Antarctica, Day 19
Peering out, my eyes adjusting to the reflective white landscape outside, I can make out two dozen lumpy black spots spread out across a line in the sea ice.
In my lab there are rows of beige bench tables and all the science equipment you’d expect – microscopes, beakers, refrigerators, tubes, sieves, tape, and sharpies. At the back, there are two windows facing out to distant mountains with an expanse of sea ice in between. Peering out, my eyes adjusting to the reflective white landscape outside, I can make out two dozen lumpy black spots spread out across a line in the sea ice. These are Weddell seals, cruelly named after their discoverer who hunted them in mass numbers in the 1820s. The seals lay out on the ice, basking in the summer weather like cats in a sunbeam.
Squinting at the lopsided dark lumps out the window, I turn back to my microscope and squint at another set of lumps. These ones are moving and translucent, some squishing up into a ball before stretching out in a seal-like silhouette, others treading the water in the petri dish with eight, stubby legs. These are rotifers and tardigrades. There’s also tiny worms, known as nematodes, flipping back and forth scouring through pieces of soil for nutrients, some with teeny-tiny swords poking out of their mouths to stab at potential food. I’m here in Antarctica to both study and film life at multiple orders of magnitude, and I can’t help but see myself and the megafauna outside as tiny microbes on an interplanetary scale.
It’s my first New Year’s Eve in Antarctica and tonight is the famous “Icestock” concert here at McMurdo Station. Billed as the southern-most music festival in the world, it’s a fan favorite where attendees dress up in costumes and listen to bands cobbled together from the people stationed here and a number of music instruments that are stored in the station’s music room.
A few days ago I spent Christmas going on a six-hour hike up a glacier in order to pull out my macro lens once I reached the top and film the ice. Even though I was hiking up from the opposite side of the glacier this time it was just as challenging as when I did it four years ago. I now remember why it felt like a huge personal accomplishment at the time. The trek involves hiking up the moraine – a loose, towering pile of boulders, rocks, and sand along the side of the glacier, pushed there through the power of ice moving over time. It requires not only stamina for trekking upward to the top of the glacier, but also confident balancing on unstable terrain. Once on the glacier, things are a little easier with the addition of microspikes on the bottom of my boots that pierce into the ice. Thankfully it was an absolutely glorious weather day – blue skies and little wind. For a moment, I wanted to just stretch out on the glacier with my hands behind my head and soak up the sun like the seals. Near me, a raging stream had just opened an hour earlier as the sun warmed up the ice, turning it to water that cascaded down the side. Experiencing the sound of a stream in Antarctica felt both beautiful and strange. As if a portal had opened up to a forest in the middle of a polar desert.
Six hours of exhaustive hiking quickly faded as I returned to immediately enjoy a Christmas dinner with the nine other people at the field station. A turkey had been flown in on a helicopter just in time. Mashed potatoes were more like diced “mashed” potatoes since we lacked a food processor. Stuffing was made out of miscellaneous frozen bread we had lying around and we cracked open a can of cranberry sauce. For dessert, a cheesecake mix. There was egg nog in the fridge that I was initially excited about until I saw the expiration date was from a year ago. I was told it had been frozen for a year and should be okay but I decided not to take that risk. After dinner, then ten of us played science trivia – I was stellar in the space category, as to be expected, but our team faltered in the math, physics, and chemistry category and never recovered.
We were due to take a helicopter back to McMurdo Station the day after Christmas, but weather forced a delay so we stayed an extra night in the field. Having already worn all my clothes and not showered for a week, I shrugged and decided to just sleep in my clothes for the extra day. Before I left, I was given a parting gift by one of the teams studying the microbial mats that carpet the bottom of the frozen lakes – a wispy vial of mat with a texture reminiscent of cotton candy for me to inspect. Under my microscope, ghostly figures emerge in the tangled algal fibers in the form of tardigrades slowly eating their way through it.
Back at McMurdo, I’m enjoying my access to showers and a regular bed. It’s much colder here this week, with windchills down to -3F. We head back into the field on January 2nd, but this time only for a couple days so that we have enough time back in the lab to process soil samples and count the number of critters we find under the microscope. I’ll get another chance at filming this iconic glacier once I’m back in the field, but hopefully I’ll let my drone do the vertical climb this time.
2023 is just five hours away now in this portion of Antarctica. Wishing you all a happy and adventurous new year :)
<3
Ariel