Pancake ice forming on the surface of the ocean

Day 30; February 21, 2009; Penguin Bukta, Fimbul Ice Shelf, Southern Ocean, Antarctica
Average Daily Temperature: 24.53˚ F
Average Daily Wind Speed: 14.77 mph
Feels Like: 2.38˚ F

This morning I awoke to find that the sea had literally begun to freeze. All around the ship, and as far as I could see, the surface of the ocean was covered in small discs of solid ice. Though the equinox is still a month away, which definitively marks the change of seasons, one can already see the signs of the quickly approaching winter.

Watching the Southern Ocean freeze before my eyes was an awesome sight—completely profound, if not seemingly impossible.

Pancake Ice

The discs of ice that had appeared overnight are called “pancake ice,” and they are formed in a most remarkable way. As the temperature of the ocean water begins to drop to the point of freezing, the surface water, which has less salinity, will begin to freeze first. However, as the ocean is never still, when the ice begins to form it knocks about gently on the surface waves, bumping into other forming bits of ice. The persistence of the motion means the ice plates are always colliding into one another, eroding each other’s edges which results in their round shape.

The last flights from SANAE arrived before lunch, and with everyone on board, the ship embarked on the long voyage north. As we moved away from the ice shelf, and the continent of Antarctica, the boat made its way through the newly frozen surface of the calm ocean, marking our path behind us. The petrels were darting around the ship, following our northerly tack. Icebergs towered, ever luminous, in all directions.

The panorama held my vision in earnest for the next six hours. The sunlight, which disappeared occasionally behind light cloud cover, was creating the seascape anew minute by minute. Literally, I could photograph the same direction three times within a short period, and the color of the ocean would be a gloomy gray in one, a radiant gold in another, and an icy deep blue in the third. Impossibly striking scenes passed before our eyes, every direction a new opportunity to gasp. I have over 800 photographs from this day, and have found it an entirely hopeless effort to try to edit them—each one holds a unique beauty, leaving me quite confounded as to how claim one superior to another.

Before long, the pack ice, which is the ice left over from the previous winter’s freeze, was scattered across the horizon, forming a theatrical stage upon which the light continued to play. Every moment was a magnum opus. Large flat pieces of ice in the shapes of squares or triangles became like monochromatic light sculptures. Jagged pieces, which sliced upward into the sky or downward into the sea, were like truculent brushstrokes upon the foreground. As I watched the landscape before me, I esteem more deeply the paintings I had seen at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts the day before I left on this journey—a wonderfully curated exhibition of historic paintings of the Arctic and Antarctic regions.

These artists, some of the first to see Antarctica, let alone paint it, had sought to represent the landscape with an air of emotionality—they attempted to reproduce nature accurately, but ever imbued with the human effort and adventure that led them to be there. I remember, as I looked into those paintings, wondering if they were a bit sensational in their approach, but now I believe that not to be the case at all. They are sensational, yes, but insofar as they accurately portray the real and persistent drama of the nature itself. Those paintings are more impressive to me now, having seen this place with my own eyes—I couldn’t have known beforehand the land those paintings yearned after. Now, I know.

I was fortunate to catch a glimpse of penguins amongst the pack ice several times throughout the day. On one large flow, there were four Adélie penguins and one Emperor penguin, which allowed a clear view of the size difference. Scurrying along the ice, sometimes standing upright looking directly at you, and then suddenly dropping on to their bellies and sliding around on the ice, they seem somehow comical and noble at the same time. I also spotted a small pod of Minke Whales in the distance, their dark fins emerging elegantly from the water as they surfaced for air.

At dusk, light continued in vain to pursue the expanding darkness. Several times the vista before me would be entirely a dark grayish blue, save for a single iceberg in the distance, which would be fully illuminated in the warm brilliance of the remaining sunlight. Perfectly horizontal lines of light would appear and disappear in seconds. The day, indeed a masterpiece in color and light, finally dissolved into night with the sun setting on the last remaining pack ice before we reached the open ocean. Behind me, Antarctica would still be illuminated, but in my growing distance, I could no longer see it.
***

Light reflecting off ice crystals

Day 16; February 7, 2009; Vesleskaervet, Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica
Average Daily Temperature: 17.78˚ F
Average Daily Wind Speed: 13.42 mph
Feels Like: -2.35˚ F

A colour is never merely a colour, but the colour of a certain object…
-Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

Here in Antarctica there is snow and ice virtually everywhere, a fact that may at first seem elementary but upon deeper reflection is infinitely complex. The impressive quantity of these natural crystalline elements extends as much vertically as they do horizontally, permeating the air and cloaking the land. The depth of the ice beneath my feet approaches 30 feet, with the thickest ice on the continent measuring nearly three miles. Above the frozen land, even the sky is saturated with floating ice particulate, which are seized by the wind, and whirled about at chaotic speeds. These icy eddies allow for the quality of air that encourages the magnificent atmospheric optics that I see throughout the day.

The luminous expanse of the ice fields tempts my eyes to peer out toward the boundless horizon, as if trying to redefine the periphery of my own vision, enticing me to look beyond the limits of my former perceptions. There, hanging on the diaphanous line between land and sky, I see only endless snow and ice. Even in the direction of the mountains to the south, where the nunataks of the Ahlmann Ridge Range break the flatness of the terrain, it is the insistent presence of snow and ice that prevails.

It would be natural to presume the whiteness of such a landscape, and yet the more time I spend watching the environment each day, the less I believe in white at all. While there are momentary glimpses of something that feels like white, as when the mid-noon sun pushes its strong rays against the landscape so that the sheer brightness of its downward angle eliminates all hope of color, in truth it is luminosity that reigns. White, then, seems to become only a vehicle for the action of light upon the landscape, yet what is persistently baffling is that white can only exist as a consequence of light.

The idea of white is rather like the idea of zero. In a sense they are both elusive, and at the same time they each define entire systems, in science and mathematics, respectively. While they themselves are intangible, they give birth to their own infinities. Both white and zero each contain within them their own intrinsic paradox: white appears to the eye as the absence of all color, and yet it can be scientifically proven that it is comprised of all color, while zero is the sum total of nothingness and yet it can be proven to exist. Interestingly, they have both in various ways referred to the idea of the void. White and zero are lone wolves, isolated, like the continent of Antarctica itself, from the very things to which they are intrinsically connected.

White is not, itself, a color in the visible spectrum of light, but rather the sum total of them all. If you take all the color frequencies in the observable gamut, which range from 380 to 750 nanometers, you would get white light. Sir Isaac Newton, standing on the shoulders of earlier optical scientists, showed us these basic principals in his legendary prism experiment. By placing a prism in the direct path of the sun, he saw that white light divided into the pure spectral colors otherwise known as violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, red.

If white is the summation of all spectral color, then why do we experience white to be the absence of it? While Newton’s discovery furthered science in extraordinary ways, what of this theory of quantitative differentiation tells us of the millions of other colors we experience that have no name? The world as we see it with our senses is not merely comprised of these six colors.

Philosophically, white has always been attributed to the “blank canvas,” new beginnings, and is a beacon for peace and purity. Yet, is anything actually white? When we think we perceive white, we actually can still see bits of other colors, as light reflects and refracts across objects and surfaces. For instance, observe an average white-painted wall throughout the course of a 24-hour period. At first you take for granted that it is white because you expect it to be white. However, when you look more closely, and with time, you will see how slightly bluish the wall is by the window at midday, and slightly yellowish it is by the lamp you turned on after sunset, and how an orange chair is reflecting slightly onto the wall, making a glowing orangey spot of color appear.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the great philosopher and color theorist, was less interested in separating the spectrum into its divisible parts, as Newton was, but investigated instead the vague space between the pure colors, where the clear delineation between one color and the next was more mysterious. He looked not to the individual wavelengths but to the merging of short-wave light and long-wave light. He looked to where light interacted with itself. His research began with the notion that color, or light, was in fact a perceptual act that necessarily included a more introspective interpretation.

Looking out toward the horizon, with the subtle hues of colors blending and overlapping before my eyes, I begin to see the wisdom of his thinking. This complex system of light, and our seeing of it, maintains that the world of natural phenomena lies quite beyond the mind.

The observer does not see a pure phenomenon with his eyes, but more with his soul. Information from the eye depends on the disposition of the organ at the moment, on light, air atmospheric conditions, matter, manipulation, and a thousand other circumstances.
Goethe, January 15, 1798 (From Goethe’s Color Theory)

Observing, then, pure phenomenon itself, like the suns rays bouncing off the snow, or refracting through suspended ice crystals that are blowing in the strong Antarctic winds, I don’t perceive just one color, but many simultaneously. These substances—ice and snow—are prisms in their own right, and so display for us a myriad of colors as the result of light passing through them as they mingle together throughout the land and sky. But, then, the question remains, what color are all the individual frozen water crystals themselves? Are they white?

Physiologically, white is the perceptual experience which is elicited by light, and which subsequently activates the three kinds of color sensitive cone cells in our eyes in equal amounts. There is virtually an endless number of combinations of colors in the visible spectrum that will stimulate these cones in such a way—in other words, the illusion of white can be accomplished by an almost infinite number of luminous color circumstances. So then where does white exist? Is it a function only of our mind?

As I watch, minute-by-minute, the way the light interacts with the ice, snow and floating crystalline particulate, I am ever fascinated by the realization that what is purportedly “white” before me, is truly anything but. Explicit indigos, barely pale blues, vague, misty yellows, severe and subdued pinks, impossible violets and lavenders, farouche grays. These, and a million others, are the colors that pervade the sky and land here. Even if they are ever so softly imbuing the surface of the pale ice or snow, the color is present, and changing subtly throughout the day. Virtually everything in this landscape is a refracting surface, waiting to scatter and reflect light. Antarctica literally holds light within it. As coherent sunlight (white light) moves slowly throughout the environment here, it shimmers across and beneath the ice and snow, making everything luminous from the inside, and displaying colors that seem unimaginable.

Looking out again to the landscape as if for some clarity, I watch the deep interplay between light and crystal and find respite in its mysterious nature. Goethe reminds me, “…the highest is to understand that all fact is really theory. The blue of the sky reveals to us the basic law of color. Search nothing beyond the phenomena, they themselves are the theory.”

***

Titan 1, on the ice field next to Grunehogna

Day 15; February 6, 2009; Vesleskaervet, Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica
Average Daily Temperature: 18.14˚ F
Average Daily Wind Speed: 11.63 mph
Feels Like: 0.69˚ F

It was half an hour before lunch when I finally awoke. On my way to the dinning room to find some caffeine, my stomach clearly announcing it was ready for a meal, I ran into the helicopter pilots of Titan 1, Neall Ellis and his son and co-pilot, Kevin Ellis. Wishing me a good afternoon, they told me that we would be flying to Grunehogna in 30 minutes and to gather my things. With my first cup of coffee sloshing over the rim of my mug as I ran around getting all my gear and equipment together, I felt a rush of elation at the prospect of journeying into the field.

We were all a bit frenetic from the quick notice of our departure. Alfons was actually down at our mobile base and Thomas had rushed off on the skimobile to fetch him, but before long everyone arrived at the hanger at the north end of the base. Titan 1′s voice thundered loudly, its two sets of blades slicing the air at top speed in opposing directions, and we were quickly airborne. Flying over the base and around our nunatak, we then turned south and glided out toward the mountain range in the distance—the view which I photograph incessantly each and every day.

The Titan 1 aircraft is a Kamov Ka32, which was built in Russia and designed for extremely heavy lifting. It has two sets of counter-rotating propeller blades, and therefore requires no additional tail propeller, which reduces its body length yet provides a lift capacity of 11,000 pounds. The helicopter is specially equipped to fly in extreme cold conditions, and can carry up to fifteen passengers and a crew of three. Today, we were a total of nine.

The afternoon grew more beautiful with each moment. The air was noticeably warm, almost gentle, as there was no wind blowing at all, but the light was strong and captivating. As we passed by the other massive rock formations along the 15 minute flight to Grunehogna, the details below were spectacular—we were only flying about 500 feet off the ground. Clearly visible were the patterning the ice and snow makes from the winds. Each continuous wave spread out over the drifting snow to fit perfectly into the next. The sun demarcated the altitude of each crest with strong highlights, marking the frozen ground as if a natural drawing, like charcoal on white paper.

The mountains here are striking. Intensely hard rock jutting upward across the ice planes, makes me wonder at the history of this place. How did this all form? Vesleskarvet, the name of the nunatak upon which we are living, is at the north-eastern edge of the Ahlmannryggen (Ahlmann Ridge) of mountains. Ahlmann Ridge, 71°50′S 2°25′W, is a broad, mainly ice-covered ridge, about 70 miles long, and scattered with other nunataks, Grunehogna being one of them. The ridge rises between the Schytt and Jutulstraumen Glaciers and extends from Borg Massif northward to Fimbul Ice Shelf here in beautiful Queen Maud Land. I must speak with the Geologists here at the base to learn more about the age and formation of this area…

Reaching the edge of Grunehogna, one realizes the shear strength of the wind in Antarctica. Catabatic winds, as it is called here, blow out from the large and elevated ice sheets of Antarctica toward the sea. The buildup of high density cold air over the ice sheets combined with high elevation brings enormous gravitational energy, which propels the winds to incredible speed, sometimes surpassing even hurricane force. The catabatic winds carve a deep incurvation at the base of the nunataks as they blow around them. Like a moat, these wind scoops surround these majestic rock castles, leaving a frozen lake at the bottom in hues of the lightest blues and rippled like the surface of water. One has to look closely to see that it isn’t actually a moving body, but solid, because your mind doesn’t expect it to be as such.

The day flowed on. Thomas and 1stborn, along with the help of the rest of the group, dug intensely into the snow to find the buried snow accumulation flag, our day’s mission, which ITASC had placed there on their 2006 expedition. They had the exact GPS coordinates, but even with a twelve foot diameter hole which was in places 4 to 5 feet deep, we still could not find the flag. Suppositions were put forth: could it have blown free and away, could it have been so buried by a storm that it was much deeper than we could dig, could it have moved from its original location by the natural flow of the ice toward the sea? We may never know. In the end, we made a large hole, a full day’s effort, for seemingly nothing. Spirits were down, even as we made strong coffee over the camp stove to keep the energy going and have something warm to keep the cold at bay. When we received a radio call from the base saying that we could stay an extra hour in the field, we continued the search, but to no avail.

The flag might have eluded us, but the day did not. In spite of the disappointment of not fulfilling the journey’s purpose, a vastly different aspiration was perfected: to simply be here, and experience Antarctica in all of its wonder and magnificence. To have spent the day feeling in my bones the immense thickness of the ice below my feet, and the ancientness of the rock mountain towering above me—I was steeped in the essence of this place.

***

Light on the eastern horizon

Day 12; February 3, 2009; Vesleskaervet, Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica
Average Daily Temperature: 15.08˚ F
Average Daily Wind Speed: 12.30 mph
Feels Like: -3.37˚ F

Last night was the opening of ICEPAC, the Bienal del Fin del Mundo’s Antarctic venue. The whole base gathered down at the remote mobile base for music, video art, and dancing to celebrate this cultural center in Antarctica as an event and a place. We had spent the whole day preparing for the opening, and organizing various components of the exhibition. After dinner we all gathered in the media room for Alfons Hug’s lecture about the exhibition here in Antarctica as well as its other venues in Ushuaia, Argentina and Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Once the discussion that followed the talk had concluded, everyone jumped on skimobiles and made their way down to the black geodesic tent. I spent too much time gathering my equipment, missing the ride down, and so set about walking there on my own. The evening was soft, the wind gentle, and light was bending across the land, alluding to colors that would intensify as the night progressed. Standing there feeling the air, I could see the party commencing below, and began my short trek.

There is nothing like being alone in Antarctica. Spending even short durations of solitude out on the ice is to be confronted by the unyielding expanse of nature. One peers into the horizon as if it were a tether, but it is at once a doorway and a mirror.

I have spent most of my days here in Antarctica gazing out toward the horizon, and find it leads me to reflect deeply on the Earth’s spherical shape. As I look into the endlessness in front of me, whichever direction I look, I can see the slight curvature of our planet, and it conjures up the image of the little blue globe I have back at home. Often I would hold the globe in my hands and look at Antarctica, always having to turn the object up-side-down in order to find the hidden continent. When I think of this now, here, it occurs to me, in a very particular way, where I am on the planet. It is a bit hard to explain, but it feels like a rubber band going back and forth between imagining Antarctica before my arrival, and knowing Antarctica now that I’m actually here. It is that distinct resonance of “place” in one’s soul, and as I begin to fully acknowledge my remoteness, I am ever struck by the sensation of it.

Perception of “place” changes in every moment throughout the day here, as light dissolves the edge where the earth meets the sky into a seemingly singular locus. I can look south out my window toward the horizon three hundred times a day, and each time I am led to a new place. Experiential adaptability and an active presence is key to delineating terra firma from the intense luminosity that sometimes removes the ability to perceive three dimensional space. It is impossible to abandon the constant interaction that occurs with the land here. Antarctica calls you to be its witness, requires you to accept its moods and then shows you the world anew, if you allow it. To abjure nature’s profound force here is to somehow ignore truth, which would leave you quite defeated.

I arrived at ICEPAC in about 20 minutes, having taken my time to meander and watch the now lowering sun. Joining again my colleagues and friends, I felt a real kinship with these and all the people before us who have lived on this continent. Even in my short time here, I already feel this place has pierced my core, as I know it has done to all who have spent time here.

***

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.

The Sun shining through blowing ice crystals as our airplane landed at SANAE Station

Day 7; January 29, 2009; Vesleskaervet, Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica
Average Daily Temperature: 15.3˚ F
Average Daily Wind Speed: 22.82 mph
Feels Like: -18.97˚ F

Yesterday morning, I awoke to a wild wind and intense anticipation. After a quick shower, I put on the first layers of gear, looked over the rest of my bags, making sure all was accounted for. My phone rang, and Thomas said the flight was confirmed and he’d be over straight away. Just enough time for a quick coffee, checkout, and then off we went to fetch Alfons and head to the airport.

The flight departed from the Cape Town International Airport, and the television monitors listing departures did in fact say “Antarctica” and indicated we would be departing from Gate B1. Although procedures seemed predictable, we were far from being a normal flight. With hand-written tickets we were ushered by the staff of ALCI (Antarctic Logistics Centre International), a Russian operated organization, straight through passport control, quick security, and then off to our gate.

The Ilyushin 75-TD converted Russian cargo plane was remarkable. A projection screen hung at the front displaying our flight information, normal airline seats were bolted to the floor to create a cabin-like feel, but then all around were the signs that this was not a luxury aircraft, but a rugged work-horse meant for utility.

Exposed pipes and insulation, wires and cables, and the Russian text hand painted on various instruments all combined to make one feel that we were in some sort of a time capsule. In an effort to make the space feel more habitable, huge flags from many of the countries who do heavy research in Antarctica and are members of the Treaty, lined the walls, bringing bright color and and a sense of unity.

The flight to Antarctica, despite some of my fears of turbulence, was in fact smoother than my flight to Cape Town. And the crew and staff of ALCI were masters of making our journey more comfortable. Sandwiches, coffee, snacks, juices, fresh fruit and chocolates were served throughout the flight, the beautiful nature programs by David Attenborough were projected onto the screen. Best of all, we were allowed to go down and up to the two flight decks at the cockpit (the second lower deck had window views below the aircraft, so you could see directly downward).

Arriving 6 hours later at NOVO Base, I stepped off the airplane and put my feet onto the ice of Antarctica. Words do little to express the exhilaration I felt. After four years of hard work and pushing steadily uphill to get the project even this far, sometimes against severe obstacles, my heart soared with a sense of accomplishment and gratitude. This beautiful vast frozen landscape is indeed the one I’ve been dreaming about. I fell immediately in love with Antarctica—in a strange sense, it felt like home.

The rest of the afternoon and evening were spent base-hopping in order to reach our ultimate destination, SANAE Station. From NOVO we were flown in a smaller aircraft to Neumeyer, which took about two hours. The flight was intensely gorgeous, and became even more so the closer we got to the German Base, which is right off the coast. From the plane, I could see huge icebergs floating close to shore, some of them the size of lower Manhattan.

We also passed over the second largest glacier in the southern hemisphere, called Jutulstraumen, which feeds the Fimbul Ice Shelf (120 miles long and 60 miles wide). The landscape changes discernibly when you fly over a glacier, and the world below looks unlike anything I have ever seen in a photo. The vast ice field suddenly seems to push upwards, bulging slightly, and is marked with rhythmic striations, geometric cuts, shimmering patterning, and a sense of enormity (both in surface area and in depth) that matches the Grand Canyon, or even deep space.

The only natural reaction I could manage when I saw this glacier was to cry. Nothing had ever seemed so beautiful, so powerful, so rare. Completely taken over by the emotion of the moment, I could not help but feel again the sense of urgency I’ve had from the first moments of initiating this project all those moons ago. How can I bring this back—this deep connection, this incredible nature, this extraordinary continent? How can we protect this unparalleled place?

At Neumeyer, we had some time to explore the base while they unloaded crates and passengers and refueled the plane. There is a new structure being built at Neumeyer, because the old one, which sits far below the ice’s surface, is sinking farther into the glacier it rests within as the ice moves out toward the sea. Descending into the base, you can literally feel the weight of the ice around you, the solid mass providing insulation and protection from the cold and wind.

Just a short walk from the entrance to the base is an artwork by German artist, Lutz Fritsch. The piece, titled “Bibliothek im Eis” (Library in the Ice) is a wonderful and surprising work. While the library itself is functional, in the sense that it has books, and provides a space to read them, the installation is in fact far more than what you see initially. The piece is a tangible experience of solitude, time and isolation.

As we took to the air again, heading now to our ultimate destination, I could not help reflect on how humans have attempted to normalize our being here, in spite of the starkly inhospitable environs. Looking at all we must do in order to survive in Antarctica, the question lingers: should we be here at all?

Our arrival at SANAE was an initiation into the extreme weather that is possible here. Just as we began to approach the base, a massive wind storm blew in, and I could see the snow blowing quickly at about a foot off the ground, floating over the landscape like river water over rocks. The runway had been cleared that morning, awaiting our flight, but the wind had been coming from a different direction then. The pilot tried to land four times, and had to ascend each time at the last minute for fear that the strong winds blowing at the plane sideways would tip the wings as he attempted to touch the ground.

In the end, the pilot had to land without a runway, making his own in order to accommodate the fast changing winds. We touched ground, slid on the plane’s skis until finally coming to a halt. The warm light from the low sun shown through the whirling snow, and the world outside looked like thick luminosity.

The cold does indeed follow the wind, and descending from the plane, I found myself putting on the remainder of my gear. I could hardly see anything in front of me, except refracting light bouncing off the blowing, airborne ice crystals. With visibility closing in rapidly, and the base still a kilometer’s drive away, efforts were made to quickly load the sleds which were attached to skimobiles, and go. The wind was painfully biting as we raced up to the station to beat what would be white out conditions in mere minutes.

Entering the base, the warmth of the inside immediately won out over the cold, and as I took off the 40 or so pounds of gear I had on, I began to realize that the SANAE station was designed to bring comfort to an otherwise uninhabitable environment. Anchored to the top of a gorgeous rock mountain, with shear cliffs that fall into the snowy landscape 600 feet below, and look out across a pristine landscape of ice fields and mountains, the bulbous and colorful structure feels a bit like a space station. Lacking almost no amenity, it is indeed a welcome respite after a long journey, and the forbidding weather outside.

***

Today, I do not have words.
I must show you…

***

From left: Erika, George, Piet, Xolile, Alfie, Diago, and Thomas at Sets and Devices, where ITASC's mobile base structures were fabricated

Day 5; January 27, 2009; Cape Town, South Africa

We continue to happily endure the seemingly never ending process of preparations, and spent the day getting extra tripod plates, DV tapes, a wind jammer for the microphone, s-rings, distilled water for our backup-power fuel cell, emergency blankets, signaling mirrors, a sound card for Ntsikelelo, and other random pieces of the equipment puzzle.

Early in the day we stopped by Bobby De Beer’s warehouse where much of the ITASC’s mobile base was constructed, and met many of the people who built the three structures.

At the end of the day, worn out from all the to and fro, Thomas dropped me off at my hotel, and I took a long and much needed nap before the evening’s events.

We were to be interviewed at 8pm by Caitlin Ross who is a writer for the West Cape News Agency, and would be gathering at Alfons’ hotel for a drink and conversation.  We chatted with Caitlin for an hour or so about our expedition and projects. Near the end of the interview, as the clock stuck 9pm, we interrupted the meeting in order to call ALCI to hear the latest on our flight details and to see if we would be leaving tomorrow at 10pm as originally hoped.

To our surprise, they changed the flight schedule again, but this time not to delay it—we were told that the flight would leave the next morning for sure at 9:30am. The anticipation and excitement was palpable—finally, we would fly in!

After a quick bon voyage dinner of burgers and champagne with some friends of Thomas’ I went back to my hotel to pack everything up and rest before the newness of everything the morrow would bring.

***

The existence of Antarctica was first predicted by the ancient mathematician, astronomer and geographer, Ptolemy (1st century AD), who claimed that there must be a southern landmass to balance the North Pole.  He named it terra incognita, “unknown land,” and amazingly it would be approximately 1600 years before its existence would be confirmed. According to history, Antarctica was first officially sited by humans in 1820. Thus, the continent has been an invisible and mysterious place to us humans for the majority of our existence.  I find this a rather stunning truth.  We had, in fact, peered deep into the universe with telescopes long before we had ever seen the 7th continent on our Earth.

Antarctica is entirely extreme, being the coldest and windiest continent on our planet. It is also the driest climate, making Antarctica the largest desert on Earth. It is roughly 4.5 million square miles (14 million square kilometers) in size, which is about the size of the contiguous 48 United States plus about half of Mexico. There are no permanent residents on Antarctica, and even during the “busiest” of science research seasons, there are still only several thousand people on the continent at one time, and they are spread out across 16 research stations operated by various countries for scientific and educational purposes.

For the last four years, I have been reading and absorbing all I can find about Antarctica, and have, rather obsessively, explored this mysterious and remote continent through images, facts, stories and my imagination.  Yet, I am awed by the knowing that the true essence of Antarctica remains firmly and deeply unknown to me. Indeed, what could possibly prepare someone for a journey to the only naturally uninhabitable continent on Earth?

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