Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
male seals flopped out, they were so fat they could hardly move. By mid-October there were many
seals, especially around Big Razorback and Hutton Cliffs. The temperature in those days might
swing between ten above and ten below in twelve hours, and from Wooville we began to see mist
rising from open water to the north. Hillocks of snow grew on the sea ice overnight as pressure
ridges formed. We sensed that something dramatic was happening to the environment. A visiting
climatologist put it like this when he sat on a folding chair at the outdoor card table, looking out at
the ice blink on the horizon.
'You are currently living through the greatest seasonal event on earth, in terms of mass and en-
ergy - the growth and decay of Antarctic sea ice.' Put like that, it was apocalyptic.
When sunlight falls on its fissured cliffs, the Barne Glacier is one of the wonders of the natural
world, and we never grew tired of looking at it. Lucia was gazing out at it one day through the
window next to the long table. Suddenly she winced.
'I must have some Windex,' she said, narrowing her eyes as if in pain. I began rummaging
through the first aid kit in search of an anti-flatulant. But she was only being American. She wanted
to clean the window.
An igloo went up in front of the huts, built by a pair of atmospheric scientists who came to stay
for a week. They were on holiday, or allegedly taking a break from monitoring the ozone layers
in the stratosphere and measuring stratospheric particles that affect ozone depletion by filling bal-
loons with helium and sending them up 100,000 feet. Shortly after they arrived, the pair of them
set to and marked out an ambitiously large circle on the ice. This resulted, four days and three
nights later, in an astrodome of igloos. As we had only one ice saw, the carving knife was called
into service. The entrance was supposed to be facing Scott's hut but, due to an architectural error,
it ended up facing the pee flag. The igloo had a carved ice figurehead above the door and a win-
dow made out of a disc of ice frozen into shape in the lid of a pan. When it was finished we ate a
celebratory meal inside, and then we all slept in it.
∗
In the second half of October the seals pupped. The snow on the sea ice was smeared with blood,
and we began to see small brown sausages next to the long grey ones. The pups weighed about
forty-five pounds at birth. At two days, they discovered they could bite their own tail flippers. Seal
milk has the highest fat content of any vertebrate (approaching seventy per cent), and the pups
gained five pounds a day. It was like watching dough rise.
On the night of 22 October I slept outside. There was no wind and the temperature was hovering
around zero. The sun set shortly after eleven o'clock, and all night I heard seals calling. The
eastern slopes of Erebus were violet at first, and then they were bathed in rosy pink alpenglow, and
between two and three o'clock, when the sun rose above Wind Vane Hill, they became sunflower
yellow.
Immediately before I awoke, I had a vivid dream. I dreamt I was going to die. I was at home,
and everyone was there. There was no panic or fear or sadness, and when I opened my eyes I felt
peaceful and happy. It had all seemed so real, and I lay supine in the bag, mummified in polypro-
pylene, wondering what I could deduce from it. After a while, Lucia came out of the hut carry-
