Antarctica (5 page)

Erebus is high—nearly 13,000 feet—and Sarah's camp was within striking distance of its summit. One day near the end of the season she took a skidoo as far up as she could get and then hiked the rest of the way to the crater. When she reached the true summit and looked south for the first time, she burst into tears. ‘I looked right down the peninsula and saw that tiny thing that was Ob Hill and to the right, the Erebus ice tongue looking like a chainsaw. And I thought, “How did I ever earn this? What will I have to do to pay for this?”'

It took her three hours to walk round the rim. The weather was cold but beautiful, and the air stank of rotten eggs. (She got ‘plume cough', she said, from hiking in the cold with those sulphurous acid smells.) She stopped at the classic viewing point, to look over the rim. To the left, the east, was the lava lake, not a big red lake filling the whole crater but a patch of dark black crust with red lines running through it. Around it, the crater was littered with glossy black bombs that had been flung out by the lava, the size of a hand, a chair, a car.

‘People talk about measuring the land, to get it down to size. I say no, don't do that. I use the land to take my measure. Am I competent enough to be there, to survive there? On a calm day at Erebus nothing seems more innocent. And then it throws up bombs with no warning. Kerpow! It's visceral. This land makes me feel small. Not diminished, but small. I like that.'

Her description was spellbinding. I couldn't understand why she was now prepared to bury herself in this dark building for the season. ‘I love this,' she said, gesturing to the banks of switches and microphones in front of her. ‘I don't know why. I guess I like feeling involved.' But then she shrugged and gave a rueful smile. ‘I do miss being outside, though.'

Jules Uberuaga was another of the pioneers. A diminutive dark-haired firebrand, she stands all of five feet two inches and drives the heavy equipment, the big macho snow dozers used to build the runways and dig out trenches and level platforms. You might run into her in one of the bars; if you ask her nicely (and flirt with her a little) she might offer to take you for a ride in her beloved D7, a massive snow dozer that she has dubbed Trixie.

She will explain the best way to flatten a skiway, or dig out a building that is buried in snow without getting stuck yourself. She talks of the need to have a ‘bubble in your ass'—an instinctive sense for when a surface is level. She will coach you in the subtle variations in angle and blade that will generate a neat roll of snow barrelling in front of you. And if you can maintain the roll without letting it break for the distance Jules sets, she will take a picture of you, standing in triumph on top of Trixie's roof.

Jules first came down here in 1979 when she was just twenty-four. There were few women in the programme and none driving heavy machines. One of her early jobs, out on the sea ice maintaining the airstrips, was immediately threatened when she was told that she couldn't use any of the men's bathrooms, which is to say she couldn't use any of the bathrooms. She was only saved when the servicemen let her use the facilities in their medical centre.

In her thirty-plus seasons she has heard everything you can imagine about why women shouldn't be in Antarctica in general and in a D7 in particular. But just as with Sarah, for all the men who protested there were always plenty of others ready to help her fight her corner. When she told one supervisor he was a ‘fucking asshole' and asked if what he really wanted was to hit her, he screamed in fury: ‘Did you call me an asshole?' ‘Yes!' She shouted back. ‘Well,' he replied, ‘it's about time someone did!'

Now Jules is a veteran, as essential to McMurdo as the buildings and the furniture. ‘I bet I've pushed more snow than any woman in the world,' she says, not in a boastful spirit, but as a simple matter of fact. Like the forams she has thrived in a world that looked well above her weight; and you sense when you speak to her that she has survived in part by building herself a protective outer shell.

The rest of the people here have also found their own adaptations to this strange way of living. They wear intricately crafted zipper pulls or carefully sculpted beards. They make spoof videos of classic sci-fi movies, or songs from
The Muppet Show,
exchange complex salutes, sit in the galley or the coffee shop arguing fiercely about Nietzsche or about game show hosts. Relationships form quickly and can break just as quickly. Some of the contract workers here have ‘ice husbands' or ‘ice wives', couplings that seem no less committed for the fact that they only exist when both partners are down here together. Even though the station has twenty-four-hour internet access, the outside world barely interferes.

The world of Antarctica, however, can make itself felt even for those who rarely get the chance to leave town. With regulation gear, the cold isn't so hard to deal with. But once in a while the winds will whip up into a ‘condition i' storm, in which visibility is zero and it's dangerous even to feel your way the few metres from one building to the next. During a condition i all outside travel is forbidden, and wherever you happen to be is where you have to stay. ‘Hurry up and wait' people say to each other, with a shrug, wherever they are trapped. They will break out the playing cards, switch on the stove, and start one of the ubiquitous coffee machines.

This applies even more during the winter, when the permanent darkness falls, and the winds rise, and the cold gets into your bones. If winter storms sweep into town, you stay where you are. And if you're outside, you'd better be near a shelter.

The animals near here have learned this, especially the true Antarcticans, the ones that don't leave for the north no matter how bad things get. When winter approaches, Antarctica's Weddell seals stay in the water, trapped under an ice lid that can be metres thick, gnawing holes that are more like tunnels to enable them to breathe, spending months on end swimming, feeding and resting down there in the darkness, sheltered by the freezing water from the even harsher outside.

Nobody has ever seen these seals during the winter; the best clues for how they make their living come only in summer, when the females at least haul out to give birth, and moult and prepare again for the coming ordeal.

 

The sky was enormous, flecked with clouds that pointed like an arrow all the way to the horizon. Between them was bright blue sky and sunshine, a glorious day. I was driving one of my favourite Antarctic vehicles—a ‘Mattrack'—which would be a perfectly normal red pick-up truck except for the triangular wheels. They made me laugh. From a distance it looked impossible, as if the wheels themselves should clunk awkwardly round. It was only when you were close that you noticed they were actually individual caterpillar treads, their triangular shape ensuring the best possible grip on the slippery sea ice.

The pace was faster than walking but not by much. I wound down my window, the better to see the view. The air that crept in was sharp but not unpleasant; the temperature couldn't be far below freezing and already I'd stripped off my parka.

A set of sea ice ‘roads' branched away from McMurdo like a family tree. All were bright white, scored with skidoo or caterpillar tracks, and flanked on the right with a long row of flags, most red, a few green, fluttering from bamboo poles every few metres. The flags looked absurd, like overkill. Why did we need so many? But I knew that Ross Island could deliver a storm with a quick, casual sideswipe that would turn this big bright view into snow and confusion.

The weather forecast looked good but before being allowed to come I had to learn exactly what sized cracks I could safely cross, and how to pitch an emergency tent, in the lee of the vehicle, using ice screws that take painfully long to twist into the hard grey sea ice. I was also forbidden to travel alone, so beside me in the passenger seat was Mike from the heavy shop, whose name was next on the list of contenders to get out of town free, and who was quietly pleased at the outing.

We were going to meet Bob Garrott, a researcher from Montana State University who I ran into in the Crary Lab on his way out to the field. Bob worked at several different Weddell seal colonies, but he said we'd find him today at Turk's Head, the big blunt end of a rocky cape that juts out into the sea ice just beyond the Erebus Ice Tongue.

He'd already told me that right now, in early November, was the perfect time to study Weddells, because this was more or less the only time any of them came up out of the sea. Even so, we were unlikely to see males since they would only usually be on the surface when they had just lost a serious fight for underwater territory. But the females had to emerge to give birth, and we were entering prime pupping season.

Bob had also told me why he was so interested in Weddells. ‘When animals are on the edge, stressed out, they come up with the most interesting survival strategies. I'm intrigued by the places and times where they have to go to the greatest lengths.'

Every so often, we saw a seal in the distance. They looked like slugs, fat and dark and lying utterly still. One advantage of the long American presence at McMurdo was that researchers had been studying and tagging the seals around here for nearly forty years. Any Weddell that you saw here was almost certain to bear a bright yellow or blue tag on its flipper. It could be jarring to see this overt sign of the presence of humans among animals that ought to be wild. But the tagging neither hurt the seals nor impeded them in their swimming, and it provided a spectacular database to trace how the most southerly mammal on Earth could make a living in a place that should surely be out of bounds to warm-blooded animals.

We parked the Mattrack and Bob came over to greet us. He led us off towards the colony, probing every so often with an ice axe. ‘Whenever you're working around seals there will be cracks,' he said. ‘Be careful and step where I step.'

As we walked, Bob explained that he was working now on population dynamics—how the seals lived and what sort of trade-offs they needed to make. All the other Antarctic seals live much farther north, in the pack ice, where stretches of open water form daily and air is easily had. Weddells are the only marine mammals to live in fast ice—where the sea covering is thick and there are very few breaks—and they have to go to considerable lengths to achieve this. It's hard being an air-breathing mammal in a place where air is scarce. They have developed special hinges on their jaws so they can open their mouths extraordinarily wide; with their inclined upper incisors they gnaw at the ice to keep breathing holes open throughout the winter. And they can hold their breath for up to an hour and a half before they have to find a hole, trumpet a warning that anyone else using it should get out of the way, and then surge upwards for that first fresh gasp of air.

Why should they go to so much trouble? Bob thinks it is so they can exploit scarce resources with much less competition. No other mammals are down here hunting the fish. And, perhaps more importantly, nobody else is on the hunt for seal pups. Up in the pack ice, killer whales and leopard seals prowl, but neither of these can live down here.

By avoiding these predators, seal pups have an unusually high survival rate compared to other similar creatures. But even so, only one in five of them will make it. Bob is interested in the details of this stark number. Who has a better chance than whom? What does it take to get ahead of the pack in the survival stakes?

Now we were walking among the colony proper, and Bob's colleague Mark Johnston came over to say hello. He saw me staring at two dead pups. They were pathetic scraps, one with its face planted in the snow, the other, even thinner, bent at an awkward right angle. ‘That's part of the eighty per cent mortality right there,' he said. ‘That little skinny one starved to death. It took about six days before he finally succumbed. It was sad. You wanted to do something like take him back to the hut and put him in a sleeping bag.'

I found this heartbreaking, but my head told me that even if they want to intervene, even if they could do something to save one of these creatures (which in the case of the pups was doubtful), they couldn't afford to. Bob and his team were studying what made the difference between life and death out here and any interference would hopelessly skew their results.

Their current study involved weighing both mothers and pups to see what effect their body size had on their chances of survival. They had brought in a weighing sled, towed behind a skidoo, and they were about to approach the first customer of the day.

Bob beckoned me over to where a seal was lying on its stomach. Just beyond was a pup so new to the world that its umbilical cord was still attached. It was a soft brown colour, small and slender against the inflated grey bulk of its mother. There were streaks of blood on the snow from the birth, and remnants of a placenta. Large seabirds were hovering nearby, waiting for the opportunity to scavenge this bounty.

As we approached, the pup moved nervously towards its mother, curling into her like a comma. A couple of researchers came up behind it and grabbed it with ropes. The pup looked tiny and fragile, and at first I couldn't understand why two of them were having such trouble dragging it over to the weighing sled. But when someone called out the reading I discovered to my astonishment that already it weighed half as much as I do. The mother followed, heaving her bulk clumsily over the ice, lurching on her flippers. She was calling like a wookie, her wails echoing off the cliffs. The pup's replies sounded distressingly like those of a crying baby.

And yet, the mother climbed cheerfully enough on to the sled to join her pup and someone called out the reading: she weighed more than a thousand pounds. Then mother and pup clambered off and lay placidly on the ice, just a few feet from the sled. It was astonishing. These gargantuan beasts had no land predators so they had no evolutionary reason to be stressed when they were up here on the ice. And that seemed to be enough to wipe out any memory of what seemed so anguished a moment ago.