In A Pitch Dark Polar Haven

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…