The ice walls and floor of Crystal Palace
Day 9; January 31, 2009; Vesleskaervet, Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica
Average Daily Temperature: 14.36˚ F
Average Daily Wind Speed: 20.36 mph
Feels Like: -16.18˚ F
The day came on with force, due to my finally managing a good night’s rest, and while I was seeking my morning coffee, I made arrangement’s with Richard Duncan, the SANAE team 47 overwintering mechanic, to teach me how to ride a skimobile. We scheduled the lesson for 3pm, which gave me some time to write and email before lunch.
Richard was a fantastic instructor, and in no time I was whizzing around in front of the station, practicing turns and getting used to the hard steering. Its actually quite fun (for those of you who know me and my love for vehicular speed, you will not be surprised) and it was a big joy to know that I now have a bit of autonomy. There are strict rules about where and in what manner one can leave the base, but, weather permitting, ITASC crew members are allowed to go back and forth to ICEPAC, and since we have our own skimobile, I ran up to grab Alfons and take my first drive down to ICEPAC and meet up with Thomas and Firstborn.
When we arrived back at SANAE, Ross asked if we wanted to join him on an expedition to the “wind scoop.” I had been told to never refuse the opportunity to go to the wind scoop if it arose, and so I accepted, my hopes full of expectation from all that I had heard about this place.
Our journey was not without a mission. Apparently a few years ago, while workers atop our nunatak were installing some electrical equipment, one of the blue plastic pipes that they use to insulate the wiring blew off the mountain, and crashed onto the rocks below, shattering the frozen plastic into thousands of pieces and scattering them into the environment. Other expeditions over the years had collected pieces from this unfortunate event, and we were going there to contribute to these efforts.
Joining Ross, Thomas, Alfons and me, was Lorena Collares, an Oceanographer from the Fundicao Universidad de Rio Grande in Brazil, and my roommate here, Carol Jacobs, who is the SANAE Environmental Officer. We took three skidoos, and rode off down the sloping ice fields, and around to the bottom, easterly side of the nunatak. The journey only took about 15 to 20 minutes, but it felt like we had traveled through time to another world.
Scale takes on a different feel in Antarctica, because the subtlety of the hues, and the gentle angle of the snowy landscape distorts distance and height in ways that are surprising. My sense of visual certainty has had to completely readjust, and I find myself looking at the world as if for the first time, like a newborn who’s eyes are trying to make sense of light traveling through space. Looking out at the sun’s setting rays across the misty snowscape, allowing for the mysterious way nature is here, I felt a deep calm wash over me. True beauty has a way of taking precedence over all other senses, and while the evening’s cold wind continued to pursue any possible opening in my gear, I found that even the coldness was perfect.
Climbing up a mountain in the snow was a bit like jogging in the sand—one step up includes some sliding backward. Steadily, we made our way, traversing my first cravasse (a very baby one, just two feet wide, but you still must have your wits about you), and marveling at the shapes ice makes when carved by the wind. Water is water, whether it is frozen or not. Ice mountains look like huge waves, and the surface close up reminds one of the choppy veneer of a lake on a stormy day.
All around me, 150 foot ice and snow walls stood, making the wondrous enclosure that people here call the Crystal Palace. A palace, indeed! The smooth, luminous structure is awesome, and in awe, I began the hunt for foreign cerulean shards.
My ice ax was quite handy, not only in stabilizing my ascent, but also in digging out the plastic artifacts I was finding. Some had burrowed too deep below the ice’s surface, and were unattainable. But you could still see them clearly, their intense blueness reflecting back up through the ice. There they lie, forever; the disruptive effects of our presence in this land. Some of those plastic shards will never be recovered, and over the millennia will instead make there way deep into the belly of the frozen Antarctic ecosystem. The dichotomy of wanting to be here and fearing our presence’s effects, persists in my mind.
Having collected a pound or two more of the wayward plastic, we began our descent. This turned into quite a lot of fun. The ice floor, where it meets the ice walls, creates a sort of slide, and so we all dropped onto our backsides and glided down the natural flow. Laughing and full with adventure, we rode back to SANAE for a hot tea.
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