Time Will Tell

'I am just going outside and my be some time'
Captain Lawrence "Titus" Oates, March 1912

Just over 100 years ago Oates went outside, telling his companions he may be some time. Time has been a particularly relevant concept this summer, with the centenary celebrations of Amundsen and Scott’s journeys to the pole. We look back on these events as if they happened a lifetime ago, which for us it did. For Antarctica though, the age of exploration happened but a blink of the eye ago.

Antarctica herself is aging remarkably well and her clear complexion betrays nothing of her life history, stretching back to the breakup of Gondwanaland 25 million years ago. 23 million years ago the Drake passage opened up, isolating Antarctica from the rest of the world. Geologists throw terms like ‘million’ around as if they are regular units on a pair of kitchen scales but for most of us such huge time scales are hard to conceptualise. The contrast in scales present in Antarctica also boggles the mind. On the one hand there is the geological scale where 1.2 million either way makes little difference, versus the fleeting lifespan of a nematode on the other.

Not being a biologist, geologist or historian, I had not thought too much about defining time scales before my trip. One thing I did know was that I felt old before going. At 22 I felt like I was past my use by date. Having graduated with an Honours degree, I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do next and felt like time was running out for me to decide. The traditional story goes something like this: graduate, get a ‘real job’, settle down, get married, buy a house, start a family. In that order. Everything seemed so linear and planned out and inflexible and I hadn’t really seen anyone buck the trend and champion the cause of any alternatives.

Spending two weeks in Antarctica changed that. I met so many people who were not only the best in their fields but had also had so many other experiences volunteering for search and rescue, working in ambulances, going to music school. All of them were over 25 but they all looked so young. I could have sworn that one of the cooks from McMurdo was not a day older than 19, yet he swore he was 30. It was like a Peter-pan effect, which perhaps it was in a way. Those wintering at Scott Base were acutely aware of the time lost back home by committing to spending 12 months down South. It was like disappearing to neverland, where one day and one night equated to 365 in the real world. People had dared to do things differently though, and that was key.

Perhaps it is only fitting that my watch should have chosen to start ticking backwards whilst out on he ice. Coming home, I realise just how much still lies ahead of me. Sure, I’m smaller than a nematode in the bigger scheme of time, but so long as I stick to inhabiting a human timescale, all sorts of things are possible. I may take me some time to get on the right track, but right now the eyelids have barely started flickering for the next blink.

Happy Feet

Forget Happy Feet, with these guys it's 'intelligent legs'...

... invading an ocean near you soon!

When most people think of Antarctica and wildlife, Happy Feet starts playing in their heads. Despite the best efforts of Warner Brothers and the makers of the old Bluebird chips ads, the waddly birds still waddle and tap dancing is not a major pastime down on the ice. That’s OK because the wildlife we encountered on our trip had quite enough pep as it was…

Let’s begin with the skua. Skua look like giant Mollymawks and are actually the same size as Adelie penguins. At Crary labs, McMurdo they have two dead birds laid out side by side as proof. Now, the penguins don’t look all that big when they scoot your way on their bellies, but transform that animal into one with an intimidating wingspan, dive-bombing you from above and you’re in trouble. Or rather, I was. It is never a good idea to take a short cut near a pond called ‘Skua Lake’. We were warned in advance that they dive bomb the highest thing around, so holding an ice axe aloft is a good tactic. Unfortunately I had no ice axe, so waving my arms around like a devout tongues-speaker and ducking at strategic moments was the go. The closest I’ve come to the ducking and twisting maze back home was playing Kinect xbox games. Perhaps their next release could be Antarctic themed, because ‘Skua Attack’ would be sure to get people moving.

Compared to such exertion, plunging my arms into water chilled to a healthy -1.7 degrees was a breeze. No, this wasn’t ‘pat a krill’, but it may as well have been because the range of animals in the Crary labs touch tank was just bizarre. Ogly eyed fish, pink kina, road cone orange sea spiders…. The sea spiders were really neat because they had all of their vital organs in their legs. I imagine if they ever made a zombie movie it would be full of single limbs limping after their prey in a bloodthirsty chase. Luckily for us we managed to keep all of the limbs intact and took all of the critters back to Scott Base for release out on the sea ice. No comment on how long they survived after that, but it was a nice thought.

Another nice thought that I never thought I’d ever think was how intriguing nematodes really are. The ‘wormherders’ in the science labs at McMurdo were all too happy to show us around and explain how they search through samples of dirt for the microscopic critters all day. We were especially lucky because they had just filmed a nematode being chewed by a tardigrade and spent three days debating whether the tardigrade was a) eating the nematode b) kissing the nematode or c) just really really dumb and looking for algae in the wrong place. This mystery was never satisfactorily solved, but it did inspire some microbiological song lyrics. For those of you wishing to enlighten young minds come bedtime, the tune can be found here.

5 little nematodes
Chillin’ out on the road
Hiding from hungry tardigrades (OM NOM)
One of them, he got caught
His chances then were nought
Then there were 4 wee nematodes….

Antarctic biology is smaller, creepier and more dangerous than I ever imagined. After experiencing a small taste of Antarctica's weird and wonderful ecosystem, I actually wouldn't be surprised if the penguins broke into song and dance whenever people weren't watching.Who knows what they'll find when they film the birds over winter? Chip manufacturers, stay tuned...

Perfection

"Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it."
-Salvador Dali

Are you looking for ‘Perfection’? Do you need somewhere to recycle those old dreams and pick up something new to aim for? Then never fear, you have come to the right place. McMurdo station, Antarctica may look like a kid’s lego set forgotten in the playground dust, but there is more to the duplo settlement than meets the eye.

First, there are trucks, and lots of them. I’m not doing much to dispel the myth of the base as a three year old’s heaven, but when a ute casually trundles past on triangular caterpillar tracks it’s pretty cool. The vehicles are not only square and primary coloured, they also give new meaning to the term ‘monster truck’, with wheel heights able to be measured in Hanne-lengths. I’m not THAT short!

Just in case being vertically challenged should become all too much to deal with, the Chapel of the Snows was open for reflection. Being the southern most church in the world is a coup on its CV, but the most eye catching piece of the church’s architecture is the stained glass window. Made up of bold primary colours to blend in with the surroundings, the penguin, chalice, grapes and book are deliberately ambiguous. Being blank, the book could be any religious text, The wine and bread could be the Eucharist or just friends sharing food and drink. The emperor penguin is not only native to the continent but represents personal sacrifice, with the male penguins sometimes starving to death incubating the egg and waiting for the female to return with food. In a twist of semiotics, the onus is on the viewer to provide meaning for the image.

If religion just doesn’t do it for you or if the relationship between signifier and signified just does your brain in, any unfinished soul searching can always continue in the bar. Here it is possible to sit back with a Speights and watch the ice hockey on wall mounted screens while the gaze of a wooden stag’s head bores into the back of your neck. This is the ‘metaphysical pole’ where you can while away hours wondering whether you actually exist and, if not, what keeps happening to the beers you order.

Perhaps that’s what the crate marked ‘perfection’ was all about. If everyone spent their spare time soul searching then not much praying or drinking would get done and the available facilities would not be used to maximum capacity, which really would be a crying shame. It’s far easier to box up flawlessness and leave it in an obvious location, thus sparing everyone the work of the hunt.

So, there you have it. Those who tell you to stop looking for perfection because you will never find it are wrong: photographic evidence never lies. If the plane ride to McMurdo to find the box is a little out of your league, just buy some arctic lego, throw away the polar bear, bring it down to the right hemisphere and you’re away. With the aid of a permanent marker and some philosophical pondering over what it really signifies the little white brick will do nicely…

The Longest Day

"One o clock melts into two o clock melts into morning

In this never ending day where shadows wax and wane

And conjure up strange images

Of sleep

In the world of insomniacs."

Back in Christchurch with the shadow of the blinds painting me zebra, it’s hard to believe this is the same sun that stood watch over my entire Antarctica trip. It’s a good place to start a narrative though because although most of the trip was like an action movie on fastforward playing out in a giant freezer, the sun stayed lazy and took its time.

During the summer months it never gets dark in Antarctica so in some ways it is like walking right into a Dali painting, the kind where the sky hangs like treacle and melted clocks prevent the future from ever happening. Only in some ways though because even though the desert landscape fits and the shadows seem grotesque at 3am, the heat is missing. We got a fitting surrealist welcome when we arrived into Scott Base, with the five suns of a ‘sundog’ halo up above that could have come from a scientific manual.

Back home in NZ everyone knows that sun = summer = sunscreen, and it’s no different in Antarctica. No different except for the fact that there is no ‘no burn’ time and protection is essential even at 2am. It was a bizarre feeling to be reaching to the SPF100 well past midnight and even stranger having to remember to dab it up into your nostrils because of the strength of the reflected UV rays. It was equally bizarre to be digging a snow cave at 11pm, midnight, 1am and still have our pit lit up like a stage. We figured the whole sleep thing could wait and the hyperactive sun did nothing to dissuade us from that view.

One thing that no one reminds you to pack when you head down South is a pair of togs. Really they ought to be essential. The reflected light creates a far better sun bed than any white sand beach ever could and some days the sun feels warmer than back home. That may of course have something to do with the layers of black thermals soaking it up and causing us to pose as if we were in an advert for Speights as ‘Southern Women’, but we all came home with particularly attractive goggle tans and surprisingly brown hands.

Some members of our group took sunbathing more seriously than the casual strip down, with one lad digging a ditch across the main walkway outside his tent. He asked me if I was wondering what he was doing and I nodded, perplexed. Was it a polar bear trap? A trench to lie in and snap paparazzi photos of the tutors? In fact it turned out to be a sunbathing trench. Designed to maximize the natural light resource. Unfortunately the construction was voted to be too much of a Health and Safety hazard because not everyone was familiar was the old NZ adage ‘slip slop slap and wrap’.

In the words of Robert W. Service, ‘there are strange things done in the midnight sun’. This tepid 9am chink of morning knows more than it is letting on. More tales from The Ice will follow, but in the meantime don’t forget the sunscreen.