| Summary: | This shows our initial sampling site at the South Pole. We went to what was called the forward scatter antennas, these two metal antennas that are out approximately a hundred yards from the station itself, and we set up our samplers there. This is our very first time sampling there, and we did everything you can do wrong. We had gum rubber tubing for some of our sampling systems, and the tubing obviously would freeze in very cold temperatures and would not be able to be bent at all. The fiberglass tubing for the high volume filters worked very well, and we had plastic filter holders for everything on there. But we tried every different type of size of filter to try to get something that would work well, and most of them actually produced fairly good data. I should mention about how clean the air is here. We would sample for one week, for seven days at a time. And when you put the filter on there, they’d be snow white. When you took them off, they were snow white. You couldn’t see anything on them whatsoever. And then we’d get a volume of air of about 20,000 cubic meters pull through it, and still there was just nothing. We were sampling particles out of the atmosphere to study their chemistry. The rule of thumb is that it’s a million times cleaner at the South Pole than it is on a clean day in the city or a state like Washington. We’re not talking about downtown Seattle. We’re talking about just like the university campus here. It’d be a million times cleaner. As compared to Seattle proper, it would probably be a hundred million times cleaner at the South Pole. The particle counts are approximately one particle per cubic meter. Now when we’re talking about a particle, we’re talking about something that would be one to two micrometers in diameter. There’s roughly one per cubic meter. Counts in the Seattle area or, on the University of Washington campus, they’re in the orders of several thousand per cubic centimeter. So it’s roughly, very simply, a million times cleaner there than it is here, on a clean day here.
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