McMurdo, December 8, 2002. 25 deg. F, no wind at 6:30 AM.

Yesterday was the first time that the temperature with wind chill has been above freezing since I arrived. Lots of people are walking around with shorts and t-shirts. Everyone is hot. I was so warm in my office that I began to picture myself in an itty bitty bikini. Lacking even a tank top, I finally asked for help from the maintenance staff to shut off the heater. It feels great to not be cold and not to have to wear all those extra layers of face mask, hat, and heavy gloves. It’s equally wonderful not to have to worry about the camera fogging up and the tripod freezing solid. Not that I would trade those cold times at Pole and up Erebus for anything, but working under those conditions was exhausting and not always successful. You struggle so hard to lug the cameras around and to get everything to work that it’s hard to concentrate on taking a good picture. Back home in Santa Fe, I would be all bundled up and cold at 36 degrees (which is what it reached yesterday), but after the last couple of months here, it feels like a heat wave.

McMurdo, December 9, 2002. A great journey to Cape Royds and Evans with Sandy Blakeslee. We enjoyed Sunday brunch, the best meal of the week, and then set off in a Piston Bully. It takes about 2 hours to get out to Royds. It was bright, clear, and warm. About an hour out, we came across a hole in the ice with a Weddell seal in it, just poking its head out for air. Its nostrils were icy and it peered through its eye slits at us watching it, showing no fear. It’s amazing that its eyes can adapt to the extreme darkness of thousand-foot water under the ice and to the bright sun on land. Near the Barne Glacier we stopped to photograph several seals and half-grown pups lying out like giant slugs on the ice. It was a glorious day for a trip on the sea ice.

As it turned out, it was probably the last day for such a journey. Where the edge of the Barne Glacier meets the sea ice, a giant, long crack forms every year. When we reached it, we could see it had opened up from the last time we crossed it. It was now more than a foot across and open to the water not far below. If we had taken a shovel and removed the snow and really taken a good look at the crack, we would have found it to be even larger. So, not good for travelers! A group of Kiwis just behind us also stopped to look. They had a couple of twelve-foot boards, which they put down across the crack to stabilize the vehicle tracks. We thus crossed safely with many joking comments about the best way to escape from a Piston Bully in case it sank. (Start by unlocking the roof hatch—we figured that at least a couple of us would have time to get out that way.)

At Cape Royds, we climbed over the narrow rocky spit and looked down at the sheltered bay. It’s a lovely, serene site with the penguin colony to one side and the hut near the ice edge. I photographed briefly in the hut, especially trying to do a few longer views of the whole interior. I also photographed more of the outside storage, A pair of skuas, apparently hungry, were eating the beans and corn that were spilling out from several of the metal cans that had opened up in the course of the nearly 90 years since Shackleton’s Ross Sea party had abandoned them. Sandy was pleased to meet several members of the NZ Historic Antarctic Trust, who were also there on an outing. In poking around, I was astonished to come across a mushroom, several inches across, growing in between some old lumber at one side of the hut exterior. It’s amazing that mushrooms could grow in such a harsh environment, where every day has many hours below freezing. Yet here it was, a hitchhiker from the Shackleton expedition, managing to flourish despite the environment, in a way that we can’t do ourselves. Just think how many years it has managed to winter-over!

Dr. David Ainley, a penguin researcher, met me at the hut and led me over the ice to the penguin rookery. The colony is a special protected area, which I could only enter because I managed to acquire a permit for it. These are Adelie penguins, the species that looks most like the generic cartoons of black and white birds in tux and tails. They are a wonderfully curious species, which frequently sidles up to tourists to take a closer look. At Royds, however, the penguins are having a hard time. The giant icebergs, especially B15 which is the size of Rhode Island, are stuck in McMurdo Sound and have changed the water currents so that the sea ice doesn’t break up as fast or as close to the shore of Ross Island as it once did. The penguins have to walk 25 miles to feed. For a small bird with little stubby legs and flippers that is a very long walk before dinner. What has happened is that a pair comes in to their nesting area, the site of a thousand years of penguin settlement. They will not nest on the uncertain sea ice, so the volcanic soil of Ross Island is as close to the water as they can get. The female lays the egg and then the male sits on it to incubate it while she goes out to sea to feed. But, since the distance is so great, she can’t get out and back in time to feed the chick. The mortality rate is very high. When I was in the colony, it was very quiet with lots of birds sitting on their nests. A few birds without eggs were walking about, stealing pebbles from unused nests and piling them up in their own nest. It was clear that the colony was smaller than usual with many unoccupied nests.

After a successful return over the Barne Glacier crack, we stopped briefly at Cape Evans. This hut is always a special place because of its sense of imminent return of the Scott party. You can almost believe that maybe they didn’t die out there on the ice and if you just sit down and wait a little while, they will come into view over the sea ice, dragging their sleds and be ready for dinner. It was warmer, than the last time I was here, and I noticed that the seal blubber that is piled in the front passageway leading to the pony stalls was partially defrosted and oozing red. Rather than nearly a century old, it looked fresh enough that you could cut a slab off it to burn for fuel or to fry up for dinner. Inside you can still smell the smoke from burning seal blubber.

The hut was lighter than when I photographed in it six weeks or so ago, too. The snow is no longer covering the windows so they are letting in considerably more light. You can see the names on the tins and can photograph without needing a flashlight. Up on the hill behind the hut, we found the remains of a dog, which had been buried by the snow when I came before. It still had a collar and chain on its neck. I was told that it has a bullet hole in its skull and was thus shot when the men left rather than dying of hunger. It still looks eager, as if it was shot as it rushed forward to greet a friend. Unlike the site at Royds, this place does not have a peaceful feel. The hut was built solidly, but its chosen environment is harsh. Only the determination of its occupants permitted them to live here and only for a short time.

We arrived back at McMurdo in time for Randy Davis’s seal lecture. He not only played some of the video footage of the seals eating and breathing but some of their sounds as well. Lots of trills and clicking sounds. Turns out that these Weddell seals are not as peaceful to their own kind under the water as they are to humans above the ice. The males do battle all the time, and sounds are a big part of their communication system.

December 10, 2002. Lake Hoare. Yesterday we took a helo to Lake Hoare in the Dry Valleys, about half an hour ride from McMurdo. Lake Hoare is the central field camp for all the Dry Valleys climate research. The camp buildings are located a few hundred feet from the flat base of the Canada Glacier, which towers over it. You’d think that it would be a precarious existence, but the Canada Glacier is what they call a “cold glacier,” which means that it is advancing and receding at about the same rate so it doesn’t appear to change much. It doesn’t calve off large pieces like the glaciers that flow down to the sea ice. On warm days where the temperature is around freezing, it drips down into small streams, which are measured by the scientists.

The main camp building is built in the same basic plan as Shackleton’s hut at Cape Royds. At one end is the kitchen and dining table, large enough to seat 20 people should it be necessary. Pantry shelves and cupboards line the counter tops and are filled with much the same supplies—canned goods, dried beans and rice, tea and coffee and other drinks. Coffee is especially important at this camp, so they have several kinds of drip and espresso makers, as well as Starbucks coffee brought from home. On one wall is the Preway stove with an enormous pot of water, melted from chunks cut off the glacier. Above the stove are clotheslines to dry wet gloves, socks, and towels. On the other side of the room, are the radio and telephone used for camp manger Rae Spain’s daily communication with the helicopters and other camps. The main camp building works on solar panels with a diesel generator for backup. At the far end is a slightly divided second room with a couple of bunk beds for relaxing during the day (because of the constant activity in the hut, nobody sleeps there except in an emergency) and several desks with computers that have Internet access. All the cubbyholes in the hut are filled with extra clothing, books, science gear, and other odds and ends. The ceiling is festooned with Thanksgiving drawings, wire sculptures, and Christmas lights. Someone who had been coming here for many years could do a history of previous occupants from the artifacts that remain behind, just as historians are now doing with the Scott and Shackleton huts.

In addition to the main building, there are three small lab buildings, a Jamesway that is used for storage, and several rocket toilets. I can’t describe the workings of the rocket toilet other than to say that when a toilet is full, it is somehow turned on and burns up all the waste (a black flag is hung outside to indicate the process is underway). The name is alarming, but they seem to work. Despite my difficulties with machinery, I found them to be more user-friendly than the usual outhouse here where you have to deal separately with different kinds of waste.

Sandy and I share a Scott tent down close to the glacier for sleeping. Everyone else has a small tent of their own somewhere up on the hillside. After my unpleasantly cold Happy Camper experience when I first arrived in October where I shivered through the night and frost nipped my finger tips, I wasn’t looking forward to Antarctic tent camping. However, it wasn’t cold last night, maybe in the 20s outside, and it was above freezing in the tent since my water bottle didn’t freeze. My sleeping bag is rated to –50 degrees, and I had a thick foam pad, a Thermarest mattress, my pillow, and my stuffed cat. I also had an eye shade since it doesn’t get dark. At least when you tent in the Antarctic, you don’t have to worry about other campers bothering you or insects or animals. I was comfy and slept soundly.

In the afternoon, we took a six-hour hike up Lake Hoare, across Lake Chad, and around the Seuss Glacier to Mummy Pond. The hardest part was walking on the lake. It is now starting to melt slightly on the surface and is quite slippery around the smooth edges. If you walk more toward the center where the ice is rough, then you risk stepping on a melt hole where the ice has melted and refrozen right on the surface but is so thin that you fall through a foot or more into water. We put stabilizers on our boots, but they didn’t fit well and so we moved slowly and uncomfortably over the ice, worried that we would slip and fall with every step. Eventually, we were moving so slowly that we left the ice and followed a path around the shore line, but it was equally difficult since it was rocky and hilly.

The way was better when we reached the Seuss Glacier and began to circle up around its edge. This, again, is a cold glacier, that doesn’t change shape rapidly. It’s flat edge, some fifteen feet high, came down to form a slight trough that will no doubt run as a stream when the weather warms it just a little more. The hillside that it sits on is dirt, not snowy and not too difficult to climb. I could walk close enough to the glacier to reach up and touch its hard surface and yet walk on dry ground. I flashed on Ronald Coleman in the movie “Lost Horizon,” trekking around the edge of icy mountains, with his beautiful love guiding him. Why wouldn’t you stay young in a place like this where time seems to have no meaning? Time is so obviously an artificial construct in the Antarctic, irrelevant in a place that changes on glacial time.

When we reached the top of the ridge and began to descend, we could see Mummy Pond below us. It is a small icy lake with the glacier feeding it from one side and Lake Bonney crowding it on the other. Its name comes from the desiccated seals around the edges of the ice. We found four of them around the lake, several rather pleasant golden ones with their fur still intact despite the hundreds of years that they have been exposed to the elements. Mainly, I am told, they are crabeater seals rather than Weddells, and nobody knows how they got here or why they came. It’s hard to imagine them slithering over our route up the ridge line next to the Seuss Glacier. Even allowing for possibly getting off course and being lost, it’s hard to imagine them coming this far from the sea. Even considering that a few adventuresome seals might want to trek away from the pack for a special outing, it could not have been the sort of journey to write home to mother about.

The following day, we flew to the Beacon Valley, a majestic site of great sandstone and dolomite formations on the edge of the Taylor glacier. Dr. Ronald Sletten is tent camping out there with an assistant, living far from the relative comforts of heated field camp huts and walking for hours every day over extremely rugged terrain, to do his research. The camp consists of the two small tents, nothing else, in a slightly cleared area amid a boulder-strewn valley enclosed by a bowl-shaped rock formation thousands of feet high. Even communication is difficult. I spoke to him over an iridium phone connection the night before we left McMurdo and he had to reconnect four times before we could complete our short conversation since the satellite kept fading in and out. The graduate student he brought to work with him slipped on the rocky surface a few days after she arrived, broke three bones and dislocated her wrist. It took the helicopter support three days to fly in and medivac her out to Christ Church. Since nobody is allowed to work alone, Alan, one of my snow school instructors, flew in to help Ron.

What Ron has found in the Beacon Valley is that there is a massive ice deposit, an ancient glacier, just a foot or so beneath the soil level. By dating an ash layer in the soil, he has determined that this ice is very old, perhaps the oldest ice on earth. It is at least 8 million years old and possibly as old as 20 million years old. Evidence of the cracking of this ice due to contraction during the rapid cooling of the frozen ground in the winter and the resulting disruptions of the soil can be seen in the polygon shapes so clearly visible from the air throughout the Dry Valleys, but especially in the Beacon Valley. Ron’s study of the ice will lead to a better understanding of the stability of Antarctica’s ice sheets and by extension, the Earth’s climate.

At the tent camp, Ron met us and the helo then flew us down the valley to a site near where a variety of his soil and atmospheric measuring devices are located. To get there required a half-hour walk from the landing site out across an enormous field of rocks of all sizes and shapes. Many are ventifacts, rocks that have been sculpted into sharp ridges and worn smooth by the wind that blows most of the time in the area. Some of these are neatly organized into desert pavement but most are piled and jumbled, making walking hazardous with camera gear. On the edges of the valley are variegated formations much like the sandstone bluffs of the Four-Corners area, but on a grandiose scale and with glaciers dripping over their sides. I kept looking up the hillsides for bighorn sheep and down on the ground for Indian arrowheads. I took deep breaths of the cool air, longing for the scent of sagebrush. But, there is no wildlife and no visible vegetation of any sort. You hear no sounds other than your own breathing and the wind passing over your parka.

Back at Lake Hoare, we met Dr. Berry Lyons, part of the LTER team that is studying the ecosystem and climate of the Dry Valleys. Despite appearances in the Beacon Valley and at Lake Hoare, the Dry Valleys are from a sterile empty place. Antarctica is the coldest, driest, windiest continent on earth. Only 2% of the continent is free of ice and much of that land is in these Dry Valleys. It is one of the most extreme environments on the planet, with strong winds blowing down from the polar ice cap, an average annual temperature of –4 degrees F and an average precipitation of only about an inch a year. Wildlife doesn’t wander around here, except for the occasional suicidal seal over the millennia. No native people have ever lived here. No trees or bushes or grass grows here. Yet, life on the small scale is thriving here. Microbiologists are looking at the microbial life in the ice—and they are finding it down to the depths of the lake sediments. Dr. Laurie Connell is studying yeast, taking samples in the Dry Valleys and returning to the Crary lab to grow colonies (and she is finding species endemic to the Antarctic). Ron Sletten lifted off a piece of sandstone out in the wastes of the Beacon Valley to reveal the greenish stain of cyano-bacteria. Further up the food chain are rotifers, nematodes, and tartagrades. Anywhere that has water has life.


McMurdo, December 13, 2002. 28 deg F, 12 deg F with wind chill.
Who knows what interesting tiny critters will surface when we can sample other planets and moons? Scientists I have spoken with agree that as long as there is water, there will be life. What is it all about? You’d think that an answer might be visible in the Antarctic, if anywhere, a place where the light hurts your eyes and distances are so large that they cannot be judged by the human brain. But, this is a place where purpose is unimportant, where destiny is irrelevant. Human musings rattle around like a few grains of sand in the bottom of a 50-gallon barrel.