South Pole

by Elizabeth Leane

  Similar to other Antarctic stations, a hierarchy of ‘ice time’ prevails, in which a stay during winter is more impressive than a summer, and returning for multiple seasons is more impressive still. The South Pole trumps other locations on this scale:

  If you’ve done multiple winters, you haven’t been to Pole. If you’ve done a summer at Pole, you haven’t done a winter at Pole. If you’ve done a winter at Pole, you haven’t done multiple winters at Pole. And, finally, once you’ve done multiple winters at Pole, you are afraid to leave Antarctica because you’ll have to pay for food and look both ways before crossing the street.27

  There are a surprising number of people in the last category: in 2015 nine of the 45 winterovers had wintered before once or more, and two were in their eleventh winter.28

  Wintering staff are systematically vetted for suitability. Even if you have the necessary qualifications or experience, ongoing health problems can easily rule you out. Statistically speaking the South Pole is not a particularly dangerous place – there have been six deaths in the 50 years of settlement, three of which were extreme tourists: skydivers whose parachutes did not deploy. These figures, however, belie the challenging nature of the environment. Apart from the unthinkable cold, the elevation above sea level creates problems, with many newcomers suffering symptoms of altitude sickness and residents experiencing ongoing issues due to the lower levels of atmospheric oxygen. The long periods of daylight and darkness also have a physiological impact, and the dry air causes skin problems.29 Since planes cannot land during the winter months, any illnesses or accidents can only be treated by the one doctor present. All winterovers are given medical screenings, but emergencies nonetheless occur, most famously Nielsen’s self-diagnosis of breast cancer, which required her to take her own tissue samples and treat herself with chemotherapy drugs airdropped to the base, before being evacuated on an earlier (and hence riskier) than usual flight.

  The small, isolated, claustrophobic community and the dark, freezing winter also represent psychological challenges. The first group of winterovers were subject to ‘extensive psychological testing’ prior to selection, to exclude those with ‘claustrophobia or mental disorders’ and to gauge their ‘manly interests and qualities’. Siple asserts that Antarctic conditions reveal a person’s core characteristics: ‘Whatever a man was inherently would be intensified during the close-quarters winter night. A mean man would grow meaner; a kind man would grow kinder.’ While this is not self-evident – why should a person’s behaviour under extreme and highly artificial circumstances be considered their ‘true self’? – it voices a common maxim of Antarctic expeditioners. Having passed prior screening, the first eighteen wintering men were required to take repeated psychological questionnaires while at the Pole to supply data on isolated living. One divisive exercise, which asked them to list those in their community they disliked, giving reasons for their antipathy, created so much resistance that it was abandoned.30 More recent winterovers are also required to take psychological tests in advance. Nielsen writes that recruiters ‘were looking for people who were stable, easy to get along with, and intuitive … They wanted to weed out people with personality disorders, chronic complainers, the chronically depressed, substance abusers, and who knows what else.’31

  Antarctica’s dry, cold environment can make ordinary tasks more difficult.

  For psychologists, the small wintering community at the Pole provides a unique opportunity to study group dynamics. From the early years of the first station, researchers have examined the challenges ‘encountered by a collection of heterogeneous strangers in developing a distinct microculture adapted to this unusual human situation’.32 One study, conducted over three years in the 1990s, looked at the formation of different social patterns in successive wintering crews, noting that the least functional group had the strongest clique structure.33 Research on both group and individual psychology provides data that can be fed back into the selection processes for wintering personnel and also informs organizations such as NASA that are interested in the similarly confined and extreme conditions of space exploration.

  One significant change to the isolation of the South Polar community in recent years is the increase in communication with the world ‘back home’. Polies today have fairly regular access to email, Internet and phone – subject, admittedly, to the availability of communication satellites, which are far less accessible near the poles. Many maintain blogs outlining their Antarctic experiences and displaying their photographic efforts. Siple’s companions, relying on the occasional use of radio, had far fewer chances to unload frustrations and share problems with family and friends. Worrying about the men’s lack of ‘an emotional outlet’, Siple thought it wise to have a dog – Bravo, a young Alaskan Malamute born in Antarctica – stay with them over winter as a non-judgemental and discreet listener, although in the end the puppy bonded closely to a single man.34 Contemporary technology makes confidants far more readily available to Polies, although it also means that the demands and stresses of life at home can impinge on the supposedly isolated South Pole experience; for Nielsen, emails and Internet phones were a ‘mixed blessing’.35

  One aspect of wintering that has remained steady since the Pole was settled is the need for ritual and periodic celebration in order to punctuate otherwise depressingly homogenous periods of time and to provide events around which the community can cohere. Antarctic expeditioners have long recognized the wisdom of this: Douglas Mawson, leader of a group of men living on the coast of Antarctica in the winters of 1912 and 1913, recalled that ‘the mania for celebration became so great that reference was frequently made to the almanac. During one featureless interval, the anniversary of the First Lighting of London by Gas was observed with extraordinary éclat.’36 At the South Pole, where extremes of temperature and darkness are much more pronounced than at the continent’s edge, the need to incorporate ritualized festivity is even greater. Siple’s men celebrated the winter solstice – the midpoint of the long polar night – with a ‘gala celebration’ involving a candelabra constructed from pipe fittings, home-made firecrackers and champagne toasts.37 Other ‘holidays’ were declared for the monthly full moon, lunar eclipses and birthdays.

  The absence of trees does not stop South Pole personnel from celebrating Christmas.

  Over the following half-century the importance of rituals and celebrations to mark important points in the South Polar year has not abated. Midwinter continues to be a significant event in the polar calendar, marked by a series of established elements, such as (for a number of years) a special airdrop, with gifts from the previous winterovers; a lavish meal and new supplies; formal dress or costumes; elaborate menus and decorations; theatricals, concerts or dancing; greetings from other Antarctic bases and government dignitaries; and an ironic screening of the horror film The Shining (in which the caretaker of an isolated, snowed-in hotel runs amok with an axe). Another significant time is the farewelling of the summer personnel. John Carpenter’s Antarctic horror film The Thing is a favourite for marking the departure of the last plane, which leaves the winterovers, like the film’s doomed expeditioners, completely isolated. Far from horror, their response to abandonment is often euphoria, with space and resources now freed up, and the much-anticipated adventure of wintering finally begun. (Conversely, at the other end of the season, the arrival of incoming expeditioners – intruders into the insular community – can create tensions among ‘toasty’ winterovers.) More familiar significant dates are marked in specific ways at the Pole: on New Year’s Day, the placing of the new Geographic Pole marker; and at Christmas the annual ‘Race Around the World’, which takes competitors (most running or walking, some in vehicles) around a course – varying from year to year but usually around 3.2 km (2 miles) long – that passes through every time zone. Another well-known tradition is the ‘300 Club’: when the temperature drops below –73°C (–100°F), initiates clad in boots and little else sit in a +90°C (+200°F) sauna for as long as pos
sible before dashing outside, ideally to the Ceremonial Pole and back again. And in addition to these regularly repeated rituals, there are occasionally more official ceremonies: the first of several weddings at the South Pole took place in 1985.38

  Traditions, rituals and ceremonies provide the ever-changing South Polar community with a sense of stability and permanence. But despite the presence of veterans of numerous winters, is it ever really possible to put down ‘roots’ in the shifting icescape? With no one ever born or buried in the place, no families or children, no retired people, no planting of trees or gardens (with the exception of hydroponics) and all resources flown in from outside, has humanity really settled the South Pole? While humans have done their best to settle in – to establish an ongoing presence, construct sophisticated ways of making life tolerable and develop a relationship with place through tradition and ritual – they are, and for the foreseeable future will remain, sojourners at 90 degrees south.

  6 Highest, Coldest, Driest …?

  What kind of place, physically speaking, had humanity colonized when it began building the first scientific station at the South Pole? Any description of Antarctica’s physical conditions is inevitably drawn towards a familiar list of superlatives: it is famously the highest, coldest, driest continent, not to mention the iciest, windiest and emptiest. This cliché is difficult to avoid in descriptions of the Antarctic environment – especially when it comes to the South Pole, instinctively conceived as the most extreme point in this extreme continent. But how well do these adjectives really apply to the Pole?

  It is impossible, of course, to separate the natural environment of the Pole from the continent that surrounds it: an inconceivable 26.5 million cubic km (6.4 million cubic miles) of ice slowly sliding over bedrock. A good deal of this bedrock is below sea level, partly due to the immense weight of the ice. If the ice melted away, the bedrock would eventually spring up (a process called ‘isostatic rebound’), but some of it would still remain underwater. Beneath the ice are substantial subglacial lakes – more than 300 have been discovered thus far – with the largest, Lake Vostok, about twice the volume of Lake Victoria. The ice sheets sit on a layer of liquid water, created by the friction of the ice moving over rock, combined with geothermal energy.1 Attached to the ‘grounded’ ice are floating ice shelves, including the massive Ross and Ronne-Filchner shelves which make almost an extra million cubic kilometres of ice. The continent, ice shelves and islands included, has an area about 1.4 times that of the U.S.; less than half of 1 per cent is free of ice. Antarctica is divided into two regions by the aptly named Transantarctic mountain range, more than 3,200 km (2,000 miles) long: West Antarctica, which includes the Antarctic Peninsula; and the significantly higher, colder and larger East Antarctica. The Pole sits not far into East Antarctica, where the ice sheet slopes gradually up towards its high domes further into the interior.

  In H. P. Lovecraft’s novella At the Mountains of Madness (1936), a scientific expedition comes to grief while investigating an Antarctic range soaring up well above the height of Everest; reality, however, is more mundane. The Transantarctic Mountains are impressive, but nothing like the height of the Himalayas or the Andes. Antarctica’s highest peak, Mount Vinson, is found in another of the continent’s mountain ranges, the Ellsworth Mountains in West Antarctica, running perpendicular to the Transantarctics. (A third major chain runs along the Antarctic Peninsula.2) At around 4,900 m (16,000 ft), Mount Vinson is just a little higher than Mount Blanc. It is not the mountains but the height of the icecap itself that pushes Antarctica’s mean height – about 2,200 m (7,200 ft), excluding floating ice shelves – to more than twice that of the world’s continental average. The highest part of the ice sheet is Dome A, an elevated plain sitting at approximately 4,100 m (13,200 ft). The Pole, lying on the plateau’s sloping edge, is much lower, about 2,800 m (9,300 ft) above sea level.

  Illustration of a cross-section of Lake Vostok, the largest known subglacial lake.

  Peaks in the Transantarctic Mountains.

  Illustration of the aquatic system believed to be beneath the Antarctic ice sheet.

  High means cold: the Russian station Vostok, at around 3,500 m (11,500 ft) above sea level, has recorded the coldest air temperature in the continent and the world (−89.2°C/−128.6°F). Dome A, the site of the Chinese base Kunlun, has the unenviable honour of the lowest average temperature: slightly below −58°C (−72°F), about 5°C colder than Vostok’s average. It may soon take the lead for the absolute low now that a year-round weather station is in place. The Pole is milder by the standards of the plateau: – 49.4°C (−56.9°F) on average, with a record low of −82.8°C (−117°F) in 1982 and a high of −12.3°C (−9.9°F) in 2011.3 Much nearer the coast of the continent and on the Antarctic Peninsula highs can easily reach positive figures: 15°C (59°F) is the upper record. Of course, the plateau’s cold temperature is not only due to its height, but to the low angle of the sun’s rays and the reflection of sunlight off the ice – the same factors behind the cold temperatures of the Arctic. Another reason, besides height, that Antarctica is the colder of the two regions is its isolation: it lies a long way from any other continent and is surrounded by the cold circumpolar current.

  Aerial shot of the Transantarctic Mountains.

  Boiling water thrown into the air by a winterover flash-freezes at −68° C (−90° F).

  Cold, in turn, means dry. Very low temperatures, together with sinking air above, result in very low precipitation: around 13 cm (5 in.) a year on average for Antarctica, well under the 25-cm (10-in.) mark below which an environment, as a rule of thumb, is classed as a desert.4 The high inland areas of East Antarctica are even drier: just over three-quarters of an inch (2 cm) at Dome A, and around 7 cm (3 in.) at the Pole (snow accumulation can be higher or lower than actual precipitation in a particular place because of windblown snow).5 While there are particular regions on Earth that are far drier (for example, parts of the Atacama desert in South America – also a high place), no continent is so dry on average. Although it does rain in warmer coastal areas of the continent, most of the precipitation in the Antarctic interior takes the form of snow grains and ‘diamond dust’ – ice crystals falling from a clear sky. Since snow does not melt in the continent’s interior, after millions of years it builds up to create the stupendous ice sheets evident today.

  Frosted face at −62° C (−80° F).

  Only a contrarian would contest Antarctica’s claim to being the iciest place on Earth: the mean thickness of the ice (excluding the floating ice shelves) is around 2,100 m (7,000 ft). Intuitively you would think that the highest place would also boast the thickest ice, but this assumption ignores the shape of the bedrock beneath the ice, itself pushed down by the huge weight on top of it. At the Byrd Glacier in West Antarctica, it dips down to almost 2,900 m (9,500 ft) below sea level, whereas the Pole’s bedrock is close to sea level. Elsewhere, the bedrock is elevated, varying from around 950–2,450 m (3,100 to 8,000 ft) under Dome A, for example. This means that although this is the highest part of the ice sheet, it does not sit on the most ice: the layer under Dome A averages around 2,200 m (7,300 ft), considerably less than the ice underneath the Pole, although it rises to more than 3,000 m (10,000 ft) at its thickest, the site of Kunlun Station.6 The continent’s thickest ice can be found an impressive 4,776 m (15,669 ft) above the Astrolabe Subglacial Basin, a small wedge of East Antarctica claimed by France. The depth of ice, and the varied nature of the bedrock, means that topological features that would dominate other landscapes are entirely hidden: under the ice of East Antarctica lie the Gamburtsev Mountains, a range similar in size to the European Alps (hence the remarkably varied height of the bedrock under Dome A). Occasionally, peaks will jut out of the ice sheet – these are called ‘nunataks’, an Inuit term transplanted from the Arctic. Of course, continental ice is only one part of the story: Antarctica is also surrounded by sea ice, seasonally expanding and shrinking from around 2 million square km (770,000 square mi
les) in the southern hemisphere’s autumn to 15 million square km (5.8 million square miles) in the spring.7

  A helicopter is used to collect data on the sea ice below

  Wind speed is also determined by the continent’s topology. The strongest winds are the ‘katabatics’, formed when cold and therefore dense air flows off the plateau under the force of gravity and accelerates down the steep slopes near the coast. Douglas Mawson, leading an expedition based at Cape Denison on the coast of East Antarctica in the early twentieth century, believed he was at the ‘Home of the Blizzard’, and he was not wrong: Cape Denison is not just the windiest place in the Antarctic, it is the windiest on the planet, at surface level. During the two years Mawson stayed there, the average wind speed was around 71 kph (44 mph). The highest wind speed ever recorded on the continent, however, was a couple of hundred miles away at Dumont d’Urville Station: 327 kph (199 mph). Well over the speed required for a Category 5 hurricane, it is also the equal highest wind speed recorded in the world (the other was at Mount Washington in New Hampshire).8 The top wind speed at the Pole, sitting on only a slight slope in the continent’s interior, is 93 kph (58 mph); average wind speed is about 15 kph (9 mph), technically a gentle breeze.9

  Sea ice breaking up in Terra Nova Bay.

  Antarctica is the windiest of all Earth’s continents.