Antarctica, Day 12
Each morning I wake up to a game of find-my-phone inside the depths of my sleeping bag within my mountain tent. Inside its bulky folds is a fleece liner I use to stay warm, along with all my clothes for the next day, and any leftover hand warmers from the same day that I clutch to at night for their remaining heat. I try to keep my phone buried with me so that it doesn’t freeze overnight and become unresponsive. My lip balm frequently becomes too cold to squeeze out of its tube and my moisturizer is more of an oily solid than a cream.
I’m now at the Lake Fryxell field station. We arrived via a very short helicopter flight yesterday with all our gear and tents packed up from the F6 station and quickly got to setting up our tents all over again. The earth is slightly more rocky here, which made the process of trying to drive stakes into the ground to secure our tents a little maddening. My knees are now completely covered in a patchwork of tiny bruises from kneeling on the ground to complete various tasks.
Today is the coldest and windiest day it has been since we arrived in the Dry Valleys. The tops of the mountains surrounding us were freshly dusted last night with snow. We at first welcomed this holiday-appropriate sight with delight, but today we’re wishing it was a little less harsh outside as we each try to get our work done. Over the radio throughout the day you can hear various science teams calling to each other about the ground being too cold to dig holes to take measurements. I filmed myself talking to camera for a bit for as long as I could safely stand. On colder days like today, I can talk for about as long as one of my camera’s batteries (~25 minutes) before it becomes hard to enunciate my words because my face is too cold to move fully. That’s usually after spending the same amount of time just setting up the shot. The work of filming in Antarctica at first seems much easier than the scientific field work, and sometimes it is – I don’t go on ten mile hikes each day like many of my teammates are. But nearly all of my filming requires me standing in one place outside for as long as I can manage, and that’s the coldest work of all out here. Not continuously moving is not advised. So, many of my forays into the outer world only last for a couple hours before I need to come back and warm up.
With our arrival at Lake Fryxell, there are a total of ten people here now. The 680 sq. ft. main building here is a luxurious upgrade from F6. It boasts a large enough dining table to fit all of us around (at F6 there were four chairs we had to take turns sitting in). There’s even a couch and a KitchenAid mixer here. Four tiny lab spaces are separate from the main building, so there’s not much competition for space. There are a number of divers here, researching the microbial mats in the depths of the frozen lake by diving into a hole they carved out in the ice. Each day they make multiple dives in dry suits, taking samples in different locations and placing and retrieving sensors built by scientists eager for data. Last night we hosted a birthday dinner for one of the researchers here. With all ten of us gathered around, eating a freshly-baked birthday cake in the warmth of the hut surrounded by nearby glaciers, frozen lakes, and towering mountains, I felt the original magic I experienced of this continent dust the top of my heart like the snow over the mountains out the window.
The original plans to hike over Canada Glacier to the Lake Hoare field station four miles away for Christmas dinner were canceled due to a number of people there getting sick (not COVID thankfully). So the ten of us at Lake Fryxell were sent a frozen turkey via helicopter from McMurdo Station so that we can have our own Christmas dinner amongst ourselves. It’s anyone’s guess as to whether the turkey can defrost enough inside the hut in time, but we’re excitedly planning. My team and I plan to still try to hike up Canada Glacier before Christmas dinner tomorrow so that we can collect some more samples and I can film the cryoconite holes there. Fingers crossed for a warmer day tomorrow.
<3
Ariel
P.S. The internet is often too slow to include pictures in my dispatches, but I managed to add a quick video of one of my filming setups from yesterday on my Instagram.