December 14, 2002. McMurdo. 25 deg. F, 12 deg F with wind chill

The weather this last week has been so pacific, so free of sturm und drang, that you can almost forget you are in the Antarctic. The seal camp researchers have all brought their huts in off the sea ice. The fish huts are finishing up tomorrow and will be towed off the beginning of the week. Before long, the ice runway will be unusable, and the planes will start landing on the ice shelf rather than the sea ice. Little rivulets of water are now running through much of McMurdo. It feels wonderful to walk around with the parka unzipped, just a t-shirt underneath, and no gloves or hat.

One especially lovely evening, a friend and I decided to climb Observation Hill, a large volcanic hill that towers over McMurdo and served as a beacon landmark for arriving explorers early in the century. I tried to climb it when I first arrived in October, but the path was very icy so I didn’t go all the way to the top. This time, the path was clear. It’s a steep climb up volcanic cinders with a bit of a scramble over larger rocks at the very top but it isn’t overly strenuous. We reached the top in about half an hour and had the tiny area with the cross all to ourselves. The view is spectacular in all directions—across the sea ice to Black and White Islands, down to Scott Base, over the ice shelf to Mt. Erebus, and down to McMurdo below. Scott’s party climbed this hill and erected the large cross after they found him and his companions dead in their tent. Since the top of the hill is so small, with the cross in the center, you can’t reach the top without remembering Scott and thinking of the hardships his party suffered. At the time, Apsley Cherry-Garrard wrote that they did not expect anyone to ever come to this place and see the cross again. Little did they anticipate that a field station of some thousand scientists and support staff would be built at the base of the hill and that workers would be climbing up it to work off their dinner.

Sandy and I spoke for several hours with Dr. Art DeVries, the fish scientist, today. He grew up on a farm in Montana and first came to McMurdo as an undergraduate. He has been asking the same question for the 40 years that he has been coming to the Antarctic: Why don’t the fish freeze? He has been studying the physiology of fish and larvae that live in the salt water here in temperatures that are several degrees below freezing. He has learned that the fish manufacture antifreeze glycoproteins that inhibit the crystallization of ice in their tissues. After all these years, he is still just as interested in exactly how the process works in the fish and now has the new tools of molecular biology at hand to help him find answers. Art is one of my favorite people here. He is a gentle curmudgeon. He fondly remembers the old days where there were fewer regulations and bureaucracy, but he manages to wend his way through the current climate and just keep working at what he loves to do.

One of the electricians said to me today, “This place is 360 degrees of wow.”

Dream: I have arrived home with family for Christmas. Everyone is happy I am there. Dinner is about to start. I love being with everyone after such a long time away. Then I realize that I don’t have a ticket back to McMurdo and I don’t know if I can arrange it. I feel pain and despair because I want to return but I don’t think I can get back.

December 16, 2002 McMurdo. 10 AM, 15 deg. F, 2 deg. F wind chill. The Hofmann fish camp was pulling up the last of their traps yesterday, in preparation for removing the hut from the sea ice. Since I have photographed many of their activities over the season, I enjoyed being included in the last outing. This particular hut was over near Scott Base, not too far from shore. The weather was overcast, a little windy, and chilly in comparison to the last week of sunshine and comparative warmth. Out on the sea ice, the wind blew the top layer of light snow into a strange flowing creature that rippled over the surface.

In the hut, a variety of problems with the generator slowed down the winching up of the traps. As I sat near the edge of the four-foot hole in the ice, a Weddell seal suddenly appeared, blowing air and foam from its nostrils as it reached the surface. On land they are sluggish but in the water, they are incredibly agile and hydrodynamic. Even though they are very large animals in this small hole, you can see how they use their tail and flippers and how easy it is for them to just flip upside down and depart. We closed all the window shades in the hut so that the only light was coming from the hole itself and the blue light under the ice and watched the seal swim up and down the hole. The seal was anxious, not about us, since he showed no fear of our presence, but of some other seal under the ice. He kept one eye down in the water, looking downward, nervous of attack from below. After several minutes of recharging his oxygen supply, he turned and swam down for another dive.

When the generator finally started and the traps eventually were winched up from 1500 feet below on the sea floor, a variety of small fish and a lovely light-colored octopus had been caught. The sea floor has an amazing amount of life here. The Hofmann group has been keeping some of their finds in the aquarium tank here in Crary to show the community. I have convinced the carpenters shop to build a small Plexiglas aquarium so that I can photograph some of the fish and hoping that it will be ready in the next couple of days.

Later in the day, Sandy and I did an interview and portrait of Art DeVries. He then invited us to a party in the dorm lounge right before dinner. All of our fish friends were there, drinking wine and talking about the end of the season. Art was serving sashimi that he was carefully cutting from the cheeks of an Antarctic cod that had just been captured, along with soy sauce, ginger, and wasabi. It was a white flesh, very tender, and light-flavored, utterly delicious. After all the heavy galley food I have been eating it tickled my senses; it was a taste of a foreign world.

Today we talked with Dr. David Marchant, who has been studying the soil and ice of the Beacon Valley and other areas of the Dry Valleys where they meet the polar plateau for the last fifteen years. Like Ron Slatten, he has been dating the ice sheet below the valley floor, as well as taking core samples from the edges of the glaciers. He believes that millions of years ago the ice cap was at least twice as big as it is now and that it has very slowly decreased over the last 25 million years. It has not rained in the area that he has been studying for 16 million years. He brought back soil samples with him that contain tiny twigs and date back to the time before Antarctica split off from South America. He also brought back ice samples that are over a million years old, older than the cores taken at Lake Vostok. It is the oldest ice in captivity on the planet. He will be taking the samples back to do gas analysis on them, and I took a shot of him holding up one of the core slices that shows the bubbles of gas inside.

The Dry Valleys of the Antarctic are pristinely ancient, unlike any other area of the planet. Topographically, they are identical to formations on Mars, according to Dr. James Head, who is a consultant for NASA. He has been here for the last few weeks working with Dave and is as excited as kid with a new Nintendo game. He is the man who chose the site for the first Mars landing vehicle and is been involved in the space program for more than 30 years. He told us that scientists have been unable to make sense out of the kinds of rock formations and topography that they see in the Mars photographs. When he went out to the polar plateau side of the Dry Valleys, he found very similar-looking situations. If he is right, this means that Mars at one time had glaciers…and if it had water, it had life. Marchant and Head believe that scientists will eventually find ice on Mars, quite likely buried under the surface soil layer. And, if Antarctica is any indication, they will find organisms in that ice that once lived or are still alive on the planet.

“We came to probe the Antarctic’s mystery, to reduce this land in terms of science, but there is always the indefinable which holds aloof yet which rivets our souls.” Douglas Mawson

December 17, 2002. McMurdo. 7 deg F, -34 degrees with wind chill. Sandy’s flight out was delayed another day, so we went out on the sea ice this morning with Dr. James Raymond. His group has been drilling at different locations around McMurdo Sound, studying the sea ice diatoms that live just under the ice. The diatoms are a class of algae and apparently produce anti-freeze glycoproteins that keep them from freezing in 28 degree salt water (unlike diatoms in warmer environments). These glycoproteins share certain properties with the fish antifreezes, although they are different in structure. The diatom’s anti-freeze proteins, unlike the fish’s, allow it to attach itself to the ice surface without congealing.

It was cool and windy this morning as we drove out on the sea ice. It has been so pleasant the last ten days or so that I had almost forgotten what cold fingers feel like. It didn’t take long, standing in the wind, to realize I needed hand-warmers inside my gloves and a face mask for my cheeks. Even then I had to ball up my hands in the gloves to keep the tips warm. The driller moved the three-foot drill into position. The scientists wait until it goes down several times, bringing up crushed ice. Then at about eleven feet the drill begins to bring up sea water and the underside of the ice. The scientists use shovels and their gloved hands to collect the dirtiest-looking chunks to bring back and examine under the microscope in their lab. In this pristinely white place, dirty ice is hard to find. We joked that they could have gone to Chicago, Minneapolis or New York to collect dirty ice.

Later in the day, I looked at their diatoms under the microscope in the lab. Even magnified, they are still tiny. The Crary staff helped me set up the microscope with an adapter so I could use my digital camera to photograph what I saw. What was surprising to me was the number of different kinds of diatoms and how different they looked. Some were football-shaped, others were round, and others were lined up in short chains. I have a new appreciation for dirty ice.

From Stuart Klipper: “On this day in 1839, an American chemistry professor named John William Draper took a photograph of the moon with a camera made out of a cigar box. He used a process like Daguerre's, but he came up with it by himself; Daguerre hadn't made his invention public yet. The plate was exposed for twenty minutes, and the image was one inch across. It was the first time anyone in the U.S. tried to take a picture of something in the sky.
                  ‘The first photographic portrait from life was made by me,’ he says, and ‘the face of the sitter,’ his sister Catherine ‘was dusted with a white powder;’ but a few trials showed that this was unnecessary.”

December 19, 2002. McMurdo. 11 AM, 24 deg. F, 0 deg. F with wind chill. Sandy left this morning on the last flight out from McMurdo before Christmas. Many other scientist friends left as well. It feels very quiet and a little dismal. Those scientists who are left are still working just as hard, but all the support staff is looking forward to a couple of days off next week. No other flights will depart until January. We are cut off from the rest of the planet.

This place may have lots of ice and snow but it’s far from a Christmas place. Santa lives too far away to make the journey. Family and friends are not just miles away; they are continents away. All the small rituals and connections that one establishes over the years for the holidays are missing. For me those include the funky tree decorations that my kids made when they were in elementary school, the Cochiti pottery nativity scene, my mother’s black and white meringue cookie recipe, and Gene Autry singing Christmas carols.

What is totally missing here is the consumer part of Christmas. The noise of Christmas is gone. There’s nothing to buy here besides sundries, liquor, and t-shirts. Nobody is blaring Christmas music, trying to sell a product. The decorations that are hung on people’s doors or in the galley are cut out of construction paper and scrabbled together. The handrails for the galley steps are wrapped in packing ribbon. It’s an odd sort of quiet Christmas after the usual tumult of jangling music, fancy cookies and candies, parties, and last-minute present buying back home.

I chatted with Chico at dinner. He has been working in the Antarctic for 10 years, this year as a sheet-metal foreman. He has wintered over at Palmer and McMurdo. This year his daughter is here and working as a painter’s helper. He has a house in El Paso and says this is his last year. It’s comfortable at McMurdo. It’s addictive because the community is the best in the world, but it’s not solidly anchored in generations of family life. It’s hard to have a life off the Ice because you’re always thinking about coming back. But, you can’t count on coming back here, he told me. You don’t know from one year to the next whether you’ll get a job or whether you will get medical clearance. You can’t choose to live and work at McMurdo like you can decide to live in El Paso. You come here at the discretion of the NSF and Raytheon. In his free time, Chico does a weekly cartoon series for the Antarctic Sun, the station newspaper.

Yesterday, Mike helped me set up an aquarium for photographing fish and the strange invertebrates in the Crary tanks. The carpenter shop made a new Plexiglas aquarium, not too large, just the right size for photographing a couple of different species. Mike helped me collect some of the volcanic rock that is common on the bottom of McMurdo Sound, under the sea ice and fill the tank with sea water. I used a net to scoop out several of the small sea stars and fish and tried different techniques to photograph them. Since the room was very bright, I found I didn’t need to use supplementary flash and could get sufficient depth of field to manually focus the entire fish.

I’ve never had the patience to photograph wildlife. Fish are even more difficult than mammals in that they have no response to seeing or hearing you and don’t perk up when you call out to them. The most difficult part of working with these fish is that the water in the tank is below freezing and whenever I have to put my hand in to move a rock around or to catch a fish, I have to be careful not to lose feeling in my fingers. They don’t tire and are quite happy to swim from one side to another of the tank without ever stopping for their portrait. Fortunately for me (and sadly for them), many of the fish have been in the Crary tanks for some time and aren’t swimming with their normal zeal. Still, after a couple of hours of photographing digitally, running back to my computer to check depth of field, and moving fish in and out of the tank, I had enough for the day.

What is most wonderful about photographing here at McMurdo (and it applies to all the scientists as well) is that you don’t have to do all the ordinary chores of daily life. You don’t have to go to the grocery store, worry about your car dying, or shovel your driveway. The galley staff cook the meals and wash the dishes, maintenance folks are constantly tweaking heat, water, and electricity to keep you comfortable, the Crary lab staff helps you with computer issues or to provide any equipment you need for your work. At home, the world is preparing for war with Iraq, and homes across the U.S. are bombarded with news reports detailing the evils of al-Qaida. Here in Antarctica, weapons are prohibited. We have no crime, no drugs, and very little real unpleasantness. Of course, sooner or later, everyone goes home, but until then you have the time and the support to do your work with minimal interruptions or stress. What a gift!

December 20, 2002. McMurdo. 4:30 P.M., 25 deg. F, -7 deg. F with wind chill. A blizzard found us last night and has played around station every since. You can only look on such a storm with reverence. Despite all the extra work that the snow drifts make for the work crews, you can’t help but respect the beauty and power of the natural forces. Here at McMurdo where many support workers never get to leave the station to see the rest of the continent, this is as close to nature as you can get.

I photographed outside several hours this morning and again this afternoon. Unlike our previous storms, this one is warm. It’s the first storm that I’ve been able to walk around and not have cold fingers. It’s so warm that my parka, hat, and gloves were wet when I came back to my office. In earlier storms, the snow brushed off without sticking or melting. I could even stand in one place and plan a shot. In fact, I stood in one place so long preparing for one shot that a friend who walked by asked me if I had got my feet stuck in the ice.

It’s not so easy to photograph in a blizzard. Even when it’s not cold, you still have to contend with wind that tries to knock you down and snow blowing on to your camera lens. Once the lens gets wet, it’s hard to dry it off and continue shooting. I keep the camera inside my parka until I’m ready to shoot. Then I pull it out quickly, turn it on, frame, focus, and shoot. If I’m somewhat protected from the wind, maybe I’ll have time to put it on the tripod. After an hour or so, I begin to feel like I’ve been beaten up by the wind. Then it’s time to come in, take off all the layers of clothing, have a cup of hot chocolate, and relax before putting on all the clothing and going out again.

“A blizzard is when the snow falls sideways,” according to a child’s definition hanging in the window of our little store. That child must have heard about our blizzards because they all seem to have snow blowing horizontally. They are usually more wind than snow, since this is such a dry place, but this one has dropped enough snow to make McMurdo look ready for the Christmas delivery. Santa has a long journey to come all the way down here but if he can make the journey, we’ll be ready for him. Happy Holidays from McMurdo, Antarctica!