Understanding the Sea Ice

On Monday, I went to Sea Ice survival school. It was an eight hour long survival course taking place mostly on the sea ice. I realized about half way through that I should have taken this course within a week of arriving here. Things make a whole lot more sense when you understand the continent you're living on and the "ground" you're standing on.

Did you know that 98% of the Antarctic continent is covered by a sheet of ice? Some of the ice is more than a mile thick and some sea ice (a sheet of ice covering open sea below) never breaks away to expose the sea. Antarctica is home to 70% of the Earth's freshwater. If all of Antarctica's ice melted (which is probable, but not in our lifetime), the world's oceans would rise up 200 feet. The ice sheet of Antarctica returns 80% of the sun's rays and is pitch black for 8 months of the year, helping the continent maintain unbearably low temperatures - creating a refrigeration effect which regulates all of Earth's average temperatures.

And I was standing on this stuff. In my mind, I imagined weak spots in the ice or cracks too warm to hold me and all of my ECW gear. A surge of panic runs through your body when you're standing 20 miles from real ground on 5 feet of frozen water with a foot-wide crack just below your feet. And not too far away, a Weddell seal flips itself atop the ice through a HOLE in 5 feet of ice. I imagine cracks shooting away from the seal's hole with the stress of my 120 pound body putting pressure on the ice. Maybe I'm nuts.

But actually, that isn't so. We drive tractors and amphibious Swedish vehicles weighing far more than 120 pounds atop this ice. People drill holes in the ice daily, taking measurements and making records of this amazingly interesting sheet of ice. At one point in the survival course, we were within a mile of open water, meaning the 5 foot of annual ice we were standing on dropped straight down into freezing cold darkness of Ross Sea. We learned to drill into the ice and decide whether or not it was safe.

Some of the sea ice hasn't melted around McMurdo Station in over 20 years. This bright blue-bubbly and shiny ice is my favorite, and not just because it's 20 feet thick at its peak. It's called multi-year sea ice. If you look closely at it, down on all fours, you can see little bubbles frozen in time. These ice bubbles reveal important secrets of frozen time throughout the continent - i.e. the greenhouse gas levels thousands of years ago, and possibly frozen life trapped in some period of time just below my feet. Unbelievable.

Next week is snow survival school - a 48 hour course taking place in the Antarctic elements. I stocked up on hand and toe warmers, because I think I'll be needing them!

Everything else is chugging along. I'm really starting to look forward to my New Zealand trip, now that I've seen penguins. Though, I don't think my amazing experiences here are through, which is about the only thing keeping me from hopping on the next plane out of here!!

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