Friday



IT'S 4:30 AM, and I'm hunched over a toilet bowl scrubbing until the porcelain shines. “House-mousing”, as it's called, is nobody's favourite task at the South Pole, but everyone is expected to contribute. Despite backsliding tendencies that increase with time, almost everyone does.

Back from cleaning, I see the New York Times has the results of the Iowa caucuses, already several days past. With limited phone and internet connections, the rest of the world tends to disappear at the Pole.

In many ways, being at the South Pole is a metaphor for the very enterprise of science itself—for the rapture that causes the scientist to drop all else, to stop eating, sleeping, and communicating in pursuit of some sort of truth.

Justin Vandenbroucke

End of the road

Even with that isolation though, finding solitude and quiet here can be hard. With the shared facilities and constant hum of heavy machinery and construction vehicles, it's difficult to imagine the South Pole as Scott and Amundsen would have known it.

Perhaps the only way to get even a glimpse of that Pole is to go out for a long walk. Luckily, I've made plans to get a tour of the Atmospheric Research Observatory (ARO), one of the main scientific facilities here a short distance from the station. I look up at the television monitors, which tell me that it's -24 °C outside, with a wind chill of -62 °C. Better get my gear.

Getting dressed to go outside here involves more layers than a James Joyce novel. First comes the polypropylene long underwear. Then perhaps a fleece and heavy-duty overalls, followed by another fleece. Boot liners and boots are next, followed by glove liners, wool mittens, a facemask, goggles, and a hat. On top of it all goes Big Red—the bright, standard-issue, USAP down coat. Each one has a nametag velcroed to the front, since, with only the tip of one's nose showing, it would otherwise be impossible to distinguish people.

I head outside and begin walking. Frost instantly adheres to my beard and eyelashes. I put my head down and continue. With a hat and a fur-lined hood pulled tightly over my ears, all noise fades out, except for the rhythm of my breath, the gusts of wind, and the sounds of shoes on snow. On their better days, Amundsen and Scott must have experienced a similar exhilaration while walking in the sun here.

ARO is one of five global observatories run by NOAA, America's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Its mission is to conduct long-term monitoring of Earth's atmosphere—of the trace gasses that contribute to global warming and of aerosols, ozone-destroying chemicals and other man-made pollutants.

Outside the blue building stands a tower with air inlets, which sample from air that has blown free from human interference for thousands of miles. The air is so clean here, my tour guide tells me, that they would notice a bit of exhaust from a diesel engine thirty miles away.

Measuring the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is one of ARO's main tasks, and it's been monitored here at the South Pole for longer than anywhere else. In 1957, Charles Keeling came down and filled several flasks with air. He brought them back home and measured their carbon dioxide concentrations, finding them to be around 315 parts per million.

Justin Vandenbroucke

The measure of man

The next year, Keeling began continuous measurements at Mauna Loa in Hawaii as well. In the entrance way of ARO hangs a poster with his data, which he used to show for the first time the seemingly inexorable human-induced rise of the greenhouse gas.

Further along on the tour, we come to a small room with four windows that open inward like hatches. On a table sits an instrument known as a Dobson interferometer, which technicians use to measure ozone.

Ozone is an atmospheric molecule that blocks harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun. In the 1970s, it was discovered that certain manmade chemicals were destroying ozone. Even though the Montreal Protocol came into effect in 1989, banning those chemicals, ARO technicians still measure the ozone hole that forms over Antarctica every winter: a reminder that it takes quite some time for nature to heal man's damage.

At the end of our tour, my guide hands me a small glass test tube to hold out the window into the breeze. I hand it back to her and she slaps on a label: “The Cleanest Air On Earth.”

Below that, a graph shows Keeling's curve and today's carbon dioxide concentration, measured right here at ARO. At 382 parts per million, it's quite a bit higher than it was in Keeling's day, and it's rising every day.

I think of that air blowing for tens of thousands of barren, uninhabited miles. Across icy oceans and sea ice, past only penguins, seals, and whales. Up mountains over which no human foot has ever tread, and over crevasses and frozen ice sheets. Thinking about it all reminds me that I'm just about ready to head out of here and back to civilization.

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Thursday

I STUMBLE out into the midnight sun and pull on my goggles to cut the glare. Still half-asleep, I walk twenty feet to the bathroom, desperately trying not to slip in my Birkenstock clogs (for the record, these are not officially recommended Antarctic footwear). A laminated sign greets me next to the sink: “When you're finished with your pee can, empty it and put it in food waste”.

Maybe I should explain. My South Pole living quarters are located in an area known as Summer Camp—overflow housing provided by green, Korean War-era tents known as Jamesways. Most occupants of the Jamesways prefer using cans to leaving their tents and braving the elements to relieve themselves in the middle of the night.

Michelangelo D'Agostino

All fun and games

After readying myself for the day, I begin the five-minute walk over to the new state-of-the-art station. I pass giant bulldozers flattening snow for roads, forklifts carrying cargo pallets and darting snowmobiles. I have to pause twice going up the two flights of stairs to catch my breath. Finally, I reach the six-inch thick stainless steel freezer door to the station. I'm not about to walk into a freezer, though: I'm coming out of one.

Inside, it's easy to appreciate what a marvel the new station is. It has a library and lounges with televisions and pool tables. Once I acclimatise, I promise myself that I'll take advantage of the full gym and exercise room.

Unfortunately, altitude isn't the only harsh feature of life down here. The South Pole is drier than the Sahara. Skin flakes and cracks; wounds don't heal; and static charges build up so easily that I get a shock whenever I touch a metal surface. When I'm in dire need of some humidity, I think I'll go to the station's hydroponic greenhouse to suck down some deliciously wet air.

The two previous, less luxurious incarnations of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station were slowly buried under snowdrifts as the years passed. To avoid the same fate, the new building rests on 32 steel columns, elevating it twelve feet above the surface of the ice. Its orientation and aerodynamic exterior accelerate the wind and channel it underneath the station. The resulting gusts scour the ice surface, depositing snow on the other side instead of letting it build up against the station itself.

Michelangelo D'Agostino

Humidity fix

The new station was designed with enough capacity to support what America's National Science Foundation expects will be an increasing array of activity at the Pole. At the moment, the main scientific fields here are astrophysics, seismology, and atmospheric science.

Astrophysicists have been coming to the Pole for decades to set up their experiments. For those trying to observe the remnant light that has been travelling through the universe since the Big Bang itself, the Pole is perhaps the best place on the planet. Over the last two years, the giant ten-metre diameter dish of the new South Pole Telescope (SPT) has become the centrepiece of the Polar skyline. Within a few years, the SPT should be providing key data that will help to pin down the nature of dark energy, the mysterious force that dominates the universe and speeds its expansion.

Several key properties make the Pole ideal for observing the microwave light of this “cosmic microwave background”. The South Pole's cold, dry, thin atmosphere emits few microwaves, which intrude on ground-level experimentation. In addition, the atmosphere here is extremely stable, minimising stray fluctuations that mask the intrinsic fluctuations scientists want to find.

Another group of astrophysicists (myself included) is here to study something else coming from the heavens. The IceCube experiment is building a giant detector out of the polar ice sheet itself in an attempt to collect extraterrestrial neutrinos—ghostly subatomic particles that interact only very weakly with normal matter.

Using a high-pressure jet of hot water, IceCube drillers melt a hole over 2.5 kilometres down into the ice sheet. Very sensitive light detectors are lowered into the hole, which is then allowed to refreeze. Eventually, the team will embed such sensors throughout a cubic kilometre volume of ice in their effort to detect high-energy neutrinos.

These neutrinos, we hope, will tell us about some of the most violent objects in the universe, like supermassive black holes and exploding stars. Coming to the farthest reaches of the Earth helps scientists explore the farthest reaches of the universe.

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Wednesday

A SLOW, bumpy ride on a contraption known as “Ivan the Terra Bus” brings a group of us from McMurdo to several LC-130 Hercules cargo planes parked on the sea-ice for our journey to the South Pole. The LC-130s are the real workhorses of the US Antarctic Programme. Outfitted with hydraulic skis so that they can land in soft snow, they bring supplies to the South Pole as well as the other, more remote field camps scattered over the continent.

Inside, we find our seats: red cargo netting attached to the sides of the plane. There are only about 30 of us today, but seasoned vets say that in the old days, when older planes flew less frequently, people packed in like sardines in rows of facing seats.

Michelangelo D'Agostino

Flying first class

After flying over the Transantarctic Mountains, a seemingly endless expanse of white spreads out beneath us. This is the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS), the world's largest. By itself, this sleeping giant contains enough water to raise global sea levels by 60 meters. Because of its size and remoteness, less is known about the EAIS than about Greenland's ice sheets or the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, both of which are rapidly warming and losing ice.

The EAIS, conversely, may actually be getting thicker as more snow falls in a wetter, warmer climate. Climatologists are actively working to determine the exact mass balance of Antarctica's ice sheets, an endeavor that has important ramifications for coastlines everywhere.

Three hours and a soft ski-landing later, we've arrived at the South Pole. We exit the plane to the right, away from the propellers, which must keep running so that they don't freeze. The reflection of the bright sun off the snow is almost blinding, and my eyes begin to water from the wind, which bites at any exposed patch of skin. After donning the ski goggles I was issued in Christchurch, I can see the gleaming new Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station a short distance away.

Michelangelo D'Agostino

Eyes of a scientist

Standing atop this ice sheet, words like “vast” or “immense” or “expansive” come readily to the tip of the tongue, but words cannot capture its immensity. And though it seems eternal and unchanging, the pole markers I see in the snow tell a different story.

A modest metal post sits next to a sign marking the location of the geographical South Pole, the exact point through which the Earth's axis of rotation passes. I look off to the right to see a series of older posts. The position of the geographical Pole is fixed, of course, but the ice sheet is actually flowing and sliding in a slow march to the sea, carrying the marker nine meters from the actual geographical Pole each year. Every January 1st, the station holds a ceremony to put a new marker at the true location.

And then there's the ceremonial, red-and-white striped pole with a mirrored ball on top. Surrounding it are the 12 flags of the original signers of the Antarctic Treaty, the document governing the continent. In 1958, after the successful completion of the International Geophysical Year, Dwight Eisenhower invited the other IGY nations to Washington to craft a treaty to ensure that “the vast uninhabited wastes of Antarctica shall be used only for peaceful purposes”.

Today, the 45 signatories to the resulting treaty have agreed to suspend territorial claims and disputes, to forego all military and mining activities here, to protect the Antarctic environment, and to preserve the continent as “a natural reserve, devoted to peace and to science”. As Richard Nixon reaffirmed in 1970, Antarctica remains “the only continent where science serves as the principal expression of national policy and interest”.

The Antarctic Treaty has been one of the most successful international agreements the world has known. To ensure its continued success, it provides for an inspection regime that would make Iran or North Korea blush. All parties have the right to inspect all stations and equipment at any time to ensure that the treaty is being adhered to. And the parties meet on a yearly basis to discuss plans and concerns, all decisions being reached by consensus.

Out-of-breath and quite dizzy, I decide to take a nap. While bedrock at the South Pole is pretty close to sea level, the ice sheet itself stretches to an altitude of 9,300 feet. Combined with the cold air and effects from the Earth's rotation, the altitude felt by the body is actually closer to 10,500 feet. This fluctuates from day to day with the weather and is listed along with the temperature and the wind chill on television monitors throughout the station. As I huff and puff off to sleep, I hope that maybe tomorrow will feel a bit lower.

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Tuesday

FOR veteran “Polies”, a stopover at McMurdo Station (pictured below) is like passing through Heathrow: an uncomfortable, often prolonged, but necessary evil. McMurdo, the logistical hub of American Antarctic operations, is on Ross Island, just off the coast of mainland Antarctica. A short drive around the island's corner are the distinctive lime-green buildings of Scott Base, home of New Zealand's Antarctic programme. Off in the distance, on the other side of the island, smoky plumes come off Mount Erebus, the southernmost active volcano in the world. Ross's volcanic heritage makes for dramatic scenery—hills of black rock butt up against the expansive white of the ice shelf. The peaks of the Transantarctic Mountains off in the distance mark the mainland.

I've often heard McMurdo compared to a Wild West mining town. With its swirling black dust, squat buildings, and work-hard, drink-hard attitude, it's easy to see why. Instead of cowboys and outlaws, though, it's full of over a thousand staff, technicians and, of course, scientists—lots of scientists. Or, to use the Antarctic sobriquet, “beakers”. The orange-haired Beaker, from Jim Henson's Muppets, was a disaster-prone lab assistant who communicated solely in high-pitched shrieks. Antarctic workers tend to look on scientists with a mixture of humour and disdain (the precise blend of the two varies widely, depending on the worker and, of course, the scientist).

Michelangelo D'Agostino

The wild south

Beakers come to McMurdo for a variety of reasons. For climatologists who are trying to study how Antarctica's ice sheets might respond to a warming world, the ice shelf here is a perfect place. From a platform of sea-ice, a team of researchers from Germany, Italy, New Zealand and the United States has been drilling down into the sea floor beneath the McMurdo Sound. They're retrieving a record of how the ice sheets have been behaving over the last tens of millions of years. The Antarctic Geological Drill (ANDRILL) team, as they're known, has just completed its second field-season here, retrieving an 1,100-metre core of rock and sediment.

By studying the core's rocks and fossils, the team has been learning about the past temperature and behaviour of Antarctica's massive ice sheets. When the ice sheets were thick and advancing, more pebbles, stones, and dirty sediment would have been carried into the core by the moving ice. During warm interglacial periods, when there may have been no sea-ice at all, an abundance of marine organisms would have left behind fossilised shells.

The advance and retreat of the ice sheets can thus be discerned quite accurately from such sediment cores. The team hopes that understanding how the ice sheets have responded to subtle increases in temperature in the past will provide important clues to what they'll do in the future.

McMurdo is also the staging ground for another group of scientists drilling into the continent to look into the planet's past. Several hours from the South Pole, in the barren expanses of western Antarctica, a small team of American researchers has just finished their second field-season with the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide Ice Core project.

Over the next five years, the team will use a long, hollow, rotating drill to cut and retrieve a cylinder of ice roughly 12 centimetres across. Such ice cores hold detailed information on the last 100,000 years of Antarctic weather.

This is because ice sheets don't form instantaneously. In any given year, some snow falls; over many years, accumulation traps the original snow underneath, along with a small amount of air and dust.

Weight and time crush this snow into a thin layer of ice. The bits of trapped air are now forever encapsulated inside tiny bubbles in the ice layer—they tell climatologists what gases were in the air when the snow fell.

Scientists think the WAIS Divide core should provide the most accurate record to date of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which will allow them to better ascertain the role of carbon dioxide in climate change. Furthermore, the high-quality dating of the WAIS Divide core will make it easy to correlate with cores from Greenland's ice sheet, allowing for a tighter coupling of records from the Artic and the Antarctic.

Trying to take all of this in, I walk out to Hut Point, the location of Scott's still-intact hut, hoping in vain to see a penguin or two. Disappointed, I head bank to my bunk to get some rest for tomorrow's journey to the South Pole.

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Monday

SOMEWHERE above the icy Southern Ocean, I start to fidget in my seat. Pulling out my earplugs and shouting to be heard above the roar of the jet engines, I ask a burly New York Air Guardsman if we've reached the fabled point-of-no-return, the point past which our cargo plane no longer has enough fuel to turn around and “boomerang” back to New Zealand.

These boomerangs occur when the notoriously fickle Antarctic weather gets too dicey to land at McMurdo Station, the American coastal base there. He hasn't heard anything about the weather yet, he shouts back, and doesn't know how far into the journey we've gone. I'm reminded anew just how much I hate flying.

Michelangelo D'Agostino

No boomerang here

My journey to the South Pole began several hours earlier at the headquarters of the US Antarctic Programme, a series of sprawling warehouses and buildings located next to the airport in Christchurch, which has long been the travellers' gateway to Antarctica. On his first southern journey in 1901, Robert Falcon Scott was blessed by the local bishop and regaled at a farewell banquet at the Warners Hotel.

Today, fresh from the plane, many a burned-out Antarctic traveller heads directly to Bailie's Bar at the same Warners Hotel for a pint or ten. Indeed, the Kiwis are so familiar with Antarctic travellers that a customs officer in Auckland took one look at my declaration form and gave me a broad smile: “So you're heading to the Ice.”

Bleary-eyed, we reported to the airport at 0600 to don our cold weather gear and to pack all our personal items into two bright orange duffel bags. Squinting on the tarmac in the hot summer sun, sweating and squirming in heavy boots, long underwear, fleeces, and overalls, it was hard to imagine that a mere five hour journey would bring me to the coldest, most inhospitable place on earth.

With winds that can exceed 300 kilometres per hour and average winter temperatures of -40 °C, Antarctica is the windiest, coldest, driest, and highest continent on Earth. At 14 million square kilometres, its landmass is bigger than the United States, though 98% of it is covered by a thick blanket of ice. This ice sheet comprises roughly 90% of the world's ice, locking up 70% of the planet's fresh water, and in some places is half a kilometre thick. Antarctica is also the emptiest continent. Just 4,000 people work there in the summer, and only 1,000 stay through the long, dark winter.

Michelangelo D'Agostino

The destination

Still, the journey has a convivial air. For many long-time Antarctic workers, this is a trip home, a familiar journey with familiar faces. To scientists who are studying Earth's climatic history, or to those who have come to take advantage of one of the myriad unique features of the Ice to do their research, this is a chance to collect valuable data.

I meet a geologist heading to the Dry Valleys, a protected area a short helicopter ride from McMurdo where long-term ecological research has been carried out for decades. I chat with a graduate student on his first trip down to the South Pole to make radio measurements of the southern auroras. My seatmate is a marine biologist studying how plankton, the base of the marine food chain, will survive in oceans becoming increasingly acidified due to the build-up of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Through a light sleep, I hear the husky voice of the Guardsman again. We've begun our descent to McMurdo. A few minutes and a slight bump later, the C-17 has touched down. Considering the runway we've landed on is made of hard snow packed down on top of sea-ice, our landing is surprisingly smooth.

Light floods the plane when the cargo bay opens. The excitement is palpable now as we begin to move towards the door. A colleague once called the moment he stepped off the plane in Antarctica for the first time the best moment of his life. I didn't quite believe him then. Now, though, stepping gingerly down the stairs and onto the ice, a blast of cold air hits my face, but it's the brilliant white of the ice-shelf extending in all directions, ending in snow-covered mountains, that takes my breath away.