Project PowWow

New York, Mar. 13, 2008 — This project has a number of new wrinkles in it for me. One is that through the entire process of deciding on what to propose, writing the proposal, and then rewriting the proposal after the initial rejection, I never met some of my co-investigators. Honestly there never was a crying need for it because
our many team teleconferences and scores of e-mails allowed us to communicate effectively. Still it felt odd that I could pass them on the street and not recognize them.

That was corrected last month when ALL the PIG investigators met (well not absolutely everyone — only one of the four British collaborators was able to get across the Atlantic, but I know all of them very well). David Holland, my field buddy now freshly shaven and all cleaned up, hosted at the meeting at New York University. We sat in a rather unremarkable city-university building in mid-town New York City discussing a very remote part of Antarctica. David was an excellent host, inviting us to his apartment for a pizza dinner the night before our meeting making it nicer to finally meet all my collaborators socially.

The meeting had a rocky start. Our program manager, who has fought so hard for our field project, had to tell us that both money and major logistic equipment (like airplane hours) are so tight that we would not be able to go the field next season. Earlier conversations I had had with the group strongly hinted at this, so the news didn’t break our spirit. We also knew that we only had one day to plan our next steps and it would do little good to whine or complain.

So we set to our tasks. David and I updated the group on our findings from our reconnaissance trip and everybody else gave a quick summary of where their contribution stood. Most important was the discussion about what we would need in the field to accomplish the drilling, the deployment of the video camera and ocean profilers and the seismic and radar survey. The program manager had to keep reeling us in as we succumbed to the temptation to do more than we had proposed. Key additional people at the meeting were
some of the contract planners who would be translating our desires into specific dates, weights and numbers of flights.

The details would probably bore you, but I was very impressed with how well everybody stayed “on task”. We used the whole day, all the blackboard space and probably a few megabytes of computer disks to lay it all out, arrange and rearrange the dates and tasks, but by the end, we had a workable plan — at least in our eyes. Getting back to the PIG ice shelf, setting up a helicopter camp nearby, checking out possible drilling sites, deciding, moving 12,00 pounds of gear and people there, drilling a hole and deploying cameras and ocean equipment (and, don’t forget getting back to McMurdo!) will take a full two months. Now we have to refine the plan. Unfortunately, we have lots of time to do this. Fall of 2009 seems sooooo far away — and the measurement we plan are sooooo urgently needed.