So what's new?

I was wondering the same thing...

I was promoted.
In five months I will be a Great Grampa.
Cyrefian clan, arise!

Nice! When will the newborn be joining an alliance?

he'll likely be pretty busy, designing dyson spheres and saving humanity and stuff.

hi orkin :p
wow cyref congratulations :)... i knew you were old ... but ...

Hi Vic! I swear I'll play eventually. I got disrupted what with going off to live in Antarctica and stuff

hi orkin

you bring cookies?

or penguins?

I only saw one penguin and it was literally as I was leaving the continent. We are literally standing on the glacial ice next to the plane getting ready to walk on and an Adele penguin runs up to us to hang out for a while :P

heya tOM !
they deported ya from Penguinland eh ;)

Welcome home! I remember we talked about antarctica before you left. Id love to talk with you about that!

I heard Orkin was asked to leave Antarctica after a former MI6 officer caught him peeing in Lake Vostok. Nearly created an international golden shower incident.

Vic: I'm not old, but my daughter is getting there.. she's gonna be a grandma !

Vostok WAS the closest neighbor to where I was. However anyone trying to pee in the snow during polar winter will get fluff frostbite.

Whats the coldest you experienced?

-107.8 F I *think* was our record low

From what I last read, they haven't actually penetrated the ice yet to sample the water (and possible biology) from Lake Vostok. Last I saw there was a debate as to which method of drilling would be least likely to contaminate a lake that's been under the ice and isolated for 20 million years.
Pretty interesting stuff.

Wow. -80C in June.

Thats awesome.

my god i totally forgot you were down there! how was it?? tell us some more stories

So if you read about the medevac that happened at the South Pole in 2016 that was me and my crew there for that. In one of the "am I really here and doing this!?" moments we had to find a way to make a lit runway in -80 for the medevac plane to land on. The way it was decided to accomplish this was to saw oil drums in half, fill them with AN8 jet fuel and light them along the skiiway edge. So me and 3 other guys are out testing this. Problem is fuel won't ignite at those Temps because it doesn't aerosolize. Solution was to stick a 2x4 in the drum like a Wick and have a guy in fire gear with an acetylene blowtorch hold it lit until the surface Temps rise enough to light the fuel. We were all just hoping it didn't explode.

was that the buzz aldrin one?

wow, fun time eh tOM ! :D

this http://edition.cnn.com/...-pole-medical-evacuation/?

Marshal has the story on the one I'm talking about. The Buzz Aldrin one was in the Australian summer when LC-130s fly frequently.

The winter medevac was nuts because no one had ever flown to Pole in the middle of winter and landed. Big planes can't do it because you need to land on soft pack snow so you need skiis. They also can't land because hydraulic fluid freezes at those temperatures. So they had to send a small ski equipped bush plane. Those planes barely have enough fuel to make it here from Rothera Station on the coast. If they get a headwind they turn back because they won't make it. Any who when it landed we had to pull the plane onto bamboo we laid out so the skiis wouldn't freeze to the ground and we had to wrap the engines up to keep them warm while it refueled or else they'd have been stuck here with us. Crazy stuff.

lol, that's awesome. Glad nobody died