Antarctica, Day 5
It's a sunny Saturday afternoon here at McMurdo Station – 32F today, which is considered tropical weather here. Getting by with a single layer of pants and no gloves is what the height of summer feels like in Antarctica. The feeling of weather that isn't unlike what you're used to back home – you know this weather, it isn't so bad at all. Only here things can and do change quickly. A familiar weather can soon turn into an alien wind and cold unlike anything you've experienced back home.
I am sitting in a generic beige office inside Crary Lab, the 46,000 square foot building that hosts offices, storage, library, an aquarium, and laboratories for biology, atmospheric science and earth science research. It's a massive space, and where I spend most of my time when I'm not out in the field. I've just completed five full days of training. It's what everyone is required to do in the first week they arrive. An incomplete list of trainings I've attended over the last few days:
- Outdoor safety
- Science in-brief
- Lab training
- Chemical training
- Field safety planning
- Communications briefing
- Gear allotment review
- General safety awareness
- Radio briefing
- Antarctic field safety (which includes workshops on risk management, survival bags, cold weather injuries, camp stoves, tents, and helicopter basics)
- Environmental field brief
- Dry Valleys field brief
- Helicopter safety
- Helicopter sling-load training
- UAS/Drone operations briefing
At the Antarctic field safety training we went around the room and shared our scariest field experiences. People had tales of surviving plane crashes, bear encounters, blood vessels bursting while they were diving, and falling down a crevasse 60 feet. I shared hiking up and out of a meteor crater in 100F degree weather at altitude when someone passed out and fell from heat stroke and I knew I had to let other people save them because I might suffer the same fate. I'm thankful to not have anything scarier than that to share.
Between all the many trainings, my team and I are trying to plan and coordinate getting out to the field (the Dry Valleys) as soon as possible. We've picked up our camping gear and lab supplies that were waiting for us down here in storage and put in our "food pull" – a list of groceries we want to take into the field with us. Since the field sites we're going to already have a decent amount of food, we just requested what "goodies" will make us happy while we're out there – hot cocoa, chocolate bars, and boxes of mac and cheese, mostly. Much of our time has been in figuring out when to fly where given the helicopter schedules.
Our plan is to go to "F6", a smaller field site adjacent to the frozen Lake Fryxell, first to do an extensive amount of soil sampling for a couple days before flying to the other side of the frozen lake that has a larger, more dedicated field hut and camp site. We'll then be at the main Lake Fryxell field site over the holiday week where we'll do more sampling and I'll be filming parts of the docu-series.
Four miles away from us, separated by a huge glacier, is the Lake Hoare field camp that will be hosting their famous, beautifully baked holiday dinner. The hike up and down the glacier had been closed this entire season due to being slick with blue ice too dangerous to traverse, but just recently was declared safe enough to hike. So, my team along with a few others at Lake Fryxell will make the four mile trek up on top of the glacier and down the other side to attend the holiday dinner. We'll then likely crash out on some yoga mats in a heated storage room for the night before waking up and hiking over the glacier again.
I hiked up this same glacier on my previous Antarctic expedition and I viewed it as a huge personal accomplishment that I never expected to do again. So much of this expedition to Antarctica is revealing itself to be a personal exploration on revisiting physical and mental challenges and finding out if they were one-off, adrenaline-filled accomplishments, or something I can achieve repeatedly.
Much more to share but it's dinner time here and I'm ready to finally have time to breathe a little and plan out of scripts for the upcoming week. Tomorrow is McMurdo Station's famous Sunday brunch. French toast is a delightful thing to have in Antarctica.
<3 Ariel