14 January 2004 Click image for full size!
This evening, we took a trip down to the old seismic vaults that are near the dome. There's a new project that will be relocating the seismic projects several kilometers away in new vaults, away from all the noise of the station. Supposedly, these new vaults are the quietest on earth- if you ask me, I can find out, but as far as real world reference goes, we're not supposed to even walk down the snow road unannounced because they can pick up the sound of your footprints.
But back to this- this is the old vaults and the best place on the station to see giant ice crystals. Over the 15 or so years this vault has been in use, ice has accumulated in this way- just a little bit of heat from the power supplies allowed the crystals to grow pretty hugely all over the ceiling and walls- some of the larger, more untouched crystals are probably as old as the vault. We were allowed to go in and photograph as long as we shared with the tech who used to take care of this (thanks Angela!). You can see Justis (astronomer tech from the dark sector) taking pictures at the bottom just to give some scale- yes these are pretty big. They are also delicate- bump them wrong and they start shattering making this beautiful sound of complex destruction! Now that the vault is shut down now with no power, the crystals won't have anything to grow with, so they'll probably stay like this until the whole vault collapses under the ever increasing weight of snow above it- actually the vault is collapsing now which is one of the reasons why they are in a hurry to relocate.