Parhelion Pemmican Pack-Ice Pancake

Many things about Antarctica feel otherworldly, and the picture above is no exception. The orange glow is the light from town, and the thin bright line on the horizon is the Pegasus Ice Runway, which has been lit going on a week now in preparation for tomorrow’s C-17 flight from Christchurch. Not sure why the runway had to be lit for a week straight, and it was sort of perfect when someone ran out of the dorm lounge last night to start the runway generator back up after someone else saw the lights suddenly go out. I’m sure they had their reasons for leaving the lights on for a week, and as long as everything is working–great. But this reminds me of a couple quotes about the ice: “There is the right way, the wrong way, and the Antarctic way,” and “measure it with a micrometer, mark it with a crayon, cut it with a chainsaw.” Anyhow, when the plane takes off it will be the last flight out for four months and I’ll be on it.

It was cookie day today. I’ve been in McMurdo for three cookie days, as good a measurement of time as any here. “The end of the free food,” some people are joking. Amidst cleaning and packing our offices and dorm rooms, we did manage to climb Ob Hill for the sunset, a dark orange strip behind the mountains. The sun rose around 10:30 a.m. today and set around 3 p.m., although we never saw it as it barely scratched the horizon. The thought occured to me that I have been experiencing the seasonal change to winter for going on five months. My days have been getting progressively shorter, darker, and colder since New York started to cool down in late October. If you live in the northern U.S. and winter-over at McMurdo, you are basically trading winters–Antarctica’s dark winter months are the U.S.’s summer months. Can you imagine spending six months of winter here, only to fly home to winter in the states?

I just took my name tag off the Crary Lab office door. This will be my last post. Thanks to all of you who have read this blog and viewed the smidgen of material I was able to upload over the past two months. If not for limitations in communications and time, I wish I could have done more. Your comments and emails always kept things in perspective for me, and reminded me how fortunate I was to spend time in–as a friend told me–one of Earth’s great moments. The Dry Valleys region is magnificent–a terrestrial theater of the prehistoric, the alien, and the dead. Like a beautiful language, this landscape communicates how far into the past and into the future our planet continues without us. At a time when the conversation around the world is centered on how we affect the Earth, and how in turn, it will affect us, seeing the world from a vantage point where humans never lived–where indeed, nothing large enough for us to see ever lived– gives a profound sense of perspective on the human situation and the value of life.

Next season out at Bonney, John Priscu will help NASA drop a new unmanned submersible into the lake as a test before putting it on a flight across the solar system and dropping it in the liquid ocean of Jupiter’s moon Europa. The project is called Endurance, and will be underway this fall. It is part of NASA’s interesting astrobiology program for finding life in the universe, which could have traits similar to the extreme life living in the Dry Valleys. But where I am from, on Earth, it is Spring. And at this point all I want to do is see my wife, watch our dog run around, and enjoy the simple sensual overload of living things in bloom.

Here are two quick videos showing how we entertain ourselves at thirty below. Obviously when it comes to fun in the cold this is only the tip of the iceberg. At some point you’ve heard of someone in a cold place throwing a bucket of water out of a second story window and hearing it shatter when it hits the ground as ice. The video above was taken out in front of the Lake Hoare Camp hut. When you throw hot water into the cold air it changes state instantly, to either ice or vapor–the ice falls to the ground in little crystals and the vapor floats away–looking a lot like fireworks. On my homepage is a running slideshow of us doing this at Fryxell during a sunrise.

This video was taken in the Wright Valley when Cliff, Matt and I were taking a break from hiking. Being a couple days into our weekend, Matt surprised us both by offering us a slice of pizza from inside his jacket. Even though his body heat couldn’t warm the pizza past the hardness of a rock, it was still nice to have something besides dehydrated food or chocolate bars to eat. Later in the weekend we experienced the coldest temperatures of the season, and the water we threw into the air from the hut at Bull Pass didn’t hit the ground, it all vaporized.

McMurdo is quickly losing light. In less than two weeks the continent will be dark. Just before returning to town, the last few limno runs out in the valley had to be completed in the dark, a new experience for everyone. Taken during this last limno run at Lake Hoare, the video above is inherently confusing, but I wanted to at least show the controlled chaos of their work and the strange working conditions, in a pitch dark polar haven where, for the first few hours, the only illumination came from a few headlamps. The work is a repeat of the same procedure I taped in the the first Fryxell limno run video–they send a bottle down through a hole in the lake ice to various depths, and retrieve the bottle using a creaky but reliable hand-powered winch. After the bottle comes back up they drain the water from the bottle, which contains the microorganisms they are studying, into nalgenes and little glass bottles labeled according to how they will process or test each samplein the labs.

Later that afternoon I was flipping through photos I had taken, thinking how creepy everything looked with this lighting. Amy was looking over my shoulder when I arrived at the picture above, and we both sort of exclaimed, “Whooaaa, who is that guy??,” at the uneasy image of a old man peering through the polar haven door window. Rae thought he looked like Walt Whitman. Subsequent viewers have suggested the old Antarctica explorer Taylor, for who the valley is named, or Fryxell, the scientist, or Sigmund Freud, or just a bearded Englishman. Whoever “he” or it was, we were thinking about a ghost at Lake Hoare.

The following night Jessy from the BFC was in camp to help close it down the next day. We were telling ghost stories over dinner and we showed her the picture. She related a few scary ghost stories from McMurdo’s recent past before going to bed, while the rest of us hung out in the hut. An hour later she came back in, demanding that we confess to messing with her outside her tent. “What are you talking about?” we asked. She had heard footsteps in the dirt around her tent, and even asked out loud who it was while buried in her sleeping bag. Seeing as how it was April Fools, we were actually upset that we had not thought to scare her in her tent.

The air was perfectly still, and although sound carries in weird ways out there, sometimes echoing off the valley wall or the glacier, none of us went outside that night. It was thirty degrees below zero, and the rest of us planned to sleep inside. To get out of her bag and many layers to come back inside to find out which of us was out there was a big deal when its thirty below. She also said she heard water pouring, like from a Nalgene bottle. We can at least feel good that if the ghost was up and about, at least it obeys the Antarctic Treaty and was presumably using a pee bottle! That night even Jessy slept inside…

Yesterday I flew back to McMurdo for the first time in six weeks. “Town” looked a little different–the light was low, slanting and orange. The air felt colder. Hardly anyone was around. The population of town is around two hundred, most of whom will stay through the winter. In some ways it was just the same–snow and dirt being blown around in the wind, buildings and machines operating noisily, conversations about the weekend’s upcoming activities and parties. Wednesday is cookie day in the galley and everyone was talking about it. Across the Sound and above the nearly permanent “marine layer” of clouds, the Royal Society Range was illuminated golden or rose.

I had a hard time sleeping last night, despite feeling totally exhausted and going to bed around 8:30. Using a real shower, a flush toilet, and sleeping in a bed felt new and different, but it surely will not take long to readjust. My office in the Crary Lab-the main research lab in McMurdo–will also be my default studio space for the time being. I’ll be making some preliminary paintings in the remaining two weeks, or until I run out of the small store of supplies I brought to the ice.

Emotionally the transition is a litte more strange. While in the field, working, eating, and sleeping by six or so people on any given day, I often longed for personal space. In the valley where you knew you were only six of twelve people for at least a hundred miles, the mental space from one building to the next, or one tent to the next, felt much closer. Now that we’ve re-entered a larger community, I found myself feeling a little lonely, even if seperated from the others by just a wall or building, as our daily tasks and habits are rearranged without each other.

To respond to a request for a little more about helicopters down here, I pieced together two videos to show a fairly typical flight and a more scenic flight. Helos move everything to the Dry Valleys. People, food, gear, supplies, the camp buildings themselves–to and from McMurdo almost every day weather permitting. When I return to New York I plan to only get around by foot or helicopter. The video above describes something that happens frequently–a typical flight from Lake Hoare Camp to Lake Fryxell Camp, over the same route we hiked in the Canada Glacier walk video. The video below is composed of clips from a half-day flight Cliff, John Priscu and I were on the other day expressly for photography. The footage is from the last few minutes of the flight, where we entered Taylor Valley via the icefall above Canada Glacier. This icefall is visible in the first video.

In two days we head back to town (McMurdo), and the camps in Taylor Valley will be closed for the season. I’ll have much better communications from McMurdo and plan to post often from there. At Lake Hoare Camp the limno team just finished their last run this morning in nearly total darkness, and each of the last few nights has been clear of clouds, the sky brightly lit by a half moon, the Milky Way, and a faint but very much alive aurora australis.