Travels in Antarctica: 126 degrees below zero is so cold it burns

By Frosty Wooldridge 

“The final loss of the Endurance was a shock in that it severed what had seemed their last tie with civilization. It was finality.  The ship had been a symbol, a tangible, physical symbol that linked them with the outside world.  She had brought them nearly halfway around the globe, or, as Worsley put it, ‘…carried us so far and so well and then put forth the brave fight that ever a ship had fought before yielding to the remorseless pack.’ Now she was gone.”

                                                                     Worsley, Endurance, 1915

          For the rest of the week, the bathrooms and toilets became a blur.  I swept and mopped the interminable floors.  Each toilet required painstaking attention. I emptied trashcans and stocked new toilet paper.  I washed out lavatories and polished the mirrors.  In the lounges, I vacuumed carpets and picked up trash.  In each building, an array of recycling cans awaited a dozen different ‘categories’ of trash.  I pulled them out and packed them into larger recycling bins outside the buildings.  Everything was recycled: newspapers, magazines, glass, plastic, tin, aluminum, steel, food, rubber, clothes, and ‘Skua’.

          Most nights, Jack complained about the drunks vomiting on the floors and renewed his attack on everything from women to government waste.  I listened with rapt attention, but kept my cool.  At least, from what I could tell, he was going to stay, but that could change with the latest flair-up.   Finally, Sunday came and I worked on a new piece for the Antarctic Sun.  Jack slept all day in his bunk.

That night, like every Sunday night, the main Galley dining room filled to capacity.  If we didn’t get there early, we’d be standing the entire hour. Dr. James was to give a presentation: “From the Subantarctic to the Antarctic.”

          The flyer pinned up on the Galley board used black and white pictures of penguins: Rockhopper, Gentoo, Macaroni, Adelie, Chinstrap and Emperor.

          That flyer brought out a huge crowd for his lecture.  At the bottom of the flyer, it read:   “There is no place as pristinely beautiful, where the air is cleaner, the grandeur more overwhelming, the animals more fascinating.  If God took a vacation on this planet, God would go to Antarctica.”  Frank S. Todd

          Dr. Borg, the head science officer, introduced Dr. James.

          “This place is cold,” he said.  “I see you all nodding your heads.  At its coldest, the mercury has dropped to 126.9 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Yes, you can throw a glass of water up in the air and it will freeze before it hits the ground.   Not only that, this place is a land of extreme contrasts.  Not a tree grows anywhere on 5.4 million square miles, but life teams on the coasts in the form of 180 million penguins, 100 million seals and millions of whales and sea birds.  Even though it has ice more than three miles thick, it’s the driest continent in the world.  It qualifies as a desert.  It snows only a few inches per year, but over the millennia, that has added up.   Its glaciers are hundreds of miles long and some are over 50 miles wide.  One of the biggest icebergs ever formed was 201 miles long and 58 miles wide.  To denote how big that is, that iceberg contained enough fresh water to give every person on Earth two glasses per day for over 3000 years. 

“Even though it’s the quietest continent, storms howl across its surface at nearly 200 miles per hour.  It’s the fifth largest continent and it’s the tallest—averaging over 7,000 feet altitude.  It locks up in ice, over 70 percent of the planet’s freshwater.  Every winter, it doubles in size from ice freezing outward into the oceans.  The term ‘Antarctic’ means: opposite of Arctic.  Arctic means: northernmost area of the Earth.  Captain Cook sailed around it in 1772 through 1775, but never saw land.   What he did report was the endless seal colonies along with whales.  That brought hunters into the area.   They wiped out the seals and in search of more prey, they discovered land.  First sighted in 1820, it was called, ‘Terra Incognita’—the unknown land.

          “It was 1841 before the British Expedition led by James Ross sailed close to the Antarctic coast and discovered the Transantarctic Mountains and a volcano spewing flames and smoke.  He named it Mount Erebus after one of his ships. It was then he discovered the Ross Ice Sea Shelf.  It was a piece of ice up to 1000 feet thick and 600 miles long.

          “It wasn’t until 1888, a Norwegian expedition wintered on the continent. That’s when the buzz heightened for the ultimate quest: reaching the South Pole. In 1909, Ernest Shackleton came within 97 miles but had to turn back for lack of food.  Finally, in 1911, Norway’s Amundsen and Britain’s Scott raced to the pole. The former used huskies and dog sleds for speed.  Scott used ponies that fell into crevasses leaving his men to pull the sledges.  They all died in a blizzard trying to return to the coast.

           “From that time, Antarctica became a haven for scientific research and in 1959, twelve nations signed the Antarctic Treaty which maintained the continent as a preserve.  It was to be a place for peaceful scientific investigation for all nations.

          “What has that research uncovered?  You can imagine; we’ve made extraordinary discoveries.  We’ve found the remains of dinosaurs here.  Not only that, we’ve found the remains of flightless birds—the same found in South America and Florida.  Evergreen trees and small mammals once lived here.  It shows this continent was once connected to North America.

          “We’ve found that thousands of blue, fin, sei, minke, ‘right’ and humpback whales visit the Southern Oceans to feed on the krill and other zooplankton.  Because the waters around Antarctica are rich in oxygen, life abounds.  Other whales such as the sperm and southern bottlenose whales dive deep, hunting for squid.  Killer whales catch squid, fish, seals and penguins.  For all these creatures, it’s a cornucopia of food stores.

          “In this place, there are habitats found nowhere else on earth.  Some fish live in total darkness under the ice and in water 29 degrees Fahrenheit.  Leave it to nature, but those fish have developed a kind of anti-freeze in their blood to stop from freezing to death.  The ocean floor is full of seaweed, corals, sponges and anemones. Limpets, sea slugs, urchins and starfish.  Even a kind of sea spider has worked its way into Southern Oceans.

          “The next big bodies are the seals.  Several weigh in over 1000 pounds, like the Leopard seals.  Ross, elephant, fur, crabeater and leopard seals live on the sea ice.  For the most part, the Weddell seals stick closer to the coast.  Amazingly enough, for the entire six months of winter, the seals stay under the ice where it’s warmer than the 100 below zero out of the water.  They dive as far down as 2,000 feet in search of food.  We’re mounting cameras on some of them to find out their paths under the ice.

          “But my favorite birds are the penguins. There are seven species of these flightless wonders; Adelie, gentoo, macaroni, chinstrap, rockhopper, king and emperor. They go from 18 inches to nearly four feet.  Although, we have discovered fossils of penguins nearly five feet tall.

          “Everything the penguins do is tied to their food supply.  Their mating season peaks when the krill flourish. Their rookeries include as many as 50,000 birds.   Couples help hatch the chick.  Females leave for two months to fill themselves with food.  The male sits on the egg with nothing to do for the next 60 days—no food, no drink, no Elton John or Elvis or Back Street Boys—no anything.  He lives on his stored fat reserves. When the egg hatches, the female returns with food and gives it to the new chick.

          “During the coldest weather, over 100 below zero, a colony of birds, sometimes more than 4,000, forms a massive huddle that moves for hundreds of yards.  The ones in the middle are pushed to the front and the front penguins move to the rear until those following them press them into the warmth of the middle.  It’s an amazing form of community survival.

          “As funny as they look when they waddle or flop down on the ice, penguins are amazing swimmers.  They actually ‘fly’ underwater.  Once on land, however, they look like a baby about to walk.  They use their wings for balance.  It’s as if they are perpetually walking on a tight robe.

          “I’ve done enough talking,” Dr. James said. “Let’s see some slides of these amazing animals.”

          For the next half-hour, we watched pictures on the screen before us.  I leaned over to Jack, “Aren’t you glad you’ve decided to stay?”

          “Still not sure,” he said.  “It could change with the next drunk who pukes on my floors.”

          “You’re a spoiled brat,” I whispered.  “Thousands of people would give their eye teeth to come to Antarctica and all you can do is complain.  Have you ever heard of the saying, ‘life isn’t fair’?  So what, keep dancing and maybe you’ll learn something in the dance.”

          “Maybe,” he lamented.  “Maybe I should take your dance classes.”

          “What about your plays?” I asked, ignoring his words.

          “They’re keeping me busy,” he said.

          It was evident to me that Jack was staying, but he didn’t like it.  I sat there exhausted by his attitude, but then, there were a lot of ‘curious’ personalities at McMurdo.  A colorful mix of characters inhabited McMurdo–alcoholics, love lorn, love lost, love hurt, angry divorcees, gay/lesbians, rednecks, military, scientists, religious nuts, slobs, miscreants, world adventurers, lazy ones, quiet and rowdy ones, couch potatoes, rapists, fighters, dreamers, artists, musicians, athletes and the brilliant all the way to utterly dull and dumb.

          Pretty much a cross section of American society.