Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica

Index

I. Antarctica 2011

In this summer of constant morning,

we are braver than science.

—Alice Miller, ‘Antarctica II’

Big White Cold Awesome

On 31/10/2011, at 3:14 PM, Matt Vance wrote:

Rebecca and Alice,

An itinerary for you.

The basic intention is to give you background and experiences that can inform your own research. While all of this is going on you will be able to rub shoulders with the scientists working in these environments as they come and go through Scott Base.

It is not uncommon to change tack on a trip like this and discover things way more fascinating than you envisaged. For that reason I tend to plan day by day on the ice so that we can accommodate any growing fascinations!

We will look after you from wheels up in Christchurch to wheels down 8 days later.

It is my job to help you while you are there . . . any questions or problems please let me know.

Regards

Matt

P.S. I traditionally take folk on a pub crawl of McMurdo, more for cultural revelation than any alcoholic motives. The catch is they only accept cash at McMurdo so be sure to bring some US$. On our side of the hill we have the convenience of EftPOS and RSA prices at the bar!

Visit to Scott Base, Antarctica

Schedule of events (times and events are subject to change)

30 Nov–8 Dec 2011

Event K240

Antarctica New Zealand Media Programme

Day one: Arrival

It was always going to take a certain amount of denial, medication and courage to get onto a giant cargo plane and fly to the bottom of the planet. I had taken a chill pill—Diazepam—which was just as well, because the lieutenant giving the safety briefing was doing his best to work me into a state.

‘I don’t want to go to Antarctica tomorrow,’ I had written on my blog the day before. I’m a nervous flyer. And a mother to three young children. And the strawberries were ripening in my garden at home. What about the carbon miles? How could I be flying to Antarctica to write about climate change research?

But going to Antarctica was the fulfilment of a long-held dream. I was excited, over-stimulated. There was too much to process; I felt like I’d short-circuited.

After a fitful night in a Christchurch hotel, I sat on a plastic chair in a large room with the other travellers on that day’s flight to Antarctica. The lieutenant stood aside as a video started playing at the front. As well as telling us we were travelling to ‘one of the most remote and awe-inspiring locations on Earth’, the narrator reminded us that ‘no one controls the weather in Antarctica and its storms are legendary . . . sunburn is not a life-threatening condition, but on the ice it can be a brutal experience . . . fatigue from working too hard or playing too hard is another danger on the ice’. Then, with mournful violin music behind the narration, we were warned, ‘It’s not uncommon to experience a sense of loneliness or disorientation in your first few days.’ We were told not to push it, and were promised unforgettable rewards. ‘You are about to embark on a journey of a lifetime. Have a good flight and we’ll see you on the ice.’

Our visit coincided with the centenary of Robert Falcon Scott’s trek to the South Pole, the visit on which he and four men reached the Pole, after the Norwegian Roald Amundsen, and died on the return journey. It had taken Scott months to sail from the UK to Antarctica, and on the final leg, between New Zealand and Cape Evans, his reinforced, wooden, ex-whaling ship Terra Nova endured a fierce Southern Ocean storm followed by 20 days stuck in the pack ice. For me, Antarctica was a five-hour flight from Christchurch aboard an enormous US Air Force C-17 Globemaster.

I was travelling with Alice at the invitation of Antarctica New Zealand, on their 2011 media programme. We had met the previous afternoon, when we had to report at 1430 hours—we were on US military time—to a hard-case, smiling Kiwi called Woody. His task was to kit us each out with layers of thermals, merino and fleece topped with a selection of orange and black nylon jackets. Alice and I tried on our gear behind a curtain, emerging to parade our new outfits and take photos of each other. Our kit was completed by two pairs of boots, a pair of goggles, a two-litre drink bottle, and a female urination device—a FUD, or the Shewee—in case we wanted to learn to undo just one zip and pee standing up. I had asked two female friends who had been to Antarctica about the Shewee. Kim said it was great, she used it all the time, and the key was to wait until you really, really, really needed to go. Veronika said it wasn’t that cold anyway, and she only used hers once. Mostly I was worried about using it the first time. Did it come with instructions? What if I did it wrong?

We had packed most of our gear into provided stuff bags, but kept one set of clothing, including the giant boots, jackets and gloves that made up our Extreme Cold Weather gear, aside to wear on the plane.

I had wanted to go to Antarctica since I was a geology student in the 1980s. Somehow, in all my imaginings of going there, I’d never really thought much about the temperature. Putting on all those layers of clothing—really uncomfortable in the 18°C heat—brought it home that it was kind of cold down there.

Alice was a poet. In her late 20s, she seemed serious and intellectual, with a pretty face and wide green eyes that gave her a slightly bewildered look—though perhaps she was just bewildered to be going to Antarctica. She was as excited as I was, but admitted to not thinking much about Antarctica before getting the invitation. We sat together while Matt, who was quiet and friendly, a bit younger than me but an old hand at taking folk to Antarctica, went over our itinerary. When Alice, like me, sniggered at Matt’s written designation as our ‘on-ice escort’, I knew I was going to like her.

A shuttle drove us out onto the tarmac where we were instructed to approach the plane ‘with a sense of purpose’. I took this to mean that mucking around taking selfies in front of the plane would not be tolerated. Only four of us were wearing Antarctica New Zealand’s orange and black jackets—me, Alice, Matt and Andrew, an Australian professor who was travelling south to study the marine communities that live under the sea ice near Scott Base. When I asked if he was excited to be heading back to Antarctica, he just shrugged. He’d been there so many times that it had become merely a place he went to gather new field data. He was much more interested to hear I had recently completed a PhD in the history of science, and started telling me about the Japanese heroic age explorer Shirase Nobu, who led an expedition to Antarctica at the same time as Scott and Amundsen.

The New Zealand Antarctic programme has a logistics pool with the US programme—like ‘a giant co-op’, said Matt—and the rest of the passengers were Americans headed for McMurdo Station. The American scientists were identifiable by their red National Science Foundation jackets, and the US military ‘carhartts’—mechanics, drivers and other support staff—by their camo overalls. Our flight crew of alarmingly young American boys were wearing dark green overalls with a US flag on one shoulder and an Operation Deep Freeze badge on the other.

Apart from five rows of passenger seats, this was a cargo plane. Behind us was an entire red NSF van, a helicopter rotor, and several giant slabs of cargo. Food? Fuel? Lab equipment? The plane itself was a giant shell, with all the wires, cords, pumps and connections exposed. Matt told us these planes were flown in the Middle East and the lack of cladding made repairs easier if they were damaged by bullets. It was reassuring; perhaps Flight ICE34 was ‘safe’ and cushy compared with some of the missions these guys flew on.

Soon after take-off there was another briefing. Behind a curtain, we were told, was the ‘honey bucket’, or toilet, which I really didn’t want to have to use. If the cabin lost air pressure, there would be no oxygen masks dropping from the overhead locker. Rather, we would be given ancient-looking oxygen helmets, which looked uncomfortably like plastic bags and went over your entire head. I felt claustrophobic just looking at them.

I didn’t want to think about fire or crashing into the freezing ocean, so I got out my laptop and opened a movie—I had the 1982 Antarctic horror The Thing and Werner Herzog’s 2007 documentary Encounters at the End of the World—but the plane was so noisy I couldn’t hear anything above the roar of the engines. The old hands, Matt and many of the American scientists, were wearing massive earmuffs and watching movies or sleeping.

The Diazepam plus a bit of sleep deprivation was enough to make me doze. But it was hot and uncomfortable in my giant boots and Antarctic layers, and I slept lightly.

A few hours into the flight there was a buzz through the plane and people started standing up and looking out of the small round windows at the front of the cabin. I took my turn and got a rush of exhilaration at the sight of icebergs floating in the ocean below us. I’d seen icebergs when I visited Greenland a decade earlier but these huge slabs of ice were on an entirely different scale. As we continued south, the ocean disappeared and the icebergs were surrounded by sea ice, a pale blue layer broken by jagged cracks, and then—finally—we were flying over Antarctica. Alice and I joined the passengers queuing at the ladder to go up to the flight deck. When it was my turn, I stood behind the pilots and gazed down at Victoria Land. A mountainous icescape stretched below us, the peaks blunted and softened by a layer of ice that draped the mountains. Cape Adare, the northernmost point of Victoria Land, was on our left. I looked out for Priestley Glacier to the south—named after a physicist in Scott’s party—and took photos that looked like nothing, pictures of whiteness. To our right were the Transantarctic Mountains, which extended all the way to the Antarctic Peninsula on the other side of the continent. Behind them was the vast expanse of the Polar Plateau. On our left, and in front of us, was McMurdo Sound. Our destination? Ross Island, a volcanic island some 40 kilometres from the coast of South Victoria Land, bounded to the south by the Ross Ice Shelf and to the north by a thin layer of annual sea ice.

We were going to land, in this enormous plane, on the sea ice.

As we began our descent the flight crew leapt into action, pulling their cold weather gear of black overtrousers and fur-hooded jackets on top of their green overalls and adding hats, gloves and sunglasses. Through the window to my left I began to see sights familiar to me from my years of devouring information about Antarctica. Smiling inanely by now, I pointed out to Alice the peak of Mount Erebus, the clutter of McMurdo Station, then a collection of crates, trucks, tractors and a radar station on the sea ice, the flotsam and jetsam of science, aviation and the military. ‘Look!’ I cried out, unnecessarily, but if I didn’t speak I would burst.

As we landed on the Ice Runway—a summer landing strip on about two metres of annual sea ice—I wiped the first Antarctic tears from my face. The world had suddenly got a lot smaller. This place at the bottom of the planet, this place of my dreams and imagination, was my home for the next eight days.

I’d read up on the airstrip before we flew. It was top of National Geographic’s list of extreme airports—the ‘number one extreme airport in the world!’—so I was relieved at how smooth the landing was. And that we didn’t smash through the sea ice into the ocean below.

Antarctica.

A Scott Base staffer drove us in a Toyota Hilux along a flagged road across the ice and up onto Ross Island, to Scott Base. We parked on snow, between a clutter of green buildings and a row of shipping containers. Across the ice, Matt pointed out, were Black Island, White Island, Minna Bluff and Mount Discovery. We turned and, behind us, Mount Erebus stood huge and white against the clear blue sky. We stomped up some metal steps and arrived, through two sets of doors, into the locker room where we changed out of our ECW gear. I pulled on a pair of jeans but Alice, after asking Matt if it was okay to wear a skirt, changed into a short black skirt and leggings. I managed a passing hug for Dan, a classmate from my undergraduate geology days, who was about to fly to Terra Nova Bay to investigate the sources and composition of the dust on and in the sea ice.

Then Alice and I were herded up some stairs, so that David, a Navy officer seconded to Antarctica New Zealand for two years, could give us a PowerPoint presentation about safety. He was an upright, meticulous man, wearing civvies like the rest of the Defence Force personnel on base, and we dutifully obeyed when he instructed us to close the blinds on the windows behind us.

The briefing was full of cautionary tales, some more relevant to us than others. We were told about a man who forgot to zip up properly after a pee and got a frostbitten penis. There were gruesome photos of cold weather injuries—frostnip, frostbite and immersion foot. I was reminded of the Australian geologist Douglas Mawson who, after his companions Xavier Mertz and Belgrave Ninnis died on their 1913 expedition, had to strap the soles of his feet back on to walk to a hut where the rest of his men were waiting.

We were told to eat more than usual to keep our metabolisms up. To drink lots of water. To wear sunglasses to reduce the risk of snow blindness. To use the pump bottles of sunblock provided at every exit. We learned the difference between a black flag (danger, stay away), a blue flag (American fuel line, stay away), a green flag (safe route) and a red flag (hmm, also safe route). We learned how to light a Primus, use the VHF radio, and read the signs of changing weather.

There was a lot of talk about the weather. Even on a glorious sunny day things could change very quickly, we were warned. Weather was divided into three categories. Condition 1 was severe weather—visibility less than 30 metres, wind speed 102 kilometres per hour or more, or wind chill below minus 73°C. Condition 2 was less severe—visibility less than 300 metres, wind speed 89 kilometres per hour or more, or wind chill below 60°C. Even in Condition 3—‘normal’ weather, which we were experiencing now—severe weather was possible within 24–48 hours. ‘Condition 1 will kill you, but even Condition 2 can get you,’ David told us.

‘If in doubt, don’t go out,’ said Stu, the field trainer who would be taking us out the next day.

We were briefed on waste management, protocol around going off base, and local wildlife: ‘Keep 10 metres away.’ David also told us about the ‘friendly relations’ between the Kiwis and the Americans. If we were planning an all-nighter at McMurdo, which was just a three-kilometre drive or walk from Scott Base, we shouldn’t sign out until the next morning. If things didn’t go well, and we headed back to base and had an accident at 12:30, no one would come looking for us until morning, we were warned. ‘Best to sign out to 12:30. If things go well, just call up,’ David said with an encouraging smile. Alice and I looked across the room at each other, wide eyed, eyebrows raised. I was married, and wasn’t planning to forge any particular NZ–US relations on the trip. Besides, I recalled what Kim Stanley Robinson, in his 1997 novel Antarctica, said was common advice for straight women coming to McMurdo Station, where the ratio of men to women was 6:1. ‘The odds are good, but the goods are odd.’

Again and again, the briefing came back to safety. David talked about ‘Antarctic time’. It was late spring in New Zealand, but here it was considered ‘summer’ and the sun never set. Rather, it circled overhead below the zenith, as though it was always two o’clock in the afternoon.

‘If you need a bit of extra time to get your boots on, laces tied, it doesn’t matter,’ said David.

‘At the end of the day, there is no end of the day,’ Matt added.

*

The next stage of our introduction to life in Antarctica was a tour of the base: the Hatherton Lab, where we could send emails and I could publish blog posts; the dining room, where we were taught how to use the espresso machine; the lounge, with its big picture windows looking out over the sea ice; the shop; and the Hillary Field Centre, where field parties mounted their expeditions. Next to the dining room, David indicated, was the Tatty Flag bar, which was open from 5 till 10pm every day. All parts of the base—the Hatherton Lab at one end and the Hillary Field Centre at the other—were connected by long corridors with windows looking out on Antarctica. Antarctica! We strode along behind David, nodding as he pointed things out to us, smiling in delight and astonishment at every glimpse of the view.

Off the main corridors were the dormitories and ablutions block. In the women’s bathroom David emphasised the three-minute shower policy, and showed us the most efficient way to remove one paper towel from the dispenser: grab with both hands and tug gently. Clearly our Antarctic experience was going to be very different from the early explorers’. But his pedantry had a purpose. Fresh water, created from seawater using a reverse osmosis plant, was limited, and all waste generated on base had to be shipped back to New Zealand at the end of the season—we were all expected to do our bit to minimise waste. He showed us the sauna, the laundry room, and the drying room where rows of T-shirts, thermals, socks and underwear hung from racks suspended from the ceiling.

Some consultants were on base installing and testing new smoke detection equipment and we’d been warned there might be a fire drill. Sure enough, as we were walking down the corridor a voice came over the intercom: ‘Please evacuate the building by the nearest exit.’

David had told us that if this happened we should grab the nearest jacket and head outside to assemble in the TAE hut, one of the few remaining buildings from the Trans-Antarctic Expedition and the base’s 1957 origin. Scott Base is a bit like a ship, and fire is one of the biggest dangers here, he had said. ‘If there’s a fire, what you jump overboard into might be even less hospitable.’ I needed a jacket. On the nearest row of pegs, in the corridor outside the dining room, a row of yellow fire-fighting jackets were hanging beside an adult-sized cow costume with big pink udders.

Pink udders? Sensory overload was kicking in. I was starting to look forward to a drink.

Neither Alice nor I managed to follow David’s instructions. I dashed to the locker room to grab my own jacket. Alice hurried outside before me, without any jacket. As I went outside I saw her ahead of me, wearing a three-quarter-sleeved black top and a short skirt—possibly the only person on Ross Island in a skirt—rubbing her hands up and down her cold arms, while a woman shouted and shook a finger at her.

After dinner, we joined Matt and some base staff for a drink at the Tatty Flag, an eccentric, eclectically decorated room with a curved bar surrounded by a row of high stools. Matt introduced us to lots of people, all of whom were friendly and interested to hear about our plans for the week. At the far end of the room, sun streamed in the windows onto a pool table, where two people were playing. Old couches, comfy chairs and low tables—one covered in a jigsaw puzzle that three base staffers were working on—filled the rest of the space. A stuffed kiwi sat in a glass-caged diorama on top of a black piano. Next to it was an elaborate can crusher made by someone in the workshop. On the wall was an All Blacks flag and a giant grainy black-and-white photograph from 1911: biologists Apsley Cherry-Garrard and Bill Wilson, and lieutenant Birdie Bowers, sitting around a table looking wrecked after surviving their sunless, winter journey to Cape Crozier to gather some emperor penguin eggs.

When the bar closed, Alice and I collapsed into the top bunks in the room we shared with two fish biologists, and closed the shutters against the all-night sun.

Days two and three: Field training

In front of the bathroom mirror the next morning Alice and I cemented our bond by discovering we had each—sheepishly—brought mascara to Antarctica.

After breakfast, I put in my earbuds and stepped outside to look at the view and listen to my Antarctic playlist, determined to attach some Antarctic memories to music I could listen to once I was home. Over the previous week, I had asked friends for recommendations. There were some silly suggestions—‘anything by Seal or Penguin Café Orchestra’ and ‘the Happy Feet soundtrack’—but if anyone recommended a particular song or album I put it on the list. It was a weird mix. One thing that struck me was the expectation that moody, melancholic tracks would be best for my trip (thankfully, I already had an iPhone full of those). Perhaps that would be true for an Antarctic winter, or a lonely field camp in the middle of the ice shelf. But it was looking like my eight-day trip would be action-packed. Veronika, who had been on two media trips to Antarctica, had advised me that with the midnight sun, the helicopter rides, and the strangeness and newness of everything, I shouldn’t expect to get much sleep.

Matt, in one of our many email exchanges before the trip, had advised that any music that was too familiar would seem odd in this strange new environment. He recommended I fill my playlist with new and unfamiliar tracks.

I tried out some of the recommended tracks—‘Antarctica Starts Here’ by John Cale, ‘Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow’ by Nick Cave, ‘Electric Blue’ by Icehouse—but nothing seemed right until I got to the Icelandic band Sigur Rós. The language was unfamiliar and the music eerie; it worked for Antarctica.

*

Before we could go off base—to the historic huts, to scientists’ field camps, or for an unchaperoned walk on the sea ice—we needed to go through Antarctic Field Training.

‘If I throw you out there and get you to survive on your natural instincts, you’ll pretty much get spanked,’ said Stu, our field trainer.

Following his instructions, we packed safety gear, food and ECW clothing and met outside by a yellow Hägglund, a Swedish military all-terrain vehicle with tractor wheels designed for the snow.

We drove down the hill and Stu radioed in to base as we crossed ‘the transition’, the humped-up pile of snow and ice that covers the tidal crack and marks the boundary between the snow and ice on Ross Island and the snow-covered sea ice. Once we were on the ice road Stu pointed out a row of black flags, and reminded us that black is for danger. ‘Danger—stay away; not danger—have a look. There are crevasses here that could swallow all sorts of things, monster trucks and all.’ There were a few American bulldozers and a couple of Hägglunds, he told us, sitting at the bottom of the ocean around Ross Island.

I asked Stu if the rooftop hatch was an escape route for in case we went through the sea ice. Stu said pretty much, yes, then did his best to reassure us that Hägglunds could float. But the hatches had other uses, and he said we were welcome to stand up, stick our heads out, and look at the view. ‘We call it manning the 50 calibre,’ he said. I stood on the back seat, the top half of my body out of the hatch, manning the 50 calibre and smiling so hard that my face started to hurt.

About half an hour’s slow drive from base we reached our campsite. Along the journey, we’d left the sea ice and were now on the Ross Ice Shelf, a floating slab the size of France. The campsite was marked by a green toilet tent and a shipping container in which we found our tents, one for Stu and one for me and Alice. Following Stu’s instructions, Alice and I spread the square base of the yellow pyramid-shaped tent, slid in the four wooden poles, and lifted the canvas. We pushed the pegs into the snow, pulled the guy ropes tight, then shovelled snow around the skirt of the tent. It was vigorous work, and we stripped off jackets and hats to work in the Antarctic sunshine. We were excited to be there, smiling and laughing, even falling occasionally, but Stu left us to it, erecting his tent as he’d done a hundred times before, then watching us work.

With tents pitched, we used a saw to cut blocks of polystyrene-soft snow to build a wall to shelter us from the wind, and a Primus to boil water for cups of tea and the Back Country Cuisine rehydrated meals we’d each selected from the Scott Base food store. Using the wooden food box as a table, we sat on tiny campstools and ate creamy carbonara, nasi goreng, and beef and pasta hotpot out of the plastic packets. A breeze was blowing down from Mount Erebus, and I was thankful for the snow-block wall sheltering our backs. Stu, we discovered, worked as a New Zealand mountain guide when he wasn’t in Antarctica. He described himself as an ‘outdoor bum’ and said he was down here not for the work but for what he could do on his days off. He asked what we were doing. Alice was here to gain inspiration for her poetry and was also recording an audio diary that would play on Radio New Zealand after our return. I told Stu I was here to write about science. I had plans to blog from Scott Base, write a series of magazine articles and collect ideas for an anthology of Antarctic science writing.

Stu spent most of his time on the ice with scientists, escorting them on field training or helping them to set up their field camps. ‘There’s people here doing PhDs on all sorts of weird things,’ he said. And then: ‘I should’ve gone to university.’

This was Stu’s second field season in Antarctica.

‘The problem is, when you get back, people always ask you what Antarctica is like. What do you say?’ he said, shrugging and looking out across the endless white plain of the Ross Ice Shelf.

After a pause, he answered his own question: ‘Big. White. Cold. Awesome.’

As we ate we spied a small black figure in the distance, coming towards us. It was Matt, travelling on cross-country skis.

He arrived, unbuckled his skis and, with a smile and a nod, pulled a bottle of Scott Base pinot noir out of his backpack. We poured some wine into our enamel mugs and toasted the view. Mount Erebus loomed above us, a puff of smoke sitting atop its 3794-metre peak.

*

After sharing the wine with us, and ensuring that Alice and I were still smiling, Matt skied back to base. It was cold but sunny outside so I braved the toilet then retired to our tent. Stu had showed us how to dig a trench in the middle of the floor so that Alice and I each had a sleeping platform, between which we could swing down our legs to take off our boots and leave them in the snow trench. On the inside of the tent were netting pockets, which I filled with my water bottle, my book—I was planning to read Scott’s 1911–12 journal while I was here—and my sleeping mask.

Alice stood outside, at a distance, to record the first of her audio diaries. The sound travelled across the silence to where I was lying and I heard her slow, sing-song, sometimes hesitant voice as she described our camping spot and her feelings of guilt that, for us, ‘being in the Antarctic is so easy . . . since we’ve arrived here the weather has been so beautiful, we haven’t really seen that much of the great perils—we’ve just seen this amazing, white, vast landscape.’

Alice finished and passed her recording equipment into the tent through the circular canvas entrance tunnel then climbed through herself. When the canvas was extended, it was like an igloo entrance, but neither of us had quite mastered it, and our entrances usually involved landing on each other, or in the trench, laughing like kids. We talked about the day, wrote in our notebooks, then lay back on our layers of sleeping bags and mats, exhausted.

Out on the ice, far from the responsibilities of home—a fifth birthday party to plan, short-term contracts at the university to negotiate, a home office that needed tidying after a decade-long PhD and book project—I felt deliciously unencumbered. It was just me and Alice in a glowy yellow tent.

*

I slept deeply, but the bright sunlight peeking around the edges of my sleep mask confused my body into jolting awake throughout the night. In the morning, we drove back to base as a thick white fog crept its way over the peninsula that separated Scott Base from Mount Erebus.  

We had been lucky with the weather—there was only a slight breeze blowing and the temperature, with wind chill, had never dropped below –9°C. ‘It’s extraordinarily warm for this time of year,’ Stu said.

After a three-minute shower and some lunch, it was back into our outdoors gear and out onto the pressure ridges, this time each of us carrying a long wooden pole that Stu called a ‘seal club’. Scott Base is built at Pram