Gearing up, Taking off...

3 January, 2008

Before heading south, we took a trip to NSF headquarters to get suited for our ECW (Extreme Cold Weather) gear...packed in bright orange bags we now carry with us everywhere.

Of course, being so close I couldn't help but find my way to the beach before taking off for the frozen expanse in the morning. I found a beach in Sumner, a small town east of Christchurch on the eastern coast of the south island of New Zealand. Perfectly shaped waves and lots of body surfing.




4 January, 2008
5:45 a.m. we left the hotel to start the weigh-in, check-in, and boarding of the Air Force C17 that will fly us to the ice. And yes, we still had to x-ray scan our bags and were not allowed more than 3 oz. of liquids in our carry-on.


The flight from New Zealand to Antarctica was on a huge military C17, and the inside was like a jungle gym. A few normal plane seats in the middle, but then seats lined up along the sides that were like camping chairs and really uncomfortable after 6 hours. In the back half of the aircraft were giant pallets with bags and gear strapped in with cargo nets.
We got to go up in the cockpit and check it out, that was pretty cool. There was not much to see but white-out, and the plane was flying itself, but the pilots were pretty cool to talk to.

When we starting flying more South we could see the ice starting to form, first in floating pieces, called Pancake Ice. As we got further south the "pancakes" start to join to form ice sheets. Then as we reached the continent the mountain ranges covered in snow popped through the clouds. We had to take turns sticking our heads into a tiny portal, and then it took a few seconds for your eyes to adjust to the glaring white. The polarizing filter on my camera helped a ton to see features in the white.

When the pilot announced we were preparing to land, I felt something was wrong when after the sharp turn right and decent to the runway, we took a sharp pull up again and started circling. Then he announced there was a penguin on the runway, haha!! Really, no joke!! They had to call in the fire department to come and try to coerce it off the runway. But then they realized the only way to get it off was to have one guy walk off the boundary of the runway, and the penguin just followed him.


We finally landed and I took my first step off the plane, bright whiteness. It was like nothing I've ever seen. Perfectly flat white expanse until snow covered glacial mountain ranges sprung up in the far distance, including Mount Erebus, a degassing volcano billowing a constant stream of white smoke. It's actually one of three volcanoes on Earth (the other two are in Africa) that still has a standing lava lake. It frequently blows "lava bombs", solid basalt rocks the size of footballs, which can sometimes reach the size of a car.

After the white blindness, the first sense that hit me though was the smell. It smelled so crisp and fresh. The way I always remember winter to smell.

Then up ahead was a big long truck/bus hybrid ("IVAN" The Terra Bus) with giant tires that we all climbed into for our trip about 30 minutes from the landing site to the living site. We drove off the ice (which is the frozen sound of the Ross Sea), and onto a continental land mass where McMurdo station is...that's where we live, eat, play, do lab work. It's pretty plush living for the South Pole, pretty much like dorm life. The night when we arrived, I got a great dinner in the Galley, did a yoga class in the chapel, then rock climbed in the indoor bouldering wall :)

Another humbling experience is realizing that in the past fews days I've traveled half-way around the world, then to the bottom. It's going to take quite a few trees to offset this carbon footprint...