
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.









