Ice-Smashing to Davis Base

We sighted land on Tuesday afternoon - a low black ragged ridge behind a shelf of ice. The sun came out for the first time in a few days and turned the smooth ocean into a mirror which reflected the bergs. The ship tracked along the coast for a while, then turned and headed straight for the land. We saw hills covered in penguin guano - the Gardiner Island rookery, within the official station limits of Davis Base - and then we saw Anchorage Island with two crosses atop. Both islands were trapped in the thick sea ice which extended past them. And then, suddenly, Davis Base separated itself from the scenery and became apparent to the eye. It was a colourful handful of square containers in the distance. It was miniscule and lonely amongst the vast sea and icescapes we'd travelled through for so many days. It seemed truly an outpost.

We raced out to the point of the bow. The ship started the process of ramming the sea ice in order to drive deep enough into it so that heavy machinery could drive up to it from the base and unload all the crates. This process of icebreaking took about ten hours. It goes like this:

Everything goes a bit quiet as the ship stands still for a bit. Then the engines GUN, and then there is this big run up and the bow hits the slush from the previous effort so everything goes 'sshhhhhHHHHHH' and then we hit the solid edge and we all hold on so we won't get flung out of the ship, and the hull rides up onto the ice and scrapes along it - crunch KSHHHXXXXXX - and then the ice starts to crack under the weight of the ship and the whole ship is shuddering and all the masts and stuff are rattling like crazy, and there's this CRACK CRUNCH GCKKXX as the ice gives way and the broken floes that have been pushed underwater float up to the surface and clang along the sides, and the motion that at first was like being in a 4WD going over moguls settles down to being like you're in a shopping trolley getting pushed over asphalt, and then gradually the ship slides and grinds to a halt. And then the thing is shunted in reverse and they carefully back it out, taking care to avoid the edges of the channel they've just made, and then they do it all over again - until 2 a.m., which made for an interesting night's sleep.

I once heard an olympian horserider talk about how she thought the appeal of horses to girls was that riding such a powerful animal made you feel powerful too, as if it compensated for your lack of burly muscles etc. I can report that riding a 94 metre long iron battering ram into thick ice and smashing it to smithereens works too.

The Adelie penguins in the area found the whole thing fascinating. Each time we backed out they would come right up to the point of the channel we were making, as if to check out our progress. Often, one lone penguin would stand puffed up with his wings out, and he would face off the huge red bulk of the ship as it charged up onto the ice. As the ship ran him down he would run away as fast as his little plump chicken legs would take him. Of course, the ship would then stop and turn tail. I can imagine him down at the pub that night, beer in hand, regaling all the other penguins about his exploits: "I dunno what that red thing was but I so had it covered. Every time mate, it backed off. You shoulda seen that thing run away from me. I held position until I saw the whites of their eyes..."

Davis Base Abandoned in X-Files-like Sci-Fi Alien-Epidemic Disaster

After a few hours of ramming the ice there was still no sign of life from Davis Base. Considering that we were the first ship to visit the base since the previous summer, I'd expected the wintering party to come out on quads and greet us enthusiastically. We peered keenly through binoculars. No movement.

There was of course only one answer: an alien organism that had been buried deep in the Antarctic ice sheet for millennia had recently been disturbed by human activity and had oozed to the surface whereupon it had sought out the base and crawled like slimy black leeches into the nose and eyes of sleeping winterers, turning them into homicidal zombies leading to a frenzied annihilation, and the only life we would find when we entered the hastily-abandoned buildings would be one lone survivor, barricaded into a storeroom, trembling, babbling incoherent terrified phrases and staring with glassy, darting eyes.

It turned out that there was also an option (b), namely that the station leader had forbid anyone travelling out onto the ice while the ship was smashing it up. Aha.

We slept on the ship that night.

Terra Firma

The next morning the outgoing station leader Bob came on board and gave us a quick briefing, after which we grabbed our packed bags and walked them down the gangway onto terra firma - well, firma in any case. It was a lengthy walk over ice before our boots actually touched land. Hagglunds, which are big caterpillar-tracked snowmobiles with a chunky cabin and trailer, came up to ferry people and bags back to the station, and utes, which are not as exotic a vehicle but just as functional on the ice sheet, did the same. Most of us walked to the base. An icy wind started to blow across the ice. I had to keep myself from continually exclaiming 'Geez it's cold innit' because (a) I was in Antarctica after all, and (b) I was only wearing the kind of clothes that I would wear in Hobart on a cold night, and really apart from my fingertips and cheeks I was keeping quite warm. Penguins, again curious as to what was going on, waddled up to us. We did what we'd been told at training, which was crouch down to be less intimidating, and they walked right up to us. The sound of nearby quads made them waddle away again. So we journeyed from the ship to the base - a group of vehicles, then a group of people, then a group of penguins.

We found our accomodation. Mine is a four-bunk crate in the middle of a mud bog, with a little bar heater, a huge door like a biological containment laboratory, and a twenty-meter trapse though the cold to the other crate which is the bathroom. Inside it is dark and done out in fake-wood laminate like a seventies-scout-camp nightmare complete with fading posters of boring Australian landscapes. Nonetheless I like it. HOME!!

Next I found the physics building - a big square yellow building on the other side of the station. Within ten minutes of being in it I was told that I had a seat in a helicopter for a flight to the Chinese base Zhong Shan that afternoon!

Diplomatic Mission to China, Intrepid Expeditioner in Name of Science, and The Envy of Everyone Else

Aha. One of the magnetometers I have to look after is at Zhong Shan -- one of the magnetometers I had planned to spend the first week at station brushing up on. I said to the space science coordinator, "Ah. Short notice - I'll have to go and prepare." He said, "No, this is just a reconnaisance mission." I said, "Well - I'll just grab my notes and spreadsheets then." He said, "No, by reconnaisance I mean jolly" to which I said, "I'll grab my camera and go."

The two choppers departed at 3 p.m. with me and Damon to look at the magnetometer, as well as Bob the outgoing station leader, Rachael the incoming station leader, Scott the captain of the Aurora Australis and Ash the chopper mechanic. The real reason we were going was so that Ash could help them fix a busted starter motor. The secondary reason for the trip was a diplomatic meet-and-greet from Australia to China, and to the nearby Russian base Progress II. The token reason was in the noble pursuit of science, i.e. me and Damon pretending to do something useful with the magnetometer.

The 40 minute flight was amazing. I was excited enough sitting in the front seat of the chopper when it was still in the hangar on the ship the previous day. Now I was in the big blue sky looking down at the tremendous spine and crevasses of the massive Sorsdal Glacier. It met the ice sheet in huge cliffed tongues, calving tabular bergs which made a trail to the horizon. Then, further on, the ice sheet edge could be seen, jagged and stark, breaking into sharp trapezoids which spread out into the ocean. Through my (literally) rose-tinted antarctic-issue sunglasses the landscape was bathed in gold light. I thought of the effort and expense it had taken to get me to Antarctica, and now I was being flown in a helicopter a hundred kilometers up the coast over spectacular scenery. And the reason was that someone had decided they were curious and fascinated about the workings of the magnetic field around the earth, and someone else had agreed that fascination and curiosity about nature were good things, worth going to a lot of effort over. At that moment I felt like I knew for sure that the world was a sane and good place, driven by enthusiasm in the pursuit of knowledge about who we are and where we live. The feeling is yet to be dispelled.

The bases appeared on a rocky penninsula - first the Russian base, looking like a scattering of rusty metal boxes surrounded by a spreading mess of old decaying junk and machinery - and then the nearby Chinese base, neat and tidy and small. The pilot flew us around the group of Australian Apple Huts up higher on the ridge, known as Law Base, before setting us down at Zhong Shan. Two TV cameras and most of the scientists were there to greet us as we stepped off. They obviously didn't realise we were just boffins and not station leaders or ship captains. On the pretext of not knowing Chinese, I didn't enlighten them. We went into the mess and sat at the big conference table they'd set up in the middle of the room - which was actually a ping pong table! They gave Rachael and I Chinese silk scarves as gifts. The one girl on the station served us all tea and cans of chinese coca-cola. Bob shook the leader's hand and did the diplomatic friends-working-together-in-antarctica-as-well-as-in-the-world-at-large talk, then they left in one chopper to visit the Russians (where they got plied with vodka), the engineer and ship captain left in the other chopper to go to the distant Chinese ship where their busted motor was located, and Damon and I went up to check out our magnetometer.

We actually did get quite a bit of useful stuff done; we checked out the system which has a few dodgey bits, then we narrowed down which bits were working oK and which need a bit of work. We walked down into the valley which is surrounded by towering spikey bergs and the cliff-edge of the glacier, and had a look at the coils and junction box and looked at what needed to be fixed there. The guy Jin who's been looking after the equipment for us all year was great. He had a really comfortable, spacious workspace with a bed in the corner for when he's working late, with photos of him and his girlfriend on the wall above his flat-screen computer monitor and printed photos of the auroras. He asked about six times after a girl called Imogen who's been wintering at Davis and visited them during a traverse they did this year from Davis to Zhong Shan, and apparently broke a lot of hearts when she left. He asked me how Zhong Shan compared to Davis. I told him I didn't know, I'd spent more time there than at Davis, but I'd let him know once I found out.

The flight back was even more brilliant than the one out. Rick the pilot flew us right down through a chasm in an iceberg so that the ice cliffs rose up either side of us. Then he circled low around the ship parked out in the ice so we could wave to the captain who was out on the helideck. He hovered so that the base was photogenically in the background and waited for us to take snapshots. Then I got a great aerial shot of our bedroom donga before he landed, and then I walked into the bar and told everyone about my amazing adventure and considering that they had all spent the day helping to unload potatoes into the mess, they were suitably jealous.

Back to Normal Life: i.e. Space Lasers, Hiking, Cross-Country Skiing and So Forth

By comparison it seemed that the following days must seem normal. NORMAL? WHAT? I unpacked my stuff into my room, helped unload some cargo, did a station tour, went for a four-hour hike into the Vestfolds and saw some stunningly beautiful frozen lakes and hills and glacier-scapes, stood in the open roof of the LIDAR (= space laser) building and watched two Chinese choppers come in for a visit, chatted to the Chinese journo who was impressed there were so many girls here and doubly so that girls were allowed to drive Hagglunds, posted some letters and phoned Australia, saw the station handover, farewelled the outgoing winterers, and I've just returned from cross-country skiing out to farewell the Aurora Australis, which just departed.

The Vestfold Hills are a big stretch of exposed rock and dirt which lie behind the station. They form a large proportion of the 4% of Antarctica that is not permanently covered with ice, and they contain some salty lakes which are of great interest to biologists like Clare. They are also striped in big black lines by volcanic dykes, where magma has intruded into the landscape and solidified. They ease into one's psyche gradually, rather than blasting you with majesty - you walk for a while through low modest hills before you start to realise that something is a little strange. The first thing you notice is that there is absolutely no life - the lizard you think you see out of the corner of your eye is of course a mirage; the air is absent from bugs and the rocks harbour no spiders. There are no burrowing creatures or crawling creatures or tramping creatures, except of course for yourself. Far from this making the land seem dead, it instead brings to the fore the geological life of the land. In the absence of animals to force fast change, the slow changes become apparent - the folding of the rock, the cooling of the magma, the slow slide of the glacier. Gaia becomes almost tangible. And then comes a sense of something outside of flat earth; a concept of the earth as a planet, equal with mars or venus. Perhaps it was my rose-tinted glasses making the sky seem yellow and the rocks seem baked and dry, or perhaps it was the strange alien effect of the ice-crystal halo that formed around the furnace of the sun, but we walked in a special and otherworldly atmosphere.

And now it's very early in the morning and I think my face was burnt by the midnight sun while skiing out to wave goodbye to the ship. After such a long acquaintance the departure of the ship seemed very quick. It carried out all of the winterers but four. Now Davis base is ours.

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Special Disclaimer for legal reasons and for mum who is worried I'll get people into trouble with this blog: My university does not run equipment that does anything but work perfectly 100% of the time (anything suggesting the contrary was pure fiction). Any suggestions that Antarctic people go on jollies is highly exaggerated. We are all dedicated to the pursuit of science and at no stage would we compromise that objective by having fun.

Thanks to Ken, Hanny and Peter, Daniel, Daniel, Lata, Rob, Brian, Richard, Simon and all the other people who left messages and sent emails! Also thanks to Mum and Dad who sent all their friends a very embarrasing photo of me in my antarctic freezer suit and snow goggles in the motel room in hobart.