Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
spiralling the corkscrew down into the ice. When the pain in the turning arm became intolerable,
the driller would change arms, and when that arm ached, we swapped positions. This routine was
avoided if anyone was watching.
Drilling to establish the thickness of the ice was more arduous than putting in flags, as it in-
volved going deeper. Even using the new method, it took us more than ten minutes to penetrate
three feet of ice, but at least we did it. If ever seawater bubbled up through the drill hole we would
get back in the Woomobile, turn round and scuttle off in the opposite direction.
Many cracks radiated from the Erebus Glacier Tongue, and we monitored their progress keenly.
A crack is a fissure or fracture in the sea ice produced by the stresses of wind, wive and tidal
action. Sea ice cracks generally look like narrow furrows - they were described by a member of the
Japanese
Kainan-Maru
expedition in 1911 as 'resembling divisions between rice paddies'. Around
Wooville cracks did not shoot out like bolts of lightning, or open up like Sesame, so we did not
live in fear of an inadvertent midnight swim. None the less, we had received plenty of instruction
in the subject. 'Profiling' a crack, which meant finding out how deep and wide it was with a drill
and whether it was safe to cross, seemed to us a complicated business.
'Now,' I said to Lucia one day as we got out of the Woomobile and stood looking down at a rip
in the ice. 'The effective crack width is determined by the required ice thickness for each vehicle.'
'Yikes!' she said. 'What does that mean?'
'Haven't a clue. It's what Buck said.' At this point one of us would usually fetch what was
known in camp as 'The topic'. It was a field manual, written by the staff of the Berg Field Center
to assist scientists camping on the ice, and at Wooville it had already acquired biblical status.
Besides ensuring that neither we nor the huts fell through a crack into the sea, we both worked.
In addition, Lucia practised acupuncture on herself, and sometimes on me. It didn't seem to matter
that neither of us was ill or injured - Lucia said the needles were 'a tonic'. I would lie on the long
table in the Clinic, looking out at the thermals threaded with mist, the moon hanging beyond the
tongue, or the miasma of blues and pinks over the Royal Societies. When we absorbed ourselves
in our work for too long, we began to exhibit symptoms of madness, with the result that a 'Weir-
dometer' went up on the wall of the Clinic with a swivel-dial for each of us indicating the level of
madness to which we had risen or fallen on any given day.
About two weeks after we arrived at Wooville, a helicopter put down in front of the Clinic, and
the crewman ran over to us.
'Want to come for a ride?' he shouted.
September was a cold month to be flying helicopters. Away from McMurdo, the pilots never
shut down, and they left contrails like toothpaste in the clear blue sky over the Sound. Lucia and
I grinned at one another in the back as we shuttled around the valleys, resupplying the camps at
Hoare and Bonney and ferrying repeater engineers to windy peaks.
'Wow,' said Lucia over the headset, pointing ahead and pulling out her sketchbook. 'Look at
that.' We were heading towards an icefall (a frozen waterfall) thousands of feet deep. It swelled
over the edge of a mountain and curled like a lip down to the valley floor. Here and there the sur-
face of the creamy curtain burst into erratic frozen plumes and then sank away like a fallow field.
This was the pilot's big chance to prove what a steely chap he was, and he flew the helicopter as
