Antarctica (4 page)

But Sam Bowser's favourite Antarctic sea creatures, though giants in their own world, are only just visible on the dives. He spots them by planting a flashlight with a spike into the sea floor so that its beam shines out horizontally and makes them sparkle into sight. They are called foraminifera, or forams for short. Some look like miniature oak trees; others are floppy and filled with droplets of fat, and all have built themselves protective coats of glittering grains of sand.

Sam is fascinated by these odd creatures in part because they are much larger than they have any right to be. Each of them is made up of one single cell. They ought to be microscopic, smaller than the full stop at the end of this sentence. But they are actually several millimetres long, the size of a fingernail, big enough to pick up individually with a pair of tweezers.

They are clever, too, in the design of their protective coats. Sam has cleaned off the sand, put them in a dish of water with some differently sized glass beads, and watched as they extrude sticky tentacles called pseudopodia, literally ‘false feet', that pick up the beads and draw them in. The tentacles move using tiny motors of the kind that propel sperm. And they pulse, almost as if they were dancing, as they select a deliberate sequence of small and large beads so that the overall shell hangs together. Each of these creatures is made up of
one single cell.
And yet they are master masons.

Mainly, though, Sam likes the forams because their way of adapting to these extreme conditions is to be extremely, presumptuously ferocious. In the tight-knit food web of Antarctic waters, they punch very far above their weight.

He discovered this one day while doing simple experiments with forams that he had brought back to the Crary Lab. ‘Single-celled organisms should be at the bottom of the food web,' he says. ‘If they eat anyone else it should be other singlecelled organisms, you know, like bacteria, or algae. So we just wondered what other organisms eat these forams. We found some likely things, crustaceans, and left them together in a petri dish.'

The following morning he discovered that things hadn't gone entirely the crustaceans' way. ‘We found an even bigger foram, and the shattered remains of the crustaceans. These forams are predators! They rip the flesh out of the much bigger critters that land in their webs. We've done time-lapse movies, it's really gruesome.'
⁷

The forams do this using the same sticky pseudopodia that draw in sand grains for their shells. If you are a small crustacean, just passing by, you might land on these, feel irritated and try to wipe yourself off. It doesn't work. Extra tentacles take hold. You start writhing now, but the pseudopodia are like fly paper and the more you struggle the more doomed you are. And then, when you are well and truly trapped, the pseudopodia start looking for parts of your body that they can penetrate. ‘They go
everywhere
,' Sam says and then he laughs darkly. ‘They start pulling off pieces of flesh. They rend you while you're still alive, and pick you to pieces.'

This is emphatically not the way the food web is supposed to work. Multiple-celled creatures are supposed to eat single-celled creatures, not the other way round. Sam and his group tried other potential predators: juvenile starfish, juvenile urchins. Everything they threw in became stuck and then became lunch.

This may seem ghoulish, but it's also a very effective strategy for surviving winter in Antarctica: capture something much bigger than you are, and fatten yourself up.

Sam and his team are now putting a camera into the water to see if they can watch this happening in the wild. They also want to know if the tree forams are rooted or if they roam over the sea floor. ‘I hope they walk,' he says. ‘That'll be a fun story.'

 

Stay in McMurdo a little while and you will start to see beyond the ugliness and the dirt. In summer it rarely snows there, but the occasional dusting does wonders for the place, and it spends its entire winter blanketed in white. Residents are fond of saying that Mactown looks better ‘with its clothes on'.

And if you look outwards from town on a clear day, the views are just gorgeous. To the south are snow-draped islands halfsmothered by the floating Ross Ice Shelf. To the west, across a frozen sea, lies a line of jagged snowcaps, the tail end of a range of mountains that bisects the continent. It is typical of this odd place that such a glorious highland should rejoice in the prosaic name ‘The Royal Society Range', after the learned society that sponsored some early expedition.

The names of Antarctic features can be delightfully eccentric the continent over. There is also an ‘Executive Committee Range', which is apparently just as beautiful as the Royal Society's, and ‘The Office Girls' are two mountaintops poking out of an ice cliff, which were named in 1970 ‘to express appreciation for the dedicated support provided to Antarctic programs by home-based personnel'. Other names can be merely descriptive, either of the feature itself—‘Brown Peninsula', ‘White Island' or ones where the emotions evidently experienced by the discoverers begin to creep in: ‘Desolate Island', and ‘Cape Disappointment', and—my personal favourite—‘Exasperation Inlet'.

And the town has a unique charm, if you let yourself see it. Though it has a slight military flavour (the base used to be run by the US Navy, and the canteen is still universally called ‘the galley'), if anything McMurdo feels more like a university. It has dorms and bars and craft centres and a general sense that the life here is both intense and temporary.

That fits the people, too. Most of the contract workers are unremitting dreamers. They have come seeking adventure and do their best to find it in among the soapsuds or engine grease of Mactown. They work as dishwashers, hairdressers, bar attendants, cleaners, heavy equipment mechanics and locksmiths. It's not hard to find someone with a Ph.D. peeling potatoes in the galley, or a qualified lawyer counting widgets for Supply. And they are all desperate to get out of McMurdo and into the wild white beyond.

These occasions don't arise easily unless you are a scientist. But few people complain about it. McMurdo residents have a saying. ‘It's a harsh continent,' they will tell you, if you complain about regulations, or your hours, or if the ice-cream machine breaks down. It's deliberately ironic; to claim to be tough here is to invite scorn.

And yet, McMurdo wasn't nearly as macho as I'd expected. I'd heard the mock slogans: ‘Come to Antarctica—where there's a woman behind every tree!' Or how the few women there earned themselves ratings, in which an ‘Antarctic 10' was someone who would rate a ‘5' elsewhere in the world. But, surprisingly, there were plenty of women at Mactown and I felt utterly comfortable in the bars, the coffee shop, or just wandering around town.

It wasn't always this way. For more than a hundred years after men first walked on Antarctica, women were not allowed anywhere near it. The first woman known to set foot on the continent was Caroline Mikkelsen, wife of a Norwegian whaling captain, who briefly went ashore in 1935. The next was not until 1947 when two women accompanied their husbands on an expedition at the last minute (they were only supposed to sail as far as Chile). The experiment wasn't entirely successful. The two families fell out, and one of the women wrote later, ‘I do not think that women belong in Antarctica'. After that, apart from a very brief visit from a Russian marine biologist, Marie Klenova, in 1956, there was nothing. By the 1950s a massive programme of science was starting on the continent, and it was strictly men only.

In 1969, Colin Bull, a glaciologist from New Zealand who had recently moved to the US, had been trying for nearly ten years to get a woman included in one of his field parties to the ice. The sticking point, time and again, was the US Navy. Though this was emphatically not a military operation, the Navy ran logistics for the US civilian programme, and they flatly refused to carry a woman on any of their transportation.

And then, Colin proposed an all-woman field party. He had been nagging for so long that the Navy was running out of excuses. They said OK, as long as he could find women with Antarctic experience. Right, well, one of them had worked on Antarctic rock samples. Check. Two of them had had to stay at home while their husbands went off to Antarctica. That was experience enough. Check. And the fourth could strip down motorbikes and carry heavy packs and, to be honest, by this stage, the momentum was there and the Navy men weren't bothering too much any more about the small print. The trip was authorised, and Colin received a short letter from one of the men who had spent the first winter at the Pole. It said: ‘Dear Colin. Traitor!'

And so they went, a team of four (plus one penguin researcher who was working with her husband in a separate team). The right-hand man of the naval commander was in charge of making it work. ‘We told these guys these women were scientists,' he said. ‘They were married. Be respectful to them and don't smart off.' And, apparently, they didn't. The women reported that naval officers were almost exaggeratedly polite in their presence, and any rating who let slip a swear word got a tongue-lashing. Still, the news of the women's presence hadn't spread to everyone. Once in McMurdo, one of them noticed a man following her round, then later saw him sitting on a porch, crying. When she asked what was the matter he replied, ‘I think you're a woman!' She reassured him that she thought so, too.
⁸

The experiment didn't exactly open the floodgates, but it did create a chink for the many women who had been clamouring to get to the ice. Nowadays, the ratio of men to women at McMurdo isn't quite 50:50, but it's getting there. More significantly, the women are no longer just scientists. If you call for a carpenter or a locksmith or a mechanic, you are as likely to get a woman as a man.

There are still some women there who remember the old days. The year I visited McMurdo for the second time, in 2004–5, Sarah Krall was working in MacOps (McMurdo Operations), the control centre for much of the continent. She was the voice of Antarctica. Though she never left town, her voice was heard in every US field camp, on every helicopter and plane. It was Sarah who would raise the alarm if your helicopter pilot didn't call in after the agreed amount of ground time. She had to be ready for any emergency, and she also had to be able to juggle the constantly changing Antarctic timetables. (When you are handed a schedule for a plane or helo journey, it often comes with the rider ‘the only thing certain about this is that it will change'.)

I went to catch Sarah at night, when most of the journeys were over for the day, and the main radio traffic was from field camps reporting their weather, their numbers and their wellbeing: ‘MacOps, MacOps, this is Beacon Valley. We have four souls on board and all is well.' All was conducted in the arcane language of high-frequency radio, where to distinguish numbers against the background buzz every ‘nine' becomes a ‘niner', where you say ‘roger' and ‘wilco' instead of ‘yes' and ‘I'll do that', and where every conversation finishes with the word ‘clear'.

Then there was nothing but the background hiss from the HF, punctuated by occasional splurts caused by incoming cosmic rays (which Sarah calls ‘cosmic raspberries'). She told me that the swishing sounds, like waves on a beach, were radio storms on Jupiter, and that low-pitched curtailed whistle was a passing meteorite.

Sarah first came south in 1985. She was the youngest of four kids, the baby, and being outdoors meant that nobody else would be bugging her. ‘All I ever wanted was to have my own ideas and not be told what to do and how to do it.' In the end, her parents used to take Sarah and her dog out to the lakes near her home in Iowa and leave them there to kayak all day. By the time she applied to go to Antarctica, she had spent fourteen years as an instructor in the National Outdoor Leadership School. Still, it took two years for her to be accepted. (Her boyfriend was accepted in two weeks.)

And on her first view of the landscape, she was captivated. ‘I felt like I had no place to put it,' she said. ‘It was so big, so beautiful. I thought it might seem bare, but that b word didn't occur to me. Antarctica was just too full of itself.'

The US Navy was still running logistics then, and there were twenty-eight civilian women out of perhaps a thousand people. Of course that meant there was a permanent spotlight on every woman in the place. The men who didn't think women should be on the ice had no qualms about saying so. For many of them, if women could do this then it wasn't such a big deal, it didn't feel quite so heroic. But there were also, she said, plenty of men who were delighted with the changes, who loved having women as colleagues and friends.

‘A few years in, a bunch of Russian men were coming through town,' she told me, ‘and the National Science Foundation Rep, Dave Bresnahan, invited me to a cocktail party for them. “What is this?” I asked him, “An escort programme?” But Dave said, “No, Sarah. The Russians don't let women in their programme. I want you to talk to them, tell them what you do. Influence them.”' She was clearly touched by this. ‘It wasn't women fighting a world of men,' she said. ‘It was women and men together, fighting the bigots.'

Over the years, Sarah had now worked in many different roles: in the field centre, as a mountaineer, as a helicopter technician, and she even operated the base's short-lived (but legendary) hovercraft. But her season as camp manager up on Mount Erebus was the one she most wanted to talk about, the one she still saw when she closed her eyes and thought about the ice.

Mount Erebus overlooks McMurdo and much of the rest of Ross Island. It is the most southerly active volcano in the world, the bottom part of the Pacific ring of fire, and one of the very few volcanoes that has a permanent molten lake of lava. It looks like a softly sloped mountain, draped with snow, except for the distant wisp of smoke that is visible whenever the cloud clears.