October 30, 2002
4 deg F, 2 deg F wind chill 8 AM

Flew out Monday morning in an A-star helicopter (a small one that only holds 3 passengers plus the pilot) to Mt. Newell. I went with Geof and Sal from the environmental team here that does an audit every year to make sure that all the different field camps and sites comply with the Antarctic Conservation Act. Mt. Newell is a small repeater station and seismic transmitter station located on a high ridge between the Taylor and Wright valleys in the Dry Valleys. The flight there was up one of the glaciers and gave an amazing view of the ice cascading down into the valley floor, a jumbled jagged waterfall. The helicopter set down on the top of the ridge and shut down for a couple of hours while the men did their inventory and I photographed.

What a spectacular place! From the top of the mountain, you can see 360 degrees. The drop off must be a thousand feet to the valleys below and down to the sea ice. It would be a heck of a climb to get up here if you had to come up by foot. On top are the transmitters, a small hut, a wind generator for power, and a survival cache. Pretty minimal human activity but plenty to photograph. I could work a week up here doing pure landscapes. I thought of Gus Foster with his panorama camera—he would be in heaven here. The tips of the mountain stick out of the snow, but otherwise everything is covered in white.

They probably get a lot of wind up here but on this day it was calm and clear. Probably just above 0 degrees. I stayed toasty warm except for my fingers. I’ve learned now to put a hand warmer in at the first sign of cold fingers; after the frost nip that I got at Happy Campers all my fingers are still very cold sensitive. When you walk around, you mainly stay on top, but every so often you sink down six or seven inches. The snow makes sounds when you walk on it, sometimes a light airy crunch, other times pitched deeper, as if you are walking over something hollow. Since the helo stayed with us, I could keep whatever equipment I wasn’t using inside it. The helo pilot just sat inside his cabin and read a book—lots of solar gain on a day like this!

The next day, I was offered a trip on a Twin Otter. There are two of these planes that are being used by the US Antarctic Program, and they are flown by Canadians Sean and his wife Sandy. They are small prop planes on skis and they can land on the sea ice or snow (or water). It’s fascinating to me that they are flown all the way down from Canada every year. They actually fly down the coast of S. America and then all the way across the continent. They are the only planes that cross the continent. With extra fuel on board they can go about 1200 nautical miles before they have to refuel. This was the plane that was used in the very ambitious and daring rescue of the doctor with a heart attack at the S. Pole in the middle of winter.

We flew north, out over the sea ice past the Dry Valleys, all the way out to Cape Reynolds at the edge of the Drygalski Ice Tongue, about a 50-minute flight. Below the plane were the icebergs stranded in the sea ice. Then, further out, I could see that the sea ice was beginning to crack and leads of water reached out like giant tentacles. Then, as we neared the landing site, the ice closed in and looked solid again. Although I was quite a bit north of McMurdo, there was no sign of open water. This flight carried 6 barrels of fuel for the helos. The pilot and his assistant circled an area that was just off the sea ice, part of a glacier as it was approaching the water, flat and open. He set the plane down on the ice, as gently as if he were on a groomed runway, but when we opened the door and hopped down, there wasn’t a sign that anything human had ever visited this place before. Other than a shot of the guys rolling down the drums, I could find little to photograph. There was nothing but white ice as far away as the horizon. You forget when you’re having lunch at the galley at McMurdo or walking around this crowded, busy town that it’s a pin prick on the edge of an enormous and empty continent. When you leave the station and get 150 miles away, you leave everything behind except for what you carry with you and have in the plane, and you realize how tenuous our hold on the continent really is.

“But, after all, it is not what we see that inspires awe, but the knowledge of what lies beyond our view. We see only a few miles of ruffled snow bounded by a vague wavy horizon but we know that beyond that horizon are hundreds and even thousands of miles which can offer no change to the weary eye, while on the vast expanse that one’s mind conceives one knows there is…nothing but this terrible limitless expanse of snow…. Could anything be more terrible than this silent, wind-swept immensity when one thinks such thoughts?” Robert Scott, The Voyage of the Discovery, 1905

October 31, 2002. 3 deg F, -36 deg F wind chill. 7:30 AM One of my neighbors at the Crary office building, greeted me with, “Have you been to the galley yet?” “No,” I said. “Why” “There are bananas and strawberries this morning.” This is a major event. We haven’t had any fresh fruit or vegetables for the last ten days. Freshies, as they’re called down here, are treasures. Someone told me that if they dropped oranges and $5 bills from an airplane at the S. Pole, everyone would go for the oranges first. I believe it. It’s hard when you don’t get any fresh fruit and salads. It’s not just the food value. You miss the smells and tastes. When I got to the galley, I put a couple of fresh strawberries on my hot cereal, and it smelled and tasted better than the fanciest of meals. All the senses are depressed here, and the fragrance of a single strawberry is heavenly.

Yesterday I photographed the Manahan group spawning sea urchins. For their research into larvae development, they need recently fertilized eggs. They inject the individual sea urchins with potassium chloride, which makes all their muscles relax, and they release either eggs or sperm, depending on their sex, into the beaker below them. The poor little creatures often die from the chemical, unfortunately, so they try not to inject more of them than what they need. I wasn’t prepared for photographing small creatures in tiny beakers since I didn’t bring a macro lens down with me. It never occurred to me I might be photographing very small objects. Needless to say, I also didn’t have a proper setup for glassware still lifes. We propped up a black drawer behind a dark mouse pad and I used natural light. The result was not too bad, considering all.

This place, with all its warmth and comforts, is also like the frontier. When you don’t have something, you can’t just go out and buy it, so you have to find a way to make do. In general, I’m feeling good about how all my gear is holding up. I’ve had no problems with dead batteries or cameras. The only difficulty I’ve had was unexpected—my tripod has a ball head and it freezes solid. Evidently, the ball contracts at a different and slower rate than the sleeve around it so it begins to stick at about 5 degrees and gets more and more solid the colder it gets. Several people heard about the difficulty and have tried to help out—we tried graphite, which did nothing, and I even had an offer to come to the machine shop and let them sand the ball down slightly. That seemed an iffy solution, though their shop here is famous for being able to make or repair anything required of them. I finally called Bernie, and he is arranging for a different head to be hand-delivered by a Raytheon employee who is coming in later this week. I am fortunate to be able to actually get a part in from the outside. If it were mailed to me, it would take a month to six weeks.

Last night I heard a lecture by Sridhar Anandakrishnan on “There is a Tide in the Affairs of Men… and Glaciers.” Their group put several GPS poles on an ice stream last year to test whether the eruptions and seismic activity from Erebus affects the movement of the stream. All the ice sheets in McMurdo are moving. Snow falls on the polar plateau and then compresses and the ice moves slowly toward the edge of the continent where eventually it calves off into icebergs. It’s like a wedding cake that has heated up and melted down over the edges. Ice streams are areas of glaciers that move much faster than the rest of the glacier, over a meter a day. Nobody is quite sure why, but they suspect it has to do with the underlying ground at the bottom, which is evidently more viscous under the ice streams. This group found that there was no particular correlation with Erebus activity, but to their surprise they found that the ice stream had daily spikes of greater movement and lesser movement and that these movements correlated with the daily tide in the Ross Sea under the floating ice sheet. Since the ice stream is enormous, a km thick, 50 km wide and more than 80 miles long, this was astonishing. The tides had a very measurable effect 80 miles away from the water. Even at that distance, the entire sheet of ice slowed down to half speed when the tide came up and slid out twice as fast when the tide went out.
Note: There are about 825 people at McMurdo right now.

November 2, 2002. 15 deg F, 14 mph winds, -15 deg F wind chill.

On Thursday, the weather was windy and cold so I walked down to the power plant. I had sat with Steve at lunch, who is the mechanic down there and he invited me to come down and take a look. I walked in and met Jordan Dickens, head of Power and Water, who kindly stopped his work and gave me a tour of both plants. Jordan has traveled all over the world and he has worked at all three U.S. research stations in Antarctica. He was the operation manager for one year at the Palmer Research Station on the Peninsula. He worked two years at the South Pole as the power plant mechanic and station electrician. He has wintered six times and summered eight times on the Ice. His job is perhaps the most important on the station. Without power (running on diesel fuel) and water (a reversed-osmosis system pulling salt out of sea water), McMurdo would not exist.

Power plants are familiar territory after photographing quite a number of them for the Millennium Survey project a few years ago. This one was small and tidy, with six turbines. The power plant provides electrical power for all dorm buildings, the Crary Lab, and the work facilities at McMurdo. Jordan said they had a few other engines scattered around McMurdo in case of dire emergency, but these guys have been doing service for hundreds of thousands of hours. They have all logged more than 95,000 hours (if a car drove 45mph for 95,000 hours; it would have traveled over 4 million miles). That’s pretty impressive for machinery in this harsh environment. What was unusual was that I was left to my own devices to photograph as I pleased… I guess the terrorist threat at McMurdo is minimal, as are liability concerns. I did a few shots of the machinery, the control panels, and the workers, and then moved on to the water plant.

The water plant was impressive. It is linked to the power plant since they use the waste heat from the power generation to heat the sea water. Since the temperature of sea water here is only 28 degrees F, below freezing, if they were to take the salt out without doing anything, the water would freeze and destroy the RO membranes. So they heat it up first. They also use the heated antifreeze coolant to heat the dorms and other buildings. It’s an efficient system and when they eventually get new engines for the power plant, it will be even better, Jordan told me.

The system has worked very well for about 8 years, but it was in trouble the day I got there. All the filters had been clogging up. They drained one of the water tanks and found a layer of several inches of pteropods, a half-inch long critter. Evidently a swarm of them had come along and been swept into the sea water intake. Invasion of the Pteropods! They were busy changing out all the filters in the system, cleaning the tanks and the intake.

Yesterday, I went out with Seth, the Science Tech here in Crary to the Cosmic Ray facility, CosRay, as it is called here. This is an old project that goes back to the IGY days of the 1950s, and the building looks a set for Dr. Who. Cosmic rays are atomic nuclei and electrons from outer space that travel near the speed of light and continuously bombard the earth. When they collide with nuclei of molecules in the upper atmosphere, they create a cascade of secondary particles that shower the earth. Neutron monitors like this one measure that shower of particles and help us understand plasma processes occurring on the sun and out in space. The actual detectors are only large tubes with a cover over them, set in a long lab building of old-fashioned, if not funky character. The computer is on one side; a vintage non-working Teletype machine is on the other with its paper tape hanging loosely to the floor. Previous scientists and techs have added many personal touches, such as murals on the walls. It was hard to believe that real science is occurring in this setting, but Seth assured me that he comes up every day to record data and check out the instruments.

Later in the day, I went out with another group of divers to Cinder Cone, a little hut on the back side of Inaccessible Island, on the way to Cape Evans. They are examining the effects of McMurdo’s wastewater dumping over the years. McMurdo houses over 1,100 people during the summer season, and all sewage and wastewater is sent untreated into the ocean, about 135,000 liters a day. The NSF is installing a sewage treatment plant that will be online in 2003 and which will then reduce untreated sewage to a minimal amount. This group has set up several monitoring stations, including this one which is some distance away from the outfall.

These divers are going down because they need to protect their underwater site from the intrusions of starfish. Starfish are voracious scavengers here. I’ve seen them in the Crary aquarium tanks, a foot across, bright orange and very fat, devouring a piece of cod. It was a good outing, but unfortunately I couldn’t photograph much of Cinder Cone, since the clouds were low and the wind was blowing. I couldn’t stay out and photograph more than a couple of minutes before I could feel the fingers beginning to freeze up, even with several layers of gloves. The divers went down for about half an hour to weigh down the fence that they have used to enclose their site and to remove the starfish from inside. The hut was none too warm, and they shivered when they came up and changed into dry clothes.

November 2, 2002
At McMurdo folks work hard and they play hard. Halloween is the biggest party of the season. It’s held in the gym, a Quonset hut down by the helo pad, which is decorated for the occasion with black lights, cobwebs, and other decorations that are carefully kept from one year to the next in a big crate above the station. Beer is $1 a glass, the music is loud, and the costumes are great. Since nobody here has access to a major costume store, most of the costumes are homemade out of whatever odds and ends people can put together. I photographed a few folks early on in the evening before they went inside, but many of the most amazing costumes came later when I had given up working. One of the guys who works at Crary as a tech came as a beaker… one lady came as a dresser… another as a shower, complete with the curtain and hanging beads for water. She eventually won the prize for best costume. Parties here are let-your-hair-down affairs but without pretense. People get bombed but for the most part, the atmosphere stays relaxed and comfortable.

November 3, 2002 9 deg F, -35 deg wind chill this morning at 11 AM Yesterday was the 100th Anniversary of Scott’s 1902 departure from Hut Point on his first expedition to the S.Pole. NSF held a short ceremony out at the Discovery hut at Hut Point, a short walk from McMurdo to commemorate the occasion. The wind was blowing with a wind chill of about –20 F so it didn’t last too long. Everyone huddled together while the short speeches were read. Also, an intrepid group of volunteers organized a man-hauling/woman-hauling sledge party in honor of the occasion. They pulled a Nansen sled the three miles from McMurdo around on the sea ice to the New Zealand Scott Base. Took them about 2 hours, and I arrived just at the end to photograph their arrival.

Here’s a quote from Scott’s diary (the 1905 book, The Voyage of the Discovery):
“We are off at last. By ten this morning the dogs were harnessed and all was ready for a start; the overcast sky was showing signs of a break in the south. Every soul was gathered on the floe to bid us farewell, and many were prepared to accompany us for the first few miles. A last look was given to our securings, the traces were finally cleared, and away we went amidst the wild cheers of our comrades.”

The three men, Scott, Wilson, and Shackleton, eventually reached 82 degrees 17’S, more than 300 miles farther south than anyone before them and only about 480 miles from the Pole. They suffered greatly from scurvy and turned around on December 31. “We are as near spent as three persons can be,” Scott wrote as they approached Hut Point again. They had been gone 93 days and covered 960 miles.