Category:

The Beauty of Water

Being on an American expedition in Antarctica often means spending time at McMurdo Station, the largest scientific outpost on the continent. Mactown, as the locals call it, sits on an active volcano, while its airstrip lies atop a shelf of ice that borders the base. Known as the Ross Ice Shelf, it is as large as the Mediterranean Sea and is nestled between mountain ranges on one side and smoking volcanoes on the other. The rocks around McMurdo are dark basalts, cooled magma bombs that were ejected from the volcanoes in years past. The location of the airstrip has had to creep farther from the station in recent years as climate warming thins the ice below it.

Since the ratification of the Antarctic Treaty in 1959, seventy scientific bases have been constructed in Antarctica by twenty-nine different countries. The total population of the continent never exceeds 4,000 people. McMurdo is one of three bases run by the U.S. Antarctic Program. It houses over 1,000 people in the height of summer and about 300 in winter. The South Pole Station is 900 miles away and sits at an altitude of 10,000 feet. A big summer event for scientists and staff at the pole has been the Round the World Run—nerd humor for a kilometer-long costumed jog or ride around the globe done in subzero temperatures. Each country's base becomes its own world with a distinctive culture. The food options on French and Italian bases—from pâté to risotto—are as different from McMurdo's meatloaf, pizza, and nachos as are the field gear and extreme-weather clothing donned by researchers. American researchers in Big Red look like five-year-olds on their first sledding trip when compared to the New Zealanders in their slick black-and-green parkas.

McMurdo is the port of entry for most expeditions on the ice, and it feels like a waystation similar to the fictional Mos Eisley spaceport in Star Wars or Rick's Café from Casablanca. The entire population is temporary: those in transit to field sites, such as me and my team, interact with people who are on base for six months or more and maintain and support its operations. Many people are waiting for flights into the field, others for flights home. Each year, several expeditions get stuck on the base for months, or never get into the field because of equipment failures or weather changes. Some arrive at McMurdo only to find their entire scientific project scuttled because a part for an experiment didn't arrive or the weather where they want to work is too forbidding.

Ice was my silent partner on base—I saw it from the panoramic windows of the science library. I'd trained in the base's hangars to camp and live on the ice, but I wasn't allowed to actually be on it until all our gear was checked and we were certified to go into the deep field. I spent weeks walking around McMurdo with a clipboard, taking notes on topics ranging from snowmobile maintenance to environmental safety, while I also checked and rechecked field lists of equipment, food, and supplies.

Bad weather had backed up flights into the field, and the population of McMurdo swelled to the point where finding a seat in the cafeteria at dinner became a minor expedition itself. One evening I found an empty spot at a table with a mix of glaciologists and ice drillers engaged in an animated conversation. One of the scientists was ruminating on how the delayed work on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet was going to reshuffle their plans. His easy demeanor was as captivating as his knowledge of glaciers, so I hung around to chat after we finished our meal.

Sridhar Anandakrishnan trained as an electrical engineer in college in preparation for a career designing equipment for scientific research. He settled at the University of Wisconsin to pursue his engineering degree, but lacking any financial support, he was stuck looking for a job to get him through the summer months. A roommate scanning the newspaper had found an ad for work in the geology department designing and building a portable seismometer to measure movements of the ground's surface in remote field locations. Lacking any other opportunities, Sridhar took the summer gig. After he built the gadget, the lab's leader came to him with a proposition: Could he join his team for an expedition on the ice in Antarctica? The group wanted to use Sridhar's seismometer, but because he knew the details of its construction intimately, he was the only one who could repair it if something went wrong.

Sridhar describes the moment he stepped foot on Antarctica as "the end of the story." He was hooked on polar research and was set on a new path in life. Shifting fields, from engineering to ice, Sridhar needed to take a crash course in geology. But it all paid off when he found himself going into the field and learning about the ice firsthand. Working on the ice was an intellectual and visceral thrill for Sridhar. He gleams as he says, "Where else can you learn about our world while living in a camp eight hundred miles from the nearest humans?"

By the time I met him at dinner, Sridhar had become a professor at Penn State University and had worked for more than thirty seasons on glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland. He specializes in using high technology to probe into the ice and explore its interaction with the ocean waters and bedrock below. As I got to know him, I became more comfortable asking naïve questions. Seeing my ignorance about the complexity of glacial ice, Sridhar smiled and casually observed that I needed to understand that "ice is hot."