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.

Southward Bound

Anyone would think we were expecting it to be a tad cold....

In six hours I will be on a plane en route to the great white continent that has dominated every waking hour of my life for the past six weeks. It only started to feel real when I was at the mall this morning and the wrapping paper girls asked Pip and I if we had any plans for Christmas. When our reply was a casual 'we're going to Antarctica this afternoon' I just felt the larvae of excitement hatch and start crawling up the back of my shoulder blades like a plague. I haven't been able to rid my face of a grin ever since.

Things were not looking quite so rosy on Friday morning when we went to get kitted out by Antarctic NZ. The fleece layers and ECWs (Extreme Cold Weather Gear) and mukluks were all awesome and it felt like we were kids again, playing dress ups at the Hillary exhibition at the museum. The thermals kind of threw me off though. 'Small' is the smallest size for ploypros, merinos and gloves and unfortunately my body and the set dimensions of the clothing provided could not reach a consensus. In short, the gear was way too big. If we had been kitted out on Thursday I would have been a bit calmer, but after an initial panic it was mum to the rescue, couriering down my sister's merino underwear on overnight delivery. Once that arrived I could relax enough to dress up and have a bit of fun waving to busses on the street outside and posing with the neighbours' bbq!

I do have a pair of AMAZING gloves though, gloves so magical that I feel hot springs in my chest just looking at them. Rainbow wool, they are fingerless gloves with a convertible mitten top and cosy fleece lining. Now you see the pinky, now you don't! They will go well with my pink patterned knitted hat. That hat is in for a treat. It already thinks it's been everywhere, having seen a German winter, the inside of a freezer bar, a polish summer and countless hikes in the Waitakeres, but Antarctica will be something else.

Our layering goes something like this: thermals, fleece pants, microfleece top, fleece top, overtrousers, insulating jacket, windproof jacket, ECW coat, sorel boots, mittens, hat, neck gaiter. That's about it. It's all very exciting and all very orange, but perhaps also a slight overkill when you consider that the forecast for Tuesday is something like +1 degrees. Then again, it's Antarctica. Posing is all part of it. We will look like real expeditioners as we use our Shewees and stand to pee in the igloo toilet round the back of the tents, faces enshrouded in fake fur hoods to dissipate the wind. It's official, Pip and Christel and I are now 'dudes', not that you could really tell the difference when we are all bundled up in our cold weather kit.

Anyway, the important thing is that we WILL be bundled up in our cold weather kits, flying on a C17 over the sea ice to Pegasus runway, catching a lift in a Hagglund back to Scott Base, going to survival school and drooling over skidoos. We are actually going! I'm sure I'll have countless tales to tell when we get back on the 30th, but until then, this is Hanne to the world, 'over and out'...

Canine Commemorations

3pm November 14 1911: Amundsen reaches the South Pole...

7pm November 13 2011: Hanne looks just as pleased as he did!

14 November 2011 was a very special day for Norway in terms of Antarctic history. Why? 3pm on 14/11/11 marked the 100 year anniversary of Roald Amundsen and his team reaching the first pole and being the very first people to set foot on that patch of world. Since then white spaces on the map have been slowly eroded and filled in. Try as she might to resist being mapped, waxing and waning with the seasons and the sea ice, Antarctica has been sketched, recorded, gridded, photographed, satellited, gpsd and had just about every other existing technical verb applied to its vast surface.

My flatmate Christel was very proud yesterday, waltzing around the city waving her Norwegian flag and whipping out her framed portrait of Amundsen and his men at every opportunity. The centenary happened to coincide with a reception at Canterbury Museum where the director of our programme, Dr Bryan Storey, was presenting a crampon to the museum collection. I don't think I've ever seen so many people so excited over a piece of footwear! We spent the evening touching the artifact, nibbling on delicacies and mixing and mingling with the who's who of Antartcticans here in Christchurch.

At this reception I got talking to Baden Norris, curator of the Lyttleton museum, long time Antarctic veteran and master storyteller. It's the last of his credentials that intrigued me the most and I can see myself following up with him again at a later date to be the loom for a few more yarns. He assured me towards the end that 'some of it, at least, was true'. I actually learnt quite a bit about dogs as well. We were chatting in front of the display with two stuffed huskies and a mannequin in Antarctic clothing and the mannequin is supposedly modeled on Baden himself. This came as something of a surprise to him, but he had raised one of the dogs from a pup and had worked with both. I imagine it must be rather odd to see animals you worked with taxidermied and put behind glass, but he just told me he thought he deserved a royalty for them. Indeed, they have very nice pelts so he did a good job raising the pup! He also enlightened me on the differences between Huskies and Malamuts, with true Huskies only coming from Greenland. The dogs he dealt with were bred there and in Christchurch, but they were the last of the pure breeds in this area of the world.

The dogs were a hot topic for me on Wednesday largely because of the events of the following evening. As a premature celebration of Amundsen's centenary the Antarctic Society arranged for the K9 dog sled team to come and do a demonstration. The dog food brand's slogan is 'feed your dog's inner wolf', so the team of racing 'Huskies' and Malamuts was a novel way to back up that message. Mark Roberts explained how he fed and trained the dogs and how he gave directions to them while we all gave the dogs a cuddle and received enthusiastic attention. Then we got a live demonstration, not on snow of course, but with a wheeled chariot attached to the lines instead. First of all three little kids hopped into the basket and went for a zoom round the carpark and then they asked if anyone else wanted a go. The 'YES!' was out of my mouth before I even had time to think about the appropriate response. Like an overripe apple, it tumbled to the ground and landed right at Mark's feet and he said 'ok then, hop in'. I actually thought my face might rip in two, my grin was that big. It was the weirdest feeling, halfway between being in a high speed passenger train and on a racing sidecar. Probably more like the sidecar, actually, but incredibly smooth. Coming down to Christchurch I never would've dreamed of trying out dog power, but it just goes to show that you never know what is around the corner. I won't be forgetting the 100th anniversary of Amundsen's milestone anytime soon, that's for sure!

Seafood Serengeti

Seafood in the Serengeti of Antarctica

We have a very interesting past few days with a series of lectures focussing on fishing in the Southern Ocean and the biological and political factors that are involved in such an activity. One term that will come up a lot is 'Antarctic Toothfish', marketed in the USA as 'Chilean Seabass'. Very little is known about this fish, which is a top predator in the Ross Sea region. The best estimates of scientists as to its longevity, spawning, reproductive age and growth rate have been fed into a fisheries model to estimate the biomass and set total allowable catch limits for CCAMLR member states who wish to harvest it. The fishing industry touts the Toothfish Fishery as the best managed fishery in the world and while it is true that allowable catches are more or less obeyed and they do have scientists hard at work trying to discover more about the creatures, at the moment they lack the information to know if their predictive models are anywhere near accurate and if the catch limits are appropriate.

New Zealand was the first to start fishing for Toothfish in 1996 and since then the floodgates have opened, with up to 21 vessels traveling to the fishing grounds in a season. We still send four boats down every season, which lasts from 1 December until the quota is full. It's a lucrative business, pumping around $30 million into our economy each year. We are also seen as leaders in fisheries management internationally and were the first country to introduce a Quota Management System. We generally use quite conservative estimates when setting quotas too, predicting how much could be harvested sustainably and then halving it to allow for a margin of error. The problem is that with the Toothfish we are still in the dark about many aspects of its life. The implications of overfishing a top predator like this are not known, and while the officials try to negotiate industry and environmental concerns when setting the quota each year, they tend to feel they have succeeded only once they have 'pissed everyone off'.

After all this debate on fish and fishing, it was interesting to hear from Dr Julia Jabour on Whaling. Most people seem to have no problem with fishing but absolutely draw the line at killing whales which is an interesting situation, particularly when the legislation in place in control both is very similar. Up until 1985 the International Whaling Commission did set quotas for minke whales, but the quota was temporarily set to zero until they had 'better science'. That moratorium has been in place ever since, despite increasing numbers of stock. The main argument against whaling? They are intelligent mammals. In fact the slide in this part of the presentation looked like it could have been lifted form a brochure on vegetarianism. 'The whales have done nothing wrong', 'whales have feelings too', 'whales are warm blooded', 'whales can communicate with each other'. All true. The strange thing is that most people who ardently argue that these attributes belong to whales see no contradiction in going to the supermarket and picking up a juicy processed steak or pork chop. The same argument could be applied: the pig is an intelligent mammal that did not do anything wrong and has feelings and can communicate. To be consistent surely you have to apply the same rules to both and either accept whaling or not eat any meat. Either that or accept that people are hypocritical and swayed by emotions, particularly when 'cute fuzzy' - or in this case 'massive and awe-inspiring' - animals are involved.

The problem is that whales count as cute, while fish do not. When it comes to fishing and whaling in the Southern Ocean contradictions abound. No one seems to be overly concerned that we are harvesting fish that we know very little about, including where they spawn or how long they live. Without this sort of data, the models that usually have a margin of error or +/- 20% are not particularly useful. People would not accept the harvesting of 30-50% of the biomass of whales. It is time they realised that ecosystems are connected, fish are important regardless of their aesthetic shortcomings and it is important to proceed with caution in order to keep things in a relatively balanced state.

Artists in Antarctica

'....One day I'm going to do that too'.

Today we had the painter Margaret Elliot come to talk to us about our personal experience projects. They are all about responding creatively to our time on the ice and can take the form of a painting, a story, poems, visual diary, collage, sculpture... the list is endless. It's refreshing to know that this course is not all about science or all about pure academics and I am quite excited about the sort of writing I might come up with during and after the trip.

We have already had a couple of artists who have been on the Artists in Antarctica scheme come and speak to us. I first heard about the scheme in 2005 at the Bell Gully writing festival at Victoria University, Wellington. A highly impressionable sixth former, I can still remember sitting in that lecture theatre looking at the images and thinking 'one day I'm going to do that too'. That particular scheme was a joint project with Creative New Zealand and these days you can no longer apply, the participants are shoulder tapped. That change in structure in 2008 gave me even more reason to apply for PCAS.

One of the other women on the course is a visual artist and she decided to take this route for slightly different reasons. For me it was a way to open myself up to a whole new world. She wanted to do that too but was worried about being beholden if she took part in such a scheme, having to say nice things and produce somewhat formulaic work that was all planned in a brief before the trip. She felt that it would be limiting to go as an invited artist because to say anything untoward would be to bite the hand that feeds, whereas you have much more freedom as an academic.

The idea of being in a bind also came up in Vicki Wilkinson-Baker's talk on Antarctica in the Media. She has been to the ice twice but also talked of feeling 'beholden' because she needed to be 'babysat' by well trained staff all the time for safety and could only do what Antarctica NZ wanted her to do and had planned out. They were very helpful with preparing stories such as the discovery of NZ butter in one of the early explorers' huts because of course those are the stories that help get funding for restoring the huts. The fact that the find was actually a year old and being kept secret until media could take part in the 'uncovering' didn't worry her too much because it was for a good cause, but the fact that it was practically impossible to ask probing questions about things that the officials did not want to discuss is still a niggle. It is very hard to investigate things down there because no one wants to make trouble or upset other bases and it's not like you can camp out in your own media van, being completely independent. Vicki did raise the prospect of one day having devoted 'Antarctic Correspondents' though, which would certainly be an exciting day!

For now, I'm just trying to suss out whether my famous crayola washable markers that accompany me everywhere are likely to survive in the deep southern freezer. I'll be sure to report back the results.