From the Antarctic: Ten days on the ice

By SIMON COLLINS, Science Reporter

The first culture shock hit us even before we got on the US Air Force Starlifter that was to take us to Antarctica, when we noticed how many of our fellow passengers were in uniform.

Despite the nuclear ship ban which drove the US Coast Guard's Antarctic-bound icebreakers from Lyttelton to Hobart 16 years ago, American and New Zealand forces still operate an integrated air service between Christchurch and the US-run ice airfield in McMurdo Sound.

New Zealand service personnel checked our baggage in, but once we were on board the accents changed as we were handed brown paper bags containing enough "lunch" to last the average Kiwi several days. It was a US flight down, but we came home on a Royal New Zealand Air Force Hercules - both packed full of New Zealanders and Americans.

Surprisingly military, cold and windy, and prone to cause "cabin fever", Antarctic culture is a three-way shock. Yet it is also an inspiration.

New Zealand's nuclear-free legislation in 1987 allowed the Prime Minister to approve landing by aircraft known to be non-nuclear, specifically including foreign military aircraft providing "logistic support for a research programme in Antarctica".

Military personnel run both the US share of the Christchurch service and flights between McMurdo and the other main US base, at the South Pole. When we left McMurdo on Tuesday, five ski-equipped US Hercules aircraft were lined up for the Pole service alongside the one northbound RNZAF plane.

When we stepped out of the Starlifter 11 days earlier, the second culture shock hit us. There's no such thing as a passenger terminal on the temporary sea ice. We were straight down the steps and out into the cold.

We blinked in the intense sunlight of the reflected snow, grabbed sunglasses and tried to avoid slipping on the ice.

From the ute to Scott Base, we could see the smoking volcano of Mt Erebus and, away on the far horizon, the long chain of the Transantarctic Mountains rising sharply like a high wall out of the sea ice.

Antarctica is vast - twice the size of Australia. And it is empty, with only a few isolated research stations.

Seals lie in the snow near cracks in the ice, penguins have colonised some of the rare ice-free coastal headlands, and if you know where to look you can find fish under the ice and algae inside the rocks. An occasional lone skua (Antarctic seagull) waits to scavenge where seals, fish or penguins look vulnerable.

But over the vast bulk of the continent, nothing moves except the wind.

It is the highest, driest, windiest and coldest place on Earth. Wind can blow at up to 200km/h in exposed places such as the summit of White Island, a 762m peak where Auckland University geology student Roseanne Coulter, 20, and three colleagues have been fossicking for rocks this month.

A wind speed of a mere 10km/h at a temperature of -10C produces a windchill which makes you lose heat as fast as you would at -70C in still air. The temperature at Scott Base in the past fortnight fluctuated between about -10C and -20C.

All this became real when we went on two days of "Antarctic field training". We dug steps in the snow to climb a slope, learned how to stop sliding with or without an ice-axe, then climbed a small glacier, watching for crevasses. I had never climbed on ice before and was the slowest of the group to learn to trust my crampons.

The next task was to create a shelter. We dug underground snow caverns and put up polar tents, set slightly below the surrounding snow level and held down around the sides by heaped snow.

Two people chose to sleep in the snow caverns rather than tents, and helicopter engineer Murray Smith slept so well in his that he did not hear the rest of us get up and get ready, and had to be woken.

We slept in neck-to-toe thermal underwear inside a sheet, two sleeping bags and a waterproof cover bag.

That first night I had to cut back to one bag in the middle of the night, but three nights later, in a fierce wind at the Cape Royds penguin colony, we needed all the bags and a balaclava.

In daytime, outside Scott Base, we wore the thermal underwear, a polar fleece jacket and overalls, another layer of windproof overalls and a huge bulky outer jacket. That was enough to keep the main part of the body warm, at least in the mostly fine weather that we enjoyed.

We were issued with high boots called mukluks, which we wore with slippers inside them and thick socks. I suffered cold feet one day wearing my New Zealand tramping boots on a visit to McMurdo Station, but never in the mukluks.

The real problems in the cold were our hands and faces, despite gloves, balaclava, neckband, headband, hat and jacket hood.

If I took my gloves off to write or to take a photo, it took ages to warm my hands again.

On one trip to look for an old survey drum on top of windblown Tent Island, my fingers were too cold to press the button on a camera and I had to borrow leather, motorbike-style gloves from an American.

Another American, who had worked at the South Pole, said he could not stand the pain if he left even a few millimetres of skin on his face exposed and he had to wear a full face mask whenever he was outside.

Even the animals adapted to this harsh environment only just survive. In the past two years, a big iceberg blocked Cape Royds' Adelie penguins from getting to sea to fish, and cut their breeding rate by 95 per cent.

Yet nature provides an extraordinary capacity to recover. With open sea again at Royds, the penguins' breeding rate may be back to normal this year. Tiny plant plankton microbes wait dormant under the sea ice for 10 months of each year, then bloom spectacularly for a brief two months when the ice breaks up in summer.

Finally, there was the third culture shock: "cabin fever". Scott Base sleeps 85 people, four to a room. There's no TV. In a place where you are not allowed to wander far outside the base unless you take at least one other person and a radio, the need to put on layers of extra clothing deters people from going outside at all.

In this small community, hierarchy disappears. Everyone washes their own dishes. The bar - virtually the only entertainment - mixes chefs, mechanics, scientists and soldiers .

It is hard to find anywhere to be alone for long. And, especially in winter when only 10 people stay at the base, people can easily get on one another's nerves.

Chris Knight, a mechanic from Palmerston North who is wintering over for the second time, says most people suffer memory lapses in the five months of darkness from April to August.

"You put down something and can't remember where you put it. You might go outside and can't remember what you are doing," he says.

"They call it T3. You do slow down a bit in movement. Your metabolism slows right down."

Knight says people stay sane by visiting McMurdo, a five-minute drive away, for bowling, the gym, a drink or an icecream.

First-aid officer Barbara Rennie, a foot surgeon at home in Christchurch, says colds and flu "rip through the place" whenever anyone brings in an infection.

In recent years, feelings of isolation have been reduced dramatically by email and the internet. Mark Hay, an engineer with grown children back in Oamaru, says people at home ply him with questions.

"It's really important to keep in touch with friends and family, because that's who you are going to go back to," he says. "People really get a buzz out of the photos that we send."

For visitors like us, email and a good phone system make Scott Base seem almost like next-door. Scott Base and most of McMurdo have New Zealand phone numbers with their own regional prefix, 02.

Despite all the deterrents, 24 countries have built research bases in Antarctica and 15,000 tourists visit each year, mostly on the South American side.

At first, they were lured by a sense of adventure, exemplified by the so-called "heroic era" of explorers Borchgrevink, Amundsen, Scott and Shackleton. All risked their teams' lives to see what lay southwards, as earlier the Polynesians had to explore the Pacific or the Vikings the Atlantic.

Their stories still inspire many. Antarctica NZ chief executive Lou Sanson took Shackleton's book with him to read in Shackleton's hut at Cape Royds.

But these days, the sense of adventure has been partially replaced by an appreciation of Antarctica's natural beauty, its stunning ice and rock formations and its wildlife. Who could not enjoy close contact with such animals as penguins, whose waddling gait makes them hard to distinguish at a distance from humans?

Science, of course, is the official justification for all the national bases under an Antarctic Treaty protocol which designates the continent as "a natural reserve devoted to peace and science".

Scientists are filling in gaps in our knowledge of penguins, seals, Antarctic fish, plankton, lichens and bacteria. They are unearthing Antarctica's geological and climatic history, and using its unique unspoiled environment to probe the fundamental nature of the universe.

Apart from Scott Base, we talked to New Zealanders at research camps studying ecology and climate change at Cape Hallett, taking ice cores recording past climates on the Evans Piedmont Glacier, doing geological drilling south of White Island and studying seals at Turtle Rock.

But each nation's insistence on its own separate bases, underscored by the military culture, is also, subtly, an assertion of national interests.

Even New Zealand's official policy, which opens with a commitment to Antarctica's wilderness values, also asserts our "long-term interest, commitment to and credible presence in the Ross Dependency".

The scientific urge to explore and understand the world, and the aesthetic need to connect with it and conserve it, are undoubtedly forces for good.

The nationalistic urge to dominate is how we have flourished as a species.

But the urge to dominate can damage both people and the environment through dangerous "heroism", overfishing, excessive tourism, greenhouse gases or the ozone hole. The possibility is there to remake Antarctica as we have remade the rest of the planet.

Yet since the Antarctic Treaty was signed in 1959, those destructive elements have been rechannelled into science and stewardship of the environment. Our challenge is to make it stay that way.