December 30, 2002. McMurdo. 28 deg. F, 18 deg. F with wind chill.

The morning was clear and warm as I walked from my dorm over to the galley for breakfast. I took a deep breath, as one does on such a pleasant day. And once again, I was disappointed. I’ve become accustomed to no children, no pets, and no insects but I can’t get used to no smells. We do of course have the galley and food smells. With as many vehicles as McMurdo has to move crates, repair roads, provide transport, and grade runways, it’s not unusual to catch a whiff of diesel fumes. But, that’s pretty much all there is. With no vegetation and none of the usual soil decay, the usual smells of organic life on the planet are absent. The air is totally clean since we have no pollutants other than the vehicles for many hundreds of miles in all directions. When you breathe in deeply, you don’t usually don’t smell anything at all. It’s like being in a sterile room.

All the senses are deprived, since there is little color or noise either. But for me, smell is the most difficult. I’ve found myself creating smells that are not there. A friend sent a picture of himself on the beach with a beer can, and I could smell the suntan lotion. Watching a hula troop in the Women’s Soiree the other night, I could smell the moist sweet fragrance of Hawaii. It was so intense and I longed for it so much, that I found myself in tears.

Yesterday, I went out to Willy Field (where they have recently moved the fixed wing aircraft runway) to see the launching of the first Long Duration Balloon (the ATIC project). During the austral summer in Antarctica, upper altitude winds form a vortex centered at the pole, so a balloon launched at this time travels with these winds, circumnavigating the continent in 12-15 days at an altitude of 120,000 feet, and returning close to its point of origin. At this altitude, above 99 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere, the ATIC payload detects and measures high-energy galactic cosmic rays. I visited the balloon hangar a few weeks ago to photograph the balloon payloads. My mental image was of a small box but that was totally erroneous. The payloads for the two balloons to be launched this season are room-size winged creations that look as much like sculpture as science. BOOMERANG, the second payload, is especially beautiful with its foil covering and winged solar panels.

The launch of the balloon is logistically complicated since the fabric is only.7 mil polyethylene, about the thickness of dry-cleaners plastic, and the length of a football field. Conditions in both the upper atmosphere and on the ground must be perfect with very little wind. All of the electronic equipment must be checked and rechecked. The preparations go on for weeks with launch times being constantly set and then aborted. When the final countdown starts, the parachute is attached to the payload and then stretched out flat on the ice shelf. The balloon itself is slowly rolled out on a piece of cloth, attached to the parachute, and then inflated with .8 million cub meters of helium. Once inflation begins, they are committed to launch. I was allowed to photograph on the work site until inflation began so I was able to get good shots of the preparations. Once they release the balloon, it quickly springs up far above the parachute and then continues to fill as it ascends. What a lovely sight it was as it headed to the upper atmosphere—like a ballet dancer not subject to the pull of gravity! As I got back into McMurdo and walked to Crary with my photo gear I could see the balloon far overhead.

Notes on wind chill: The wind chill factor or wind chill index is a number, which expresses the cooling effect or moving air at different temperatures. It indicates in a very general way how many calories of heat are carried away from the surface of the body. The term was first coined by Paul A. Siple in 1939, the first Boy Scout to come to Antarctica. Siple was the youngest member of Admiral Byrd's Antarctica expedition in 1928-1930 and later made other trips to the Antarctic as part of Byrd's staff and for the United States Department of the Interior assigned to the United States Antarctic Expedition.

Here at McMurdo, we have the following weather conditions:
- Condition THREE is anything better than condition II
- Condition TWO is when any one of the following are true:
Wind speed is between 48-55 knots
Visibility is less than 1/4 mile but greater than 100 feet
The wind chill is greater than -75 degrees F but less than -100 degrees F
- Condition ONE is when any one of the following is true:
Visibility is less than 100 feet
Wind is greater the 55 knots
The wind chill is greater than -100 F

January 1, 2003 McMurdo. 25 deg. F, -3 deg F. with wind chill.
Happy New Year! I always like to do something on the first day of the year that represents what I want to do most during the next year. Today that will be an adventure since I am to fly out in a few minutes to the Polar Sea, the Coast Guard icebreaker that is out at the edge of the sea ice some 45 miles from McMurdo. I had hoped to fly out yesterday and spend New Year’s Eve with the Coasties. I got up about 5 in order to get to the launch pad with all my gear at about 6:30 AM but then fog rolled down and snow began to fall. The launch was delayed for an hour, then several hours. By mid-afternoon, my flight was finally cancelled for the day. By then, I was exhausted. I spent an hour photographing diatoms but came back to the computer to find them all slightly fuzzy. By early evening I was tired and in no mood to celebrate the year out. I went to bed early. Many others here had party time, but for most it’s a work day today, like any other, and who has the energy for such a party!

"Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised."
-Apsley Cherry-Garrard

January 3, 2003. Polar Sea icebreaker. 23 deg. F., -2 deg F. with wind chill, cloudy.

The Coast Guard has three icebreakers of polar class (the Polar Star is in dry-dock in Seattle and the Healy is also in Seattle but works primarily in the Arctic). Every year one of them has the responsibility for cutting a channel through the sea ice in the Ross Sea for the boats that bring fuel and supplies to McMurdo for the following season. Without these deliveries, the station could not operate, nor could the South Pole Station. The 399-foot Polar Sea has the job this year under the command of Captain Miller…and a formidable job it is.

The ship is an impressive bit of horseflesh. With a combination of turbines and diesel engines it is capable of 60,000 horsepower, more power than ten of the most powerful locomotives. Indeed, it is the most powerful non-nuclear icebreaker in the world. When you stand on the fantail on the ship’s stern, you see chunks of ice the size of small houses being tossed and overturned in the ship’s wake as it plows through the ice. Alongside the boat, the ice cracks, tips and is thrown back. The power is awesome, the sight hypnotic.

That’s when everything is working. The Polar Star is twenty-five years old, and the Coast Guard has no money to replace her. During the four days I was on board, she was using a combination of turbine and diesel engines, and one part or another was always breaking down. Out near the water edge, 45 miles north of McMurdo, the ice was only a few feet thick, and the boat made excellent progress, cutting five to ten miles a day. When I got on board, she was about 23 miles from McMurdo and was cutting well, except for frequent mechanical problems. I overheard one of the engineers say, “At some point, surely, we will run out of parts that can break down.”

The ship breaks in the channel by ramming her front end up on the ice and using her weight to crack the ice below. She has a rounded bottom and almost no keel just for that reason. It means she can roll some 65 degrees in a bad storm (and the crew experienced one on their trip down from Seattle) but she does a great job of breaking ice. Part of its success is the sheer weight of the ship, which is in large part due to 1.5 million gallons of fuel on board. By our third day, when we reached a point some eight miles from McMurdo, the ice was considerably thicker—between eight and thirteen feet thick. What’s more, it is third-year ice, ice that is sturdier from being compressed for several years. The ship’s radar can see the channel that was cut last year and tries to follow that, since the ice is a little less strong with its mixture of third-year chunks and first-year ice holding it together. The force required to ram and crack this ice is prodigious. The ship rams her bow up on the ice, forces a crack here and there, then backs up and does it all over again. When I flew off this morning to McMurdo, she was about six miles from Hut Point but only making a few meters with each ram.

From the inside of the ship it is like being inside a metal battering ram attacking a major fortification. You can feel the movement forward and the moment of impact, and the follow-through of splintering ice. There is a short moment of calm while the propellers shift angle to back up, and it starts all over again. The engines and turbines run constantly so it’s difficult to tell whether the boat is moving forward, backward, or at a moment of stasis preparing for the next attack. In my cabin down on the second deck, I felt like I was inside a metal monster bent on a demolition derby. Fortunately for sleep, the turbines are shut off from midnight to 8 P.M. for maintenance. Out on deck, the sound is tolerable and the motion more interesting than unpleasant. My cabin has two double bunks, a sink, and a bathroom with a shower. It’s the “Women scientists’s room,” but I have it to myself right now. It’s spacious enough, though its metal lockers, stone floor, and brown walls leave hominess something to be desired. I am tempted to pin a few photos up on the wall but have none with me.

After three months of McMurdo good spirits, I find life a little dour on board. The officers are pleasant enough and work hard to help me get the photographs I want but they are simply doing their jobs, not loving what they do. The crew is mainly young, only eighteen to twenty-one and not college educated. Most sign up for three years at sea and then find they put into port rarely. It’s hard to get leave on a trip from Australia to McMurdo. Even the captain gets only three weeks off a year. What is there to look forward to? No alcohol is permitted on board. There is nothing to buy and few perks: TV with old movies, an occasional bingo game, and Sunday night sundaes. The chief executive officer came from a small town in Iowa. He told me that he had never seen the ocean before and never taken a plane ride until he joined the Coast Guard. For him, like many young crew members, it was a way of finding new opportunities in a home situation that offered few.

The night we arrived, the crew was given “ice leave” from 6 P.M. to midnight. The ship rammed up on the ice. A gangplank was put down and everyone walked out on the sea ice. Beer was served. Some brought folding chairs and sat around in their parkas, drank beer, and talked. Most played football, hockey, or soccer or just walked around. Groups of penguins shuffled through the games, looking around at the strange creatures. They showed no fear of the vigorous activity all around them, and after looking about, proceeded on their way. The ship’s doctor told me the next morning that he dreads such evenings because there are always injuries, and indeed I was surprised there weren’t more since tackling one’s fellows on the ice, which is considered good fun, is both precarious and potentially damaging.

While the crew partied, I accompanied diatom biologist Jim Raymond and his assistant Mike while they gathered chunks of algae-covered brown ice from the channel behind the ship for their project. Jim, who has worked in the Artic, has no fear of the icy water and jumped from chunk to chunk of floating ice, looking for the darkest samples. He was as excited as a small child over the magnitude of the diatom population. Before this trip he believed that they existed in only a few locations under the ice where conditions were perfect, but from watching the overturned pieces that fill the channel behind the ship, he believes that all the ice has a layer of diatoms beneath it, as long as there isn’t too deep a snow layer to block light. The channel is speckled with brown ice. According to Mike, diatoms process 25% of the planet’s carbon dioxide so they are a critically important part of the food chain.

Our food on board is excellent with fresh fruit always available for breakfast. One day we had great steaks with onions and mushrooms for lunch. Cafeteria food at McMurdo involves grabbing a tray, plate, and silverware, serving yourself from the buffet and then finding a table. Manners become a little lax, and some folks forget the plates and just pile food on their trays. To me that is efficient, but a little disgusting. Strange food combinations are the norm, so it’s not unusual to find someone putting peanut butter on their mushroom omelet. On board the Polar Sea, life is more civilized, especially since I was asked to eat with the officers in their mess room rather than with the enlisted folks on the deck below. Place settings are neatly set out on tables with tablecloths and cloth napkins. Soup and salad are served first, followed by platters of meat, potatoes, veggies, rolls, and finally dessert. No wine, however, is served. The ship’s executive officer heads the table. Yes, sir, and no, sir, are common, as is the use of last names. Being a Patrick O’Brien fan, I kept expecting Dr. Maturin to walk in for dinner and begin discussing his most recent penguin sighting.

Much of my time on board is spent climbing ladders. The ship is a labyrinth of staircases. For the first day I was completely turned around as soon as I walked a short distance because by the time I climbed up a ladder I would be heading another direction. “Just remember that your cabin is port aft and you can find your way back,” I was told when I arrived. From the bowels of the ship, of course, it is impossible to get a sense of which direction the ship is moving. Fortunately, the decks are numbered, which helped a little, but I still had trouble finding the right ladder to reach the officer’s mess. Photographing with the large Fujica was a challenge since when I carry the camera case and the tripod, I have no hand free to hang on to the stair railings while the ship jolts about ramming into ice.

I photographed some of the daily activity of the ship, including mechanics working on the engines and the lowering of the rope ladder. My mental image of crew members out swabbing decks and polishing brass has been largely replaced by crew members manning sophisticated computer read-outs of position, ice depth, weather, and mechanical functions. My most exciting photo op came when one of the Coast Guard helicopters landed on deck. You see this in the movies and it looks simple, but in reality it’s a complicated and dangerous maneuver. At least six crew assist on deck, several in full firefighting gear, and all in flotation vests. At the last moment, I got a call from the bridge saying that I had been cleared to photograph. I dashed down umpteen flights of ladders to the hangar where I had to take off my parka and put on a blue flotation vest, complete with whistle, and a helmet with goggles. I couldn’t understand why I was being asked to dress for possible water immersion when all I wanted to do was stand quietly in a corner and photograph the helo. Without my parka I was cold, even with gloves and the vest. When the helo arrived a few minutes later and began to descend to the deck, I finally understood. The air from the blades rushes out with terrific force, and there is no railing on the flight deck; several crew members grabbed my vest from the rear to keep me from blowing overboard as I tried to frame a picture.

January 5, 2002. McMurdo. 2:30 P.M. 25 deg. F, -4 deg F with wind chill.
Today, back in MacTown I photographed the Scott’s Hut race, a 5-k run held just before Sunday brunch. Since it was snowing and the wind was blowing some 20 mph, it didn’t look like a whole lot of fun to me, but for some 50 people it was anything from serious business to a weekend amusement. For $15, you get a number, a t-shirt, a chance to win a dinner for two in Christ Church, and a good time. Not bad. I am constantly surprised at how many different ways folks find to amuse themselves here with minimal resources.