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Published: March 7th 2008
What’s green and rainy and gets dark at night?!? New Zealand!!! I’ve been back in the “real world” for just over a week and my whole Antarctic experience is finally transforming from a surreal dream to a memory-banked experience that I’m ready to do all over again... well, maybe. And now, just as one trip has ended, my Oceanic travels have begun. I’ve already road-tripped all around the South Island of New Zealand and now I’m gearing up for more travels on the North Island, Australia and Hawaii… but that’s a whole other blog that’s night-and-day (literally! I’ve finally seen the moon and stars!) from “Betty on the Ice.” So, for now, I’ll stick to reminiscing about my time on The Ice…
Here are some random lingering thoughts that have not yet made it into any of my previous blogs:
One of the coolest natural occurrences that I got to experience was touring the pressure ridges near Scott Base. As you can (hopefully) see from my photos, some pretty incredible ice and snow formations transpire when the huge frozen mass of the Ross Ice Shelf warms and cools repeatedly (therefore expanding and contracting) and butts up against the fixed
ice that forms near the coast of Ross Island. Much like plate tectonics, this creates massive “mountains” and “valleys” of ice that become incredible natural sculptures that are pretty awe-inspiring to walk amongst and through. Pretty cool, if you ask me.
Another exciting development this season was the establishment of the first NASA “Lunar Habitat” at McMurdo Station as a year-long test to see if the inflatable structure can hold up to the “coldest, harshest, windiest” conditions on earth and therefore become a prototype for a possible pressure-tight lunar habitation for the planned 2020 landing on the moon. Although it stands to put the carpenters out of a job in Antarctica (their structure inflates/deflates in 6 minutes whereas our Jamesways and Polar Havens take a few hours to assemble/disassemble), it was still pretty cool to be involved with the future of the US space program. You can read more about it here:
NASA Press Release I got to meet the lucky few NASA engineers who accompanied the structure to Antarctica and even got a NASA pin for cutting some sheets of plywood for them. I guess there are as many females engineers at NASA as there are female carpenters in McMurdo…
Yet another highlight of the austral summer season was M.A.A.G. (pronounced mog), the McMurdo Alternative Art Gallery. On any given weekend, one could expect a “happening” of some sort- the annual rugby game against the Kiwis or a Carp Shop party for instance- but M.A.A.G. was unique in its uniqueness. Although my photos do not do the event justice, it inspired some of the craziest costumes, art installations, and activities that I experienced in Antarctica… and most closely resembled aspects of my life in NYC (think Gay Pride Parade meets Village Halloween Parade in a mechanic shop…) that I miss and treasure. Whereas many McMurdo-ites were turned off or confused by the art show, to say the least, I felt right at home and only wish I had known about it sooner to plan my own contribution.
Something that I rarely acknowledged was the fact that we were living beneath the infamous “ozone hole.” As all environmentally conscious geeks (Brody, that’s geek. for your information… yeah, I admitted it) like me know, the discovery of the ozone hole became the evidence to ban CFCs in styrofoam and thus became the landmark successful international environmental agreement upon which all
global warming policies are now being based. Although wearing polarized sunglasses and lathering sunscreen on our few patches of exposed skin became the daily norm for those of us on the Ice working outside, the impact of the intense solar radiation did not really dawn on me until I was asked to RFI (Ready for Issue) a Polar Haven that had been set up at a field camp in West Antarctica for the previous 3 years. After assembling the floor and metal framework as we so often did, my co-worker and I prepared to throw the huge blanket over the top but could not determine the inside from the outside- the sun had faded the bright blue canvas so severely that both sides appeared white! After correctly securing the endwalls and top blanket we called our foreman out to give it the “okay” and he promptly put his fist through the middle of the now-fragile fabric wall- not quite RFI after all! I have included photos of this event so you can begin to imagine what an effect the solar radiation might have on our own bodies if we sat outside unprotected for a few years…
Having never skied
before in my life, I decided that the best place to start would be while living on an island covered by snow and ice! As such, one evening after work I rented a set of “skate-skis” for $2 (complete with poles and boots that clipped into the ski bindings at the toes) and two of my brave new friends offered to take me out for my first lesson. Upon determining the wind direction, we took the shuttle bus out to Willy Airfield and planned to skate-ski the 4 miles back to Scott Base (with the wind at our backs) where we could catch another shuttle on its return trip. For my first time skiing, I wouldn’t say that I was awful but also have no plans to make a career out of it… the first mile I fell about a dozen times and the last mile was equally sloppy (I got pretty tired!) but during the middle two miles I managed to establish a pretty even rhythm that made it actually become fun… that is, until I met a lady who had skied from McMurdo Station over 800 miles to the South Pole in the first such all-female expedition… no
thanks, I’ll stick to my day job!
One of the coolest science projects (and most endowed) is the Long Duration Balloon (LDB) experiment. Run by NASA, they launch huge balloons (weighing over 4000 pounds each and made of the same plastic as grocery bags) that are as large as 1.5 football fields and tasked with collecting data on “ultra high energy cosmic rays over the elemental range from protons” (?!?!?!?). After they launched each of the three balloons from their facility near Willy Field, we watched them rising higher and higher until their final cruising altitude of around 125,000 ft… and then about three weeks later we glimpsed one of them (CREAM, I believe) flying high over McMurdo as it completed its first circumpolar flight and began it’s second rotation. I became good friends with one of the PhD students working on the LDB payloads, and was amazed with how many hours she devoted to making sure the crazy expensive balloons were launched and recovered as smoothly as possible. Unfortunately, I think it would take an equally impressive number of hours for me to begin to understand exactly what she does, which is why only one of us is
an astrophysicist. At least I can admire its beauty and scientific significance…
McMurdo Station became my home-away-from-home in all its mundane and bizarre realities. The town of 1200 was a true melting pot of all the factions that normally do everything in their power to distance themselves from one another. At the four meals per day served in the single Galley, the jocks and the nerds coexisted, natural scientists and industry became neighbours, and everyone got along harmoniously (or at least maintained the peace) because we all knew that punishment was a looong plane ride away (Hawaii, to get technical). We became a microcosm of the States- complete with our lingo, laws and regulations, town meetings, traditions, celebrations and holidays- but with a flair unlike anywhere else. Office workers wore Carharts (because they blocked the wind) and the blackened hands of anyone who worked with fuel or machinery were looked upon with gratitude (in appreciation for keeping the station running smoothly) as opposed to shame. Practicality trumped egos and appearance, every single person I met had a unique story to tell and an ear to listen to my history, and at the end of the day it still seems
miraculous to me that we were able to live as comfortably as we did where we did.
They say that no one gets to Antarctica by accident. Some have touched the other six continents and need the seventh to feel complete while others are searching for a way out of debt and chose to live in a place with no bills. Still others dream of living among penguins while some (admittedly) just want a free trip to New Zealand. Regardless, Antarctica is only arrived at by will—and with what some people call "a bit of ice in the head." Although I miss living in an environment where scientific discovery is an everyday topic of discussion, the top bingo prize is three-ply toilet paper (instead of the easier degrading one-ply stuff), and any superfluous calories I consumed were quickly burnt off just maintaining my body temperature outside, there are plenty of realities of working at the bottom of the world that I am glad to leave behind- bureaucratic micromanagement, tofu that tastes like a sponge after being frozen, and not being allowed to venture beyond a one mile radius without copious hours of planning and training, to name a few.
Nonetheless, the first time I smelled a fresh flower, my first meal of Indian food, and my first glimpse of the moon and stars at night were all just that; firsts, like a young child experiences as they grasp each new experience with naive senses, and such was an experience that I don’t think I could duplicate without returning to the Antarctic.
After meeting countless people who have become “career Antarcticans,” the thought becomes quite tempting. It’s a pretty easy life- you get flown down, show up to work on time, do your job well, don’t drink too much to get your supervisor paged in the middle of the night, and avoid getting MedEvaced (medically evacuated) for stupid mistakes- and thus you can return yearly to a happy bubble of friendly people who are being fed, clothed, sheltered, and otherwise provided for by the federal government. And, at the end of the austral summer season, you get dropped off in beautiful New Zealand with a bank account full of cash and a flexible plane ticket home. I met numerous people who are on their 5th, 10th, or even 20th year in which they have eight free months per year
to travel, do summer seasonal work or just live frugally… a tempting lifestyle, to say the least. But indeed it is just a thought for me- I realize that you never meet such people until you go down there- as infamous as they become on the Ice, they are absent from life as we all know it in the “real world”- and I miss and love my home in NYC more than ever before. As grateful as I am for the experience, it will be a few years (if ever) before I return to the Ice because there are too many places left on this earth for me to explore…
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