Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
the mercury touches minus five in London the weather is headline news and the trains grind to a
standstill - and it feels worse at home because one doesn't stroll around swaddled in three layers of
polypropylene, two layers of fleece and an industrial-strength parka. For many of the Americans
on station, winters at home are a good deal colder than summers on the edge of Antarctica.
What no one ever quite gets used to, however, is the brutalising effect of the wind. The average
windspeed at McMurdo is ten miles per hour (twelve knots). Extremely high winds, common all
over Antarctica and terrifyingly swift to arrive, can freeze exposed flesh in seconds. That, effect-
ively, is what constitutes frostbite, not initially a highly dangerous injury but one that can soon be-
come fatal if untreated. A wind racing along at thirty-five miles per hour (56 knots), for example,
which is fairly usual, reduces an ambient temperature of minus six degrees Celsius to a windchill
factor of minus twenty-eight.
The Crary Lab was a long, wet-cement-coloured building on stilts, the showpiece of American
science in Antarctica. It consisted of mysterious enclaves of petri-dishes and microcentrifuge
tubes, well-heated offices, antiseptic conference rooms and a lounge presided over by a scrofulous
penguin in a glass case. Each lab door bore a number corresponding to the project number of its
occupants. These Science or S numbers were the key to many things in McMurdo. The small and
unfunded Artists' and Writers' Program, in which I was a participant, dispensed W-numbers (for
Writer), and my number was W-002; a textbook writer from the Midwest had got W-001. On some
doors, a metal sign had been stuck under the project numbers. Most of these signs were self-ex-
planatory, such as Penguin Cowboys or Sealheads, but some were more gnomic: The Bottom Pick-
ers, I found out later, were investigating the seabed.
The best thing about the Crary was the view from the picture window which ran the length of
the lounge. It looked directly over McMurdo Sound at the Transantarctic Mountains. They stuck
up like the bones of the planet.
I had been given an office, and its door sign said,
W-002: Wheeler
. It was a windowless room
about eight feet square with two modern desks, a set of bookshelves and a blackboard. Around
the corner, in the wide corridor, a collection of startlingly ugly Antarctic fish leered out from glass
cases under belljars labelled with Latin names. Among them a bright blue plastic fish with yellow
protrusions and goggle eyes glared out of its own jar of formaldehyde.
Later that day I was inducted into the intricacies of the Waste Management Program. I learnt that
there were eighteen different kinds of waste ranging from Light Metal to Cooking Oil, though for
complicated reasons a broken glass did not belong in 'Glass' nor should a cereal box be thrown in
'Cardboard'. This explained the behaviour of people I had seen standing in front of a row of bins
clutching a small item in one hand and scratching their head with the other. Hazardous Waste con-
stituted an entirely separate department of even more Byzantine complexity. The sprawling piles
of rubbish once photographed by Greenpeace were a distant memory. Only veterans could remem-
ber the barrel which had been roped off between McMurdo and Scott Base after it allegedly fell
off the end of the Geiger counter. The 413-ton nuclear reactor brought to the station in 1961 was
a distant memory, as were the noxious brown clouds which used to billow from the high-temper-
ature incinerator every Saturday. Two decades ago, waste was simply left on the frozen sea until
the ice melted. This practice was outlawed by the U.S. Antarctic Program in 1980, however, be-
