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South Pole

Page 12

by Elizabeth Leane


  United States presence at the South Pole Station demonstrates United States commitment to assert its rights in Antarctica, its basis of claim, and its commitment to conduct cutting edge scientific research there. Abandonment of the Station would create a vacuum and likely result in a scramble to occupy the site, to the detriment of our position as well as to the stability of the Treaty system.19

  In the same year, the Undersecretary of State in the Clinton administration, Tim Wirth, similarly maintained the political high ground while asserting a United States presence: ‘If we weren’t at the South Pole, there would be a mad scramble for territory … We’re the only country that can manage the logistics in that extraordinary place … We have to maintain this presence to maintain the continent’s neutrality.’20 In 1997 Congress approved President Clinton’s request to begin building a new station, solidifying U.S. occupation of the Pole. While scientists and tourists of many different nations visit the Pole, and many current research programmes based there are international collaborations, the station nonetheless functions as an ongoing demonstration of specific U.S. power. Its pivotal position, sitting in six claimed territories at once, although neutral from one perspective, is from another a blatant statement of the nation’s ‘right to go anywhere and everywhere’.21

  Greenpeace blockade an airstrip site at Durmont d’Urville, Antarctica.

  Contemporary political debates over the Antarctic, revolving around issues such as climate change and melting ice, potential extraction of mineral resources (currently banned by the Antarctic Treaty System), the intentions of new global powers such as China and India, and the impact of tourism, rarely explicitly involve the Geographic Pole, sitting on miles of ice in the interior of the continent. Occasionally, however, an event will set off a wave of interest about the prime position of the U.S. One trigger point was the construction of the ‘South Pole Traverse’, a compacted snow route for tractor convoys carrying materials and fuel from McMurdo Station to the Pole. The media quickly dubbed it a ‘road’ or even ‘super highway’. While most objections were environmental, there was a particular sense of umbrage at the U.S. riding roughshod (so to speak) over the pristine icescape. ‘Is this the beginning of the end for the last great wilderness?’ asked the Guardian newspaper on hearing of the proposal, relating a British adventurer’s experience of arriving at his destination to find a gift shop and ‘a large stars and stripes marking the fact that the U.S. now controls the south pole’.22

  The U.S. South Pole Station has a snow-packed skiway so that it can be serviced by ski-equipped planes such as this LC-130.

  The three other poles occupied in the IGY have seen diverse fates. Given the shifting nature of the Magnetic South Pole, the French station near there, Charcot, was a small, temporary affair: three men at a time occupied the base until it was abandoned at the end of the IGY. Another coastal French IGY station, Dumont d’Urville, became a permanent base. Vostok Station on the Geomagnetic South Pole – the most prominent of Russia’s five permanent Antarctic bases – has remained occupied. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, its future looked shaky; the base closed several times over winter due to an inability to provide fuel and resupplies and had to rely on U.S. emergency support to ensure the safety of personnel. ‘Russia no longer considers its Antarctic bases politically important’, reported the New York Times when Vostok was closed in the winter of 1994, although the Russian programme pointed to climatic conditions rather than lack of political commitment.23 While the ever-restless Geomagnetic South Pole has slipped away over the station’s half-century history and is now hundreds of miles away, the discovery of Lake Vostok – an enormous subglacial lake about 4 km (2.5 miles) beneath the base – has opened up an important area of research.

  For relatively new players on the Antarctic political stage, the prime symbolic position is unavailable. But, ironically, the politics of climate change have led to a change in ‘prestige locations’ in the Antarctic. Interest is now focusing on the vertical rather than the horizontal – drilling down into the ice, not travelling across it. For this reason, high points in the continent have become important places – something that has benefited Vostok’s scientific programme. The ‘humps’ in the ice plateau known as ‘domes’ are crucial – with the turn of the twenty-first century, domes seem to have become the new poles. Japan’s Dome Fuji Station (at Dome F) was established in 1995; a decade later, a joint French and Italian station, Concordia, was built on Dome C. Four years after that, China opened Kunlun Station (its third on the continent) on Dome A, the highest and probably coldest station on the continent – an impressive logistical achievement that reflects and reinforces China’s emergence as a political power, in Antarctica as in the rest of the globe.

  Stations high in Antarctica’s interior are ideal for glaciological, astronomical and atmospheric work. At Dome C, ice cores have been retrieved at a depth of 3,200 m (10,500 feet), revealing data from 800,000 years ago. At the higher Dome A, where snowfall is less and the ice reveals more data for the same depth, researchers are hoping to push back to 1.5 million years.24 Even here, despite the evident usefulness of such data for human knowledge of the planet’s history and ability to predict its future, it is hard not to sense political one-upmanship in the ‘race’ to see which nation or group of nations can dig deepest, peer back furthest.

  Map showing Antarctic stations and other facilities in 2014.

  Bust of Lenin atop the buried Russian station at the Pole of Inaccessibility, 2008.

  One of the most telling images of polar politics, and a reminder of the Cold War roots of the Antarctic Treaty, shows the fate of the Soviet IGY base Polyus Nedostupnosti (Pole of Inaccessibility), established at 82°s, 55°E. The meteorological station was inhabited for a couple of weeks in late 1958 before being abandoned to the elements.25 Unsurprisingly, it was considered too inaccessible for long-term habitation. Over the next half-century, it was visited very rarely, and when a private guided expedition arrived there in 2007, no one had reached the spot for almost two decades. The buildings, not unexpectedly, were covered by ice, but something remained poking up above it: approaching their destination, the adventurers saw a ‘black dot’ marking the white plateau, the only visible sign of the base. As they came closer, it resolved itself: it was a bust of Lenin.26

  9 Pictures of Nothingness

  In late 1956, when construction of the first South Pole station was about to get under way, a cartoon appeared in Parade, a widely read U.S. Sunday magazine: it showed a fur-clad expeditioner with a camera, against a uniformly white background shading into blank sky, instructing his subject, another fur-clad expeditioner: ‘Now let’s get one of you standing over there.’1 The cartoon neatly encapsulates the aesthetic problem facing the visual artist at the Pole, at least in the popular imagination: what is there to see?

  The continent’s coastal regions and ice-strewn waters, first encountered in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with their impressive icebergs, calving glaciers, plentiful animal life and rocky edges, fitted fairly readily into existing aesthetic approaches, whether these came out of a natural history tradition or the developing conventions of the Picturesque and the Sublime. George Forster, a naturalist on James Cook’s Antarctic circumnavigation in the late eighteenth century, drew on a proto-Romantic aesthetic in his single Antarctic image The Ice Islands, painted in gouache.2 However, the expedition artist, William Hodges, seems to have been underwhelmed, artistically at least, by his Antarctic encounter. While he produced the first paintings of the region – five watercolours – this was far fewer than he created on other legs of the journey, and none of them was later worked up as an oil: ‘One can only assume Hodges did not think the ice of the Antarctic Ocean was a suitable subject for a major painting.’3 Later sea voyages, such as those led by Charles Wilkes and James Clark Ross, generated artworks and illustrations in the naturalistic tradition, ‘bringing the Antarctic coast into the visual imagination of Western civilization w
ithout seriously challenging [established] techniques and without suggesting that Antarctica was, for the visual arts, anything unique’.4 Not all Antarctic art of this early period, however, was produced by those who had seen the continent: some of the best-known images of the region were the Gothic illustrations of an 1875 edition of Coleridge’s poem ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, created by the popular French artist Gustave Doré, whose ‘farthest south’ at this point was a tour of Spain.5

  Cartoon by David Huffine, Parade magazine, 1956.

  Since Cook’s time, fewer than 300 visual artists, according to one estimate, have visited Antarctica.6 They have produced a large and varied body of art, including painting and photography in a diverse range of traditions, installation art, sculpture and fine art objects in the form of jewellery, glass and porcelain. Whole books have been written on the topic, and numerous exhibitions held. Most Antarctic art, however, responds to its coastal regions, with more recent artworks engaging particularly with scientific data and climate change. The interior plateau poses its own set of challenges: first, as an artist, how to get there; second, how to work in its conditions; and third, how to develop an artistic language equipped to respond to – or perhaps to challenge stereotypes of – its scale and bareness.

  Kirsten Haydon, ice horizon brooch, 2012. Enamel, copper, photo transfer, reflector beads, silver, steel, 80 × 80 × 15 mm.

  For the first artist to reach the Pole, Scott’s trusted companion Edward Wilson, the first challenge was already moot (returning was the issue); the second he had come to terms with on an earlier, unsuccessful polar journey during the Discovery expedition; and the third would in one sense have been welcome. The problem was that the Pole – the goal of many weeks of struggle and suffering – was not, in fact, bare when Wilson arrived. He thus made sketches of his own forestalment: Amundsen’s black flag, first from a distance and then much closer; a cairn the Norwegian team had left; the tent they had left as a marker. These images joined many he had already made on the polar journey, and would continue to produce on his return. They were found in the polar party’s tent along with the men’s bodies, and a number are reproduced in the first edition of Scott’s journals. As the expedition zoologist, concerned with creating accurate records of his surrounds as much as aesthetic responses, Wilson was highly experienced at sketching in Antarctica. He knew its hazards: the low temperatures would freeze the watercolours he liked to paint in, not to mention exposed fingers, so sketches needed to be made in pencil and worked up later, ideally in the comparative comfort of a hut.7

  By Wilson’s time, not only an artist but a photographer was a common inclusion in Antarctic expeditions. Among the continents, Antarctica is unique in that its exploration took place alongside the development of photography and cinematography, meaning that the shots taken of the continent were not preceded by any prior artistic images, indigenous or imported. The oceanographic Challenger expedition (1872–6) captured the first photographs of Antarctic icebergs and a Dundee whaling expedition in 1892–3 took the first of Antarctic land.8 The earliest human settlement of the continent – the huts built by Carsten Borchgrevink’s Southern Cross expedition in 1899 – included a darkroom, and it was this expedition that took the first photograph on the continent: a British flag.9 Photographs had several uses: they served as records of achievements; encoded information about the topography and environment; provided a leisure activity for expeditioners, who sometimes brought their own cameras; and could be used in vital post-expedition publicity, such as newspapers and lectures. Ernest Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition (1907–9) included at least fifteen still cameras – cumbersome but high-quality ones that used glass plates and smaller, more portable ones that took advantage of the newer technology of roll-film.10 Shackleton – who had served as photographer on Scott’s first attempt at the Pole – brought one of the former, along with 36 plates, on his own sledging journey towards the Pole, and it was used to take a photograph of his ‘farthest south’.11 Like the artist, the Antarctic photographer faced numerous challenges in the environment, including the weather conditions, the long periods of darkness during winter, the reaction of the equipment to the cold, the need to wear only one pair of gloves to work the camera, and the long exposure times that required subjects to stay painfully still. These problems meant that photography did not automatically replace art in Antarctica as a means of visual record.12

  Edward Wilson’s sketch of Amundsen’s tent.

  Kirsten Haydon, ice structure brooch, 2011. Enamel, reclaimed steel, photo transfer, silver, 65 × 65 × 12 mm.

  Training and equipment from a prominent Norwegian photographer formed part of the preparations for Amundsen’s expedition, but in the end the official camera was damaged and the polar party had to rely on the personal camera belonging to Olav Bjaaland for its visual record of the journey.13 Thus as an image-maker as well as an explorer Wilson was forestalled – by a portable Kodak. On the southward journey Amundsen’s team ‘photographed each other in “picturesque attitudes”’, but the now iconic image shot by Bjaaland shows the team more reverential, hats off, side-on in a rough line beginning with their leader, looking up at their flag.14 This is ‘not merely a picture of someone somewhere’, writes Harald Østgaard Lund, who curates the picture collection at the National Library of Norway: ‘It is the ultimate mental image, the emblem of the proud, independent Norway, stamped, engraved, printed and reprinted again and again in books, magazines and films, on posters, postcards, stamps and packaging material.’ The original negative has disappeared, and many versions – some hand-coloured – exist, with ‘both the flag and Amundsen’s belly’ varying in slackness.15

  This Norwegian newspaper article from May 1912 boasts the first photographs from Amundsen’s expedition.

  Bjaaland’s photograph of the rest of Amundsen’s team at the South Pole. L–R: Amundsen, Hanssen, Hassel, Wisting.

  In the same place a month or so later, while Wilson sketched, Birdie Bowers took photographs, including shots of his companions ranged disconsolately around the same tent. Scott’s men seem dispersed and distracted. The British team took more formally posed shots next to their own flag – all five of them, standing in some versions and sitting in others; the string that Bowers pulled to trigger the shutter is just visible in some reproductions. Having received lessons earlier from the official expedition photographer (the first in Antarctica) Herbert Ponting, Scott himself took many of the photographs on other stages of the journey.16 Ponting was back at the base. He and his heavy equipment could not travel more than the first two days of the journey, and anyway, Scott had reassured him, there would not be much to photograph on the plateau except ‘boundless, featureless ice, with the long caravan stringing out towards the horizon’.17 As it turned out, despite Ponting’s fine photographic record of the expedition, the ‘selfies’ taken by the downcast men at the Pole have become its visual emblem.

  Bowers’s photograph of the rest of Scott’s party ranged around Amundsen’s tent. L–R: Scott, Oates, Wilson, Evans.

  Amundsen and Scott also brought cinematograph (moving film) cameras, as did other expedition leaders such as Shackleton, Charcot, Mawson, Shirase and even Borchgrevink in the very late nineteenth century. These cameras too could not come on polar journeys. For Amundsen, departing for the Pole, the last sign of civilization was the surreal sight of his endeavour being recorded for posterity: one of the men staying at the base turned the crank of the cinematograph, the machine disappearing below the horizon as the team passed over a ridge.18 Ponting had learned the new technology for Scott’s expedition, and showed numerous versions of the resulting film over his lifetime, to gradually diminishing audiences. His inability to capture the polar journey was significant: the narrative is marred by the gaping hole in its middle, which Ponting could fill only with pre-enactments, illustrations, maps, stills, intertitles and (in the last version) voice-overs. Frank Hurley, another important early Antarctic photographer and cinematographer, suffered a
similar problem when Shackleton’s attempt to cross the continent via the Pole (the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914–17) went awry before it even reached land. The dramatic footage of the ice-crushed Endurance sinking in the Weddell Sea was some consolation, but Hurley nonetheless appended some footage of animals on the sub-antarctic island of South Georgia, shot on a separate trip, to keep the crowds happy.

  This illustration from a Norwegian newspaper shows Amundsen lecturing to a large home crowd in September 1912, displaying images from his expedition.

  The Terra Nova expedition photographer Herbert Ponting with telephoto apparatus.

  These early images of Antarctica were produced at a time when the artistic world was in transition, moving away from established conventions of visual representation and towards the experimentation, formal abstraction and expression of internal states of mind characteristic of modernism. The seminal discussion of Antarctic art in Stephen Pyne’s The Ice emphasizes the irony that Antarctica’s ‘abstractions, minimalism, and abolished perspective’ failed to engage the modernist artists best equipped to handle these challenges. Modernists’ interest, Pyne notes, was focused elsewhere; additionally, there was the challenge of travelling to the plateau after the ‘Heroic Age’ had waned.19 Anyone wanting immediate experience at the Pole, whether artist or scientist, had to wait for several decades after Wilson had departed.

 

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