He’ll head to RAF Brize Norton, where he’ll catch a Ministry of Defence flight to Ascension, a small island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. After a stop to refuel, it’s on to Stanley in the Falkland Islands, where he’ll board the RRS James Clark Ross, a supply and research ship operated by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) which will be his home for the next two months.
Ashurst is a mechanical engineer – or a “jack of all trades,” as he puts it – for the BAS. Most of the time he’s based in Cambridge, where he helps design scientific equipment for the various research expeditions and experiments that run in the cold southern waters.
“The cold is a big factor,” he says. “If we’re doing marine-based things it’s a pretty harsh environment, the Southern Ocean, so that is a consideration that we have to deal with.” However, the biggest challenge is making sure that the equipment not only works in harsh conditions, but is also easy to use and maintain by non-experts. “There won’t always be an engineer on hand to fix any problems, so they have got to be failsafe and relatively simple to use,” says Ashurst.
The James Clark Ross, where Ashurst will spend the next two months By Tom L-C at the English language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0
During the winter months, much of the experimental equipment – nets for catching krill and plankton, and camera systems - sits idle in freezing seas, which can lead to problems when it needs to be set-up again. “Obviously it’s been a year since it’s been used to so everything has been abused for a year in the ocean, and most of the time it probably won’t work off the bat,” he says.
“You’ve got a short deadline before having to actually deploy it, because the actual ship doesn’t wait for you. The crew gave got their own deadlines to get to certain bases to restock them.” That means regular all-nighters to make sure the equipment is ready to deploy by the time the boat gets to a certain point in the ocean.
The most interesting thing about his job is the sheer variety, says Ashurst. “It’s so different from what other engineers that I talk to are dealing with. One week I’ll be focussing on some helicopter radar rigs, other times I’ll be focussing on underwater camera systems. And there’s always the potential that I’ll be deploying these pieces of equipment.”
“How can I get there?”
This will be Ashurst’s third research trip to the seas around Antarctica, which he says is different to anything you might expect “A friend of mine likens it to being in a prison on the sea, but in a nice way,” he says.
Ashurst studied mechanical engineering at the University of Newcastle, and was inspired by documentaries such as Blue Planet and Frozen Planet. “I thought wow, these are places that I want to go. How can I get there?” he remembers.
The BAS came up during his research and, he says, he harassed them until they gave him a job – drawn by the promise of not being tied to a desk.
Because the trips generally take place in our winter – the Antarctic summer – he’s not usually greeted by the frozen vistas and biting blizzards that were promised by the nature shows. “In the summer months there it’s not as cold as you expect,” he says. “On some of the sub-Antarctic islands it’s pretty green. It can be a bit jarring. Last Christmas we got the day off and it was really nice and sunny. We were out in t-shirts and sunglasses, relaxing on the deck. It can be pretty different from what people see on television.”
There are wildlife encounters too – which can be slightly distracting. “When we’re deploying moorings off the aft-end of the ship, everyone’s trying to concentrate and be focussed because all of these bits of equipment are pretty heavy and can potentially be swinging around quite dangerously,” he says. “But if a whale pops up everyone gets distracted and you’ve got to rein people back in. There’ll be another whale in five minutes!”
This year, for the first time, Ashurst will be venturing off the boat to do some ice drilling on land – the kind of work that has to be done during the summer months, before the sun disappears for 30 days over winter and the temperatures plunge to -60C. There are some electronics engineers who spend winters at the bases alongside a skeleton crew of scientists, but it’s an 18-month commitment and one that Ashurst isn’t tempted by at the moment.
However, he says the trips are an incredible experience. “Every time you’re struggling and feeling down about something breaking, or having to stay up until 3am, you’ve just got to remember where you are, and how few people actually get to go there,” he says.
Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.