Jules Uberuaga was another of the pioneers. A diminutive dark-haired firebrand, she stands all of five feet two inches and drives the heavy equipment, the big macho snow dozers used to build the runways and dig out trenches and level platforms. You might run into her in one of the bars; if you ask her nicely (and flirt with her a little) she might offer to take you for a ride in her beloved D7, a massive snow dozer that she has dubbed Trixie.
She will explain the best way to flatten a skiway, or dig out a building that is buried in snow without getting stuck yourself. She talks of the need to have a ‘bubble in your ass’—an instinctive sense for when a surface is level. She will coach you in the subtle variations in angle and blade that will generate a neat roll of snow barrelling in front of you. And if you can maintain the roll without letting it break for the distance Jules sets, she will take a picture of you, standing in triumph on top of Trixie’s roof.
Jules first came down here in 1979 when she was just twenty-four. There were few women in the programme and none driving heavy machines. One of her early jobs, out on the sea ice maintaining the airstrips, was immediately threatened when she was told that she couldn’t use any of the men’s bathrooms, which is to say she couldn’t use any of the bathrooms. She was only saved when the servicemen let her use the facilities in their medical centre.
In her thirty-plus seasons she has heard everything you can imagine about why women shouldn’t be in Antarctica in general and in a D7 in particular. But just as with Sarah, for all the men who protested there were always plenty of others ready to help her fight her corner. When she told one supervisor he was a ‘fucking asshole’ and asked if what he really wanted was to hit her, he screamed in fury: ‘Did you call me an asshole?’ ‘Yes!’ She shouted back. ‘Well,’ he replied, ‘it’s about time someone did!’
Now Jules is a veteran, as essential to McMurdo as the buildings and the furniture. ‘I bet I’ve pushed more snow than any woman in the world,’ she says, not in a boastful spirit, but as a simple matter of fact. Like the forams she has thrived in a world that looked well above her weight; and you sense when you speak to her that she has survived in part by building herself a protective outer shell.
The rest of the people here have also found their own adaptations to this strange way of living. They wear intricately crafted zipper pulls or carefully sculpted beards. They make spoof videos of classic sci-fi movies, or songs from The Muppet Show, exchange complex salutes, sit in the galley or the coffee shop arguing fiercely about Nietzsche or about game show hosts. Relationships form quickly and can break just as quickly. Some of the contract workers here have ‘ice husbands’ or ‘ice wives’, couplings that seem no less committed for the fact that they only exist when both partners are down here together. Even though the station has twenty-four-hour internet access, the outside world barely interferes.
The world of Antarctica, however, can make itself felt even for those who rarely get the chance to leave town. With regulation gear, the cold isn’t so hard to deal with. But once in a while the winds will whip up into a ‘condition i’ storm, in which visibility is zero and it’s dangerous even to feel your way the few metres from one building to the next. During a condition i all outside travel is forbidden, and wherever you happen to be is where you have to stay. ‘Hurry up and wait’ people say to each other, with a shrug, wherever they are trapped. They will break out the playing cards, switch on the stove, and start one of the ubiquitous coffee machines.
This applies even more during the winter, when the permanent darkness falls, and the winds rise, and the cold gets into your bones. If winter storms sweep into town, you stay where you are. And if you’re outside, you’d better be near a shelter.
The animals near here have learned this, especially the true Antarcticans, the ones that don’t leave for the north no matter how bad things get. When winter approaches, Antarctica’s Weddell seals stay in the water, trapped under an ice lid that can be metres thick, gnawing holes that are more like tunnels to enable them to breathe, spending months on end swimming, feeding and resting down there in the darkness, sheltered by the freezing water from the even harsher outside.
Nobody has ever seen these seals during the winter; the best clues for how they make their living come only in summer, when the females at least haul out to give birth, and moult and prepare again for the coming ordeal.
The sky was enormous, flecked with clouds that pointed like an arrow all the way to the horizon. Between them was bright blue sky and sunshine, a glorious day. I was driving one of my favourite Antarctic vehicles—a ‘Mattrack’—which would be a perfectly normal red pick-up truck except for the triangular wheels. They made me laugh. From a distance it looked impossible, as if the wheels themselves should clunk awkwardly round. It was only when you were close that you noticed they were actually individual caterpillar treads, their triangular shape ensuring the best possible grip on the slippery sea ice.
The pace was faster than walking but not by much. I wound down my window, the better to see the view. The air that crept in was sharp but not unpleasant; the temperature couldn’t be far below freezing and already I’d stripped off my parka.
A set of sea ice ‘roads’ branched away from McMurdo like a family tree. All were bright white, scored with skidoo or caterpillar tracks, and flanked on the right with a long row of flags, most red, a few green, fluttering from bamboo poles every few metres. The flags looked absurd, like overkill. Why did we need so many? But I knew that Ross Island could deliver a storm with a quick, casual sideswipe that would turn this big bright view into snow and confusion.
The weather forecast looked good but before being allowed to come I had to learn exactly what sized cracks I could safely cross, and how to pitch an emergency tent, in the lee of the vehicle, using ice screws that take painfully long to twist into the hard grey sea ice. I was also forbidden to travel alone, so beside me in the passenger seat was Mike from the heavy shop, whose name was next on the list of contenders to get out of town free, and who was quietly pleased at the outing.
We were going to meet Bob Garrott, a researcher from Montana State University who I ran into in the Crary Lab on his way out to the field. Bob worked at several different Weddell seal colonies, but he said we’d find him today at Turk’s Head, the big blunt end of a rocky cape that juts out into the sea ice just beyond the Erebus Ice Tongue.
He’d already told me that right now, in early November, was the perfect time to study Weddells, because this was more or less the only time any of them came up out of the sea. Even so, we were unlikely to see males since they would only usually be on the surface when they had just lost a serious fight for underwater territory. But the females had to emerge to give birth, and we were entering prime pupping season.
Bob had also told me why he was so interested in Weddells. ‘When animals are on the edge, stressed out, they come up with the most interesting survival strategies. I’m intrigued by the places and times where they have to go to the greatest lengths.’
Every so often, we saw a seal in the distance. They looked like slugs, fat and dark and lying utterly still. One advantage of the long American presence at McMurdo was that researchers had been studying and tagging the seals around here for nearly forty years. Any Weddell that you saw here was almost certain to bear a bright yellow or blue tag on its flipper. It could be jarring to see this overt sign of the presence of humans among animals that ought to be wild. But the tagging neither hurt the seals nor impeded them in their swimming, and it provided a spectacular database to trace how the most southerly mammal on Earth could make a living in a place that should surely be out of bounds to warm-blooded animals.
We parked the Mattrack and Bob came over to greet us. He led us off towards the colony, probing every so often with an ice axe. ‘Whenever you’re working around seals there will be cracks,’ he said. ‘Be careful and step where I step.’
As we walked, Bob explained that he was working now on population dynamics—how the seals live
d and what sort of trade-offs they needed to make. All the other Antarctic seals live much farther north, in the pack ice, where stretches of open water form daily and air is easily had. Weddells are the only marine mammals to live in fast ice—where the sea covering is thick and there are very few breaks—and they have to go to considerable lengths to achieve this. It’s hard being an air-breathing mammal in a place where air is scarce. They have developed special hinges on their jaws so they can open their mouths extraordinarily wide; with their inclined upper incisors they gnaw at the ice to keep breathing holes open throughout the winter. And they can hold their breath for up to an hour and a half before they have to find a hole, trumpet a warning that anyone else using it should get out of the way, and then surge upwards for that first fresh gasp of air.
Why should they go to so much trouble? Bob thinks it is so they can exploit scarce resources with much less competition. No other mammals are down here hunting the fish. And, perhaps more importantly, nobody else is on the hunt for seal pups. Up in the pack ice, killer whales and leopard seals prowl, but neither of these can live down here.
By avoiding these predators, seal pups have an unusually high survival rate compared to other similar creatures. But even so, only one in five of them will make it. Bob is interested in the details of this stark number. Who has a better chance than whom? What does it take to get ahead of the pack in the survival stakes?
Now we were walking among the colony proper, and Bob’s colleague Mark Johnston came over to say hello. He saw me staring at two dead pups. They were pathetic scraps, one with its face planted in the snow, the other, even thinner, bent at an awkward right angle. ‘That’s part of the eighty per cent mortality right there,’ he said. ‘That little skinny one starved to death. It took about six days before he finally succumbed. It was sad. You wanted to do something like take him back to the hut and put him in a sleeping bag.’
I found this heartbreaking, but my head told me that even if they want to intervene, even if they could do something to save one of these creatures (which in the case of the pups was doubtful), they couldn’t afford to. Bob and his team were studying what made the difference between life and death out here and any interference would hopelessly skew their results.
Their current study involved weighing both mothers and pups to see what effect their body size had on their chances of survival. They had brought in a weighing sled, towed behind a skidoo, and they were about to approach the first customer of the day.
Bob beckoned me over to where a seal was lying on its stomach. Just beyond was a pup so new to the world that its umbilical cord was still attached. It was a soft brown colour, small and slender against the inflated grey bulk of its mother. There were streaks of blood on the snow from the birth, and remnants of a placenta. Large seabirds were hovering nearby, waiting for the opportunity to scavenge this bounty.
As we approached, the pup moved nervously towards its mother, curling into her like a comma. A couple of researchers came up behind it and grabbed it with ropes. The pup looked tiny and fragile, and at first I couldn’t understand why two of them were having such trouble dragging it over to the weighing sled. But when someone called out the reading I discovered to my astonishment that already it weighed half as much as I do. The mother followed, heaving her bulk clumsily over the ice, lurching on her flippers. She was calling like a wookie, her wails echoing off the cliffs. The pup’s replies sounded distressingly like those of a crying baby.
And yet, the mother climbed cheerfully enough on to the sled to join her pup and someone called out the reading: she weighed more than a thousand pounds. Then mother and pup clambered off and lay placidly on the ice, just a few feet from the sled. It was astonishing. These gargantuan beasts had no land predators so they had no evolutionary reason to be stressed when they were up here on the ice. And that seemed to be enough to wipe out any memory of what seemed so anguished a moment ago.
But, then, I shouldn’t be so quick to interpret the sounds Weddells make. They have twenty different vocalisations—everything from a chugging truck noise to high-pitched chittering. I have heard recordings of whistles, booms, gulps and chirrups. They emit alien whooshing electronica, sounds that shouldn’t rightly come from any animal, let alone a furry one.9 Bob told me that you could hear these sounds in the camp outhouse, resonating eerily up through the hole in the ice.
As he spoke, I was trying to take notes but my pen was giving me trouble. I scribbled irritatedly, wondering why it had so abruptly run out of ink. Mark glanced over. ‘You’re not using a pen are you?’ he said incredulously. ‘You can’t do that out here—the ink freezes! Here.’ He rummaged in his pocket and handed me a pencil. I noticed belatedly that the people noting down seal weights and dimensions were all using pencils. My issue gear was so warm, I’d forgotten that it was still sub-zero here.
Chastened, I left the team to their weighing and wandered off among the sparsely scattered colony. Near me, a seal abruptly poked her head through one of the two breathing holes, surrounded by slushy ice crystals. She blinked. Her eyes had a purplish bloom; they seemed to be all pupil, perhaps to help her hunt in the dark. Droplets of water dangled like beads on the ends of her whiskers. For a while she just hung there, inhaling deeply through her nostrils, holding her breath as if savouring the sensation, then releasing it with a snort. Each time she held her breath, I found myself holding mine, and then gasping on her behalf.
Suddenly she opened her mouth wide, called loudly, with a deep-throated ‘coo-ee’, disappeared from view, and then hauled out in a dramatic whoosh of water and slush. Even though she came out on the opposite side of the hole from me I leapt back in alarm and Bob looked over and laughed. ‘Wahay! That was a thousand-pound rocket!’ The call was to her pup, who responded by hurrying over and clamping to her invisible nipple like a limpet.
Bob told me that this urgent feeding process was the most important adaptation the Weddells had made to living down here, on the edge of survival. First the mothers store vast amounts of energy in their blubber—which is why they look so pumped up, as if their skin was ready to burst. Then they quickly dump an astonishing quantity of this into their pups. When they are nursing, even their blood is so full of fat it looks thick and creamy like a milk shake, and their milk itself is like warm wax. From just before birth to weaning, the mothers will lose nearly half their body weight in less than forty days. Bob pointed to a pregnant seal. ‘Right now she looks like a fuel bladder. After she’s pupped and weaned she’ll look like a long thin cigar.’ And the pups go the other way. They start at about seventy pounds, and within a month they will weigh five times as much.
The effectiveness of this process is crucial for survival. Pups are more likely to live through to weaning if they are born to a larger mother.10 And the heavier the pup when it is weaned, the more likely it is to survive to adulthood.11 I like this. Survival not of the fittest, so much as the fattest.
I also like the team’s other key finding. For clearing those two hurdles of first survival through to weaning, and then to maturity, it helps immensely to be born to an older mother. The svelte young things of maybe six, which have only just started to breed, turn out to be less effective at raising pups than the ones that have been around the block a fair few times. The researchers think this is because the older the mother is, the fatter she is likely to be and the more energy she can pump into her offspring. (The benefit disappears when the mothers get really old. In a reversal of middle-age spread, a twenty-two-year-old Weddell has such worn-down teeth from gnawing on years of sea ice that she is a less effective hunter, and hence tends to be less substantial than, say a fourteen-year-old.)12
The rest of the team was now struggling with a mother-pup pairing that didn’t want to play. They had managed to drag the pup over to the weighing sled as bait, but it was thrashing and wailing. The mother had humped her way over to the sled but refused to get on. She rolled over, buried her nose in the snow, arched her back and then tried to get out of
the way of the student blocking her path. Everyone was still and silent. Would she settle? No, she rolled away again. ‘She’s not going to do it. We’ll leave them be.’
They released the pup to rejoin its mother and, once again, they were now both as docile as ever, the drama apparently forgotten. Still it seemed like hard labour, and I could see that every data point was dearly won. I asked Bob why he was prepared to put in so much effort.
‘The best ecological insights come from living in the field and grunting around from day to day,’ he said. ‘You can use satellite images all you like but you don’t really learn things until you are watching them every day saying “why are they doing that?”
‘Most of the time on the ice they are just sleeping and nursing. But if you look at the same animals again and again you start to realise—that’s a good mom, that’s a bad one, that’s one’s mellow, that one’s psycho.
‘Sometimes if you look down a hole with a parka over your head to block the light you can see them below the ice, perfectly at home in water that’s at 28°F. I’m constantly amazed at how they survive in such a crazy environment that shouldn’t support life. And you know what? They don’t just survive there. They flourish.’
On the way back to town, I thought about those mothers urgently fattening up their pups against the coming winter, and how in spite of this four out of five of the pups would die. That McMurdo mantra may be said ironically but it was also true: this is a harsh continent. And I was beginning to feel that we humans, the newcomers, could learn a lot from the creatures that had spent thousands or even millions of years figuring out what adaptations it takes to flourish here.
Antarctica Page 4
