Ocean Notorious

by Matt Vance

  Frank Wild, Ernest Shackleton, Eric Marshall and Jameson Adams on board Nimrod after an unsuccessful attempt on the South Pole, 1909.

  I politely asked him not to enter the hut for another twenty minutes as Laurence was near the end of an hour-long exposure and any movement would appear as a ghostly image. I offered to escort him and his entourage to the Adélie penguin colony in the meantime.

  The ambassador was not a man used to the word ‘no’. ‘We haven’t much time,’ he blurted out. ‘There’s some bad weather on the way.’

  I looked over at the pilot who, far from pacing nervously, was reclining on a rock eating a chocolate bar. He grinned with a mouthful of chocolate and shot me a wink. When I turned back, the ambassador had seen his chance and stormed off to the hut.

  As the entourage sheepishly ignored our furious looks and Aberhart patiently waited for the ambassador to destroy his shot, I walked to the Adélie colony with one of the carpenters who were camped near the hut, preparing for a big restoration project that was to take place the following year. He seemed to welcome the opportunity to escape the tedium of his work. I had noticed that the process he and the other carpenters were engaged in was painstakingly slow, more like an archaeological dig than a building project. At one stage I had watched him roll out an electrical extension cord from a small generator into the hut. This had taken an hour as he painstakingly laid the cable so it did not touch the building if at all possible and added soft velvet pads where it did.

  We walked to a hill overlooking the sea ice, sat out of the wind just below a ridge, and watched the Adélies. The rookery was like society unhinged. Every possible kind of turmoil was under way, from passive resignation to furious fighting. There were minor offences, such as the stealing of nest stones from a neighbour, and serious crimes, such as hovering skuas snatching a chick from a crèche – one pinning down the chick, the other eating it alive. As is nature’s way, these crimes went unpunished.

  A constant trail of penguins waddled out over the sea ice to the open water, where they were transformed into sleek, efficient fishing machines. The trail was linear and straight, like a highway through a desert: the birds were taking the shortest possible route to and from their source of food. Those returning with gullets full of fish were harassed by squawking, persistent chicks urging them to disgorge their catch.

  All around us was an enormous whiteness. To the south a seemingly dead expanse of snow and ice floated on McMurdo Sound. To the north we could see the edge of the sea ice and then the open sea, teeming with Adélies, killer whales and the odd leopard seal. It is at the ice edge that the richness of the Southern Ocean meets the barrenness of Antarctica. The edge is always on the move as the ocean surges break and chip away at it, and wind and the swirling gyre of the Ross Sea sweep the resulting chunks of ice out into the violence of the Southern Ocean proper.

  This day a north-east wind in the sound was slowly shoving any loose pack ice back at the ice edge, which appeared to be growing by the hour. I knew, though, that by the next day all the ice would be gone, leaving only black open water.

  The life that is drawn to the edge of the ice travels along with it, using the movement to gain access to food. From our vantage point above the rookery we could see minke whales blowing plumes of spray in the air, Adélie penguins using the edge as a drop-off point to go fishing, and fat Weddell seals finding it a convenient haul-out spot.

  The kings, though, were the killer whales. They were treating the ice edge as though it were a Formica table in a diner. As a small pod patrolled the pack ice, penguins scrambled out and on to the ice in a mad panic. A leopard seal, also scared witless, lunged out of the water. The bigger males of the pod launched their upper bodies out of the water to survey the buffet before sneaking under the ice and thumping it with their heads, testing for any weakness that might result in a quick meal, while the rest of the pod waited for hunger or stupidity to drive the petrified refugees back into the water.

  Suddenly, a loud noise shattered the peace. The ambassador’s helicopter rose up into the air. From the front passenger seat a small fat hand waved at us. We did not wave back.

  ‘What’s that one up to?’ I pointed a dusty mitt at an Adélie penguin that had broken from the pack. There was a long pause. ‘Looks like he’s sick of being a live donkey,’ the carpenter said.

  The penguin was heading south, away from the rookery and ice edge, across the frozen sea to the Transantarctic Mountains and almost certain death. Nestled in these mountains are the Dry Valleys, a landscape scoured free of ice by fierce katabatic winds that swoop down off the polar plateau.

  Skeleton of Weddell seal, Dry Valleys, Antarctica.

  William Lashly, a seaman who accompanied Scott on both of his Antarctic expeditions, was one of the first people to see the southernmost of these valleys, the Taylor. He initially described it as ‘a splendid place for growing spuds’. However, after the party wandered down into the valley and saw the desolation close up, Scott would note: ‘It is worthy of record … that we have seen no living thing, not even a moss or lichen; all that we did find, far inland amongst the moraine heaps, was the skeleton of a Weddell seal, and how that came there is beyond guessing. It is certainly a valley of the dead.’

  Had Scott ventured further he would have come across more dry valleys punctuated by mummified bodies of Weddell and crabeater seals, some of which had lain there for over two and a half millennia.

  This unusual behaviour of some animals to head inland, away from the ice edge and any chance of survival, is curious. Gerald Kooyman, an American physiologist, was one of the first to look into it. In 1960 he conducted simple experiments on a juvenile crabeater seal he found wandering south over the sea ice. He turned the crabeater around and pointed it towards the north and the ice edge. It snapped and snarled at him before proceeding south once more. Thinking it might be only crabeaters that exhibited this insanity, he tried the same trick with a Weddell seal he found wandering inland. It, too, promptly turned around and headed south again.

  Several explanations were proposed. Most revolved around a genetic imprinting process in the seals while young. One of the strong instincts of Weddell and crabeater seals is to migrate inshore from their birthplace on the pack ice. Perhaps this, together with their lack of experience, could drive them south? Others hypothesised that the animals were trapped by moving sea ice and simply got confused.

  No conclusive answer to the mystery has yet been found. What we do know is that when seals and penguins wander to the Dry Valleys they die of starvation and can remain in a preserved state for hundreds, even thousands, of years.

  The Dry Valleys are of interest to scientists for another reason too: the conditions there seem to replicate the earliest instances of life on our planet, and possibly on others. Until the 1970s it was believed that the cold and dry atmosphere rendered the soil practically sterile, as Scott had surmised. This didn’t change until 2006, when Craig Cary, a microbiologist, received permission to examine the microbial community beneath a 250-year-old mummified crabeater.

  The seal had been slowly trickling carbon, nitrogen and other nutrients into the soil. The rate of decay was such that it had acted like a bag of slow-release fertiliser: the microbial community Cary found under the seal was far more luxuriant than that in open soil just a metre or so away.

  He moved the seal to a new location and waited to see what would happen. Within a few summers the soil under the seal also burst into life. Cary had shown that microbes were lying dormant in the ground of the Dry Valleys, simply waiting for a chance at life to come their way in the form of a suicidal seal or deranged penguin.

  The only other species drawn to march southwards in Antarctica is homo sapiens. We too give up our families and head to the bottom of the world, looking perhaps for immortality. Luckily, most of us get to go back home again. Upon Shackleton’s return to England he was rewarded with a knighthood, a gold medal from the Royal Geographic Society – although the society b
riefly entertained the idea of making it smaller than the one given to Scott – and the brotherhood of Trinity House. Fridtjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen both publicly lauded him. Beneath all the praise and glory, though, the expedition’s finances were in a shambles and Shackleton was unable to meet the financial guarantees he had given his backers. In the end the British government had to step in with a grant of £20,000 to settle the most pressing of his debts.

  In an attempt to cash in on his fame, Shackleton threw himself into some get-rich-quick schemes. There was a tobacco company, an Antarctic stamp business and a Hungarian mining concession. All failed spectacularly. On top of all this Scott, despite being beaten to the South Pole by Amundsen and dying with his men on the return journey – or perhaps because of this – became firmly cemented in the public mind as the polar hero and martyr.

  Scott’s wife and supporters in England had carefully edited his journals and in 1913 published their version of his journey as Scott’s Last Expedition. The story of fortitude in the face of certain death appealed to the English passion for glorious failure. It had biblical overtones and every schoolchild in the British Commonwealth was brought up on it.

  Shackleton’s Endurance ice-bound in the Weddell Sea, 1914.

  Shackleton had one more shot at polar exploration with his infamous Endurance expedition. Once Amundsen’s party had reached the South Pole in December 1911, the crossing of Antarctica from sea to sea via the South Pole remained the last great challenge on the continent. Shackleton set out to meet this in 1914, in what was boldly named the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. The venture only further proved his ability to attract disaster and get away with it. The Endurance became trapped in ice in the Weddell Sea before the overland journey could even begin. In what became an epic feat of survival and hardship, the party abandoned the ship and managed to cross sea ice and the full fury of the Southern Ocean in winter in only a small ship’s boat.

  Lone Adélie penguin, Ross Ice Shelf.

  In 1921, at the age of forty-seven, Shackleton instigated another expedition. Financed by an English businessman, John Quiller Rowett, and using a former Norwegian sealing boat, renamed Quest, the expedition set off on an oceanographic and subantarctic survey that had, among its dubious goals, the search for several mythical islands in the Pacific and Southern Oceans. Like most officers of the time, Shackleton lived hard and drank heavily. This, together with his periods of starvation, scurvy and exhaustion, finally caught up with him. Three and a half months after the ship sailed from England, he died of a heart attack in Grytviken, South Georgia, and was buried on the island.

  Scott was to remain in the public mind as the greatest hero of the south until 1979, when an English writer, Roland Huntford, in his book Scott and Amundsen, accused Scott of being an inflexible and incompetent leader. The decomposing myth of Scott saw the reinvention of Shackleton. He was lauded for having had the fortitude to turn north with his men, away from certain death and the promise of fame. What started as a trickle quickly developed into a torrent of books, movies and management philosophies that claimed failure could be constructive.

  Eventually the carpenter and I, sitting near Shackleton’s hut, lost sight of the perverse Adélie penguin. The wannabe dead lion, with no care for its future, blurred into a small dot and vanished into the white horizon, assured of a mummified immortality.

  Flag trail, Ross Ice Shelf.

  Trick of the light

  77°48′S

  Black Island appears to levitate above the Ross Ice Shelf. A shimmering dark lake has formed below it, where there has not been rain for over two million years. I rest on my ski poles and catch my breath in the thin air. As I watch, the lake grows, folds, collapses and gently lowers the island back into place.

  On calm days mirages like this are common in Antarctica. Roald Amundsen and his party saw their fair share of them. Perhaps the most famous was within days of their becoming the first people to reach the South Pole. ‘Our finest day up here,’ Amundsen wrote. ‘Calm most of the day with burning sunshine … as we were breaking camp Hassel called out, “Do you see that black thing over there?” Everyone saw it. “Can it be Scott?” someone called. Bjaaland skied forward to investigate. He did not have to ski far. “Mirage,” he reported laconically, “dog turds.”’

  Away to the east I spy my destination: an A-frame hut. The hut has been an institution at New Zealand’s Scott Base since it was rescued from the American McMurdo Station’s trash pile in 1971. Every year it is dug out of the snowdrift and roughly levelled on its skids. Inside, it is lined with timber panels and boasts a selection of saggy couches and beds – and, most of the time, good company.

  It’s nearly eleven at night by the time I reach the hut but the sun shows no inclination to set. Inside, I am greeted by an artist from Auckland and a scientist from Dunedin. Like me, they have come out here for a night of respite from the hustle and bustle of Scott Base. They seem happy to see me. They are even happier when I produce a bottle of whisky from my pack.

  The hut is warm. We drink the whisky. It is rough but somehow it tastes smooth. We talk with long pauses, as if the vastness of the Ross Ice Shelf is nudging in between our words. We talk of ice, and of Amundsen and his dogs.

  On the shelf above a bunk on which I recline there are novels and non-fiction epics of varying quality. One of the better ones is Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane, in which he writes: ‘Ideas, like waves, have fetches. They arrive with us having travelled vast distances, and their pasts are often invisible, or barely imaginable.’ Antarctica is one of those ideas and, like the Southern Ocean that surrounds it, it has the greatest fetch of any ocean on Earth.

  It took a long time for the idea of Antarctica to catch up with the reality. In the meantime every possible future scenario was played out on the blank white canvas. The darker theories, such as the emergence of alien bases and military conspiracies, were outweighed by those that saw the place as utopia, a heaven on earth where people could live in peace and warmth.

  The A-frame hut is as close to the utopia theory as it is possible to get, a human-scale refuge from the vastness outside, black against white, vertical against horizontal, warmth against cold. This is a pleasant surprise for the visitor.

  Colonisation came late to this continent: humans began to set up camp here less than 120 years ago. The first people even to sight the place were members of a Russian expedition in January 1820, led by Thaddeus von Bellingshausen, a German officer in Russia’s imperial navy. The first to land on the mainland was an American sealing captain, John Davis. The first to dwell here over the formidable winter was a party led by Carsten Borchgrevink, which endured the dark months in a small hut at Cape Adare in the winter of 1899. Despite the heroic age of exploration that followed, and which ended with Shackleton’s legendary survival against the odds, there was no serious settlement until Argentina set the ball rolling by building a base in 1947, followed closely by Chile and Britain. Even today, Antarctica’s daunting climate and geography have dictated that human presence is little more than a sprinkle around the edges.

  For those of us who live in New Zealand, Antarctica is never far from our thoughts. Around my home port of Lyttelton there are constant reminders of the expeditions that sailed south in the heroic era. I often step on to the wharf from which Scott sailed, and pass the pub where he had his last drink. Each morning in summer my commuter ferry skirts another icebreaker bunkering before heading south. At night, Antarctica occasionally sends an icy blast that shakes the roof of my house.

  Being one of Antarctica’s nearest neighbours, in 1957 New Zealand bowed to pressure from Britain and not only claimed the Ross Dependency but built a complex of six small buildings, the grandly named Scott Base. In 1977 and 2005 more buildings went up. Despite being a new country, New Zealand had managed to colonise just like the rest of them.

  Travelling across the Ross Ice Shelf is not unlike moving across the ocean that flows below it. At roughly 487,000 square kilometres it
is the largest ice shelf in the world, a floating mass of glacial ice the size of France and averaging 200 metres thick. For most of its northern face it finishes in towering cliffs but near Ross Island it dips down to form a gradual ramp, making this an ideal location to gain a footing. The New Zealand and US bases perch on the rare ice-free ground. Around each, a network of paths leads out on to the shelf. As you move away these paths gradually dissolve. The further you go from bare land, the greater the dangers become.

  If you consult a chart of the ice shelf you are confronted with small areas of detail surrounded by large blanks. In medieval cartography these blanks were known as isolarions and populated by swirling dragons, sea serpents and ferocious cannibal tribes. Today they contain merely ice and crevasses.

  Nevertheless, Antarctica is a cartographer’s nightmare. The physical environment is violent and ever moving: this is not a landscape that tolerates being pinned down. While we may attempt to name places, the exercise borders on the absurd. These days names are dished out mainly for political reasons and most people so honoured will never see their col, glacier or mountain. Within a few generations this won’t matter anyway: the connection will be lost in the thick volumes of the Composite Gazetteer of Antarctica. It’s as if words refuse to stick to the slippery substrate.

  In the shifting and impermanent scene, the colonisers of Antarctica clasp on to the familiar. Residents at McMurdo Station, over the hill from Scott Base, have Frosty Boys, bowling alleys, cable TV and ATMs. The New Zealanders have Massey Ferguson tractors, corrugated iron cladding, rugby goalposts and a bach.

  On the Ross Ice Shelf, navigating is much more complex than any chart can suggest. On the route from Scott Base to the A-frame hut, for example, there are sometimes areas with no obvious reference points. This happens most often in cloudy weather and can induce a sort of horizontal vertigo in the skier. The only aid is a thin tapering line of flags that denotes a trail free from the cold furious death of the crevasse.