He's moved to the end of the earth to help save it

Barrington man spending an Antarctic winter researching climate science with NOAA

By Christy Nadalin
Posted 8/29/19

"Technically, I'm only down here for a single night," said LTJG Ben Kaiser, of his yearlong stint in Antarctica. The sun set at the south pole on March 21. "It's been pretty dark ever since," Kaiser …

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He's moved to the end of the earth to help save it

Barrington man spending an Antarctic winter researching climate science with NOAA

Posted

"Technically, I'm only down here for a single night," said LTJG Ben Kaiser, of his yearlong stint in Antarctica. The sun set at the south pole on March 21. "It's been pretty dark ever since," Kaiser said. "We're just now starting to see the first bit of sunlight on the horizon and by September 21 we should be finally able to see the sun above the horizon once again."
Starting in September, they'll get sun from September to March, without it ever setting.

"Constant night isn't too bad actually," he said. "The stars down here are amazing, and with the auroras that you see pretty regularly, it's pretty beautiful. Also, the moon is up for two week intervals throughout the winter, and it's so bright that you actual get a shadow, so it's kind of like a mini sun."

The 2006 Barrington High School graduate attended Boston University on a swimming scholarship, graduating in 2010. After working in Boston for a couple of years, he followed the advice of a friend who suggested he check out the NOAA Commissioned Officer Corps. 

"I was accepted, and went to train to be an officer in August 2010. NOAA Corps officers are members of the US Uniformed Services, I have a military rank but we are non-combat; we assist with NOAA's operations and science."

Kaiser spent his first assignment on a NOAA Fisheries Research Vessel, the Oscar Dyson, based out of Kodiak, Alaska, working in the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea, monitoring and reporting on the stocks of fish, primarily Alaskan Pollock.

Following that assignment, in April 2017, he was transferred to his current post with the Global Monitoring Division, performing long term measurements of various components of the atmosphere (i.e. carbon dioxide, ozone, solar radiation, etc.) He was assigned to serve as the station chief of two separate observatories, one in American Samoa and the one he is presently manning, at the South Pole.

"Both are about as far from human influence as possible so that we can get an accurate baseline of what is going on in the atmosphere without stuff like car exhaust interfering," said Kaiser. "On a daily basis I, with the help of the tech wintering with me, ensure that all the scientific equipment is running properly, perform the manual sampling that needs to be done, and coordinate with other station personnel. We're only one of the projects that is going on down here, so there is a wide variety of scientific support on site to help ensure that South Pole Station is properly manned and all the science is happening as needed."

Kaiser and his colleagues are located pretty much directly at the Geographic and Ceremonial South Pole — and they're the only living creatures for miles around. At McMurdo Station, the biggest US station out on the Coast, they have penguins, various seabirds, and seals (there's no land-based animals like bears on Antarctica at all). But where Kaiser is, at the South Pole, it's too cold, isolated, and far from any source of food to allow any wild creature to survive.

"It's just us," he said. "No sounds of birds or crickets or anything of the such."

The work that Kaiser is helping to perform, long term atmospheric monitoring, involves continuing to build on the longstanding data sets that have compiled at the Antarctic site since the 1950's. "We're more interested in the long term changes to the baseline, non-localized influences, than rapid sudden shift," he said. "Such as determining how the ozone hole has been recovering from a year to year basis, or how CO2 level have risen over the past 20 years or so."

For Kaiser and the other 41 people at the station, though they are isolated, life isn't bad. "It's pretty nice actually," he said. "We get into such a routine that it's pretty much Groundhog's Day down here. Wake up, have breakfast, walk out to our observatory, walk back in for lunch, back out for the afternoon, and then come back in for dinner and any activities planned for the night."

Though Kaiser does have to go outside everyday as part of his commute (even when it is -100 outside!) his NOAA-provided ECW (Extreme Cold Weather) gear makes it tolerable, over short distances. "What's bad is when the wind whips up and blows snow all over the place and you have to navigate by your headlamp and the flag line to the building," he said. "Some days are worse than others but for the most part, the quarter mile walk to where our instruments are is one of the best parts of my day, since I get to get out of the main building. A lot of people barely ever got out of it during the winter."

Kaiser tries to exercise every day, and said they have a pretty good gym — and even a rock climbing wall.

They also have a galley crew of about 4 people who do the meal prep and try to keep things as fresh as possible. 

"We have a greenhouse in the station, and the folks working it have been really good. We have fresh salads almost every night. We won't see any fresh fruits until the planes start to come again, but that will be soon enough," he said. "I do have a wide assortment of vitamins to help maintain my health though, and I was sure to bring down lots of vitamin D pills as well."

During the winter, there's nothing coming in to the station, so what they have on site is what they have.  "Granted our supply building is huge and probably has enough items and food in it to let us make it for years.  The bigger thing is fuel for our power plant, which we have a lot of but only enough for around 13 months of continuous operations," he said.

"So during the summer months when the station can get planes in, almost everyday we have a LC-130 coming in bringing people, supplies, and fuel. We also have three traverses that come over the summer, which are a bunch of tractors pulling huge sleds of fuel from McMurdo to us to deliver the bulk of our fuel for the winter.  We even have a post office down here, so if I really wanted to I could order things from Amazon and get deliveries down here over the summer."

They also have a doctor and a physician's assistant on site who can handle most medical emergencies, and Kaiser reports that medical evacuations have thankfully been rare.

Kaiser is scheduled to "get off ice" in November, and plans to spend a bit of time traveling around New Zealand before heading home for a bit. His next assignment will be in a significantly warmer clime, Monterey, California, where he will spend two years as the Operations Officer for the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. Before then, he's looking forward to a little downtime, and reconnecting with people from home.

In Antarctica, he said, "Your life is effectively on pause while everyone's back north keeps moving forward, and that makes things difficult."

Ben Kaiser, NOAA, Antarctica

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