The end of the road

Well, I am back in Christchurch, NZ, in the hotel SO (which, as all who have stayed here can attest, is like living in an ipod). I'm leaving for Sydney tomorrow, but have been here for three days, which was the perfect amount of time to rest and recuperate, and work on my return to the real world. My first day was really hard, but its getting easier and easier to be around so many people and so much stuff. Darkness, green, and the smells of nature and all the different colors and things around are all still novel and exciting. The humidity however, is not.

Antarctica was incredible. It is truly a part of my soul and changed my life in so many ways. I don't know when I'll get back there again, but I have experienced so much in my six months of work there (not to mention my week vacation there over a year ago) that I know I have had the experiences of a lifetime.

I am going on vacation for about two months. Since its not an ice adventure, I will be writing about it on my second blog (wow I am becoming quite the blogger these days) sarahstravelsandadventures.blogspot.com

January at McMurdo

Wow, its been a long time since I have posted. The holiday season went by very quickly. And now, my Antarctic adventure is almost over. I will be leaving the ice at the end of January (and be going on a very lonnnggg vacation).

I promise I will talk about holidays soon. But, I think I owe an entry on one of Antarctica's more common events...the presence of a skua.

These are the nastiest birds you ever could meet. Cross a seagull and a crow, give it more attitude, and a roach's ability to survive and you have a skua. They will eat anything, and have found quite a home at McMurdo. Over the years they have learned that the "silly red penguins (us in our big red coats)" who live in this "colony" are harmless, and so come and do what they want. We aren't allowed to bother them. So, they sit in the middle of the road.

Eat anything they can get their claws on

And are pretty much a menace. They will attack people for food. You learn not to carry open food outside on the galley trays because they recognize them. I have heard of nasty pranks of sticking pieces of meat in someone's coat hood so they will be dive bombed by skuas. And, on occasion, they will stalk you.

Of course, we all secretly love them because its a living thing in Antarctica and all of their antics are pretty funny when not directed at you.

A happy 2011 to all.

My Antarctic Anniversary

Me on Deception Island last December, looking at a nice up-close iceburg (that I later went swimming around)

A year ago today, I landed on Antarctica on Deception Island, up in the peninsula. A year ago today, my fascination/love/obsession with the ice began. What was supposed to be a fun vacation has turned into so much more- a true Antarctic adventure, that after all this time is still going strong.

Antarctic Thanksgiving

So I have survived my first Antarctic holiday. Working in food service, we had to work on the day. I thought I would really hate spending Thanksgiving at work but I actually really enjoyed the day itself. It was really fun to see everyone and just be in the middle of all the fun hustle and bustle and excitement.
Since it’s a holiday, the community gets an extra day off, so we celebrate it on Saturday so that people can have Saturday off and then their regular Sunday off. The prep for it was insane, but there were a lot of volunteers coming in to help all week which was really nice. Plus the entire kitchen staff worked on the day, so it was a little crowded, but very well staffed. We got to eat at 1:30, and then the community had seating’s available at 3, 5 and 7. They could stay for 1 and ½ hours, and then we had to turn over the whole house in a half hour for the next seating. The night workers also had a dinner at midnight.
The general consensus was that the food highlight of the day was the crab legs. They were so big that they hardly fit on the trays. My favorites were the chocolate covered strawberries and all the traditional turkey stuff.
I have to admit, this was my favorite day of work. It was really fun, and I think we all enjoyed the day as much as the community did. I’m looking forward to doing it all over again in a month for Christmas!

The internet is being weird today, but I will hopefully be able to add pictures to this post later!

The Pressure Ridges

Lots of interesting things going on in Antarctica these days. Primarily, I went to the pressure ridges, and saw seal babies!!!

The pressure ridges are where the sea ice, which is about 8 feet thick, meets the ross ice shelf which is 300 feet thick. They crush together and push the ice out of the water, and create these weird formations. Its basically plate tectonics, but with different kinds of ices. We got to go on a tour and walk through all of the pushed around ice.

I admit, Antarctica always feels like a different planet when you get far enough out of town, but walking through these was reallllly like being on a different planet.

It was amazing to see. McMurdo is to the right of and behind that hill on the right, to give you an idea of where the ridges are in relation to town.

I have also started to make field lunches as part of work. Basically, I make the bagged lunches that people take on flights and out on day trips when they go around the continent. Its a lot of fun actually, and I have become quite the sandwich professional.

One thing that was interesting in the galley was veterans day. We have a lot of military people around, I think I have talked before about how its a deployment here for them. On veterans day, a small table was set up very nice, with a bible, and a wine glass, and a candle, as well as normal table setting things. This was for the missing soldiers all over the world. I had never seen this done before, and it was interesting to kind of just look at that table all day and think about it. I wanted to take a picture of it but I wasn't sure it would be respectful. It was a good experience to see though.

I have been here over 3 months, which is unbelievable. Time really makes no sense anymore.

LDB, Arrival Heights, Ob. Tube, and Discovery Hut

I had a very busy day and a half off this week. On my day off, I went out to the long duration balloon facility, or LDB for short. It is about 6 miles from the base out on the ice, and from there you have a beautiful view of the whole island, and can see Erebus, the volcano, with smoke coming out of the top.

The facility is still starting up since its early on in the season, and scientists who are doing atmospheric research with balloons are starting to come. That night I went on a tour of Arrival Heights and the Cosray building, which are two scientific centers studying particles. The Cosray research has been going on since 1960, and is the longest running thing here.

The next morning, I went out to the Observation tube. Past Hut Point out on the sea ice, there was a tube put in that goes under the sea ice and has a little glass room at the bottom so you can crawl down and see what everything looks like under the ice. It’s really neat to see what the ice shelf looks like from the bottom- its covered in crystals. Plus, climbing down the tube gives you a really good visual of how thick the ice really is, about 15-20 feet.

Waiting to go down was really a morning at the Antarctic beach…the sun was shining, we were walking on the frozen ice waves, and we could hear the skuas in the background (which sound like seagulls).

We had to wait awhile to go down the tube, and got to meet a group of people heading to the pole. They were delayed here for a few days, and wanted to see as much as possible during their stay. I ended up giving them a tour of Discovery Hut, the hut at Hut Point, since I am a historical hut guide. This was my first tour, so it was very exciting. Actually, it was my first time inside this hut, so that was exciting as well. It is still full of stuff leftover from the explorers.

This was the first hut built in Antarctica, by Scott in 1901. Although it doesn’t have as many artifacts as Cape Evans, it holds many different pieces of history, as many different explorers used it over the years. It also holds a lot of seal blubber. The hut was primarily used for storage, meat butchering, and as a theater. It was fascinating to see, and really nice to realize how the hut that used to be the portal to the Antarctic (most explorers at least used this particular hut in one way or another) is just a stroll away from where the largest Antarctic community is now, and still serving as the gateway to the Antarctic, as most people come through here to get anywhere on the ice. All in all, another set of wonderful adventures in Antarctica.

The Disconnect with Reality

Today I stayed home from work with a cold. There’s not a whole lot you can do here while you are sick, besides watch TV and try and get better. I never watch TV here, except the occasional movie on one of the movie channels, but I ended up watching the news this morning, which was interesting. We have the armed forces television channel here, so I got to see the nightly news (morning here is last night in the states). It finally hit me how much of reality I have been missing. Like, for example, the Chilean mining crisis. Life here sometimes doesn’t feel that different then life in America, in a very small secluded community somewhere very cold with beautiful views, but we are so very far away from everything, and really don’t come into too much touch with reality (for example, me knowing nothing about this Chilean miner thing until today).

Watching the Armed Forces Network was interesting as well. All of the commercials are aimed at deployed forces. Some were about how to deal with the stress of being deployed. Lots were messages from people in the states to soldiers thanking them for their service. I admit you feel a little odd watching this stuff down here, because even though we are technically “deployed” (and get a newspaper called “Stars and Stripes” for deployed troops) its not like we are actually in similar situations to troops in Iraq or Afghanistan, or anywhere else. Antarctica is a truly unique place.

Things are pretty much the same around here. I went to a science lecture on climate change, which was really hard to grasp, but somehow the ozone hole is playing a small role in protecting Antarctica from suffering the disastrous effects that climate change is having in the Arctic- how’s that for ironic? And that the sea levels are rising not just because of melting ice but primarily because water takes up more space when its warmer. Pretty interesting stuff, overall. Its always nice to go to these science lectures and learn about what is going on in the scientific work on the base…or the work of the entire continent even. I found this lecture really neat because it talked primarily about the peninsula of Antarctica, which I visited on the cruise last December. It even cited scientific work done with ice cores that was done at Verdansky, a Ukrainian station where we got to stop at while on the cruise.

Lastly, the Skua are here. But they deserve their own blog post, once I can take some proper pictures of them.