Thread: Antarctica and Tractors

Ref; https://www.facebook.com/TheScottExpedition

I have posted in full, Ben and Tarka's blogs here for days 64 and 65, to give an insight into their thoughts as they reach the half way point of their trip.

A Big Day Out (Day 64)

Apologies for the delayed update, but I suspect you already know that we swang round the South Pole yesterday (the day before yesterday by the time you read this) and are now on the homeward leg of our journey. Our plan was always to pitch the tent and leave our sleds about 10km from the Pole and then to leg it with not much more than a bit of food and drink, our satellite phone, our tracking beacon, a camera and a flag. The round trip turned out to be a bit of an epic by the time we'd followed the regulation route into the South Pole station itself, skirting the runway, and we clocked 56.7km (nearly 36 miles) in what turned out to be a eighteen-hour day.

In short, I'm afraid to say -though it's probably quite apt- that I concur with Captain Scott himself when he said of the South Pole "Great God this is an awful place". For him, of course, there was nothing there at all. A patch of snow at the heart of a barren, deeply inhospitable continent. For us, it felt like walking into a cross between an airport, a junkyard and a military base. Or perhaps a scene that was omitted from a Star Wars film: skiing along with sacks swinging from our backs, futuristic mirrored goggles and hoods framed by coyote fur, we looked like two bounty hunters approaching some sort of outpost on a frozen planet.

As we skied alongside the runway, two skidoos -presumably electric ones as they sounded like hairdryers- skimmed past us, and one visored pilot raised a mittened hand in a half-wave, half-salute. It all felt very strange. The next thing we spotted was several acres of oil drums, cargo containers, pallets and cardboard boxes, with giant tracked vehicles moving between them, belching smoke and reversing with beepers blaring. We skied past several vast sets of fuel bladders that had been towed to the Pole from McMurdo, leaving tracks thirty feet wide. The smell of aviation fuel hung in the air, and huge exhaust plumes rose from what I assume are generators near the main station buildings itself. Anyone who thinks the South Pole station is all about bearded scientists releasing weather balloons and peering into telescopes is sadly mistaken; the place is a giant logistics hub geared, it seems, mainly around the vast quantities of fuel needed to keep this outpost heated and powered all year round, and to quench the thirst of the Hercules aircraft we saw sat on the snow runway.

We raced to the Pole (there are two actually, a few metres apart, the ceremonial one with all the flags, and the actual Pole that they move around as the ice slowly edges towards the coast), and took a few photos, shot some film and made some calls, before racing away again as fast as we could. By the time we made it back to the tent it was nearly 1am and we still had snow to melt and dinner to eat before sleeping for all of two-and-a-half hours and skiing another 35km today.

I felt strangely devoid of emotion at the Pole, but now we're skiing back to the coast my excitement (and indeed apprehension about the colossal distance that still remains) is mounting. We're both, as you might imagine, pretty shattered, and were struggling deeply today after almost no rest. Sat on my sledge at some point this afternoon, struggling to keep my eyes open, I said to Tarka as we ate and drank, "This is a stupid way to make a living". "True," he replied, as he emptied a packet of cashew nuts into his mouth, "But it's not a bad way to make a life".

Day 65

Another day on the white treadmill, and not an awful lot to report, other than that the weather was good to us today, and we're both feeling extraordinarily tired, but still giving our all.

There's been a lot of fresh snow recently and the surface is proving our biggest headache at the moment; you can see the deep furrows we've ploughed up to this evening's camp site. When we take our skis off in the evening and walk around in the deep powder to pitch our tent, we've marvelled several times at how on earth Birdie Bowers -an apparently indefatigable member of Scott's team who abhorred skis and chose to walk instead- managed on this type of stuff.

Speaking of marvelling, now Tarka and I are both feeling as knackered as we've ever felt, we reckon we're finally getting some sort of glimpse of what day-to-day life out here must have been like for Scott's party (and indeed for Shackleton on his Nimrod expedition). It's still an awfully long way back to the coast, which was the only way home a century ago, and like them, we're now threading a path through our lifeline of tiny depots, dotted along nearly 900 miles of nothingness.

Apologies if my post about the Pole sounded a bit negative (particularly to the US National Science Foundation personnel who live and work there!) but it was a long, tough day and I think the tiredness and lack of calories had put me in a bit of a grump. The blue skies today have cheered me up immensely, and I wish I had the words to explain my excitement about now being on the journey back to Ross Island. I'm still pinching myself at times that we've come as far as we have. Thanks for following, and I hope my updates will be back to normal once I've caught up on a bit of sleep...

.

Ref; Cookies must be enabled. | The Australian

Overnight, those stranded posted videos of themselves celebrating New Year's Eve off Antarctica.

In one, they perform a song about their plight, while in a second they sing Auld Lang Syne as they stamp down the snow near the ship in preparation for the arrival of a rescue helicopter.

Expedition leader Professor Chris Turney on Wednesday tweeted that it was warm, wet and windy.

"Poor visibility. Unlikely we're flying this morning," he wrote.

New year on board the Akademik Shokalskiy - video | Science | theguardian.com

Alok Jha and Laurence Topham are on the MV Akademik Shokalskiy, a research vessel stuck in ice off the Antarctic coast. This is what they have to do to get stories to you

How to file a story when you are trapped in Antarctic ice
.