AntarcticDoctor

Eh? Barring the fact that the title is a rather imperfect rhyme, what am I talking about?

You may, if you’re an avid follower of the blog (thank you kindly), remember that our meteorologist Sanki wrote a great article in one of the newsletters about interesing atmospheric phenomena here in Antarctica.  If you haven’t read that yet, then pop over to the newsletter page and look it up.  Sanki also gets special mention because I know her grandmother is a regular reader (Groete ouma!).

Parhelia, or ‘sundogs’ as they are commonly known, are bright glowing points in the daytime sky formed when the the rays of the sun are reflected by ice crystals in the atmosphere.  The same mechanism can cause beautiful rings to form (or an arc, if the sun is close to the horizon).  Depending on the size and type of the ice crystals, the common forms are 10° and 22° arcs.  Although not as striking as some of the ones I’ve been too slow to photograph, we had sundogs and an arc this evening which I was able to capture.  Oh, and yes, ouma, that is Sanki posing in the middle to blot out the sun 😉

Yes, the much-awaited August newsletter is approved and published; download or view it on the newsletter page here.  There are some great articles by  various members of the team, covering topics ranging from the Dry Valleys to our heating and ventilation system to the Aurora Australis.  Of course, there is the usual dose of good photography and light humour.  Have fun and learn something too 😉

Our pipe problem is STILL a huge issue despite the whole team putting in a very long day’s work yesterday (until around 23h00 last night) in poor conditions.  The saga continues today – I’ll write something when I get a chance.

I’ve always marvelled at how dreams can seem to be prescient; you reach a critical point in the dream, waiting, for instance, for a knock on the door, and then when the knocking comes you realise that it is in the real world, at just the right time.  I’m sure that there are perfectly good explanations regarding the comparative speed of dreams versus reality, or the temporal disjunction of recollection, but I still find it fascinating when it occurs.

This morning I was working hard in the hospital, moving briskly between the emergency department and intensive care and dealing with some very sick patients.  A rather rotund gentleman with severe fluid overload was worsening in the ICU, and I suspected that he had been misdiagnosed – although he certainly did have an element of congestive heart failure, I suspected that his kidneys were to blame for the deterioration, and had asked the nurse to start a drug infusion and ring me in the on-call room as soon as the results of the urgent blood tests were available.  I climbed into the on-call bed, wrapped the blankets in a tight cocoon and was barely asleep when the phone began to ring.  Groggy, I wondered why the air-con was making such a rumbling noise… and then realised that I wasn’t in the hospital; this was SANAE IV; there was a storm wind outside making the whole base rumble and my telephone was ringing. Read the rest of this entry »