Crossing Antarctica
Wednesday, September 7th, 2011
“I’ve been monitoring your frequency as best I can. We would like you to give us a brief talk when you arrive to tell us how things have been going.
Okay we will probably arrive on December 11th between 6 and 8pm or around 11 or 12 on December 12, Chile time.
Okay that is understood. We are on New Zealand time and it is 11:54 in the morning of December 7th.
Okay. You’re operating a day ahead of us, so we will most likely arrive early morning on your 12th.”
This conversation (between the Trans-Antarctic expedition team and the South Pole station of the U.S. National Science Foundation) brings into perspective the different time zones. It fascinates me immensely, and pardon the cliché but, I was drawn to the story like moth to flame.
Crossing Antarctica – by dogsled, has never been attempted before; not until a motley crew of 6 men embarked on a shared childhood dream immortalized in the book Crossing Antarctica by famed adventurer Will Steger. It began at Seal Nunataks (nearest Antarctic airport south of Chile in the Atlantic) and ended after 3,700 miles and 220 days later to the Russian base at Mirnny in the Indian Ocean.
Dogsleds
17 miles; just 17 miles of travel per day, it seems a snail’s pace; but in this forbidding, desolate and frozen wasteland – it’s a marathon! In order to grasp the full weight of this trekking madness, the team has to endure on a daily basis the following: Sastrugi, a wind-eroded, hard-packed snow surface with irregular grooves and sharp ridges often appearing like frozen waves. It is very difficult to cross by foot or on skis; Crevasse, cracks in the ice hidden by fallen snow. It ranges from a few feet deep to a hundred. However, it’s not the depth that kills, it’s the narrowing of the walls of ice rendering you incapable of moving in a death grip; Whiteout, literally white blindness, is created when light reflects and refracts both from the snow surface and from a thick cloud ceiling. Surface definition is lost because there are no shadows; the horizon disappears as the white surface blends into the white clouded sky.
Crevasse
But the worst of these is that which is unseen. Antarctica is shaped like a bottle cap sloping gently from the interior plateaus down to the coast. As the elevation drops and the air warms, the gusting winds known as Katabatics grow stronger up to 200 miles per hour. They come up without notice. They can hurl heavy objects into the air and blow men from their feet. They pick up snow flakes, ice crystals and frozen pellets, all of which blown in the wind, become abrasive material that can polish rough metal to brilliant sheen.
The Dream Team is composed of 6 people travelling in two-man team dogsleds of 6-8 dogs each starting with: Japanese Keizo Funatsu who is an excellent dog handler; French Jean Louis Etienne is the team’s radio man who has explored Greenland and the Himalayas. He climbed Patagonia twice and made a successful solo to the North Pole; Russian Viktor Boyarsky has meteorological studies in his bag and already experienced two winters in Antarctica; British Geoff Somers is an accomplished adventurer who has spent 35 years in Antarctica as a guide with the British Antarctic Survey; Chinese Qin Dahe is an esteemed glaciologist; 24 gallant dogs; and American Will Steger has explored the Arctic by dogsled and skis and an unprecedented (at the time) unsupported trek to the North Pole. He wrote this story.
Nunatak Sastrugi
It’s daunting to squeeze in just a few paragraphs a remarkable journey (literally to the bottom of the earth) told by Will Steger that’s filled with the smell of adventure at every page. But I will try to capture some of the moments excerpted following, starting with the landscape:
Since the start at Seal Nunataks, colossal forces of nature ruled over the expedition. These are glaciers, the gigantic rivers of ice that takes a year to move as far as you can walk in a few minutes. The corrugated land mass formed by the moving glacier is called a moraine; and when a piece of a glacier breaks off and floats in the water, it’s called an iceberg. Antarctica (like Greenland) are technically Ice sheets. An Ice Sheet is a mass of glacier ice that covers surrounding terrain and is greater than 50,000 square kilometers; masses of ice covering less than 50,000 square kilometers are termed an Ice cap. Small areas of rocks emerging above ice sheets and glaciers are called Nunataks, magnificent views but invisible in a whiteout, a fatal situation when you are left out in the cold.
Glacier
Keizo was almost killed in one of these dreaded whiteouts. He was just a few hundred feet from his tent but couldn’t find it amidst the storm and -50 degree wind chills. He survived by digging and burying himself in the snow and staying overnight until the winds let up. The team found him in the morning after searching for hours in figureless whiteness.
Viktor, who uses the walls of his tent to a keep a record of the team’s progress, has developed a penchant for early morning show showers (even in whiteout conditions) by going out barefoot and nude into whatever condition he finds and scrubs up with snow. For the others, bathing is confined to a small washcloth and a few ounces of lukewarm water. Viktor is rock steady and keeps an almost unshakable optimism. But even the strongest breaks in the face of desperate conditions. One time when he was leading, Viktor stepped on soft snow and fell in a crevasse. He didn’t notice it because a bridge of snow spans the jaws of this gaping hole, and he didn’t straddle a rope as Geoff warned. Luckily, he was able to grab the harness of his lead dog and pulled himself in to safety. Unlike Viktor, Qin Dahe was always careful, but he has not yet mastered dog sledding or skiing. He falls many times a day in negotiating sastrugi, and each time he does, the rest of the team twinge out of sympathy and responsibility. Qin however, collects ice samples for study, a very valuable role in the expedition.
Iceberg
Jean Louis probably holds the most adventures and was always optimistic, but he almost gave up the expedition fearing loss of life when they were unable to locate a cache of food and supplies. At the time, a dog died and the other dogs had frost bites. But Will, in the lead, is always in a problem-solving mode and somehow managed to squeeze out the last remaining ounce of optimism in Jean Louis. Halfway through the expedition, they were low on supplies and the resupply plane was cancelled twice owing to forbidding storms. Acting on their collective survival instincts, the team built cairns every two kilometers to guide the aircraft to where they are. Cairns are 6-foot high snow forming visible trail viewed from the air. This was a decision reached upon Will’s initiative. But Geoff oftentimes challenge Will’s leadership and decisions. Heated arguments ensue and they would hate each other for a while, but exchanges like these only made them resolve to push harder towards the finish line.
Inching towards the bottom of the earth, it’s surreal to have a glimpse of the team pulled by the dogs creeping down the lines of the globe as Will wrote on December 4, Day 13:
“When we made camp last night, we were at 87°14’, today, after travelling 25 miles, we estimate we’re at 87°35’. Sometime tomorrow we should cross south of 88°. The miles and the degrees just keep ticking by.”
Mile after frozen mile, the dogs need to stay warm by burying themselves in the snow as insulation against the bitter whipping winds. This is quite hard to imagine by somebody coming from the tropics, for how can cold-snow warm you?
Ice Cap
One time the dogs were shaken by a snow quake. Snow quakes are caused when snow that has built up in a layer several inches thick –covering an area from room size to bigger than a football field collapses from its own weight, dropping a few inches all at once. Though totally harmless, snow quakes can be frightening. So when it happened, all three dog teams scattered, attempting to run away from the loud noise.
A dog in particular was Thule, the only female dog in the team. She was a lead dog. Surrounded by admirers, she wasn’t disappointed when in the midst of the expedition, she was in heat. Her ensuing pregnancy made headlines around the world and many were excited to bring home Antarctic-born pups - she had four, but all died! This had taken a toll on the team that even menial tasks got frustrating like melting snow for drinking and cooking water, and hoping that the heat rising from the stove dries out the clothes hanging from the tent’s ceiling, because in these conditions, moisture is the mortal enemy, drying the savior.
Sun Halo
As the team approaches the South Pole, a sun halo greeted the team. Sun halos are visible all over the world and can be seen whenever the sky is wisped or hazed; much smaller colored rings around the sun are called Coronas. Just before sleeping, Geoff made the point of going for a walk around the globe. Choosing a 10-foot radius around the South Pole, he crossed every line of longitude and passed from Monday into Tuesday and back into Monday. Tomorrow, he says, he’s going to take Thule for a walk around the world.
Just a few paces…. around the world…. literally, in just a few seconds, amazing!
It struck me that Antarctica can be so colorful. Unlike most accounts about the continent, it’s not all whiteness, and ice and snow; Will Steger tells of double rainbows, and green skies, and dusk shades of orange and yellow. This was quite an adventure where you are forced to trust your teammates with your life, to sometimes rely on gut feel alone, and to really live one day at a time. Thanks Will, Keizo, Jean, Qin and Geoff, and my favorite Viktor Boyarsky! And the dogs too! In dark days, I will remember you, and then hope will spring as clear as that sun halo Will so ably described in this immensely entertaining book Crossing Antarctica. I read it and was grabbed by the throat!
