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periencing on the peninsula was grinding me down, and, more seriously, it was getting in the way
of my response to the continent. It wasn't quite the dark night of the soul at Ski Hi - but it was
damned crepuscular.
They were desperate for co-pilots on the radar project. Everyone else had done the job many
times and said it was boring. It was obviously my turn. I set my alarm for 5.30, now a time of bleak
half-light, and stumbled over to the aircraft, where the technician was warming up the hard disk of
his laptop with a hairdrier.
'All you have to do', said the pilot as he cleaned his teeth in the cockpit, 'is keep looking at that
dial there' - he pointed - 'and tell me when the needle goes beyond that figure there.' He stabbed
with his finger. 'And don't talk to me apart from that, as I have to concentrate.' I could see why
this was not a popular job.
It was a sunny morning, and when I dared glance up from the dial, I noticed that around the
nunataks the patterns in the snow were as regular as a carpet. Further south, the blue glacier ice
was glassy and cusped. The pilot glanced darkly at me looking out, and I sank back into my seat,
eyes glued to the dial. At least I was warm, once we got going. I ended up doing this job several
times - being comfortable gave it a purpose, and anyway, there was nothing else to do. I was cold
all the time at Ski Hi. Sometimes, in the tent or the weatherhaven, I would think myself back to a
warm place, just to try to deceive the cold for a few moments. I used to imagine swimming in the
Aegean Sea and diving through pellucid green waves to the ridged and sandy bottom. It is difficult
now to remember why I kept doing this for it never worked.
I was at Ski Hi for a week, and during this time the weatherhaven became increasingly derelict.
Everyone was expecting to be gone in a few days, so there wasn't much point in clearing it up. We
all crowded in for the evenings, and took it in turns to cook. One day I found Vasco stirring a pan
of tomato soup.
'There's this field assistant and his beaker holed up in a tent for days in a blizzard, right?' he
began, addressing no one in particular. 'The beaker goes out regularly to piss, but never the field
assistant. Eventually the beaker says, “Look, how do you do this? It's incredible”, and the field
assistant replies, “Easy. Every time you go out, I piss under your airbed.”'
Apart from these bursts of pyrotechnic wit, conversation meandered through the same familiar
topics (the arrival of the ship, the condition of the Dash-7 plane, the mental health of BAS manage-
ment and where they were all going to travel when they left the ice), eventually reaching the end
only to start again at the beginning. At about that time we heard on the radio that a piece of ice the
size of a minor English county had broken off the Larsen Ice Shelf and was heading purposefully
for the Falklands. This newly-created iceberg inevitably propelled the press into a feeding frenzy
of catastrophe stories about London and New York being flooded by the tide of melted glacier wa-
ter pouring off Antarctica. The formation of a berg, however - even a particularly huge one - is
part of the natural cycle of renewal, and not therefore necessarily indicative of imminent global
disaster. It is the gradual disintegration of the ice shelves year on year which is a new phenomenon,
and one which is gripping glaciologists. Since 1990, for instance, the ice which formerly occupied
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