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NZ air force medevacs sick man from Antarctic

WELLINGTON, New Zealand — An American working at a U.S. scientific base on the frozen continent of Antarctica has suffered heart problems and was being evacuated to New Zealand, the New Zealand air force said Monday.

The air force was asked to help Sunday and sent a Hercules C130 airplane on the 16-hour return flight, New Zealand Sq. Ldr. Richard Beaton said in a statement. The man suffered cardiac problems at the McMurdo base and was being flown to a hospital in Christchurch, southern New Zealand, for treatment.

He had been working as part of the U.S. Antarctic Program and was in a serious but stable condition, Beaton said. The man's name and hometown were not immediately available, nor was more information about his illness.

"He needed immediate evacuation from here for treatment" but was stabilized for the flight, Raytheon Polar Services operations manager Kerry Chuck told The Associated Press by telephone from McMurdo.

Colorado-based Raytheon provides communications, logistics and other support services for the U.S. National Science Foundation's programs in Antarctica.

Two New Zealand defense force medics and two civilian medical staff were also on board the Hercules C130 airplane to provide medical aid during the flight back to New Zealand, Beaton said.

"Medical evacuation is a capability the air force can deliver as and when required," said Beaton. "Our crews are experienced flying in and out of Antarctica and this task doesn't present any issues for us."

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

More Outside McMurdo September 1-10, 2009

A few more random pictures of the skies around McMurdo.

Fun and Science

Nickolas Logan and James Maslanik from the University of Colorado Boulder launch their Aerosonde® unmanned aircraft system (UAS) off a truck traveling 60 miles per hour across Ross Bay sea ice near McMurdo Station Antarctica. The UAV then lands on the sea ice and skids to a stop.

The Aerosonde® unmanned aircraft system (UAS) offers an impressive endurance of more than 30 hours (with a minimal payload). In fact, it was the first UAS to cross the Atlantic Ocean, a feat achieved as early as 1998.

This impressive endurance, as well as the aircraft’s flexibility and affordability, make it an ideal choice for remote data collection and reconnaissance missions for military, civil, and scientific entities. The aircraft employs a catapult system to take off from small, remote clearings, and also can launch from the roof of a fast-moving ground vehicle.

With these capabilities, the Aerosonde aircraft has accumulated several significant flight milestones including:

In 2007, it was the first UAS to penetrate the eye of a hurricane. Under a program administered by NASA and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Aerosonde aircraft flew a mission of more than 17 hours, a record 7.5 of which were spent navigating Hurricane Noel’s eye and boundary layer.

During 2006, the aircraft set a world flight endurance record in its class by remaining in flight without refueling for more than 38 hours

McMurdo Sunset

A very clear Saturday night I looked out my window and saw rainbows in the clouds. Unlike a normal rainbow which forms an arch due to the uniformity of the raindrops, these rainbows form ice crystals in the clouds that create patches of color amongst their fellow clouds.

I threw on Big Red and ran past the Uppercase Dorms to snap a few photos. The dorms lie just above the sea ice. Normally the dorms block most of the wind but as I passed the last building the wind chilled me to the bone. I was only able to shoot 5 or 6 photos before I noticed the LCD screen on my camera begin to freeze.

Leonard Discovers Music in the Cracks and Creaks of the Ice

By Peter Rejcek
Antarctic Sun editor
An Adélie penguin colony can be a cacophonous place, with hundreds of birds braying in an unlikely chorus. That was one of the sounds that Cheryl Leonard wanted to capture, but it wasn’t the most interesting one that she discovered.

Instead, she literally found music at her feet. Or, more accurately, at the feet of the Adélies. The dense stones on Torgersen Island off the Antarctic Peninsula produced melodious sounds — like coins falling together in a pile — when the penguins walked across them.

“Little melodies would come out from their feet as they walked on the stones, kicked the stones, jostled the stones,” says Leonard, a San Francisco-based composer and musician who spent about a month at Palmer Station this past season on an Antarctic Artists and Writers Program grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Leonard composes musical pieces not for piano and violin, but from more unconventional sources such as pinecones and shards of glass. She started her career writing traditional compositions, but eventually gravitated toward stranger sounds that can be made with instruments, such as playing the strings of a violin behind the bridge, which produces high, squeaky notes.

“It was a slow morph into weirder and weirder sounds and sound sources,” she explains, adding that she was later influenced by friends interested in “noise music,” an avant-garde art form that uses a variety of elements, from feedback to random electronic sounds.

Leonard found inspiration in urban objects, producing music from box spring mattresses and circular saw blades. At the same time, she developed an interest in the outdoors, and took up mountaineering and climbing.

“I think for me it was a natural progression from playing sounds with urban objects to playing sounds with natural objects,” she says. “I was looking for a way to combine the musical side of myself with the outdoors side of myself.”

An opportunity to work in Antarctica and record the creaks of icebergs and the calls of its birds seemed ideal.

“I’ve always been attracted to remote, wilderness places. Antarctica is the ultimate location for that,” Leonard says. “At the same time, I was really interested in what kind of sounds one might find there. Antarctica’s sounds haven’t been that well documented. We’ve seen lots of pictures and films and science about Antarctica, but not heard many of its sounds.”

She found those sounds in dripping icicles after rappelling down a crevasse, and in growling snow and ice while boating near the edge of the calving Marr Ice Piedmont.

And just as her companion and fellow artist, Oona Stern , discerned immense variety in the types of ice in Antarctica for an unrelated sculpting project, Leonard discovered a range of music in the icebergs that calve, float and disintegrate in the sea.

“I was really surprised at how different the icebergs sounded,” she says. “The melting ice was always different, sometime subtly and sometimes extremely different. … It’s kind of like snowflakes. Visually, snowflakes are all different and aurally, the icebergs each have their own sounds.”

Leonard’s recording equipment — which she carried on hikes or on the small inflatable boats used for local travel around Palmer Station — included contact microphones, condenser microphones and hydrophones. Contact microphones pick up audio vibrations directly from objects that they touch, while hydrophones record sound underwater.

“I sort of looked like I was doing sound for a film,” Leonard says.

Recorded sounds only make up part of Leonard’s compositions. She also collected various objects found during her trip, including limpet shells and Adélie penguin bones. Normally the removal of such items from Antarctica is restricted, but Leonard had a permit from the NSF.

She is undecided about how she will incorporate the penguin bones into a composition, but says she will likely assemble them into little instruments that she can slide a bow across or rub, brush or strike with mallets or other objects. “Some of the thinner bones can probably be plucked.”

“I’ll be amplifying those and playing them live together with field recordings and projected video,” she adds.

How do you notate music for a penguin bone? You really can’t use traditional musical staves and notes, Leonard says. Instead, she has developed her own style of sheet music that combines graphics and words to describe how someone should perform on one of her unique instruments.


“Every time I have a new instrument and a new way of playing an instrument, I also have to invent a notation to explain that to the performer,” she explains. “I like the idea of performing [my compositions] live. It’s been a big focus for me because I’m using these unusual materials and getting these unusual sounds from them. I think it’s interesting for people to see where the sounds are coming from and how they are being produced.”

The public won’t have to wait too long to see and hear some of Leonard’s first compositions from Antarctica. She will premiere several pieces in October at Mills College Concert Hall in Oakland, Calif., including a composition called “Lullaby for the E [lephant] Seals.”

Many of the works, she explains, subtly combine aesthetics with a message of environmental awareness. “I am trying to make a great piece of music, but I’m really inspired by aspects of the environment and ecosystems.”

NSF-funded research in this story: Cheryl Leonard, Antarctic Artists & Writers Program, Award No. 0739804.

A walk around McMurdo Station early in the morning