Terra Antarctica

Looking into the Emptiest Continent

William L. Fox

• Publisher: Trinity University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781595341006
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Conservation & Protection
• Index: Biological Sciences

How does the human mind transform space into place, or land into landscape? For more than three decades, William L. Fox has looked at empty landscapes and the role of the arts to investigate the way humans make sense of space. In Terra Antarctica, Fox continues this line of inquiry as he travels to the Antarctic, the "largest and most extreme desert on earth.” This contemporary travel narrative interweaves artistic, cartographic, and scientific images with anecdotes from the author's three-month journey in the Antarctic to create an absorbing and readable narrative of the remote continent. Through its images, history, and firsthand experiences—snowmobile trips through whiteouts and his icy solo hikes past the edge of the mapped world—Fox brings to life a place that few have seen and offers us a look into both the nature of landscape and ourselves.

1

THE MIRROR & THE EYE

IT IS SEVEN O’ CLOCK on an early November evening, and five of us have gathered by the snowmobiles parked out on the sea ice below McMurdo, the largest American station in the Antarctic. It’s already snowing, the temperature above zero degrees Fahrenheit for the first time in days, driven upward by moist air in a low pressure system rotating around from the south. After weeks of unrelenting Austral spring sunshine twenty-four hours a day, the streetlights have been turned on in town and it feels as if night has returned. The meteorology office has advised us to get back before midnight, when conditions are forecast to deteriorate into a whiteout, a condition in which the snow so perfectly disperses the dim light that it can be impossible to see your own feet, much less the person in front of you.

McMurdo is built on Ross Island, an ice-locked two-hundred-square-mile expanse of volcanic rock where both Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton based their attempts to reach the South Pole. Still visible to us through the light snow is Scott’s Discovery hut, which housed his first expedition a century ago in 1901–1904. The trip we’re making tonight, a traditional pilgrimage for the residents of McMurdo, is out to the Cape Evans hut, a much larger building fourteen miles to the north that Scott erected when he reached the Antarctic aboard the Terra Nova in 1910. It was the starting point for his second and fatal expedition, the race against the Norwegian Roald Amundsen to the South Pole the next year. As such, the hut is a mythical touchstone for everyone in the Antarctic.

Tonight we’re going out with Ted Dettmar, the head of the mountaineering crew responsible for safety in the field as well as the local history guru. Bearded, slow to speak but with much to say, and wrinkled two decades beyond his thirty-six years, Ted looks like the kind of teamster who last century drove draft animals on the family farm—precisely the job for which he was apprenticing when he accepted a job as a general assistant at McMurdo in 1994. “GAs,” as they’re called, do everything from chip ice from underneath buildings to sort bolts in barrels, all of the less than romantic but absolutely essential tasks on station. Ted is a climber who for five winters ran the Harvard Mountaineering Club hut on Mt. Washington, the site of the highest recorded winds in the world, and by his second season on the ice he had earned a place on the backup search-and-rescue team.

Now, several years later, he’s head of the Field Safety and Training Program, otherwise known as “F-Stop,” and he runs us through the basics of snow machine operations. The Alpine II models we’ll be riding are the workhorses of the ice fleet. Their top speed is only 45 mph, but they’re reliable and easy to fix in the field if something goes wrong. And it always does. It’s not that the machines are fragile—far from it—but that driving conditions on what is famously referred to as the “windiest, coldest, highest, and driest continent on Earth” are brutal on vehicles. By the time we get the survival bags loaded and prepare to pull out in single file onto the sea ice, it’s quarter of eight and the visibility is beginning to close down.

The Antarctic is the size of the United States and Canada combined, but each Austral winter the sea around it freezes, almost doubling the size of the continent, then thaws out during spring, a cycle that’s been called the largest seasonal event on the planet. This month the extent of the sea ice around McMurdo is greater than has ever been seen before, and it’s ten to twelve feet thick, substantial enough for the nearby ice runway to accept fully loaded military C-141 cargo jets with ease. An iceberg the size of Delaware, labeled B-15, is parked off the island seventy-five miles to our north, both slowing down the circulation of ocean currents and injecting tons of freshwater into McMurdo Sound daily. It’s the largest ever recorded of the five to ten thousand major icebergs that the Antarctic calves every year, and its presence means the ocean’s salinity is diluted, so it is freezing more easily and the usual currents and wave action aren’t breaking up the ice. Normally the frozen sea would be clearing out already, by the turn of the year making the American station the southernmost navigable port in the world.

The unusual thickness of the sea ice this year means we’re not worried about running into cracks along our route tonight. The only concern on our minds is the storm. Weather reports in the Antarctic come in three flavors, all considered to be “severe” by the McMurdo meteorologists. Condition Three, the most benign, is what we’re driving through: winds are less than 51 mph, wind chill is warmer than 75°F below zero, and visibility is a quarter mile or better. We are following flags—orange squares mounted on flexible bamboo poles—planted about a hundred feet apart, roughly ten to the quarter mile; as we leave fifteen are in sight. Under these conditions snowmobile travel is permitted as long as there are at least two in the party.

The next weather stage is Condition Two, which is defined as sustained winds of up to 66 mph, a wind chill between–75°F and–100°F, and visibility down to one hundred feet, or two flags. At this point snowmobile travel is not authorized. When wind chill drops bel–100°F and visibility shrinks to less than a hundred feet, it’s a Condition One lockdown. No one is allowed to leave the building they’re in, much less travel in a vehicle. Such frigid whiteouts are usually caused by the local storms here referred to as “Herbies” (hurricane plus blizzard). That’s the condition the weather office has said might develop sometime after midnight.

Ted rocks his machine to make sure its dual treads aren’t frozen to the ice, guns the engine, and gives us a thumbs-up. I fall into line, then Andrea Donellan drops in behind me. A geomorphologist from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, her multiyear project involves placing Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers out in the remote Marie Byrd Land hundreds of miles to the northeast from here. She’s attempting to measure the tectonic forces slowly driving apart the archipelago of islands that form the West Antarctic, where we are, from the East Antarctic, the high polar plateau to our south that sits behind the 1,370-mile-long Transantarctic Mountains. Normally during summertime along this route those mountains across the sound would be visible twenty-four hours a day, but tonight the entire world is shrouded in gray and white.

Following Andrea is Jeff Scaniello, a surveyor who works frequently out on the sea ice marking off the runways. Riding swing at the back, making sure we don’t drop anything or anyone, is Charles Ray, or “Chas” as everyone calls him. A retired navy man who once worked at F-Stop, he guides on Denali in Alaska during the northern summers and is one of those lean quiet guys you’d happily follow anywhere. This season he’s serving as Andrea’s field safety person as she travels around placing her instruments on the peaks of mountains sticking up through the ice cap, which ranges from four thousand feet deep to over two miles thick. These “nunataks” (an Arctic Inuit word adopted for the Antarctic) provide the only stable platforms for the GPS units, which can detect as little as a millimeter of change in their position a year.

I’m a novice at Antarctic travel, but all five of us have been on snowmobiles in storms before; we’re experienced enough to be wary but also enjoying the notion that we’re heading out into something more than your average bus trip to the historic hut. We bounce across the transition ice—the ice within a few yards of shore where tidal action has rucked it up into small pressure mounds, almost like frozen ocean waves—and are soon on the smoother sea ice road leading north out of town.

The storm has thickened a bit already as we pass unseen Hut Point with Scott’s modest bungalow. When Scott appeared on the scene leading the British National Antarctic Expedition in 1901–1904, he unloaded from the Discovery a prefabricated building modeled after an Australian outback homestead house, complete with deep verandas on all sides, a structure designed to shed heat instead of preserve it. It’s no surprise that the 370-square-foot structure was the coldest of the three historic huts on the island. The modifications specified by Scott—double layers of tongue-and-groove Douglas fir insulated with wool felt—apparently were insufficient. Even today when you’re inside the Discovery hut, with coal and seal blubber soot all over the walls and empty packing crates, and tattered woolen blankets hanging from the ceiling in an attempt to create smaller and more easily heated rooms, the hut is a miserable place.

We’re riding along the margins of McMurdo Sound, that seasonal adjunct of the Ross Ice Shelf separating the island from the continent. Whereas ice in the sound usually breaks up and blows out by January of every year, the shelf is another matter entirely. For all intents and purposes, it is a permanent feature of the continent, a floating sheet of glacial ice that covers 190,000 square miles, an area the size of France. Ross Island sits on a corner of its northern edge, the shelf being 400 miles wide here and extending behind us more than 600 miles toward the South Pole. The shelf is nearly 1,000 feet thick at the ice front, or sea edge, and up to 2,300 feet thick at its southern root. It is the largest single piece of ice in the world.

The forty-five-minute trip goes quickly. Once well out from shore we’re able to zip along at full speed, every couple of minutes turning around to check that the person behind us is still there and on course, a routine safety precaution. We sense rather than see the low profile of the Erebus Ice Tongue, a five-mile-long floating extension of a glacier that, when the sea ice clears out, calves icebergs into the sound. The dark volcanic Tent and Inaccessible Islands on our left side are equally invisible. Near the small islands we discover a dead Adélie penguin, stopping briefly to pay respects to the eighteen-inch-long bird and touch its feathers. This is probably the only time in my life I’ll be able to approach a penguin so closely, as all wildlife here is strictly protected by the environmental protocols of the Antarctic Treaty. None of us know how or why the young bird got here, many miles from any open water, but it’s not an uncommon sight this year. The slowing of the thaw caused by B-15 means the Adélies are having a hard time getting to open water and are slowly starving to death.

By the time we pull up in front of Scott’s Terra Nova hut at Cape Evans, the winds are climbing past 25 mph, lowering the wind chill to minus forty-five. Visibility has slipped to eight of the orange flags. We park the snowmobiles fifty yards offshore; small pressure ridges and cracks have been multiplying here during the spring, and the walk to the hut is noticeably rougher than on my first visit a week ago. The wind is beginning to mewl around the corners of the hut with an ominous pitch.

When I was first here it was a clear and still evening, the Austral spring sun low over the mountains across the sound. I walked up to the highest point on the cape, only a hundred feet in elevation above the building, and scanned the view. The several square acres of Cape Evans ordered itself around the foursquare presence of the wooden hut. Behind me rose the smooth slopes of Mt. Erebus, a gently rising mass that is the southernmost active volcano in the world. From its summit floated a white plume of ash and steam. Erebus looked like a day hike, a common error in the Antarctic, fostered by the hyperarid air so clear things appear closer than they really are. In reality its 12,447-foot summit is more than a dozen miles distant, and snow camouflages the fact that its sides are scored by deep couloirs and heavily crevassed glaciers. The illusion helps creates a scene both as peaceful and as desolate as you can imagine. It’s peaceful in part because, as in almost all of the Antarctic, there is little discernible noise apart from the wind and your heartbeat. It’s desolate because there is only a single major human artifact in the landscape, the hut. Colors fall into three categories: dark brown volcanic earth, blue sky and ice, white clouds and snow. Nothing grows here that is visible to the naked eye. Nothing moves except for you and your companions.

Tonight is anything but peaceful, and it’s with relief that we scrape off the snow on our boots and pass inside, leaving behind the wind and snow and concealing ourselves from a nature that seems to be measuring us. This is a primordial human response, personifying a storm as if it were a malevolent presence—a way of enfolding the impersonal nature of danger within a comprehensible emotion.

Scott’s Terra Nova hut is the largest, best-insulated, and best-preserved of all the Heroic Age structures, a sturdy refuge fifty by twenty-five feet in size that was designed to hold twenty-five men. Historians broadly define the age as lasting from 1895—when the International Geographical Congress met in London and set off a wave of government-sponsored national expeditions—until 1922, the year Shackleton was buried on South Georgia Island while sailing into his third Antarctic adventure. Fourteen expeditions from eight countries transpired during the period, their stories still the primary source for more novels, nonfiction books, poems, films, and ephemera than any other facet of the continent.

Scott had first set foot on the ice in 1902 with Shackleton and the artist Edward “Bill” Wilson (1872–1912), who was officially serving as the expedition doctor. They landed at what is now known as Winter Quarters Bay, the location of present-day McMurdo, and erected their little outback building that they had bought in Australia, immediately complaining how drafty it was. When Scott returned in 1911 to the Ross Sea, he found McMurdo Sound still frozen and the Discovery hut inaccessible. Turning north, he cruised up to Cape Evans, the first logical anchoring point free of ice, and set up the custom-designed hut he’d had built the year before in England. Relatively spacious and insulated with layers of quilted seaweed, it had a ceiling that rose to sixteen feet at its apex and sleeping quarters for the officers partitioned from those of the seamen.

Despite the insulation improved over that of the Discovery hut, hoar frost lines the ceiling and the windows seem to steal the light from our flashlights rather than augment it. The cry of the wind stops at the door, and we hear nothing save our muffled footsteps, Ted’s subdued commentary, and the occasional click of a camera. Studded boots hang motionless on the end of a bunk bed, cups dangle beneath a shelf in the kitchen area, and chemistry benches are landscaped with barren funnels and beakers. Tinned cocoa and mustard and bottles of ketchup sit on the shelves, reputedly still good to eat. I wouldn’t bet my life on it, however, and consider this an urban legend that has been grafted onto the main trunk of the heroic myth embodied by the building (Plate 1).

At the far end of the hut is Herbert Ponting’s darkroom, a six-by-eight-foot closet where he both slept and developed his seven-by-five-inch glass plates and movie films. Plates are stacked in boxes and fixing agents reside in their stoppered jars. Scott, understanding well the power of the photographic image for fundraising, had been keen to bring a professional with him. Ponting (1870–1935), who had worked previously in the mountains of Japan and the Swiss Alps, was equally ardent to join the expedition, although at times he found Antarctica a less than congenial place for his talents. Experienced in the telephotography necessary to magnify the mountain peaks in alpine scenery, for example—a convention left over from the nineteenth century’s infatuation with exaggerated landscapes in quest of sublime images—he found that the severe temperature discontinuities over the sound between Cape Evans and the Transantarctics almost always dissolved such attempts into a meaningless blur.

Turning to my left from the darkroom door, I take two steps to the table that stands where Wilson painstakingly composed his watercolors. Its wooden top is occupied by the intact carcass of an emperor penguin, left hurriedly by a later expedition that had been commissioned to bring back the skins for stuffing. I stand where Wilson painted Antarctic landscapes and atmospheric phenomena, the last time a painter would accompany an Antarctic expedition as the person responsible for recording the topography (Plate 2). Although Ponting had trouble photographing the mountains across the sound, Wilson had sketched them on the previous expedition in a series of panoramic views that, even when scaled down in lithographs, still totaled more than one hundred feet long. Scott said that he could match the drawings to his maps with astonishing accuracy. Wilson died with Scott on the way back from the Pole, sketching the mountains almost to the end, but from this expedition onward it would be Ponting’s successors, the ground and aerial photographers, who would do the job. And with that, a huge wedge would be driven between painters and scientists in the history of exploration.

The sleeping bags of the time, which are stretched out on the beds, were made of reindeer hides; they became so thoroughly frozen over the course of an expedition that men were reduced to inserting themselves one limb at a time to thaw them out and gain entrance. Looking at the tubular mass of hide, and having noted the pile of seal blubber that sits outside the door, we’re grateful that the temperatures remain as low as they do. The olfactory assault would otherwise be intense, and many of the artifacts would self-destruct within weeks. Visitors often remark that the huts look as if the explorers had just stepped outside for a moment, but the artifacts are in fact decaying, if slowly. The humidity of our breath encourages the rust that’s eating into the biscuit tins and the fungi that grow almost invisibly in the sleeping bags and hanging clothes.

While everyone else moves around taking their digital mementos, I pause at a mirror mounted on the wall outside Scott’s bunk. Perhaps eighteen by twenty-four inches, a little larger than my torso, it hangs where it appears in a famous photograph of Scott and his men seated around the big table on his forty-third, and last, birthday. The silver has deleafed from the back, leaving a clear pane of glass behind which there are swatches of crumpled foil. The mirror line, that juncture where silver meets glass and your reflection is created, has been obliterated by cold. Your image falls into the glass and never comes back out, so perfect a metaphor for Scott’s fate, and to some extent the Antarctic itself, that it’s almost unfair to point it out.

Instead of gaining the fame and fortune that he thought a successful race to the Pole would bring him, Scott not only lost by a month to the Norwegian, but perished of cold and starvation along with Wilson and four other men on the return pull. His journey quickly became a touchstone in a world hungry for heroism, but to some extent it was a false picture constructed on death. Had Scott lived, he would have been a footnote to Amundsen. The empty mirror embodies for me both the fact that Scott never returned and the essential hollowness of his achievement.

dp n="26" folio="10" ?

And the Antarctic itself? Historian and natural history writer Stephen Pyne posits in his book The Ice that it is the least complicated of all the continents in terms of information. It hosts little in the way of a biotic community and has never been permanently occupied by people. Its geography is overwhelmed by ice, and it is the most unfamiliar landscape on Earth, more akin to the surface of Mars or the moons of Jupiter than to London, Los Angeles, or Lahore. He calls Antarctica “an information sink,” a place where we expend far more energy and information than we receive in return, another mirror with no back.

By the time we get outside it’s ten o’clock and the wind has graduated from making animal sounds to those found inside a wind tunnel. We can’t even see the snowmobiles, less than two hundred feet away. I hope out loud that we will decide we have to hunker down, it now being a Condition Two, and suggest that we have an excuse to stay in the hut. Unfortunately, everyone else is sanguine about traveling in these worsening conditions, so off we go. Before leaving, however, Ted warns us that in a few minutes, as we round the point and come out of the lee of the Erebus Ice Tongue, the wind will become much worse.

We start out with three to four flags visible, our speed twenty-five miles per hour. It’s easy to tell when we pass the invisible promontory of glacial ice fifteen minutes later, because the wind redoubles its force. Now we can see at best two flags, and we’re in a marginal Condition One whiteout, following each other in a tight pack, eyes focused on the single red parka visible in front of us. My head is swathed in the thick coyote fur–trimmed hood of my parka, a bulky down-filled nylon garment that resembles a sleeping bag more than a jacket—and is meant to perform exactly that function in an emergency. My head is further covered by a pile hat, balaclava, neck gaiter, and neoprene face mask. Five snowmobiles chewing their way forward in a Herbie, the two-stroke engines straining against the wind, is not a quiet walk in the park—and yet I’m so muffled by the whiteout and government-issue extreme cold weather clothing that everything seems silent. Snowdrifts have formed across the track since we drove out an hour...