November 2, 1996

Bjorn Johns, GPS specialist.

Saturday, and there was still no sign of the Weddell seal folks at McMurdo...This was a laundry and cleaning day--an opportunity to read, relax and catch up on some correspondence. I had discovered that my dormitory, Building 209, is equipped with a sauna. This was just what I needed, having had a touch of a flu that had been going around: the McMurdo Crud, as it is dubbed. The smell of steam heated wood and the hot, dry air of a sauna is an evocative memory of my childhood years, spent in Sweden. Smell registers in my memory in a way that sight and sound do not; there is a deeper, more visceral connection to association and place. In the semi-darkness of the sauna, I could make out Bjorn Johns, whom I had met earlier in the day. Bjorn is half Norwegian and spent 8 years near the Arctic Circle in Norway. A graduate of the University of California at Davis and the University of Colorado, Boulder, Bjorn is an engineer with the University Navstar Consortium (UNAVCO) tasked with assisting nearly a dozen other science projects with their GPS needs. GPS, or Global Positioning System, is a remarkable technology that enables locations to be identified to within less than a centimetre accuracy. This is important for scientists studying glacial movement and seismology, among other things. One of his numerous projects involved developing a carefully detailed map of the South Pole area. The surface around the pole has appeared as a somewhat featureless plateau. GPS measurements have revealed a varied topography with many surface anomalies. Be sure to stop by the UNAVCO web site to learn more about their involvement in the United States Antarctic Program.