Antarctic Journal

I went to Siple Dome on November 8, aboard a Hercules, a plane with huge skis, so it can land on hardpacked snow. Inside the Herc are seats made of red nylong webbing. We all crouched down into them and huddled in our parkas, with earplugs to guard against the roar of the engines.

Siple Dome is out on the West Antarctic ice sheet, almost on the continent proper, across the Ross Ice shelf from Ross Island, in what is called West Antarctica. It was about two hours away.

Siple Dome camp itself is a collection of Korean war surplus jamesways, made of green canvas, and a large tent city of modern REI dome tents. The galley, the medical tent, a science lab and a recreation and shower area are all in the jameways, as well as some of the sleeping quarters. I stayed in a tent while I was out there. It was most enjoyable, even though I had to wear my little black ear band down over my eyes at night, and almost could not read in my tent at night because of the brightness--had to put on my shades!

The scientists out there are drilling ice cores. NSF has hired a company called PICO, which is famous for ice coring in the northern polar regions, to drill down here. Consequently, there is a good mix of harworking laborers as well as hard working science types at Siple Dome.

I helped shovel a lot. It seems science (being demystified for me down here) includes a lot of shoveling and a lot of hauling of cargo and a lot of counting. See, what happened was that last year they built a very eerie, deep, science fiction-type trench to store their ice cores in--underground, showing through blue light when you walk through, very cold and still and frozen. But it was not deep enough to keep the cores cold enough, for one, and two, part of the roof caved in over the winter. So before any work could start this year, they had to shovel off about nine feet of snow from the roof of the trench (this is a big trench. We are talking as big as two semi trucks here) and then they had to dig the thing ten feet deeper, cutting out blocks of ice with chain saws and piling them on huge sleds, called maudheims, that were yanked out of the trench by snomobile. I helped shovel and helped schlep blocks.

I also got to talk a lot with the two scientists who were there doing the ice core project--one of them was Kendrick Taylor, a very sweet, freckle-faced man with black hair and beard. We talked a lot about science, what his motivating question was. He said what motivated him to do this research was the realization he came to not long ago that climate change can occur in decades, not over millions of years. He is fascinated by this--how climate changes and why, and he thinks he can find out the answers to this in ice.

He took me out on a snowmobile picnic the second day I was there. We drove out (I got to drive my own snowmobile!) about 15 miles from camp, then drove off the flag line into the white horizon. I've never seen anything like this--white and flat for as far as the eye can see, and a huge dome of blue sky and clouds. I was...well, falling back on superlatives again...awed. Then he stopped and told me to go further, by myself, about two kilometers, and then turn off the sled and sit there, by myself. He knows something, this man, about writing, and being.

So I did. I drove off into the vast white--no markers, no nothing to tell me where I was. Just the slight curve of the earth at the horizon and the white and blue to show me where one ended and the other began. Then I shut off the engine and got off the snowmobile and stood there, then lay down in the snow. The snow was hard, so I didn't sink in. And the wind was blowing snow over me. After a while, after listening to it collect on me, after hearing it whisk past my ears, I looked up and I was nearly drifted over, in that short a time. It impressed upon me how quickly one could perish out there, with absolutely nothing but yourself to depend upon to make the landscape less harsh.

Kendrick would let me ask him questions for a while, then he'd ask me questions. What, he asked, was my motivating question. I enjoyed being asked that. I said what I was motivated by was a desire to know how people have made sense of landscape, historically, and how they do now. I am interested in the ways in which we bring landscape to life in our lives, through stories and experience.

We had one night when everyone cuddled up on beds in one of the jameways and we played instruments (everyone had to have their turn at the accordion) and read stories. I read half of Love of Life by Jack London, and finished it the next day in another jamesway, by request.

Coming home from Siple on November 20th, I got to ride in the cockpit of the C-130, just me and the pilots and copilots. They were very sweet and gave me all kinds of paraphernalia about their plane--patches and buttons and post cards. It was awesome coming home in the cockpit, being able to look at and name all the landmarks as we got closer and closer to McMurdo.

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