and Madison training. The reason why it's wilderness is we don't have access to any hospitals or any large medical facilities there, so we package each other up in this sled system that you can use outside in the snow. It consists of a sleeping bag and some insulation material. We learned how to do CPR during that training too. But my favorite was fire school. So, I had no idea how hard it is to be a firefighter, by the way. Everybody knows it's hard to be a firefighter, but putting on that gear in Denver, it was really hot and it's heavy, the gear is heavy. 

You have to breathe. Here we have our masks on. You see there. So, the top picture we're breathing through a mask. We're actually using air from a bottle. So you're breathing through that mask, you're trying to put out the fire, you're running around, running up and down the tower. It's great fun. You also get to crawl through a lot of small holes. For some reason, not necessarily something you would do in the South Pole, but it learns you how to handle the equipment. And this is us putting out a propane car fire, also not something that is helpful at the South Pole. 

[LAUGHTER] You don't have propane cars there. Great fun. So, after that, and I passed the psychological test right away. At the same time, they don't tell you if you are sane or not. They just tell you you are passed for wintering. So it might mean that you're insane enough to do it. [LAUGHTER] I never figured that one out. So after that, my home is in Belgium, so I flew back to Belgium to say goodbye to everybody. About a week, then I met Jens in Germany, and the next stop is by commercial airline you fly to New Zealand, Christchurch, where there is clothing distribution. So you don't have to bring a lot of warm gear if you have the position of winterover. 

They will give it to you. So, in Christchurch there's a big center. This is a nice picture of Christchurch. There's a big center from the United States Antarctic program called Clothing Distribution Center, and there you will get a lot of bags. If you winter, you'll get three bags. Three of those orange bags there. Some of them are outside, so you can check that out later. You maybe already tried on the big red that you can see here. And you get all the gear that you need in order to keep warm. However, this is a picture of me in the winter. 

So you see none of that is actually issued. The brown coat is issued, sorry. But then people were knitting scarves. You wear whatever people are knitting. You wear whatever is comfortable just to keep warm. And this is a picture, so when they say distribution center, they really mean it. There's a lot of people going to Antarctica every year, and these people give you the right size of coats, pants. It's quite an operation there. Very nice people. Once you got all your clothes in the bags, you have to get to Antarctica. 

And so this is where commercial flights typically don't sell tickets anymore. So the United States Antarctic Program has military flights that do these steps. The first is to get to Antarctica which is you fly from Christchurch to McMurdo, which is a station at the Antarctic coast. The reason for, there's a lot of science happening at McMurdo. There's a larger crew there, so it's a very large plane that flies there. And the plane has wheels so you can't land on snow. The wheels can land on ice. That's what they do there. They land on the Ross Ice Shelf with a C-17. This is us checking in Christchurch. 

They give you a little tag with a number. I found that interesting. And here we go. So after a small bus ride, they put you in these big C-17. It's a giant airplane. And usually engines are running by this time, so it's really quite an impressive view. Then inside, depending on which flight you're at, they sometimes put chairs, like a commercial airline, in the middle of the plane. And then some people will be sitting on the sides. And then the cargo is in the back, you can see here. No real windows. 

There's some small windows but not a lot. And then you land on the ice in McMurdo. Very strange to go from New Zealand, where it's summer typically or spring, to this ice landscape. Very beautiful. This was not a very clear day. The C-17 just parks on the ice. And people, you just step out and you're in Antarctica. And there's a bus waiting for you. So you just grab all your stuff, walk to the bus, and this is a picture of us at the bus. This is actually the crew that I wintered with. 

We all got to go down together. This is a picture of McMurdo. So that's the McMurdo Station in October. >> Is that a volcano on the right? >> No. This is not the volcano. The volcano is behind. So there's a volcano, Mount Erebus, somebody points out here, but that's not on this picture. And they have a really nice sign. People take a lot of pictures of this sign. You might have seen it before. 

So this is the bus that takes you from and to the airport, and then the McMurdo Station sign. So the volcano would be here, out of the picture. I don't have a picture of the volcano. Next, in McMurdo you have to switch planes because at the South Pole there's only snow. So you have to go to a plane that has skis. An LC-130 does the job. And here there are a couple of them standing around. So the LC-130 is a C-130 with skis. The skis, they can lift them so they can land on the ice using their wheels or they take off on the ice using their wheels. They lower the skis and then land on the snow at the South Pole. 

Or they don't lower their skis and then you have to fly back. It happens. This is us boarding the plane. It's much smaller, as you can see. Actually, you might spot me there. It's a picture of Jens'. So all of our luggage is kind of in the back or in between us, and then we're just sitting with our backs to the fuselage. A lot of people, these parkas, they're outside. You should try them on. They're so comfortable. 

You can just crawl them and sleep. A lot of people would do that. It's a three hour flight. Three hours and a half. But you shouldn't be sleeping really because if it's a clear day, you're flying over the Transantarctic Mountains, and it's an amazing view outside. It's really one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. Just the snow, the plain of snow with the tips of the mountain sticking out. Really nice. So, back to the map. This is McMurdo right here. 

This is a better projection if we're talking about Antarctica. What you do, you flew in on a C-17, landed on the ice, and then you fly with the LC-130 to the South Pole. And this is the view if you arrived at the South Pole. There's no mountains. There's no volcanoes. There's no dirt. There's no tips of mountains sticking out. It's just a giant plain of snow. And seeing this out of the plane just makes you realize how isolated it is because this is it. This is a picture of the South Pole. 

With the station, the biggest thing of course. That's the station. Then -- is one of the science labs. SPT is the South Pole Telescope. Here's another science project at the South Pole. And then here's the ICL, about 800 meters walk from the station. And drill camp was situated there in our year. And then the runway is right here. So when you go from the station to the ICL, you cross the runway. Another nice aerial view of the station. 

There's a lot of information in this, but I'll just point out a few things. The station has wings, and you can see this is kind of like the main structure and then wings going out. So these two are berthing wings. They're just all rooms with beds. And people get their own private room at the South Pole, which is important. There's also an emergency power plant in the station, and we have a very large gym. So the entire ring here is a gym and a basketball court, and it's really nice. There's also a sauna and a galley right there. The geographical South Pole, when this picture was taken, was located here. The South Pole is located on a glacier, and the glacier moves 10 meters each year. 

So it's not that the geographical South Pole is moving but we are kind of sliding next to it. So the geographical South Pole I think next year will be more around here. There's the ceremonial pole where there's flags of all the countries that signed the Antarctic Treaty. I'll just show you a few shots of the station. So you can see here the berthing wings with the emergency exits. This is looking out towards nothing really. [LAUGHTER] No really. I don't think there's anything in that direction. There's a clean area here. There's the Atmospheric Research Station hidden by the side of the station. 

Looking towards the front. So the galley would be right here. It's a really beautiful station. It's just black, and with all the white snow it's very stunning. The weather is not all that good of course. And I'll just show you a couple of shots of inside the station. It's a really modern station. Construction finished a couple of years ago. So when I was wintering, everything looked really clean and new. And there's these color codes that they use. 

I've never figured out what they mean, but it's quite stunning. I get a lot of questions about laundry. So, this is the laundromat. It's not coin operated. You can just go in, but you are restricted to one load a week because water is so scarce. At that time, we were cleaning out sheets to do the mid-winter dinner. And this is the B2 science lab where IceCube has a section there, which is my next shot right here. So, this is the IceCube area inside the B2 science lab. So this is inside the station. And this would be my desk right here. 

This is not in the IceCube lab, but inside the station we have a spot where we can work. This was my view during the summer. Unfortunately, once the sun goes down, you have to cardboard everything up so that no light escapes the station. And this is my room during the winter. So it just has a small bed. People judge the room size by the number of tiles in the ceiling. No, really. People ask, how many tiles do you have in the ceiling? [LAUGHTER] I was a four-tile person which is good. And this is because I was at the South Pole four seasons before I wintered. So it's all about how much ice time you have. 

How much experience you have. So I got an extra tile. Still not a lot of space. But it's private. It's nice to have your own space. This is an example of a less wetter day. So it can be overcast at the South Pole. Looking towards the ICL in summer. So, when we arrived, this is me right there and Jens, when we arrived in November, we were, of course, relieving the two winterovers that were there for 13 months before us. So this is Ralph and Emmanuel were waiting there for us. 

We would spend two weeks just talking about the detector and handing over everything. And this picture was taken right before they left. So right before they went into the plane, and they left us behind. So it was just Jens and me having control of the full detector. And I swear they were just in the air and we had a major IceCube breakdown. [LAUGHTER] However, before that, sorry timing-wise, but this is a picture of Ralph and Emmanuel leading us towards the IceCube lab to go and look at the servers and everything. It was really bad weather that day. One thing during this, there's a lot of things to say about summering too, but I wanted to point out that being a winterover, in the summer you get a lot of activities that you can do, that people allow you to do. For example, park the plane, which is one of the favorite things to do. We had sign-up lists and everything. 

[LAUGHTER] It's literally, they let you park the plane which is quite stressful, but they give you this little 20-minute, this is how you do it. So this plane can come further and then stop. So this is me saying stop because this doesn't look close but I was like... [LAUGHTER] Christy, one of our co-winterovers, had this nice, beautiful cardboard hearts cut out for the LC-130 crew. This gives you the situations of the LC-130's landing. I don't know if they can actually see us, but it's a lot of fun. Jens on a Ski-Doo driving towards the station. A little bit more about what are the duties if you winterover for IceCube. They always tell us, keep the detector running, keep the detector running, but a lot of people also told us be safe, that's number one. So if it's too bad weather outside, you don't have to go to the lab if you think you might get hurt. 

So priority number one is stay safe, and then priority number two is keep IceCube safe. This means if we have to shut down the detector to save the equipment, that's what we're going to do even if we lose data. We want to save the equipment. And the third one is keep IceCube running. We want to have data. Another big part of our work was outreach. During our winter, we would give tours in the ICL. People would come from the station and look at what we're doing there. We would have an event display running outside, you've seen that, where you can see the neutrino events in the detector. Some more pictures of us working. 

I just want to prove that we were actually doing work, not just Ski-Dooing around and playing in snow. So these are our data tapes. A lot of the work was getting that cabinet in order that we understood. Unhooking some cables on the servers. So the servers are in racks and most of the server failures that I had were either the top one or the bottom one. Nothing really at comfortable levels. A season that I, the summer before I wintered was the summer that IceCube finished construction. So we were there for that too. And I just want to show you this picture of the very last DOM that went into the ice. And usually there's maybe five or six people in this area, but for that very last DOM, the whole place is just packed. 

And people signed their names. [LAUGHTER] Good luck. They can spot a name that you might know. And then before you know it, you're busy all summer and there's lots of IceCube upgrades that have to happen and you get very familiar with the detector and then suddenly it gets really cold and the LC-130s can no longer land safely. So this is when they have the last LC-130. And this is it. You're standing there, you're saying the next six months or seven months, that's it. These are the people that are going to stay behind, and it's a great feeling because the summer was so busy. It's sort of like finally I can just rest. But then you're also like, wow, this is actually happening. 

Literally everybody came outside to wave to that last plane. So that was a nice moment. And then keep up with the work, but you can see that sun just going lower and lower on the horizon. And the way I would notice is the shadows would get so long of the ICL. Really very long shadows. You get really nice effects with the sun behind the station but also very bad days. The station would just frost up. Everything would get frosty. At the time, we could still run these machines, but once it gets colder, literally the only sure way of moving around is your own feet. There's emergency vehicles but there's really no assurance. 

This is the sun going down. You can see the ICL right there. And then the sun goes down for, like, days and days and days. She's going down but then there's atmospheric disturbances and then there she is again and down again. And so we had this big, everybody was trying to get the green flash. So I think the whole station was trying to take thousands of pictures. This is an example of a picture that you might say, okay, that's the green flash right there. And then the sun is gone. And you get this little bit of light at the horizon. This is drill camp right here, seen from the ICL. 

But then, no denying it, it gets really dark. And nighttime is there. But then you have the moon, and the moon is really bright too. So when the moon is up, I could see the station from the ICL no problem. When the moon's down, you can't really see the station from the ICL. So this is, the contrast is not really good, but you can see here a picture of the ICL in the winter just by moonlight. Jens is taking the exact same picture that I'm taking. Sometimes we would use red lights for exits. So these are two examples. The top one is the ICL really frosted over. 

This was like in August. So just a lot of frost on the ICL. And the bottom one is the station. You can recognize the berthing wings right there. It's the view you would have with the red emergency lights. And then, can you see this? It's right there. One day in April I was walking back from the ICL to the station and I saw and aurora, my very first one, and it's one of the reasons why I wintered. I was so excited, and this is the picture I took. It's a really bad picture because I had no idea how to take that picture. But it's the very first aurora that I saw, so I was super excited. 

We have an aurora channel on our radios, so I could just call in and be like, I see an aurora. And then people come out and try to take pictures. But it does get better. So this is a couple of days later. And then just beautiful auroras that we saw in my winter. And, again, the radio channel would go off and I would just grab my camera, run outside, and try to take pictures if I wasn't working. Everything would be set up and my tripod ready to go. So you get shots where you can see the red lights from the station. This is quite a long exposure, the station against the back light of an aurora. This is a picture of Jens'. 

Very bright auroras really. Sometimes I would be walking and the snow would just be green, like this green glow. Very bright. Not quite as bright as the moon. And then, before you know it, it's mid-winter. There's a big celebration because mid-winter means the sun is coming back. It reached its deepest point and now the sun is going to come back. So traditionally, every station in Antarctica that is wintering takes a mid-winter picture, and we send each other mid-winter greetings to wish each other the best winter. So this is our mid-winter greeting picture. That's me right there Unfortunately, in our winter we had an emergency air drop. 

Somebody needed some medication that we didn't have. That's not a big problem because a C-17 can fly over and drop packages on parachutes. This is what happened. We trained for this in the summer, so we were all ready to do it. The way you do that is by putting a lot of burn barrels outside. And what is a burn barrel? It's a barrel filled with fuel that you light. I think this is Jens lighting a barrel right here. This is one of the packages after it dropped. So it gets dropped by parachute. The actual package with the medication was about this big, but the parachute needs a certain amount weight, and they pack weight using mail. 

Let me point out a very nice shot by Robert where you can see the C-17 flying over. Some more shots. Let's get to the important part. Oranges. [LAUGHTER] That C-17 crew went in Christchurch to a store and bought nets of oranges because they were like I'll just put whatever in there to get the weight, but these people know. [LAUGHTER] And they were very nice, and  they packed the weight with oranges. So we all got to have half an orange. That's my half. This is an actual picture of the half that I ate. [LAUGHTER] And I didn't only eat it, I was like sniffing it and oh, it's so good. 

That was great. And we had the medication, and everything went fine after that. Talking about food, this was a station engineer, and he was very much into making pizzas. So we had this whole pizza-making team. You can see him here on our pizza delivery bike. [LAUGHTER] Delivering pizzas in the gym. So this doesn't require you to go outside the station. It just requires you to bike from the galley, that's one side, to the gym on the other side. It's a lot of fun. He was abiding by regulations right here. 

The helmet. And that's the pizza team. So it was him and then just girls. So we'd call it Five and One Pizza, five girls and one guy pizza. [LAUGHTER] And in a station where there's 14 women out of 49 winterovers, I don't think I mentioned this. We were 49. So this is quite a bizarre ratio. And we would make pizzas typically on Sunday and watch a movie in the gym. Talking about Sunday cooking, Sunday cooking, there's no, the galley, the cooks are not cooking on Sunday. It's their day off. 

So they would just let people cook. And the rule is if you cook on Sunday, you have to cook for everybody. And I knew this beforehand, so we would buy stuff in Christchurch, ship it to us, and then keep it for somewhere in the winter and make some kind of special dessert. And this is an example of Jens and myself making crepes. And so banana and Nutella. Does anybody know that? It's really good. It's really good. So we served the entire station crepes. Another big occasion was the Fourth of July celebration. There's boxes of decoration in the station for every single event that you can think of. 

So "let freedom ring," "happy Fourth of July," and in that occasion we wanted to make an American flag made out of cupcakes. [LAUGHTER] Don't judge. [LAUGHTER] This is hard because we didn't have food coloring. So the blue coloring came from some kind of berry juice that we had. The red was cherry juice that we used to do the red coloring. So I don't think this is too bad. Somebody sent me those star decorations. How cool is that? They were delicious. They didn't look too good, but they were delicious. We did have a greenhouse. 

So, even though the cooks worked mainly with canned food and frozen food, there is a greenhouse that produces lettuce and kale and cucumbers and tomatoes, but also, and we were most interested in this, tiny strawberries. These are plants that are supposed to produce giant strawberries. And this is a strawberry example. [LAUGHTER] This is everybody getting super excited about the strawberry. She's holding the strawberry and people are taking pictures. And then just walking in the greenhouse and looking at the plants and the flowers was really nice because outside you don't have any vegetation or life. So it's really good. Something else that we did for fun. There's a winter film festival each year. So just like every station sends each other greeting cards in the mid-winter, in August they send each other little videos that they make in the station. 

And it's a competition, it's a festival. This was really a station effort where we said together, and we're like, we need to make this movie. We decided to go for a horror movie where IceCube has the main role, really. Attack of the Killer DOM, and DOM is a digital optical module in IceCube. So this is a shot of Jens and -- while taking the movie. So the movie asks: what if IceCube becomes self-aware and decides that humanity is inefficient? [LAUGHTER] We took a lot of shots outside, in the generator plant, it was really an occasion to just show everybody the whole station. So, kill all humans. [LAUGHTER] This is me. I'm the first death, dying in the ICL. [LAUGHTER] She electrocutes me. 

That's very ungrateful. I also talked about station duties. These are two examples. So there's dish pit duty. So typically every month you would be signed up for dish pit duty. And this means literally doing the dishes. And then also there was a cleaning schedule where people would clean the corridors in teams, and it was always fun or not so fun. Talking about outreach, the top two pictures show the day that we started taking data with IC-86, and that was a big event. So we invited the entire station over to the B2 lounge, which is in the station. We had drinks and snacks, and they were all there while Jens and myself, together, pushed the enter button to start data taking. 

It went well, surprisingly. And this is a picture of the Sweden cam that we showed in the IceCube lab. People would visit and look at those pictures. We also had some radio interviews that we would do while at the South Pole talking about how things are going. But then, before you know it really, you start noticing this light at the horizon. At first you're like, oh, it's the moon coming out, but it really is the sun coming back. And a little bit annoying because it starts messing with your aurora pictures pretty soon. [LAUGHTER] You're not quite thinking yet that you're going to ever leave. I think next is a few pictures about when the sun comes back. This is the flag lines. 

So these flags we would follow to go back to the station. We actually connect to over flag lines. We had kind of an angle. The reflection of the sun coming up in the windows of the station. Very frosty station after the winter. And then the same picture I showed before but now with the upcoming sun behind the ICL. Another picture of the station after the winter. As you can notice, it's kind of the same picture as before but you can no longer see the drill cam because it was mostly covered in snow at that time. And then, a plane. The first plane is not an American plane. 

It's a plane coming from a British station. It's called a Basler, and they just want to refuel. They're on their way to McMurdo, and they can't do it with the fuel they have. They come from -- which is on the other side of Antarctica, and they basically land to refuel. Two of them. And it's amazing. The whole station was just buzzing. Planes are landing today, and we were falling down. How far are they? When are they getting here? And these guys know that. They know they were the very first ones in, and they brought tons of vegetables. 

So, they open their doors and gave us vegetables and fruit and freshies, what we call them. It's really great. They were probably just trying to not have us attack them or something. They were probably a little bit afraid. I don't know. [LAUGHTER] But it worked. So we decided to give them fuel. This is us hooking everything up. So Baslers, as I said, and the strange thing is we gave them, actually, a receipt after that. So they're going to have to pay for that fuel of course. 

Two weeks later, the first LC-130. Who are all these people? First you are 50 people and then suddenly 100. It's very strange. A lot of your winter crew also leaves on the first LC-130. So suddenly you go from this isolated crew to a lot of people, and you're like, what are these people doing in my station? [LAUGHTER] They're using my bathroom. But you get over that pretty quickly. And also, this plane brought the new IceCube winterovers. This is when it gets really close. There they are. The same picture as before but  now Jens and myself leaving and Sven and Carlos arriving. 

And this is Jens and me, still very good friends after working together for a year at the South Pole, leaving. The day that we leave. So I didn't show any pictures, but you go on the LC-130, you go to McMurdo, then you get on the C-17, and then New Zealand in summer or spring. It's amazing. Just the smell of flowers, fresh avocados. You can go to the store and buy anything you want. Anything. [LAUGHTER] The candy you haven't eaten in a year. Just you have to not forget to pay because you also spent 13 months not paying for anything. [LAUGHTER] Carrots. 

My thing was carrots. Crunchy, fresh. Something that is crunchy and fresh, wow. Carrots and apples and avocados Yeah. You can still see I'm still enjoying that experience of getting back to New Zealand. Swimming. I didn't mention, but we were only allowed two-minute showers twice a week. Getting a long shower. Great. That's where I want to leave you. 

So, thank you for your attention. [APPLAUSE]