Juanita Ryan calls home during a lunch break at the Meteorite Hills icefield, during the 2000-2001 field season. More about the picture below.
A short post today where I beg our reader’s forgiveness for the lack of posts from the field lately. The field team called me yesterday (lunch time at Davis Ward) and confessed they ran out of minutes for their Iridium satellite modem a few days ago. They’re putting a bunch of content on a thumb drive that they plan to send back to McMurdo with the resupply flight (we call this system “TwinOtterNet”). That flight is due again today, after being cancelled yesterday because of poor weather in McMurdo. I don’t know if they’re going to buy more minutes or not, and I’ve offered to transcribe any verbal messages they share via satphone, if that’s more convenient. I’m not sure what options they’ll choose, they clearly have a lot of priorities to juggle right now.
What have they been up to? As described in the most recent post they’re in “end of season” mode; they’ve also been dumped on by a lot of snow. Yesterday and part of the day before was spent once again digging gear and tent stakes and everything out of snow drifts. They’ve also been playing stevadore, staging things that are going back to McMurdo to the airstrip and arranging them by priority to facilitate loading. As weather allows they continue some final searches of the northern reaches of the Davis-Ward icefields, filling in some of the few missing spots in our systematic searches. They’ve been really happy to find a few bigger-than-typical meteorite specimens out there and they’ve also had a few adventures among the pinnacles that often decorate the edges of the blue ice.
With no new pictures from the field, I did a quick search of my own archives for “iridium” and here came the picture above, which makes my nostalgia glands happy. Juanita was an amazing, fearless grade school teacher who spent the 2000-2001 season in the field with us. She was always very eager to share her ANSMET experiences with her students (I think she ended up inviting every one of us to visit her school in San Jose, CA). And yes, that’s my old Alpine I snowmobile with the UT Lady Vols sticker and the green dashboard bag.
ANSMET was one of the first field groups to use Iridium phones for communication from the Antarctic deep field; That 2000-2001 season was probably the first time they were available to anyone and we were eager early-adopters. They were very expensive, slow and only partly-functional in 2000, given the constellation of satellites would not be completed until a few years later. But they worked (the military had been using it for several years) and the system was a huge technological leap forward over shortwave; it is still in major use today.
In the 2000’s the field party was on a strict ration of minutes- we’d load up the primitive SIM cards of the day (at exorbitant prices) before going into the field, with no possibility of buying more. We timed our calls based on when a satellite might be popping over the horizon for 10-15 minutes. It would be over a decade later that USAP would routinely trust Iridium for communications from the deep field and start providing phones for our use. There’s clearly a transition underway toward Starlink, which with nearly 4000 satellites in orbit (and another 8000 approved) is over 10,000 times faster than the phone Juanita is using above. And with competitors to Starlink on the horizon (pun intended), including Europe’s 640 satellite Oneweb system and Amazon’s 3200 satellite Kuiper system), full-blown internet from the field is here to stay. Given Starlink plans to offer full global satellite cell phone service by this time next year, the 2024-25 blog may include streaming video….. stay tuned!
-Ralph, from the campus of Case Western Reserve University