by Mark Bowen
Christchurch has been called the most English city outside England. Before it was hit by a major earthquake in 2011, the lovely old town in the center of the city featured several impressive neo-gothic landmarks of red brick with white trimmings and many fine old buildings made of rectangular gray stones. In spite of the devastation, which is still quite apparent, it is a wonderful town to walk in. One comes across clusters of Christ’s College schoolboys in their black-and-white-striped jackets and ties. There are beautiful English gardens, many parks, and a world-renowned botanic garden, which seasoned Antarctic travelers tend to make a point of visiting on their way south, in order to take in the colors and smells of life one last time before heading to the white and blue, mostly lifeless landscape of the frozen continent.
One is more aware of the natural world in Christchurch than in most cities of its size, owing not only to the gardens and the rivers that flow through the town, but also its location. It sits on a plain between the Southern Alps and the sea, so the mountains afford a majestic backdrop and there is usually a salty smell in the air.
The town figured largely in the golden age of Antarctic exploration, because the South Island of New Zealand is the closest major land mass to Ross Island, the site of present day McMurdo Station, which happens to be the farthest south—in other words, the closest to the pole—that it is possible to travel by ship. In 1911, both Robert Scott and Roald Amundsen made final landfall in Lyttleton, the port city five miles from Christchurch, before sailing to the Ice and engaging in their legendary race to the pole. When Scott finally reached what he mistakenly believed to be the exact geometric pole, slightly more than a month after Amundsen had come within a few hundred yards of the real thing, he wrote in his diary, “Great God! this is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.” He and his men then proceeded to lose their lives on the gloomy trudge back to Ross Island. New Zealanders, with their British heritage and all, tend to favor Scott over Amundsen. There’s a statue of him in the town center, and there’s a wonderful collection of historic Antarctic artifacts in the local Canterbury Museum.
On my way to Pole in 1999, I stayed at the Windsor Hotel, a comfortable bed and breakfast that was a favorite of Antarctic travelers. (Sadly, it was destroyed in the 2011 earthquake.) Having had some experience as a mountaineer and climber, I had heard a lot of adventure stories by then, so I approached Antarctica with a sort of ho-hum attitude, expecting more of the same. At breakfast on my first morning at the Windsor, however, when I noticed the gleam in the eyes of a man who had just come off the Ice, the place began to exert its magnetic pull. A kind of madness takes over—like an addiction. I have never met anyone who went to the Ice who didn’t scheme to go back for a year or more after their return.
The gateway to the Ice is the International Antarctic Centre, a gleaming set of buildings that is part Disneyland for the tourists and has an adjacent set of runways, where you will catch your flight to McMurdo. Your first order of business is to pick up your “Extreme Cold Weather” or ECW gear: a big red down parka with a fur-edged hood, insulated Carhartt overalls, very warm boots, socks, long underwear, gloves, hats, face mask, goggles—enough to fill a large duffle bag. Then you slip into a pattern of waking at five a.m., donning your ECW paraphernalia, shuttling from your hotel to the Centre, doing the first of many “bagdrags” (dragging your luggage to your awaiting flight), finding your flight has been canceled, and returning to your hotel to change into spring or summer attire and spend the rest of the day sightseeing in Christchurch. On a lucky day you’ll get the call that your flight has been canceled before you leave your hotel; on an unlucky one, you might board your plane and take off, fly for a few hours, and boomerang. The flight to McMurdo takes from five to eight hours, depending on the aircraft, so it’s not unusual for conditions to deteriorate mid-flight.
All flights from Christchurch forward are in military transport planes, either LC-130s or other much larger aircraft that don’t have skis and can only land on one of the sea-ice runways at McMurdo—if it has been made flat and hard enough. This is a hit-or-miss proposition nowadays, as the climate on the Ross Ice Shelf has warmed enough in recent years to create a surface layer of slush for much of the summer.
These planes are basic affairs for the passengers, who sit in canvas-slung seats along the walls of the huge, open cargo compartment in order to keep it clear for whatever equipment and supplies the plane might also be carrying. There are only a few small windows in the compartment, but the mood is quite relaxed, in contrast to the usual commercial flight. Folks sprawl on the floor to sleep, or chat together leaning on boxes of cargo. You’re even allowed to enter the cockpit every once in a while to join the pilots for a panoramic view of the land or seascape.
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You land and disembark in the middle of the vast, flat plain of the Ross Ice Shelf, five or so miles from shore. As you walk away from your plane, even it begins to look tiny in the huge and unusual, truly breathtaking landscape. White mountains rise sharply in the distance, at the edge of the icy plain. Mt. Erebus, a bulbous white dome dominating the skyline of Ross Island, behind McMurdo, is probably emitting white steam. It is the southernmost active volcano on the planet.
Everything is pristine white and blue, except for your destination. You ride a shuttle bus across the ice to a collection of metal and wood buildings clustered in random array among the low hills at the edge of Ross Island. McMurdo Station is mainly black and brown. It looks like a mining town (see photograph 3). The roads are dirt, and the dirt is volcanic. Little besides lichen grows in it. It doesn’t have the rich smell of topsoil. In fact, your sense of smell goes more-or-less dormant in Antarctica. A farm of disc-shaped fuel tanks lends the aspect of an oil refinery. McMurdo is the fuel depot for the lion’s share of U.S. operations on the continent, and fuel is what makes it possible to live in this alien environment. It keeps you warm, it cooks your food, it melts ice for your water, it generates your electricity, it enables you to go where you want to go. It is delivered by tanker once a summer on a route cleared by icebreakers, after the sea-ice has softened enough to let the breakers through. A large golf ball housing a satellite dish stands on a hilltop, and tiny Hut Point juts into the sea on the far side of the large rectangular pier, ingeniously crafted of floating ice covered with dirt, where the oil tankers and cargo ships dock and unload (see photograph 4). The hut that Scott built for his fatal 1911 expedition still stands on the point, the cold, dry conditions having kept the building and its contents remarkably well-preserved. You sit through some briefings and find your Spartan accommodations.
McMurdo has most of the amenities of a small town: bars, clubs, gyms, movie theaters, a chapel. No children or pets allowed. As at most bases on the continent, there is a rowdy party scene. It’s a busy place in summer, with innumerable operations to run and scientists to support. It has a strong ethos of its own, and many people go back year after year, but you won’t find too many McMurdo fans among the scientists who work at Pole. To them it’s a place to get stuck on the way to or from your workplace. “Rotting in McMurdo,” it is sometimes called.
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You soldier through your period of waiting and abortive bagdrags, which may last as long as a week, and finally board the LC-130 that will take you to Pole, hoping not to boomerang. You’re a little more careful about your ECW gear on this flight, since you’ll be stepping from the plane directly into minus thirty or forty degree weather.
The flight is spectacular. Nothing but blue above and white below, except during the brief crossing of the Transantarctic Range, a band of gray sandstone nunataks jutting up through more than a mile of ice, which flows in great rivers around them (see photographs 5 and 6). This crossing occurs early in the trip, so for most of the flight all you see is the unblemished ocean of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. A few minutes before the plane lands you discern a collection of black dots, tiny Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, on the
snowy plain in the distance.
The flight protocol calls for an LC-130 to remain at Pole for as short a time as possible and to keep its engines running. The passenger exit is near the bow of the plane on the left. Once you step onto the Ice you notice a couple of people standing there, directing you toward the station. (I had made the acquaintance of a South Pole veteran named Martin Lewis on my way south. He stepped off the plane just before I did and was hit by a fusillade of snowballs.) Meanwhile, a cargo crew, the “cargoids,” swiftly empties and reloads the plane through the large access door at the rear, and a group of “fuelies” siphons off some of the plane’s fuel, which will be used to power the station. Almost half a million gallons need to be stored in the huge tanks on-site before the last flight leaves in February and the winterovers are left to enjoy the nine-month winter alone. After the incoming passengers have debarked, the outgoing passengers board. If all goes according to plan, the plane is on the ground for less than half an hour.
In the early days of AMANDA, the nerve center of the station was a large, orange metal Buckminster Fuller dome that functioned as a sort of tent, enclosing a few small buildings that resembled refrigerators. Their doors were just like the locking doors on walk-in freezers in the real world (as they say in Antarctica), except that they were meant to lock the cold out rather than in. The dome was unheated—a few grimy icicles, known by the locals as crapsicles, hung from the triangular panels about fifty feet above your head—and it was entered by way of a tunnel. It has now been replaced by a gleaming, new, multi-hundred-million-dollar station and is widely missed. An AMANDA veteran once told me that moving into the new station was something like moving from a comfortable old bed and breakfast into a Best Western hotel. The dome was “the real Pole” (see photographs 7–9).
Aside from adjusting mentally to a new, surreal environment, you are immediately beset by acute altitude sickness, since you have just flown from sea level to about ten thousand feet: headaches, nausea, listlessness, and sleeplessness in varying degrees. You are also prone to dehydration: the air is extremely dry, owing both to the altitude and to the cold. Technically speaking, Antarctica is a desert; it snows less than three inches a year at Pole. But buildings are eventually buried nevertheless by blowing snow. (The dome proved to have an unanticipated advantage in that respect, since its spherical shape somehow minimized the drifting. It lasted about twenty years longer than it was expected to.)
At the briefing you attend first thing, you are advised to drink plenty of water, but not do much else with it, since it takes labor and fuel to make this valuable substance at forty below zero. You are allowed two two-minute showers per week and one load of washing. Your room will most likely be an eight-foot by twelve-foot canvas-walled cubicle in one of the Jamesways, a sort of insulated, canvas Quonset hut, out in Summer Camp, the berthing area for the “hordes” who descend in summer. There’s a bed, a small side table or bureau, a large tin can for peeing in—and not much privacy. Conjugal relations in these quarters don’t involve much pillow talk.
A vibrant culture has developed among the people who have maintained South Pole Station continuously now for about sixty years. The first station, which was known as “Old Pole,” was built during the Antarctic summer of 1956–57. Until it was blown to smithereens during the summer of 2014–15, it lay buried beneath the snow about three-quarters of a mile from the new station, out beyond the “dark sector,” where the telescopes are located. It was blown up for safety reasons. Some mini-crevasses had opened up around the buildings and the tunnels that entered them, and it also used to be a favorite forbidden pastime to explore the place—especially in winter. Imagine crawling around in an underground maze, partially filled with snow, by headlamp, in the dark, at minus fifty degrees. If you were caught, you’d be escorted off the continent forthwith.
It’s a tribe really. They tend to be frontier types, cultists, and free spirits: Deadheads, rock climbers, Red Sox or Cubs fans.… In 1999, I met a guy who was writing a book about riding the rails through the American West like an old-fashioned hobo. Another fellow had just sold a bar he had owned in Thailand (which seemed to be a popular R&R spot for “Polies” after leaving the Ice). The tattooed bulldozer mechanic you strike up a conversation with in the galley, who looks like he could easily break you in half over his knee, happens to knit Icelandic sweaters for a hobby. There’s a women’s knitting club called “Stitch and Bitch.” There’s a fly-tying club.
The real hard core are those who have worked on the continent for years, many of whom have wintered over in the past and may be at it again this year. They are privy to the innumerable secrets of construction work and getting infernal gadgets to work and stay working in this brutal environment. This is an oral tradition. One trivial example is not to leave metal tools outside. If a cargoid thinks she might need a big box-end wrench to open the cargo bay or disassemble a large piece of equipment that needs to be removed post-haste from the back of a “Herc” (Hercules transport plane, aka LC-130), she leaves it in the cab of the forklift that she races up to the back of the plane with. If she leaves the wrench outside at minus fifty, her hands will freeze when she uses it, no matter how thick her gloves are.
The saying among the inner circle is that the first year you come for the adventure, the second for the friends, the third for the work … and the fourth because you don’t have any friends left in the real world anymore. In other words, it’s mainly for the work—or “mission” as they call it. The scientists find themselves in the hands of a seriously competent group of people, who take pride in their work and are inspired in return by the quality of the science they are supporting. The science talk given every Sunday in summer is usually well attended. There is a sense of trust in one another that was reminiscent to me of the people I used to share a rope with on rock or ice climbs. Competence and trust translate into survival in dangerous situations. The atmosphere at the station is infectiously positive and can-do, with a rough, unsentimental edge that makes it all the more effective.
Scientists are known as “beakers,” and while it may not sound like it, this is a positive term. The derogative is “jafa,” for “just another fucking academic,” which you don’t hear as often as “fingy,” for “fuckin’ new guy,” a carryover from the Vietnam War that applies to the clueless scientist and non-scientist alike, there for his first “summer jolly” on the Ice. (A large fraction of the support personnel are first-timers, seeking only adventure, who won’t be back next year.) The PICO drillers, who are doing skilled manual work in the service of science, liked to be called redneck beakers.
It seemed to me, incidentally, that the most competent heavy-equipment operators, that is, bulldozer, bucket loader, and forklift drivers, all happened to be women.
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There is no place on Earth further south than the South Pole, obviously, so when you’re traveling to the place you are inevitably headed south, and when you leave you’re headed north. There is no longitude at the pole either; its coordinates are 90° South. While, technically speaking, every direction is north, it is necessary to be able to talk about directions, so at Pole they are defined by a grid. Grid north follows the prime meridian or zero line of longitude, which passes through Greenwich, England. Grid south (180°) passes through New Zealand. You can also step easily into any time zone, so for convenience the clocks are set to New Zealand time.
The endless white plain surrounding the station has been divided into pie-shaped sectors. The clean air sector lies up the prevailing wind, grid northeast between 340° and 110°; the wind blows from this direction 90 percent of the time. Although the South Pole has the cleanest air on the planet (upwind, at least), it is not immune to pollution. The U.S. National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration runs an observatory in the clean air sector not only to observe the weather, but also to monitor air quality, and it was at the pole during the International Geophysical Year, 1957–58, that the anthropogenic or manmade increase in carbon dioxide, the gre
atest contributor to global warming, was first confirmed. (Old Pole was built under the auspices of the IGY.) It is ironic therefore that the U.S. Antarctic Program runs almost entirely on fossil fuels. The snow in the downwind sector has registered the pollution from the station’s power plant ever since it was erected. The snow is noticeably darkened, and in the immediate vicinity of the station you can even pick out annual layers of black soot.
Grid east lies the quiet sector, free from sound and radio noise, and grid west, across the airstrip and a little more than half a mile from the station, lies the dark sector, where the telescopes are located.
Also, incidentally, since everything we’ve talked about is sitting on top of an ice sheet, it’s all sliding grid northeast, in the rough direction of the Transantarctic Mountains, at the rate of about thirty feet per year. Every New Year’s Day there’s a grand and motley procession, led by John Wright if he’s in town, a miner and demolitions expert who also plays the bagpipes. The procession ends with a ceremony for placing a marker at the precise location of the geographic South Pole on January 1. There’s a line of them stretching across the Ice in the direction of the dark sector (see photograph 18).
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In the austral spring of 1991, Bob Morse, Bruce Koci, Steve Barwick, and Tim Miller traveled south to do the first drilling for AMANDA. PICO also tasked a drilling crew that included Bill Barber to the job.
Since AMANDA had no infrastructure in place, Bob and Bruce decided to ride on the backs of SPASE and GASP. They drilled out by the “SPASE shack,” so they could retreat to its warmth every once in a while during the drilling of the holes and the deployment of the strings, which took place in the wide-open in temperatures that were pretty much always below twenty below.