Palmer Station miscellany

where's the vestibule?
Biolab during the 1968-69 summer. This NOAA photo is the only one that shows the front.
I don't understand why the NOAA guy (actually he was with USGS doing geodesy) had to
show all the construction debris in these photos, but anyway, in front of Lab 3 is one of their
equipment vans as well as the satellite camera housing (that's the round thing).

this was the general idea

At left is the architect's conception of what the place would look like. Of course, the architect didn't know how the blasting and land clearing would really turn out. In addition to the pad for GWR, there is another parking lot or future building pad over on the other side of the fuel tanks, and that side road to the small boat ramp(!)

cool krill

Jump ahead a bit, to 1979-1980, when females were much rarer at Palmer than they are today. At right is Maggie Amsler during her first visit to Palmer as part of Mary Alice McWhinnie's research team. (The lab at Palmer is named for McWhinnie, who had previously worked aboard research vessels in the Southern Ocean and was one of the first two women to winter at McMurdo in 1974.) A few years after this picture was taken, Maggie was on the first NSF winter cruise in 1985 aboard the Polar Duke. And this lab space at Palmer has been renovated more than once to keep it a state-of-the-art facility. (NSF photo by Erick Chiang, Antarctic Journal, December 1981. The caption: Using a microscope in one of Palmer Station's biology laboratories, Margret Amsler studies the development of krill.) Oh yes, Maggie was more recently at Palmer February-May 2004. And the team returned to the station in 2007, here's the current blog site!

The 2003-04 summer saw the third and final phase of the cleanup of the old buried dumps. Here's my page which takes a look at what got dug up...

That is all that Bill Spindler has time to work up at the moment; I did buy a new scanner, and have had a couple of jobs to keep me busy. The one in 2005 was a winter at Pole, for that one I obviously left all my hard copy Palmer notes and slides behind. Now I'm back in the real world working in Nevada. And still way behind with site updates. But I can reveal a couple of secrets. If you haven't clicked on any of the NOAA photo links on this site, you've missed something. There are two sections on the NOAA geodesy pages that have huge and unretouched (and unidentified) color pictures from Palmer and the local area during the 1968-69 season. My intention is to use a few more of them and add descriptions. In the meantime, I'll reveal the secret and tell where they are (updated links). The first photo section is here, and the second one is here...scroll down and look for Palmer Station in these indexes.

And last before I go, here's that gallery of w/o pictures in the renovated GWR stairwell!