As one might imagine, getting to Antarctica is difficult, both due to the remoteness and the harsh environment. To start, I flew commercial from Boston to Christchurch, New Zealand, via San Francisco and Auckland, which requires 19–20 hours of flights, plus layovers.² The next day, I arrived at USAP’s clothing distribution center (CDC), just outside the Christchurch airport, for COVID testing, a brief introductory presentation, and to try on the program-issued extreme cold weather (ECW) gear. At this point, we learned that our “ice flight,” our flight from Christchurch to McMurdo Station, was scheduled for three days later. McMurdo Station is the largest research station in Antarctica, and it serves as USAP’s primary base on the continent; all personnel and cargo headed to the South Pole pass through McMurdo. All personnel head to McMurdo, as well as New Zealand’s adjacent Scott Base, pass through Christchurch. While we had a couple days in Christchurch, we were under strict isolation instructions due to COVID, although I did get to walk downtown and see the lovely Christchurch Botanical Garden.

After some additional training held online and another COVID test the day before our flight, we were ready to depart. The day started with waking up well before dawn and calling the flight status hotline to ensure the flight was not delayed. Due to the harsh and unpredictable environment, flights are frequently delayed due to weather or mechanical issues. Upon arrival at the CDC, we donned our full ECW—in case of a flight emergency—and proceeded to check in. We were weighed along with our luggage, such that extra cargo could be added right up to the weight limit. Most of our cargo was packed onto pallets, with the exception of a small carry-on bag. One checked bag was designated a “boomerang bag,” which we would get back in case the weather deteriorated at McMurdo and the flight had to “boomerang” and return to Christchurch, becoming a very long flight to nowhere. There was then enough waiting time to grab something for breakfast at the nearby supermarket, after which we were bussed onto the tarmac to board our flight. As I was flying in early-to-mid December, this was on an NZDF C-130 aircraft; early in the season, flights are primarily on USAF C-17 aircraft, but as temperatures rise and the runway softens, this switches to lighter NZDF C-130 aircraft and finally to ski-equipped NY ANG LC-130 aircraft. Next came the >7 hour flight to McMurdo, which, while uneventful, was loud, uncomfortable, and packed full with both personnel and cargo pallets. As we proceeded south, sea ice began to appear, and then we finally saw the outer reaches of the Antarctic continent (the C-130 only has a few small windows, so folks had to take turns looking out).

Finally, we landed at Phoenix Airfield on the McMurdo Ice Shelf and were then driven to McMurdo Station in the Kress Transporter for our arrival briefing. In the summer, the air temperature at McMurdo hovers around freezing, so a flannel shirt, fleece jacket, and windbreaker—along with a wool hat and gloves—were enough to stay comfortable outside (at least if one wasn’t just standing around). After an initial “night” in Building 140,³ we were tested for COVID again, and I then settled into my home for the next two weeks, a room in the Hotel California (HoCal) dorm, with a lovely view of McMurdo Sound, Mount Discovery, and the Royal Society Range.

We were scheduled for five days of quarantine, but once that was up, the weather finally improved at the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide field camp, after the better part of a month, so the LC-130 aircraft were prioritized for trips there. The South Pole was a backup destination the entire week, which meant in addition to not flying, we also had to live out of our single carry-on bag, since the rest of our luggage was on pallets ready to be loaded should the weather at WAIS deteriorate. Although unplanned and uncertain, the extended stay in McMurdo was not all bad, as I got to go hiking in the vicinity of McMurdo; see Discovery Hut, built for Scott’s Discovery expedition and also used for his ill-fated Terra Nova expedition; and see the launch of the SPIDER balloon-borne telescope. For the latter, we were not allowed to take the shuttle vans out to the Long Duration Ballooning (LDB) facility for the launch as we were quarantining, so I borrowed a fat-tire bike and biked the 13–14 miles round trip to near the LDB facility and Williams Field, a.k.a. Willy Field, to get a closer view of the launch. I also got to see plenty of seals and skuas,⁴ as well as a single Adélie penguin off Hut Point, probably the first Spheniscidae visitor of the season.

As we had still not flown by December 23, we were stuck for the weekend. Normally, Saturday is a work day in Antarctica, but Christmas was observed on the 24th, so in addition to there being no flights, we also couldn’t take part in the festivities as we were in isolation. On Monday, we were finally the primary flight and were driven to Willy Field for our flight to the Pole.⁵ After a few hours waiting around the airfield for mechanical issues with the LC-130 aircraft to be addressed,⁶ we boarded the aircraft and began to taxi. Unfortunately, the aircraft was still having issues with its hydraulics, so we deplaned and returned to McMurdo for another night. On Tuesday, December 27, we returned to Willy Field. During the ride to the airfield, it was unclear if the weather would hold, but it ended up cooperating and we quickly boarded the LC-130 soon after we arrived and departed for the South Pole.

After a three-hour flight, we landed at Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station’s Jack F. Paulus Skiway and taxied to the ramp adjacent to the station, where we deplaned with the props still spinning as the cold makes it difficult to start the engines. Here, the weather was much colder, so the ECW gear was very much necessary; it is also very, very, very dry. After an arrival briefing and lunch, I went straight to work, helping with the installation of a detector module that a colleague on my flight had carried. Other than the day I left in February, I went out to the “Dark Sector,” which has restrictions on radio transmitters, to work on the telescopes every day, specifically in the Dark Sector Laboratory (DSL) and Martin A. Pomerantz Observatory (MAPO) buildings. In addition to assembly, installation, and calibration work on BICEP receivers, I also overhauled the computers running the BICEP3 telescope, which was the primary reason for me to deploy.

The South Pole Station is located at ~2800 m (~9300′) elevation, on the desolate Polar Plateau, with nothing besides the Station for hundreds of miles. Despite the extreme conditions outside, life in the current elevated station is pretty normal, once you get used to the fact that the sun never sets during the summer. Meals are served in the galley, although without any fresh fruit or vegetables most of the time, and the berthing wings consist of single-occupancy dorm rooms, albeit very small ones. There’s a science lab, gym, post office, store, medical clinic, laundry room, music room, arts & crafts room, sauna, greenhouse, and a couple lounges. However, there’s severe water rationing, with a limit of four minutes of shower water a week, typically a pair of two-minute showers, and one load of laundry. Internet access is also extremely limited; depending on which—if any—geostationary satellite is visible, it ranges from very slow and high latency to practically unusable to no access at all.⁷ Although I missed Christmas dinner being stuck in McMurdo, I did get to attend the New Year’s Eve party, held outside due to COVID, and the yearly Geographic Pole remarking ceremony on New Year’s Day.⁸ Thanks to the unique weather, sun dogs and related atmospheric optical phenomena are frequently visible.

As the end of the summer season neared in February, temperatures began to dip below −40°, with the wind chill pushing it significantly lower. I left the Pole on an LC-130 on February 15, the last flight out for the season, with around two dozen others; due to the extreme cold, there are no flights in or out until late October or early November, and the 40-ish people on the Station right now are isolated from the rest of the world. After arriving at Willy Field at McMurdo, we took “Ivan” the Terra Bus straight to Phoenix Airfield to wait for our flight to Christchurch. Our C-17 landed during the drive between the airfields, and after waiting a couple hours on the ice waiting for cargo to be unloaded and loaded, including a helicopter, we boarded the aircraft for a five-hour flight off the Ice.⁹

Upon arriving in Christchurch, it was dark and raining, a significant change from Antarctica. In addition to the sound of the rain, the humidity, the sounds of birds and insects, and the presence of smells¹⁰ are the drastic differences one notices upon leaving the Ice. After returning my ECW gear at the CDC and arriving at my hotel very late, I took a very long hot shower and went to bed. I had arranged for two extra days in Christchurch, so the next morning I booked a hotel room for the next two nights; the hotel room for the initial night was booked for me by USAP, and given the prevalence for flight delays to and from Antarctica, making arrangements in advance is risky. The first day, I visited the Christchurch Botanical Garden a second time, visited the Christchurch Art Gallery, and took a public bus out to go hiking in the Port Hills between Christchurch and Lyttelton. The next day, I took a bus to Lyttelton and a ferry across Lyttelton Harbour to Diamond Harbour and hiked to the summit of Mount Herbert, the tallest peak on the Banks Peninsula. The scenery was gorgeous, although it did rain a bit that morning. The next day was the long return trip to Boston.

I’ve uploaded more photos of both Antarctica and New Zealand to albums on Flickr.

1. And, yes, I got back almost six month ago and am just writing this blog post now. ↩

2. I had a very long layover in Auckland, although this did allow me to take public transit downtown and see parts of Auckland. ↩

3. The sun never set in my two months in Antarctica. ↩

4. Skuas are essentially large brown seagulls. ↩

5. Phoenix Airfield is a compacted-snow runway used for wheeled aircraft, while Willy Field is a skiway used for ski-equipped aircraft. ↩

6. We fortunately could spend time in the airfield galley and also got a tour of the control tower. ↩

7. Besides 24/7 email access on certain shared accounts, over Iridium. ↩

8. Due to movement of the ice sheet, the location of the Geographic South Pole moves relative to the Station. ↩

9. Unfortunately, this meant I did not get to see any more penguins. ↩

10. Not smelling much at the South Pole is probably a good thing, given the dearth of showers. ↩

To create the custom shapes, I 3D printed molds. To create the molds, I first drew a set of 43 mm by 53 mm designs—the size I measured the commercially-available cookies to be—in Inkscape, making each line at least 2 mm thick, to ensure it would survive the molding and baking process. In the end, I settled on twelve designs: four designs showing E- and B-mode polarization patterns; four designs with Antarctica themes, specifically, an Adélie penguin, the True South flag, an Antarctica outline, and the ceremonial Pole marker; and four designs with BICEP themes, specifically, the Dark Sector Laboratory (DSL) building with BICEP3 ground shield, the BICEP3 cryostat, the BICEP Array tower connected to the Martin A. Pomerantz Observatory (MAPO) building, and a BICEP Array cryostat. After converting the outlines of the designs to paths and taking their union, each design was individually exported in the DXF R14 format and converted into solid models using a custom CadQuery script. The molds were then printed out of PLA using a Prusa MINI+ 3D printer using 0.1 mm layer height. For initial prototypes, the molds were designed to act as both molds and cookie cutters, but the dough would get stuck in the mold. Instead, the design was modified to only cut out the corners, leaving the sides connected to the rest of the rolled out dough; after removing the molds, the sides were cut with a dull knife, freeing the cookies from the dough.

Others have previously baked cookies in this style, so I had an existing reference for a recipe to use. However, I tried to more closely follow Pepperidge Farm’s recipe based on the ingredients list and nutritional information. In the end, I settled on a recipe of 3/4 cup butter, 3/4 cup granulated sugar, 1 3/4 cup all-purpose flour, and 1/2 cup corn starch. Originally, I had included 1 teaspoon of baking powder—as a substitute for the baking soda and cream of tartar in the commercially-available cookies—and less flour and corn starch to better match the fat–sugar–carbohydrate ratio in the nutritional information, but the cookies rose and spread too much during baking, ruining the designs. Thus, I removed the leavening agent and increased the amounts of flour and corn starch to the values listed above. As eggs are listed as being less than 2% of the cookies, I suspect they are only used for the wash, so I left them out of my dough recipe.¹

To make the dough, I partially melted the butter and mixed it with the sugar using a fork. Separately, I mixed the flour and corn starch and then mixed it into the butter–sugar mix, first mixing in half the dry mix and then the rest, until the dough was well mixed. Next, I split the dough in half, wrapped it in plastic wrap, and chilled it. If the dough is too warm, it will stick to the molds, and if it is too cool, it is difficult to roll out, so a happy medium needs to be found. I rolled out the chilled dough between two layers of plastic wrap, to prevent it from sticking, to a thickness of 6 mm, using a rolling pin with disks on the ends that allow setting the thickness. Removing the top layer of plastic wrap, I then dusted flour onto the dough to reduce the risk of it sticking to the molds and used the molds to shape the cookies, pressing down on the molds using much of my body weight.

The mold is then carefully wiggled back and forth to free it from the dough without damaging the design. Originally, I had molded one cookie at a time (as is shown above), but I found that it’s better to press in all of the molds before removing any of them, since this prevents shifting of the dough from later molds from disturbing earlier cookie designs.²

Once the molds are removed, the cookies can be freed from the dough using a knife with a rounded, non-serrated end. Using the same knife (or some sort of small spatula), the cookies are then transferred to parchment paper and placed in a freezer. The remaining dough should be balled back up and placed in a refrigerator; the other half of the dough is then removed from the refrigerator, and the process is repeated. I found that this recipe and mold combination produces around 28 cookies in total.

After freezing the cookies for a least an hour, an egg yolk wash should be applied.³ To do this, I whisked an egg yolk using a fork and then carefully painted it on to just the raised design on the cookies using a foam brush (a suggestion from the recipe I had consulted). The cookies should then be returned to the freezer for at least another 15 minutes, such that they’re frozen when placed in the oven.

Finally, the cookies can be baked. I found this to be a finicky process, since the designs on the cookies would be damaged if the dough rose in the center of the cookies, but the bottom center of the cookies would be under-baked if the cookies were taken out of the oven too soon. In the end, I settled on a procedure using an oven preheated to 425°F, to try to quickly bake in the designs. Start by placing the frozen cookies and parchment paper on a room-temperature baking sheet and baking for 6 minutes; any more than this, and the center of the cookies would begin to rise, damaging the designs. Remove the baking sheet from the oven and allow the sheet and cookies to cool, without removing the cookies. Once the cookies have cooled to near room temperature, return them to the oven for an additional 3 minutes. Again allow them to cool on the baking sheet. Flip the cookies over, return them to the oven for a final 3 minutes, and then allow them to cool. The initial two runs in the oven bake in the designs, while the final oven run finishes baking the bottom of the cookies.

Overall, I was mostly happy with how the cookies came out. The taste and texture were nice, and the designs remained intact, although I would have preferred if the egg yolk wash on the designs made them darker. After dialing in the recipe and baking procedure with two prototype batches, I baked an additional two final batches, producing 60 “good” cookies,⁴ comprised of five of each of the dozen designs.⁵ Between molding the cookies and painting on the wash, it takes over an hour for a batch, and the entire process takes several hours once the cooling time and baking time are included.

My colleagues seem to have enjoyed the cookies.⁶ For anyone wanting to make similar cookies, I’ve uploaded the designs and the script used to create the molds.

1. It would also make it easier to make a vegan version of the recipe. I originally planned to make a vegan and gluten free version for colleagues with dietary restrictions, but I ran out of time.  ↩

2. It also allows the designs to be placed closer together, since the risk of disturbing the adjacent designs is significantly reduced.  ↩

3. If the dough is too warm, applying the wash can damage the designs on the cookies.  ↩

4. I also used some leftover dough from the earlier batches.  ↩

5. Except, I accidentally made one too few of the True South design.  ↩

6. There were several approving comments about how I had gone through the effort of producing both directions of B-mode patterns.  ↩