My brother Andy physically put the cache here (I can't
tolerate cold or altitude) while on a US Antarctic Program AGO
maintenance mission.
The AGOs (Automatic Geophysical Observatories) are six
trailer-sized structures around Antarctica that collect "space
weather" atmospheric and magnetospheric data transmitted back via
satellite. They were developed by an international consortium of
universities, scientific and engineering organizations and are
maintained with funding from a number of sources including the
National Science Foundation, which funds the US Antarctic
Program.
Here's a shot of AGO 1 as it appeared in Dec 2009 after it
had already received some attention from my brother and the other
two guys on the crew. The Google Map will take you right to it :-)
:
For contrast, here's a picture of AGO 2 my brother took when
he and the the other two guys on the crew first approached it on
their December 2009 maintenance mission. As you can see, the first
task is shoveling. Not only do the crew need to be proficient
mechanical and electrical engineers, but they need to be proficient
snow shovel engineers at altitude.
You can get information about the mission to the AGOs and
view the actual data graphs here: http://space.augsburg.edu/ago
As you can imagine, the extreme conditions take a brutal toll
on the equipment, which must operate unattended for most of the
year, until the Antarctic summer when a crew of three people visits
the AGOs to dig them out of the snow, repair and maintain them. One
of those three people is an EMT or experienced mountaineer -- this
is dangerous work in extreme conditions for accumulation of
knowledge. But they still dash out to the potty in flipflops. Can
you guess why?
For those who are interested in applying for a mission and
getting to this cache, or are interested in the US Antarctic
Program generally (which is jam-packed with science-y awesomeness
ranging from space to weather to geophysics to particle physics to
biology and beyond), check out the USAP page at http://www.usap.gov/usapgov/
By the way, Andy owns the Lhasa Apso named Buckley of the
"Buckley's Walk" cache, and actually milled out the wooden camo
block for that cache.
Strongly suggest posting a photo of yourself or emailing
validating info about your mission there. To the admins -- keep it
fun or this is going away.