October 27, 2002,
McMurdo Base, Antarctica
10:00 AM, 7 deg F, 7 deg F wind chill
1:40 PM, 5 deg F, -35 deg F wind chill.

Went to a great lecture last night by Dr. Donal T. Manahan of USC on the importance of McMurdo to the great age of Antarctic exploration. We are here at an historic moment. It is the 100th anniversary this October of when Scott, Shackleton, and Wilson set off on their 1902 expedition to the South Pole. This was the first real attempt on the Pole, and although they didn’t make it and had to turn back, all suffering from scurvy, it was the beginning of the race to the Pole that would be finally won by Amundsen a decade later. Dr. Manahan showed wonderful slides of images taken during that expedition of this area. Nothing of the station existed of course, but you could see the topography very clearly and think, “Oh, that’s where my Crary lab building sits today.”

The Discovery hut, which Scott brought from Australia, is still here at the edge of the sea ice. It was never designed to be permanent housing, since the men expected to sleep in their quarters on shipboard, and is neither well insulated nor well designed for such a cold environment. I walked down to see it a few nights ago. It was used primarily for storage and still has large carcasses of meat hanging in it that look like they might still be chopped up for a stew after 100 years. Well aged meat.

The men climbed Observation Hill, which is just behind the station, for exercise. So did I, yesterday. How strange and wonderful to be walking around in their footsteps. When I have been in London, my favorite stop in the British Museum Library is to see Scott’s final pencil-written journal, brought back after his death. From seeing it, I could almost imagine him writing his daily comments with half-frozen fingers in his small tent. Here at McMurdo, you can imagine the men alive, walking around, full of dreams and hopes.

One of the best parts of the lecture came at the end. Dr. Manahan showed about two minutes of a film that photographer Ponting took of Scott’s party, Scott, Evans, Wilson, and Oats, harnessed together and practicing pulling a sled before they left on the 1902 journey. It was taken here at McMurdo. It gave a sense, better than anything else I’ve seen, of the labor of pulling a half-ton sled, of putting one foot in front of the other and slogging all day long, of falling, getting up, and pulling again. How determined we are as a species to do what has not been done before! How amazing some individuals are at doing what they believe they need to do despite all discomfort and pain.

The heroic stories of the exploration period at the beginning of the century are the beginning of Ross Island history. This is a continent without a native history, without native peoples, so most of what we have is from the arrival of white European males in the twentieth century (except for a couple of earlier expeditions that sailed by or stayed without doing major exploration). Since white European males have also written the stories and the textbooks, their history is of course always suspect. The image of Antarctica has been forged on their anvils. It is one of struggle and endurance, heroism against all odds. I think about that a lot.

Another way of looking at Antarctica is to see it as a blank slate, without true long-term human history of occupation. Unlike other parts of the world, the early explorations here led to no colonization. The British explorers did do important scientific research here, which has continued to the present, but they couldn’t live here with their families. Despite all efforts, this place is uninhabitable. You can then see it as a heroic place… or a hostile one… or as an impersonal place. More than any other place on the planet it simply reflects whatever we bring to it.

This morning I got a snowmobile lesson. How to start your snowmobile and how to repair it when it doesn’t work. The three other people in the class looked like they understood it all perfectly. All of them have already used snowmobiles, so I suppose that might have helped. I have no idea what a carburetor is (other than it makes a car go), so I am at a loss for how the fuel lines relate to it. When the instructor started taking the carburetor apart, I knew it was hopeless for me. I’m still not sure which gizmos I have to push and pull to start the thing, much less what to do once it was running. Hopefully, no body would be standing nearby. My inability to deal with mechanical objects is a great detriment down here where everyone seems to have some sort of mechanical knowledge. I have never driven such a snowmobile or anything like it, and I’m going to make damn sure that if I have to take one to get somewhere, I have a knowledgeable companion.

Today, the Antarctic is living up to its reputation. The whole Crary lab building is shaking with the force of the wind, now gusting to over 50 mph. I was supposed to helo out to Black Island today, but I could hear the wind before I ever got out of bed and knew I wasn’t going anywhere. Tony Marchetti who manages Black Island sent me a note later in the morning that the wind was gusting to over 70 mph out there. Probably, it’s even stronger now. From the top floor of the lab building the blowing snow looks like the billows of the sea.

“There's something about seeing the marks of man where none have a right to be,” Denise Kusel about Cape Evans

8 deg F, -24 deg F wind chill. 7 PM. Yesterday, I got out to Black Island. It is an island, though not one surrounded by water. It’s a 15-minute helo ride from McMurdo across the sea ice toward the south. Black Island is black because the winds off the glaciers that sweep down from the polar icecap blow it free of snow. It is a very windy place. It is also the control center for all the TV, satellite, and telephone communication systems for McMurdo. Because of its geography, McMurdo has trouble getting clear line of sight to all the satellites, so the signals are bounced off Black Island first.

Inside the station, all is warm and friendly. Tony is the station manager, Karen is the cook, and Steve is the tech who minds all the communication equipment. Tony is quite a character. He’s a sweetie—gruff, good-natured, and voluble. He loves to tell stories. The main living area is open and comfy with a kitchen with lots of storage and counter space, a big dining room table, and pleasant living room. The hallway to the bathroom is lined with shelves for a large pantry. A door at the end of the hall leads to the communications control center and then on to the inside of the microwave dome. It’s a welcoming sort of place.

Outside, it’s a strange, fringy place. The hut is dwarfed by two giant microwave antennas, one for NASA, and the larger one for McMurdo. All the structures have a sense of impermanence and instability, as if they might be blown away in the next wind breath, despite the heavy cables that anchor them. When the wind blows, the panels on the microwave domes rattle like the top of a kettledrum. The landscape is austere with frozen ponds cradled in rocky hillsides. On one side is Erebus puffing away; on the other is Mt. Discovery, with a similar cone shape but now extinct. The landscape, though dramatic in scale, is not friendly.

I walked around for several hours, shooting both panoramas and digital. I couldn’t get the strangeness into the picture frame. Genies are always elusive when you want to do their portrait. But, I did succeed in shooting a view of Ross Island with Erebus looming above it, as seen from the microwave dome of Black Island. It was the first moment that I really understood the geography of the place. From Mac Town, Erebus is invisible. From Black Island, it is enormous, and the town is a speck so tiny that you can’t even see it. I shot a good bit of the camp, trying to show how it sits in the landscape. I also did some still lifes in the kitchen and a portrait of Tony.

When I got back, I attended a lecture by Dr. Donal Manahan from USC (the same man who did the wonderful history lecture on Sunday night). This lecture dealt with his research and was entitled “Growing up Cold and Hungry. Larval Biology in Antarctica.” “Larval biology” sounds dry and technical, but the lecture was well-given and fascinating. According to Manahan, their research is showing that polar organisms have rate processes as fast as similar organisms in the tropics.  The RNA synthesis of sea urchins here is as fast as in the tropics, and the rate of mRNA is four times faster.… These organisms are able to synthesize proteins at a phenomenal pace. The physiological processes are quite different from organisms that live in non-extreme environments. The eggs of some species can live up to a year and a half just waiting for the right conditions. It made me wonder what life might be like on another planet with very cold or very hot temperatures. We tend to assume that intelligent life can’t exist in such places but after this lecture I think that’s a bad assumption.

Today, I went out to one of the dive huts nearby. At the moment, some 14 divers are going down on several different projects, including Donal Manahan’s see urchin study. All of the divers I’ve met love their visits to this underworld and can hardly wait to go down the next day. Their clothes provide good insulation against the cold, so that they say they don’t suffer. Today, I worked as dive tenders, which means that I helped the two divers fasten their tank straps and put on their tight-fitting gloves. It’s a careful process to suit up for diving in this cold. When they finished getting all the layers on, only their lips were exposed to the cold water (the sea water underneath the twelve feet or so of ice is salty so that it doesn’t freeze, even though it is below freezing temperature). They then sank slowly into the small hole that had been drilled in the ice inside the hut. A few bubbles marked where they had gone for a few seconds, and then just a blue hole. The dive time was about half an hour, during which I couldn’t see any trace of activity in the hole. They told me later that they went down about 90 feet (130 feet is maximum), down a steep slope. When they came back up, they had a net of star fish, sea urchins, and other strange critters to take back to the lab. It’s a beautiful place under the ice, clear blue, they said, and they saw a Weddell seal that swam gracefully up to them and then away.

Notes from Waste and Environmental Management briefing: 100% of all solid waste from Antarctica is removed and sent back to the US or Chile. 65% of it is recycled. That means a lot of work for many people… and lots of scratching of heads in front of the numerous bins that you have to choose from to sort your garbage.

Down here they make some very strange Mexican food.  Burritos for breakfast with some odd egg-based tortilla and French fries to put in it and pickled jalapenos.

This afternoon I learned how to drive a Piston Bully (a macho-looking enclosed caterpillar truck on treads).  People here on station are dying to drive these trucks. Several women I chatted with at breakfast looked totally envious and even offered to carry my camera gear for a chance to barrel out across the sea ice in a Piston Bully. Meanwhile, I am moaning to myself about the number of new skills I'm having to acquire—mechanical objects are my nemesis.  I open milk bottles with a cleaver.

My new roommate is the coordinator for Fixed Wing operations. That means organizing all the airplane flights in and out of McMurdo. It’s a nightmare of the first order and she hardly sleeps. She comes to bed after I’m asleep, gets pager calls often at midnight, and goes to work at 4 A.M. It’s not a job I’d do no matter how well I was paid, but she seems to love it. Flights in and out of here are notoriously unpredictable. A couple of days ago, the first flights were to leave to open up the S.Pole station for the year. No flights have been in there since early spring. The first flight took off but then had mechanical problems (took a dive and made a number of folks, sick) and had to return to McMurdo. Today all flights were cancelled because of blizzard conditions at the Pole. Every day is full of new difficulties…we haven’t had a mail delivery for a week, and lots of science cargo is backed up in Christ Church awaiting transport.

What a great day! Set off early AM with Eddie from the Berg Field Center. We got the Piston Bully going, loaded my gear, picked up lunches from the galley, and set off across the sea ice to Cape Evans. The Piston Bully is not a fast (nor efficient) vehicle. It took us over an hour to travel the 15 miles to Cape Evans (and used up 8.5 gallons of diesel fuel). Speed was not important, however. It was a good feeling to be leaving the town behind and heading out. Little wind, not too cold—wind chill –17 degrees, 7 deg. F.

It’s a thrill to unlock the door to the Cape Evans hut and peer into the darkness at all the objects left from the men who lived here almost a century ago. First was Scott on his ill-fated trip to the Pole, then Shackleton’s Ross Sea party, preparing to lay depots for his equally ill-fated attempt to cross the continent. The big table in the center of the room made me think of the dinners they would have eaten in this space. You could still survive for a considerable period of time on the food remaining in this hut. The hut is crammed with food and small objects left behind. A hundred years ago, the British had a policy of leaving behind anything they did not need for the use of the next group that came along. It saved Shackleton’s men, who lost all their supplies when their boat broke anchor and drifted out to sea without them.

You can see where each of the men bunked, Scott’s little den with a dead penguin laid out on the table ready for dissection, the chemistry lab, the kitchen, and best of all for me, Ponting’s darkroom. You can see his tripod, his developing trays, and left-over chemicals. His apron hangs on a hook on the open door. He could come back at any moment and develop more plates. Around to one side of the central living area are piles of seal blubber, perfectly preserved, and the pony stables (some of the pony tack is hanging over Oates’s bunk, including a pony snowshoe).

To photograph this incredible site is another matter. First of all, it is very cold inside. There is no heat and no solar gain. Second of all, you are not allowed to touch or move anything so you can’t make a still life more neat and tidy. Third, the only light for the entire large hut comes from a single long window over the chemistry table. That’s why we see many beautiful images of glass tubes and beakers from Scott’s hut! Everything else is in near pitch darkness. You cannot see the objects in the kitchen, much less frame them for a photograph. It is very hard to photograph what you cannot see.

I did come somewhat prepared for this. I brought hand warmers to put inside my gloves (which really helped when my fingers began to get cold. I brought an external battery pack to run both camera and flash, so I didn’t have to worry about batteries going dead. It was annoying to hook it all up and to wear the heavy battery under my parka, but it worked perfectly. Eddie helped me see what was stacked up in crates in the kitchen, in the corners of men’s beds, and on shelves by shining a flashlight around. I couldn’t see very well to frame a picture but the light provided enough to be able to focus and take the picture. I was often surprised by what appeared on my digital monitor, since the camera clearly saw a lot more than I did. Many images won’t work, but hopefully a few will. I’ve never had a more unpleasant working situation but it was worth it.