Didier and Steve surface and we lift out the camera, their tanks and weight belts. They are excited by what they have seen, mumbling through half-frozen lips about filming groups of penguins converging on the holes like fireworks, leaving twisting trails of bubbles hanging in the water. The sea temperature is −1.8°C (28°F) and only the salt is preventing it freezing. Didier has torn one of his gloves and it’s leaking. After half an hour he can hardly move his fingers. He thinks he will be able to improvise something in time to dive again tomorrow, but before we reach the camp a blizzard is blowing.
Everyone arriving for the first time at McMurdo Station has to take a course on what to do if they are stranded on the ice with minimal equipment. Without this training you are likely to die before being found. The course is known as Happy Camper.
On the sea ice, where we were dropped out of sight of the base, there was a panoramic view of the Royal Society Range, on the other side of McMurdo Sound. Our instructor, Dylan, pointed out glaciers which were named after Scott’s companions. White Island rose from the ice sheet nearer to us. Scott’s party had marched past it on their way to the pole. At the beginning they had used inefficient ponies and tractors to pull some of their heavy gear. Two weeks earlier a group of Norwegians, led by Roald Amundsen, had left their base further east, travelling light with dog sleds and skis. The quest to reach the South Pole had become a race.
Dylan explained that if we found ourselves in trouble, our first priority should be to make shelter. We practised putting up a pyramidal canvas tent of the same design that Scott took to the pole. They are still used today when weight is not an issue. We also made a kind of igloo called a quinzhee, by laying a groundsheet over our piled-up rucksacks and shovelling snow on top, then tamping it down. The snow quickly froze into its new shape and after a couple of hours the roof was strong enough to stand on. We dragged the bags out through a hole and crawled inside. There was space for five or six people to escape the wind. Lying in the soft turquoise glow of the crazed ceiling, their bodies would soon warm the air. I opted to dig a snow hole to sleep in. The trick, Dylan said, was to start by digging a narrow trench and then broaden it out from below. Snow is a good building material and it was easy to carve a raised sleeping platform into one wall of my cave, so the cold air would settle lower down. There was just enough headroom to lie on an air mat, with an upside-down sledge as the roof. We built a wall of snow blocks too, to shelter the cooking area, and learned that it takes a long time to melt enough snow to make hot drinks and a meal. The effort involved was extraordinary and Dylan drove home the point that survival depends as much on staying positive as on what you decide to do.
In the snow cave that night, my breath froze into frost crystals. They hung from the ceiling like a thin coating of fur. Occasionally flakes floated down and tickled the tiny part of my face not covered by the sleeping bag. I thought about how we had unwound the antenna of the short-wave radio and adjusted its length for different frequencies. Voices had crackled to us from Korean fishing boats in the South Pacific. We had re-tuned and taken turns to call the US base at the South Pole. Scott’s expedition carried no portable radios on their march because none existed at the time. They could not transmit the news that at the pole they had found a Norwegian flag, nor could they call for help when they were pinned down by bad weather on their return journey, just 17km (less than 11 miles) short of their final depot. Dylan talked to us about this too, about what to do when conditions deteriorate: whether to turn back, or wait, or press on and, if you do decide to continue, how to reduce the risk by spending as little time exposed to it as possible.
Scott’s failure was in part because he had decided not to use dogs to pull the sledges, so his journey took much longer than Amundsen’s and his party had to drag more food and fuel behind them. Their bodies were not found until the next spring, frozen in their pyramidal tent out there on the ice. They are still there. Their comrades folded the tent over them and left it to be buried by the snow. Long ago they were incorporated into the Ross Ice Shelf, which is moving slowly towards the sea. In about 270 years they will reach the edge and then perhaps float away, entombed in an iceberg.
At Cape Washington we each have our own sleeping tents and we share three larger ones: the mess tent and one each to store the camera equipment and the dive gear. These three have gas heaters so, apart from when we sleep, they are the only places warm enough to take off our huge red coats. There is a drawback to heating tents that have a frozen floor: after a week they have all subsided, but moving them will be time-consuming because the guy ropes are not held down by pegs, which would easily pull out in a storm. Instead they are looped around horizontal lengths of bamboo, called ‘dead men’, buried deep in the snow. While the wind is still blowing, moving the tents will have to wait, so we put up with the sloping floors and when pools appear on the groundsheets we make snowballs and dip them in the puddles to absorb the water. We use the time to review the shots we have taken so far and to maintain the cameras. Didier mends his torn glove. The resupply flight was supposed to come today but we can’t see the sky and with such a strong wind blowing it has been postponed.
During Happy Camper we did an exercise to prove how dangerous a blizzard like this can be. We were told to search for someone who had gone outside and failed to return. Eight of us took part, wearing large white buckets over our heads to simulate what it’s like in a whiteout: we could see nothing but our own feet. We knew we must not risk losing anyone else so we paid out a rope from a fixed point and spaced ourselves evenly along it, then tried to walk to and fro in an arc, extending the rope each time a sweep found nothing, conscious that the clock was ticking. The lost person had not taken her coat – it was just a short walk to the toilet tent. Eventually someone tripped over her, lying in the snow. Dylan told us that most groups fail even to do that.
I have this in mind when I visit our own toilet tent at Cape Washington. We have marked the way with more of our little flags and I am glad of them today because after just a few strides the world ahead contains nothing but a small red triangle on a wire. There is no ground and no sky. It’s not dark, just maddeningly, uniformly white in every direction. Without shadows to give them depth, I trip over snowdrifts and stumble into pits, with that jarring feeling of coming downstairs in the dark and miscounting the steps. It’s hard even to stand upright, as though gravity has lurched sideways. Reaching the loo is a relief in more ways than one.
For three days the snow has fallen continuously, in flakes half the size of my thumb, and it now lies waist-deep around the tents. There has not been so much snowfall here in twenty years: the air is usually too cold to carry enough moisture. We dig paths between the tents and shake them so they will not be buried. Of course, there is no possibility of going to the ice edge while it’s like this and even the penguins have left the camp. They cannot walk or slide through the drifts. The waiting is using up our precious filming time but there is one bonus of being stuck on the frozen sea: when I lie down in my tent, unearthly sounds filter up through the ice: a reminder that there is something underneath and it isn’t land. Straining to hear them is like tuning the radio and finding alien signals there among the static: electronic-sounding chirps and tones, smoothly rising and falling, long notes held and sustained. They are sounds from another world: the songs of Weddell seals. These are the only seals to swim so far under the ice. They keep their breathing holes open by rasping the sides with their teeth. The males defend them against others because the holes are not just precious for access to the air: female seals will also climb through them to give birth, after which they’ll mate. The songs I can hear are made by males declaring their presence to each other and keeping their rivals away, trilling in their odd dark world as they pass below us like submarines.
At last the wind has dropped and quiet returns. Every footstep is transmitted through the hardening snow and into my tent. Creak, creak, creak: the penguins are coming back. Creak, creak … twang (they have no
concept of guy ropes).
We have missed their company. When we are inside the tents the emperors stand beside the most penguin-like objects they can find, the divers’ white air tanks. They are gentle birds and good company but you wouldn’t want one in your tent: their farts are terrible. Outside they go everywhere with us: they watch us brushing our teeth, they trudge with us to the loo tent and wait there, beside the drums labelled Human Waste.
Early expeditions dug pits in the snow, as dumping places. It’s said that in those less enlightened times, when the US South Pole Station needed a deeper trash pit, a bulldozer was brought by air all the way from New Zealand. There was too little fuel for the aircraft to land and take off again, so it was pushed out as the plane flew by, to parachute down. As the chutes were too small to work unaided, retro-rockets were supposed to fire at the last minute and slow its descent, but they didn’t go off and the bulldozer smashed into the ice, at once excavating a new pit and becoming its first piece of junk.
Since those days an international treaty has put strict limits on what can be brought here and left behind, so when we leave Cape Washington we will take everything back with us to McMurdo, including the waste drums. At the end of the season they will go onward by ship to San Diego, with all the other rubbish from the base. There will be plenty of it because McMurdo Station is the size of a small town. It has a hospital, a library and even a fire truck. Its inhabitants have formed several bands, one of which has the curious name of Porn Spill, to commemorate something that happened when the annual resupply ship was being unloaded in the US. That year an amnesty had been declared, to purge McMurdo of any pornographic magazines that had accumulated there. They filled a large container and it was duly taken to California. As it was being swung ashore a cable broke and several tons of porn spilled spectacularly onto the dock.
Next morning the storm has passed, the sky is blue to the horizon and everything is covered in fresh snow. The view inland is spectacular. On every surface tiny ice crystals splinter the light, each beaming a fraction of the sun’s spectrum. When I move my head they blink in different colours. During the blizzard it felt as though the beauty of this place would be broken, but instead the wind has sculpted the snow into crescent-shaped dunes with intricate patterns on their surfaces. Warmth is the only thing capable of destroying what is here, including the sea ice. While we have been sheltering in our tents the days have grown slightly longer and a little less cold.
We stand with the penguins, listening for the plane. It is six days late now but we know it has taken off, bringing Dylan to take Steve’s place and Martha to replace Leah. There will be some extra food as well as the camera equipment I need to film the penguins in extreme slow motion. Didier and I have already been slowing them down but the best we can manage with our cameras is 150 frames a second, which plays back six times slower than normal. The new camera was designed for filming artillery shells leaving gun barrels and seat-belt tests in dummy car crashes, and it has another great advantage for filming leaping penguins: it stores every frame in a memory cache, endlessly looping, so it has an ‘end trigger’: jargon meaning that I don’t need to press the record button until after the action has happened, although I will still need to predict where to frame and focus the lens. This camera was never meant to be used outside or at such low temperatures and we are not certain it will work here at all.
On Dylan’s first journey to the ice edge we push a bamboo pole into the growing crack by the last iceberg. It is now about two feet wide. The pole goes straight into the sea. There’s a breeze blowing from inland and he suggests that we should pause to discuss whether to go on. We all need to be happy with the decision. Chadden mentions the principle used by cave divers, who agree in advance that any member of the team can say at any time that they want to go back, without giving a reason.
Didier interrupts: ‘I tell you about us cave diving,’ he says. ‘I was diving in a cave, we are hundreds of metres underground, in water as clear as glass, and then what happens? Earthquake! Suddenly the visibility is zero. There is just our one little line to guide us back.’ He holds up his thumb and forefinger, almost touching, to show us the thin thread on which their lives depended. ‘If it breaks we all are dead. It was every man for himself.’
There is silence while we digest this. Maybe the cave diving model isn’t the best one after all.
Dylan reminds us that we can limit the risk by reducing how long we spend out there. As we climb back onto the skidoos and set out to find our ice road, I think about how long it would take me to pack away the slow-motion camera if we have to leave in a hurry.
All our flags have been buried but we can remember the twists and turns and it seems the penguins can too. Reassuringly, we pass quite a few in the half hour it takes us to reach the holes. They would be the first to tell us that the ice has broken: if they could jump into the sea beside the last iceberg we would soon find ourselves alone.
Dylan spins the drill. At McMurdo he taught us how to test the thickness of the ice, using an electric drill with the longest bit I have ever seen. It towered over us and took several minutes to reach liquid water, two metres down. We have brought a hand augur to save weight but it’s all we need to show that the ice by the penguins’ holes is only as thick as the width of my palm. It’s enough to support a person and perhaps even a skidoo, because its weight would be spread across its large track, but we know it would be foolish for all of us to stand in one place with a pile of heavy equipment. And then there’s the effect of the wind and the sun on the ice.
‘If we got more wind from any direction it would break that up real quick,’ says Dylan. ‘While it’s been cloudy the ice will have been getting much warmer. Long-wave radiation comes in through clouds and the ice absorbs it. Short-wave radiation gets reflected back, but it can’t escape the clouds, so that warms things up too. There’s way more heat going into the ice when it’s cloudy than when it’s sunny … If it feels slushy where it felt crunchy the other day, that’s something to bear in mind.’
I have spread the parts of the slow-motion camera kit around me on the ice and I’m connecting it together with cables. It’s like setting up a computer outdoors, while curious penguins look over my shoulder: ‘System Set – Select,’ beep, ‘Segment Size – 100,’ beep, ‘Knee – On,’ beep, ‘Luminance – Normal,’ beep: on and on through the menus until the most important one: ‘Frame Rate – 750.’ Seven hundred and fifty frames a second – that’s thirty times slowed down. At last it’s time to point the camera at something moving fast.
Before long a group of penguins surfaces in the furthest hole, gasping for breath just as they did before. I have focused on the closest hole, where I think they might leap out. The camera is primed and I remind myself that I must not press the trigger as soon as I see them, but afterwards, which goes against every instinct. They dive and almost immediately shoot out of the water in front of me, slamming down on the ice and skidding in all directions. I am so close to the hole that one penguin slides between the tripod legs and others drag the camera’s cables with them. The birds are gone in a blink and I jab the button to save the recording. At such a high frame rate there’s only a moment to do this and it’s impossible to know whether I have recorded anything worthwhile.
Playback takes some time and when the shot first appears it shows nothing but a calm patch of water reflecting some ice. The reflected image deforms a little. Something is coming: a sharp bill rises to pierce the surface, like Excalibur leaving the lake, followed by the crown of the emperor’s head and then its eye. A film of water clings to its body, flowing smoothly down half its length as if it were a gleaming second skin, perfectly reflecting the sun. When its flippers meet this water-skin they shatter it to atoms. The whole penguin passes through the frame and leaves, trailing water. It is breathtaking to watch. Over the next few hours I frame the penguins from many angles as they leap and crashland. My favourite shot shows one flying clear of the ice as high as my head, scatteri
ng drops like sprays of diamonds in the intense light.
Didier is delighted with the shots from his diving too and, now he is out and getting dry, Chadden decides to take a risk that would not have worked while Didier was filming close to the holes. The slow-motion camera has an underwater housing. It was designed for a single use in the tropics and, apart from one dunk in a bath to test its seals, it has not been used since. It has never been tried in the cold. If it works, the pictures could be extraordinary, but if it doesn’t, and the camera floods with salt water, there will be nothing we can do to fix it. Once it’s in the housing it becomes even more troublesome to use. There is no way to attach a viewfinder so we have to lower the camera into the water on a pole and look at the picture on a screen, huddled under a coat to avoid the glare. To set the focus and exposure we have to haul the pole back up, unbolt the housing and dry it meticulously, before taking the camera out to make the adjustments, and then repeat the process in reverse. We do this several times until it is set correctly. Finally, the camera is underwater and facing almost directly downwards, where the light rays dance, but now the weather is deteriorating. The wind is still blowing directly offshore and it’s strengthening. A pure white snow petrel glides across the expanding area of grey sea. Antarctic sailors say these birds are a sign of an impending storm. Ice is blowing away from the edge and we must leave. I am about to pull the camera out when a penguin shoots through the frame. It is gone in a flash but I press the button anyway. We haul the camera up and pack it as quickly as we can. As we reach the last iceberg, Cape Washington disappears into the lowering cloud.
The Shark and the Albatross Page 24
