Season number three on the ice (localspeak for Antarctica) just started. Feels similar to the first two only more familiar. Taking this place for granted is too easy sometimes. There are so many distractions from the essential fact that we here are living and working on the most remote continent on Earth. I was having coffee with my friend Karen this morning and she mentioned what it felt like to be at the shore last season, water lapping up on black volcanic sand. She and two other friends just kneeled, facing north towards New Zealand, a few thousand miles away, the closest land. They were on the very margin of the world. Where no human has ever, or will ever, be able to sustain life without outside resources. A place so harsh that even in the best of conditions few animals visible to the human eye can exist. A few birds, some seals, not much else.
Here is an example of some of the coolest birds there are, the Adelie Penguin(s).
There is a wild energy at McMurdo now because the powers that be overbooked the season here beyond the capacity of the station and the logistical support. There are Australians sleeping on childrens cots in the gym, and South Pole people crammed five to a room where only four should be.
Luckily parts of my job involve going out of town into the landscape, which is the primary reason I come here. While driving on six feet of sea ice, beneath which is a thousand feet of twenty-eight degree ocean water, arcing around grounded icebergs and birthing seals, my own troubles seem trite. The cycles of ocean, land, and sky are harsh and predicitible. Today the wind bit with a cold force yet the sky was clear and I could see eighty miles to the north.
Karen driving our Hagglund around a trapped ice berg, which is larger than most city blocks. Keep in mind that the sixty feet showing above ice is one ninth the total height. That makes it 540 feet deep.
Here is my group posed in front of another iceberg on a sea ice course my second day at work.
Karen, Julian and I made it out to Cape Royds to check out the sea ice route conditions. This is as far north as I get on our island. The background is frozen ocean, which extends for a few hundred miles north and gradually melts out on its circumpolar course. Beyond the horizon is New Zealand, the direction from which the early explorers came from.
Karen was right that this place is about adventure. There is no other continent that is uninhabitable. We are visitors and like another friend said to me once as we were looking out at a similar vantage..."we're lucky, aren't we." He couldn't have been more right.