For all the hardship British explorer Robert Falcon Scott suffered to reach the South Pole, he wasn’t too happy to be there.
“My God, what an awful place,” Scott wrote in his journal when he reached the pole in January 1912.
Tom Tatley knows the feeling. As the
electrician at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, he’s responsible for keeping the lights on throughout the winter, a 6-month-long night with temperatures that can reach 100 below zero.
“You can allow yourself to have feelings of `What have I done? Where am I?’ ” Tatley said. “But you’ve got to work somewhere. I ran out of work at home, so I came here.”
Today, most people who go to Antarctica have more in common with Tatley than with Scott, who froze to death on his trip back from the pole.
For electricians, plumbers, bus drivers and bureaucrats, the world’s southernmost continent is not just an adventure, it’s a job. Almost every American there works 54 hours a week to support the main Antarctic activity-science.
So many experiments are running at the South Pole that the oil-powered generators there can’t meet the electricity demand during peak hours. To prevent brownouts, station manager John Parlin has banned clothes-washing between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. and has asked researchers to operate their most power-hungry experiments at night.
When such inconveniences arise, the people who work in Antarctica love to remind one another where they are. If a flight gets canceled, an experiment goes awry or the food tastes really bad, they recite an Antarctic mantra: “Hey, it’s a harsh continent.”
Actually, most of the time it isn’t all that harsh. Even the South Pole now has electronic mail, and McMurdo Station has satellite television, saunas and stair-climbing machines. About 10,000 tourists visit every year during the short Antarctic summer, most arriving-and lodging-on cruise ships.
The U.S. research program puts about 2,500 people on the continent each summer, and the research programs of about 25 other countries add another few thousand souls.
Antarctica’s boom started with the ozone hole, biologist Chris McKay contends. In the 1980s, scientists discovered a depletion of ozone-which protects Earth’s surface from damaging ultraviolet rays-above Antarctica.
“It’s all actually fairly recent,” said McKay, who has done research in Antarctica for nearly 15 years.
For example, a growing number of glaciologists and geologists study the ice sheets that cover 98 percent of Antarctica and the rocks underneath them. If the more unstable of the ice sheet’s two pieces melted, sea level would rise 20 feet or more worldwide. And if all the Antarctic ice melted-fortunately an unlikely proposition-sea level could rise 200 feet. That kind of sea-level rise easily would put Miami, Boston, New Orleans and Houston underwater.
“It’s necessary to really understand, not just talk globally, about such things,” said Hermann Engelhardt, a glaciologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
Perfect for astronomy, too
Astronomers have grown interested in the South Pole, which may be one of the best observatory sites on the planet. The pole’s extremely cold temperatures mean the air there holds very little water vapor, which absorbs and scatters the light of distant objects. And at the pole’s altitude of 9,515 feet, there is a thinner layer of air than at lower sites. As a bonus, the South Pole’s six-month nights offer continuous observing. The sun goes down in March, and it doesn’t rise again until September.
“We think this site is far and away the best ground-based site,” said Tony Stark, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., who operates the Antarctic Submillimeter Telescope and Remote Observatory.
As the South Pole develops into a world-class astronomy observatory, McMurdo Station is getting its own modern scientific facilities. Scientists used to have to dodge one another’s experiments as they walked through McMurdo’s biological labs, McKay said. Working there was like going to summer camp-it was primitive but friendly.
Now the cramped biology building has been demolished to make way for a laboratory that would blend in on any North American university campus. The Albert P. Crary Science and Engineering Center, a 46,000-square-foot building that was dedicated in November 1991, has modern analytical equipment, a card-key security system and an aquarium that is nearly complete.
“It’s not anywhere near as fun as it was,” complained McKay, a biologist at the NASA Ames Research Laboratory near San Francisco. “It’s taking me psychological adjustments to fit in.”
That’s no accident, said Erick Chiang, who manages polar operations for the National Science Foundation. The government agency, which spends about $200 million a year managing U.S. scientific research in Antarctica, is quietly replacing the rough-and-tumble frontier flavor of Antarctica with a more serious, scientific approach.
“The fights, the brawls, the heavy-duty drinking-I think a lot of that is gone,” Chiang said.
McMurdo Station, the main U.S. base in Antarctica, once boasted five bars. Today it has two bars and a coffeehouse.
And it isn’t just the nightlife that’s changing. The U.S. Navy, which traditionally has provided logistical support for the Antarctic program, wants a smaller role there now that the Cold War has ended. It used to build, maintain and operate U.S. Antarctic bases, but now the Navy wants to limit itself to flying the airplanes and helicopters that move people and cargo around the continent.
Changing face of the continent
The National Science Foundation has hired Antarctic Support Associates, a private contractor based in Englewood, Colo., to deliver some of the services the Navy once provided. Contractors cook the food, fix the snowmobiles and maintain the scientific equipment in Antarctica.
Antarctic Support Associates employees are a diverse lot. Some come for the experience, others for the pay. There isn’t much to spend money on in Antarctica besides beer, so it’s easy to save while working there.
“I haven’t paid rent in four years,” said Steve Dunbar, who heads the search and rescue team based at McMurdo Station.
Environmentalists hope Antarctic Support Associates can assist scientific research with fewer people than the Navy did because fewer people on the continent means less environmental impact.
“I personally think that McMurdo is way too big,” said Beth Marks, director of the Washington, D.C.-based Antarctic Project, an environmental group that has monitored conditions on the continent since 1981.
McMurdo’s summer population peaks at about 1,100. About 250 people stay through the winter season.
Marks argues that McMurdo could accomplish just as much with perhaps a third as many people. Nevertheless, she acknowledges that McMurdo is much cleaner than it used to be. Horror tales abound about the past state of the station’s environment.
“Frankly, I was embarrassed when I came here in the late ’70s,” said Cornelius Sullivan, who is now director of the National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs. At the time, garbage was dumped on the outskirts of town or burned in the open. Scientists said they were warned that a moment of inattention on a windy day could mean getting popped in the head by a sheet of flying plywood.
“It was a dump,” said Bill McIntosh, a geologist at New Mexico State University in Socorro.
Paradise, it isn’t
McMurdo isn’t exactly a garden spot today. The station is 3 square miles of cargo yards, metal buildings and storage tanks on the coast of a barren volcanic island. But there are no dumps or burning rubbish piles left in McMurdo, because everything the National Science Foundation brings to Antarctica eventually gets shipped back to the United States, where 75 percent of it is recycled. The average U.S. community recycles only about 17 percent of its waste.
“We don’t have the luxury of ignoring parts of our waste stream,” Chiang said.
The 1991 environmental agreement essentially preserves Antarctica as a world park, with no activity beyond strictly controlled tourism and scientific research. But it does allow for significant new developments, such as a new U.S. station at the South Pole.
In January, engineers swarmed over Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station bearing binders and blueprints, busily planning the construction of the new station. National Science Foundation managers have said the current one, completed in 1975, is approaching obsolescence.
“The condition of the station is continually degrading,” Chiang said. In 10 years, he estimates, the station will no longer be a safe place to live and work.
National Science Foundation engineers predict it will take nearly a decade to build the new station. The agency may present its $200 million construction plan to Congress this session, Chiang said.
Even today, the station can’t support the science experiments that operate at the South Pole. The station was built to house less than half its summer population, which peaked this January at 140.
In winter, the population of the South Pole drops to 27. The people who winter over-scientists and support staff-stay from one October to the next, getting a summer under their belts before being isolated from February to October. Contact with the outside world during that time consists of the Internet and a single airdrop of mail and supplies that comes in June.
A hostile environment
Even so, the South Pole isn’t such a bad place to live. The station is extremely cramped, but the galley serves three good meals a day, plus a midnight snack. Amundsen-Scott South Pole station also offers a library, a gym, a pool table, a souvenir shop and a collection of 1,500 videos.
Nevertheless, videos and South Pole T-shirts don’t make Antarctica a safe place. Most years, accidents kill at least one person on the continent.
In December 1993, Dunbar and three others rescued three Norwegians during an expedition to the South Pole.
The explorers had set out from the coast on snowmobiles, intending to recover the tent of Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian explorer who beat Scott to the South Pole by a month. Amundsen arrived at the pole on Dec. 14, 1911, and left the tent as proof of his accomplishment.
The Norwegians proposed to excavate the tent, which now is buried under about 30 feet of ice, and return it to Norway for display at the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer.
Things began going wrong just after Christmas, when the explorers started crossing crevasses, which are narrow cracks in the ice that usually are covered by fragile snow bridges. On the night of Dec. 28, 1993, Dunbar was notified that one of the Norwegians had fallen into a crevasse and been trapped there for 28 hours.
“This accident was mostly due to a lack of knowledge and preparation on the part of the Norwegians. They were totally unprepared to encounter crevasses and behaved foolishly when they did,” Dunbar concluded in a report on the rescue.
When the U.S. search party reached the Norwegians 15 hours later, they found that the man trapped in the crevasse had died, and another who had been injured in an earlier crevasse fall had suffered broken ribs and possibly a concussion.
Dunbar and his crew evacuated the three surviving members of the expedition. The fourth explorer’s body still lies 130 feet down the crevasse where he fell.
“This Norwegian expedition was just mind-boggling,” Rutford said.
It’s a harsh continent.
A LANGUAGE ALL THEIR OWN
Antarctica has no native inhabitants, so it has no official language.
But it does have an unofficial language. Americans in Antarctica have invented colorful terms to describe some of their more unusual experiences and observations. Some of those terms can’t be printed. Here are some that can:
Beaker: A scientist.
Beaker box: A rectangular blue building at South Pole station where scientists sleep.
Boomerang: Just because you’re flying on an airplane in Antarctica doesn’t mean you’re getting anywhere. Flights sometimes turn around and go right back where they came from because of weather or mechanical problems. Anyone on such a flight is said to have been boomeranged.
Cheech: The Antarctican’s Shangri-La. Almost everyone at McMurdo Station and Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station got to Antarctica by flying eight hours from Christchurch, New Zealand, a k a “Cheech.” The name derives from a common abbreviation for Christchurch: CHCH.
Herc: Getting just about anywhere in Antarctica means flying on a Herc, one of seven C-130 Hercules military transports owned by the U.S. Antarctic Program and flown by U.S. Navy pilots. Even though some of the planes are more than 30 years old, they have an excellent safety record.
The Ice Capades: The romantic intrigues of McMurdo Station.
Mac Town: McMurdo Station, the main U.S. base in Antarctica, is on Ross Island in the Ross Sea. About 1,100 people inhabit the station during the Antarctic summer, and 250 live there in the winter.
The McMurdo crud: A flu-cold combination that occasionally goes around McMurdo station. New strains typically arrive on flights from New Zealand and get passed around for a few weeks.
PSR: Stands for point of safe return. Up to this point, an airplane has enough fuel to get back where it came from. Afterward, it’s going wherever it’s going.
Roger that: Yes. Antarcticans frequently slip radio lingo into everyday speech.
Skua: To salvage something from the garbage. The word is also the name of a garbage-eating seabird common at McMurdo Station and other coastal bases.
