All Bundled Up With No Place to Go
You might wonder what to pack for a journey to Antarctica, but the beauty of visiting this place is that you don't have to bring much — you're outfitted with the hardiest polar gear available, everything from an oven of a bright red down parka to "bunny boots" to socks and long underwear. ...When you put on all of the official "cold weather gear", you weigh about 20 extra pounds and occupy about 70 percent more space, but man, you are toasty and warm and ready for the worst.
Dressed in our best the day after arriving in New Zealand, over a hundred of us Antarctic-destined folks were stuffed like puffy red sardines into the belly of a US Air Force C-141 jet, where we sat on mesh webbing, listened to the deafening roar of the engines, and stared at mysterious jet plane electrical innards (no windows) for four hours of a five hour flight when the cabin radio loudspeaker crackled to life. This was it! We were about to land! Or so I thought — instead, the pilot announced that we were turning around. The weather had deteriorated in Antarctica to the point where it was dangerous to land the plane, so back to New Zealand we went.
This marked the beginning of an unexpectedly long stay in Christchurch. For the next five days, we went to sleep hoping to fly the next day, only to be woken up by a 3 a.m. phone call telling us that the flight had been delayed another 24 hours.
We finally got news that the weather was clearing and were soon bundled up in our cold weather gear and re-packed on the plane destined for the south. I refused to hope that we were actually going to make it, and throughout the flight I kept imagining with dread that I could feel the plane banking into a boomerang turn back to New Zealand. When the pilot finally came on the loudspeaker about five hours after takeoff, I braced myself for disappointment, but all he said was 'prepare for landing'. Really, truly, this was it.
Happy Camper School
...Off the plane into the blinding white of Antarctica, with Mount Erebus solemnly puffing smoke in one direction, the endless ice pavement of the Ross Ice Shelf in the other, and a piercing blue canopy over it all.
Next we were bused to McMurdo Station, the main US base located on the tip of Ross Island (which is connected to mainland Antarctica via permanent ice). "Mactown" is home to over 1,000 scientists and support workers in the Antarctic summer, but fewer than 200 people winter over. This place is a weird mix of industrial mining base and college town. People live in dorms equipped with hot showers. They work 12 hr + days in high-tech labs, or doing construction work, janitor work, etc., and then relax during their designated "night" by playing intramural volleyball, attending lectures, or hanging out at one of the four bars/coffee shops. A bustling cafeteria feeds the entire population (food is free!), and a small store sells candy and snacks, toiletries, books, and the inevitable Antarctic t-shirts. All waste, human or otherwise, is carefully sorted, recycled where possible, and shipped off the continent — leave-no-trace living taken to the extreme.
The Antarctic definitely attracts a unique subset of humanity. Of course you have the scientists; they're here to figure out how Antarctica ticks. There's a great quote by Antarctic explorer Douglas Mawson that perfectly describes how most scientists feel about this place: "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." Then you have the Raytheon Polar Services workers; they keep the place running so science is possible. Raytheon workers are without doubt the most highly educated and overqualified group of janitors, cooks, construction workers, and toilet scrubbers on the planet. You'll have people with creative writing Masters degrees sorting trash, astrophysicists dishing out oatmeal, and computer science PhDs hammering away in the carpentry shop — all doing relatively menial work in order to live in Antarctica. Scientists and Raytheon folks together make up a fascinating community of intelligent, adventurous, travel-obsessed dorks who are drawn to cold, isolated, off-the-map places — these are my people.
...One ritual that all Antarctic newbies go through is "happy camper school", a.k.a. snow survival training, a two-day course that teaches you how to avoid freezing to death if you're stranded outside somewhere. This was an absolute blast. The best part was building a snow cave, or Quincy shelter, and spending the night under Antarctic snow. We heaped all our backpacks on the ice, threw a tarp over the pile, and shoveled snow onto the tarp until the snow layer was at least an ice- axe shaft-length thick. After the snow had settled and cemented on our heap, a couple of us dug a hole down and then up into the heap to haul out all our gear, leaving a cozy cave space inside. After hollowing out the interior, the cave was large enough to sleep two people comfortably, and I officially had the coolest (on many levels — actually it was really quite cozy) sleep of my life out there on the ice shelf. Our course instructor was an ex-Outward Bound instructor who spends the austral summer in Antarctica and mountain guides big climbs during the northern summer, and he kept us entertained with stories of adventure and survival in wild places.
Later today (as always, weather permitting — that unavoidable Antarctic caveat) our research team is flying by helicopter to the Dry Valleys, arguably the most Mars-like environment on Earth! We'll be out there for a couple weeks doing stream geochemistry fieldwork, and it's gonna be awesome.
Alien Planet
By most measures and standards, I'm on an alien planet right now - this place just doesn't operate the way the Earth I've known does! Here the sun never sets on a desolately beautiful landscape of snow, ice, and rock....
Last spring I spent days scrutinizing black and white aerial photographs of Antarctica's Taylor Valley in an effort to locate promising field sites. ...I thought I had a pretty good idea of the lay of the land. But these valley mountains defy all topographic expectation, and the sun's circling rays seem perfectly directed to highlight the staggering, austere beauty of it all, impossible to capture on film.
So what is this place really like, this 'valley of the dead', as polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott first described it?
First and last, there is the quiet. Not a bird chirping, tree rustling, car honking, airplane roaring, person hollering — just a vacuum of sound, a stillness beyond frozen.
...When it is still and sunny, the air is brisk but generally more pleasant than a typical wintry day in Canada. But without warning, ...the wind rises and gushes through the valley, scouring fines from the regolith and prodding stones into reluctant motion. The wind whistles around jagged peaks and glaciers and screams into the eyes, ears, and nostrils. Then you feel the cold, then you pile on the layers, then you trudge to the nearest slope just so you can climb up and down and up again to generate heat.
The Martian landscape is empty of all obvious signs of life, at least at first glance. Nothing moves, nothing breathes. And you can't help but feel that you're the last human being, the last anything being, left on the planet.
But upon closer inspection of the right places, life is revealed as rampant. Algal mats tenuously cling to the bottom of the permanently ice-covered lakes, deriving energy from the diffuse rays of sunlight that filter through the frozen lid. If you crack open certain porous rocks, you'll see a dusting of red and green just beneath the surface. These are photosynthetic endolithic microbes that have sought refuge within rock from the cold, the parched, the uncompromisingly desolate environs. At the top of the minimalist Dry Valley food chain are invertebrates like tardigrades and nematodes, tiny creatures that subsist on the even smaller microorganisms.
Scientists survey the valleys for the strange and unique, outfitted with curiosity, wonder, and backpacks full of sampling bottles. I've been stationed at the Lake Hoare camp in Taylor Valley for nearly two weeks now, home to one of many Long Term Ecological Research sites dispersed across the globe. The Dry Valleys contain the least diverse desert ecosystem on the planet, and the idea is that by studying all the distinct components of such a "simple" system, scientists will better understand the structure and functioning of ecosystems in general.
My research project involved surveying the Dry Valleys for groundwater seep features — basically, streams without obvious glacial or snow-derived sources — and then analyzing the geochemistry of collected water samples. The idea is to study these Dry Valley seep features as analogs for the geologically young gullies observed on Mars, since my favorite planet and the Dry Valleys are fairly close cousins. Furthermore, understanding what's happening with groundwater flow will contribute to the evolving picture of the hydrological cycle in this desert region of Antarctica. Since seeps supply nutrients to the lakes, the hotbeds of life in the Dry Valleys, they're an important part of the local ecosystem framework.
I definitely lucked out with a project that taps into both my extraterrestrial interests and geobiology background. But the icing on the cake has been the actual field work: every morning I'd hop on a helicopter and commute to a different area of the valley, then I'd hike for about 6-8 hours searching for seeps and taking samples, and then I'd be picked up by another helicopter and be dropped off at base camp. Over the past couple of weeks, I've section hiked the entire length of the Taylor Valley, exploring glaciers and mountains and plateaus along the way. 'Phenomenal' doesn't even begin to describe this landscape, this experience — I've been living a dream, wandering an alien world. Hiking all day in the name of science, sleeping at night in a tent pitched in the shadow of a massive glacier, dining on camp manager Rae's gourmet cooking — yep, life in Taylor Valley is basically a polar scientist's paradise.
Not for long, though. Soon the sun will slip beneath the horizon in a sunset that spans weeks. All the scientists and support staff will scurry back to balmier climes. The nematodes will retreat into freeze-dried spores, and the photosynthetic machinery of the microbes will crank down. The wind will howl, the stars will powder the night, and the unearthly quiet will settle in the valleys. First and last.
As for me, I fly back to McMurdo later today, and then on to Christchurch, ...and quite frankly it's all too much, all too soon. I'm not ready to leave, and I'm madly brainstorming how and when I can return. As Kim Stanley Robinson wrote, "First you fall in love with Antarctica, and then it breaks your heart." I've half-seriously contemplated stowing away in one of the valley base camps for the winter — imagine the stars! — but while there's plenty of food, the lack of fuel would be an issue. Could get lonely, too.
Plus it would mean forfeiting upcoming summer adventures in the wilds of western China, where other equally worthwhile heartbreaks might await. So it's off the ice for me, and next on the agenda is tramping in New Zealand for a few weeks before returning to the Byrd Polar Research Center in Ohio to wrap-up the seep project.