(Jan 20-22, 2026)
Once the spindrift from drill camp setup settled, it was my team’s day in the sun. Literally. After weeks of bad weather that had kept many of the Araon’s science projects hostage, the pattern finally shifted, and we found ourselves installing our radar into one of the helicopters under clear blue skies.
Our ice-penetrating radar (IPR) installation is a fairly invasive procedure. At the center of it all is a 250-lb rack of equipment: a mix of genuinely fancy computers, mysterious electronic boxes that look like they belong in an ’80s arcade, and a chaotic petrel’s nest (Antarctic seabird) of wires weaving between ports, power switches, and everything in between. Thick radar power cables snake through the aircraft’s fuselage and exit through the center of the belly, where they meet our three externally mounted booms. The booms are about 5.5 meters long (18 feet), each housing an antenna for the system to send and receive signals. By the time we’re finished, it’s fair to wonder whether the aircraft is still flightworthy — but I promise, the whole contraption is officially certified.
The installation takes about two full days, and the blue skies were met with mixed emotions. There’s a bit of FOMO (fear of missing out). Good weather is hard to come by around here, so installing on a cloudy day wouldn’t feel like a missed opportunity to have the helicopter in the air. But when the sun is shining we know the helicopter could be flying. Still, manual labor under clear skies — after several weeks cooped up on a ship in gloomy Antarctic weather — felt pretty fantastic. It almost brought to mind that scene in The Shawshank Redemption, when the prisoners savor their brief chance to work outdoors in the sunshine. We couldn’t control the weather, so we embraced it.
Dillon, our engineer, managed the installation with the precision of a meticulous professor. He doesn’t let much happen unless he is directly involved. After three seasons with this equipment, I’ve reached something like post-doc status: occasionally I’m allowed to touch things unsupervised. Jason and Jesse, in their first field seasons, were the equivalent of grad students in their first week of lab. “Can you come hold this?” was often the most advanced task on offer. Dillon’s oversight can feel a bit overbearing — but the system is delicate, and many of the connections are unforgiving.
Installation also meant finalizing preparations for Flight Operations (FOP) and Base Operations (BOP). Both rely on a web of complex, home-grown applications. FOP, in particular, translates the experiments our collaborators dream up — often from the comfort of faraway offices — into the practical flight plans for a remote corner of Antarctica. Each day we fly, FOP provides the pilot with detailed instructions: waypoints, flight paths, and the aerial maneuvers to execute over the ice. These plans must account for weather, fuel capacity, and the limited options for takeoff and landing. This was my primary task for the season. I felt compelled to prepare several possibilities for our first flights, even though I knew they would remain in constant flux.
After a flight, BOP organizes and quality-checks the massive volume of information we collect. The fancy computer mounted in the rack records the timing and intensity of radio signals reflected off the ice. From this, we build a two-dimensional image of the ice interior — an X-ray of sorts —revealing bed topography, layers, and hidden structure.
Of course, the radar is useless without high-precision GPS and avionics data: pitch, roll, heading, and height above the surface. There are plenty of ways for this delicate system to misbehave. BOP attempts to diagnose those problems before the next flight.
All of this code runs from the command line on Linux computers. This can be daunting to the unindoctrinated — which accurately describes Jesse and Jason, this year’s BOP personnel. The fact that BOP works at all is a tribute to our engineers back home. Getting it running in the field, however, always involves someone losing sleep (and possibly hair) over head-scratching roadblocks and cryptic error messages.
This season, that special someone was Jesse. Ultimately everything got worked out, with plenty of support from Dillon, Jason, and Greg (our engineer back at the University of Texas). Jesse was a trooper, doing his best to mask his frustration. I’ve told him more than once that he’s doing the Lord’s work.
With all these moving parts, the work days quickly grew long. I was already feeling fatigued from these first few “real” work days. We’d accelerated from our previously glacial pace into a blizzard of activity — and I knew it was only going to intensify over the coming week.
By the end of January 21, our installation work was complete. Unfortunately, it coincided with very strong winds and a patchwork of clouds in the forecast — tricky conditions for helicopter operations. Dom, the chief pilot, had a plan though. He wanted the Araon to retreat north about 100 km (60 miles). The seas up there would be rough, but the wind more manageable for takeoffs and landings.
It was counterintuitive. We had spent nearly a month at sea getting within a stone’s throw of Thwaites Glacier — our primary science target. Pulling back meant longer flights and caching fuel on the glacier in order to reach our survey lines. Still, it was the only viable plan we saw to get our IPR helicopter in the air, so we accepted the trade-offs as a cost of doing business.
With our first flight expected the next day, I worked well into the night refining flight plans and preparing for the 07:30 operations meeting. I finally retreated to my bed around 1 a.m., which by then was swaying heavily with the strengthening winds, for a few not-so-restful hours of sleep.
By morning, the winds and sea state were worse than anticipated. Dillon and I quipped that today might “marginally meet expectations.” That turned out to be astute: the weather delayed our plans and forced several last-minute revisions before we finally settled, at 2 p.m., on a short test flight over a cluster of nearby icebergs.
Scientifically, it was not a very exciting sortie — but it allowed us to put the system through its paces in the air, run our FOP and BOP procedures end-to-end, and help our pilot, Dan, get comfortable flying with the awkward-looking contraptions suspended from the helicopter’s belly. In science, as in life, you rarely get everything you’re hoping for on the first shot.
We marked the milestone with a well-earned adult beverage that night, before being rocked to sleep by perhaps the largest waves we’d encountered to date.
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