Four Men Who Work in Antarctica

The Ross Ice Shelf is pocked with deep crevasses where the ice meets the rocky shore of Ross Island.

Andrew G. Fountain, professor of geology and geography, Portland State University

Vice: How did you end up working in a frozen wasteland for weeks at a time?

Andrew:

During junior high school this guy from the State University of New York in Albany gave a lecture about cloud seeding and that led to my interest in ice crystals. I never looked back from there. I started studying cloud physics, specifically ice-crystal formations. While searching for a job I ended up in the field of glaciology, which wasn’t what I was really interested in, but hey, a job’s a job. Then it ended up being my niche. Antarctica has some of the most unique and massive glaciers, so it’s a great place for my kind of research. I’ve visited over ten times now.

Most of your field research takes place in the McMurdo Dry Valleys. Terrestrially, it is considered the closest thing to Mars on Earth. What’s going on there?

Dry valleys are not covered by ice, and McMurdo is one of the only ice-free places on the continent. The ice sheet is blocked by the Transantarctic Mountains, and the valley itself is composed of sandy gravel. It’s essentially the last functioning terrestrial ecosystem in Antarctica and it’s microbially dominated, meaning it has more plants than animals. What we’re interested in is how climatic variations affect the function of this ecosystem. Because it’s at a very elemental level, it helps our understanding of Earth’s early ecosystems and also ecosystems that exist or perhaps once existed on planets like Mars. Melting glaciers supply the only water to the region for a couple months in the summer. It’s my role to monitor how the glaciers are changing, and that informs us of climate change.

A seal carcass decomposes slowly in the subfreezing Antarctic environment.

McMurdo Station is the largest Antarctic research facility and has been used as a backdrop in a lot of science-fiction stories. It seems like a pretty wacky place to live, even for a short time.

Arriving there is like being on a mission in a sci-fi movie or novel where the spacecraft lands and you get in a moon vehicle that takes you to the space station, but instead you land in an aircraft and then it’s an hour bus ride to the station where you get carted around in these giant-wheeled vehicles. The station itself reminds me of an Alaskan village. There are a lot of huts and electricity poles are up all over the place because of the permafrost. It has a very industrial feel.

How about downtime? Is there any place to kick up your feet?

We have Armed Forces TV and Radio. Then there are three bars: a bar for smokers, a kind of typical, noisy bar with a foosball table and shuffleboard, and a place we call the Coffee House where you can play chess and checkers and catch up with people over a glass of wine.

Science writer Hugh Powell prepares a dispatch from a snow cave.

Chris Linder, photographer, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Vice: And why are you freezing your balls off in an unpopulated ice desert?

Chris:

I started out in science but I’ve always run my own photography business. My fieldwork and photography kind of came together in March of 2007 when I wrote a proposal to join five different polar expeditions with the intentions of doing some embedded journalism. So far I’ve been to the North Pole, the Arctic Ocean, Greenland, and Antarctica. It was my first time anywhere near the South Pole. The main components are a website that documents our travels and talks at museums via a satellite feed. A moderator feeds questions to us from a live audience.

What kind of research were you documenting in the Antarctic?

We decided to divide our time between monitoring an Adélie penguin population and some oceanographic research on relic lava flows. They’ve been studying these penguins for many years and recently the lead investigator, David Ainley, has been using the birds as a measure of Antarctic animals’ responses to climate change. In the lava project they measured how long it’s been since the solidified lava was buried under a glacier. This also has a link to climate in terms of being able to figure out how long rock has been exposed and when the glacier was here and when it was not.

How’s the grub down there?

In the field it’s basically camping food. You rely heavily on stuff that’s easy to make. In some places we had to melt our water from super-frozen snow. It can get really tedious. There’s a lot of pasta because it’s easy but there are also things like frozen fish fillets. I’ll never forget the scallops because they leaked in our coolers and everything stunk for the rest of the week. They shipped Cadbury candy bars from New Zealand and I ate two or three of those a day. You actually end up losing weight by the end of the trip because you burn so many calories to stay warm. And fresh stuff is in short supply. Vegetables are at a premium, but you could get them if you knew the right people.

Anything really weird or spooky happen to you during the trip?

Everything is perfectly preserved so when you come upon a seal carcass from a hundred years ago it doesn’t look all that different from its original state. The dead penguins littering the colony are still all intact. Then there are things like Ernest Shackleton’s hut, where there’s canned food and shoes stuffed with straw in relatively perfect condition. It’s kind of like being stuck in time.

A geology team from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution prepares for a day in the field.

Gifford Wong, helicopter technician

Vice: What brought you to the great white abandon?

Gifford:

In ’97 I was working in Denver for AmeriCorps and I saw an advertisement for a program in Antarctica. Right away I knew it was something I needed to do when I had a free winter, so I applied and kind of forgot about it until the interview. I was lucky enough to land a gig as one of the general assistants for operations. They hire about nine or ten assistants each year who are basically the muscle for McMurdo station. One day you might help the waste department sort through recyclables and the next day you’ll be with the science group helping them bag and tag 550-pound seals. It was a totally awesome job and I thought it was a cool place, so I’ve been back six of the seven last austral summers.

Do people ever get so fed up with all the isolation and perpetual daylight and bleached landscape that they just flip out and party for days on end?

I’m not a big partier so I can only say what I’ve heard. There’s one building where the work group is known to be very fun and outgoing, so they always have parties. They go on till at least 2 or 3 AM. It doesn’t get too outrageously raunchy or anything, but there’s a lot of loud music and lots of dancing. This particular place always has costume parties, and it’s amazing how quickly that costume box is gravitated toward. Antarctica, as you may or may not know, has a long history of cross-dressing.

Holy shit. Are you kidding?

No. A lot of the original explorers were British, so they would bring down “culture,” if you will. They put on some Shakespeare plays and, being that they were all men, the guys playing the female roles had to dress the part. Since then it’s become historically Antarctic. Everyone laughs when you’re at a dance party because it’s like, “What is it about Antarctica that makes all the men dress up in skirts and leopard-print pullovers and prom dresses that are way too small?”

There are rumors that everyone in Antarctica fucks each other all the time out of sheer boredom. Any truth to that?

Some. People are social animals by instinct and that can sometimes lead to social pairings that you may not normally see in the real world. It’s like summer camp, so in that regard it can be rather innocent. There aren’t as many females there so I’ve had some friends who are girls say it was the first place they’ve ever had so much attention. Some people can grow from it and take advantage of it, and some people let it go to their heads and maybe become a little off-centered until they hit the real world again. But I do know a lot of people who have come off the ice and ended up getting married.

Air Force personnel and Antarctica scientists pass the time on the five-hour flight from New Zealand to McMurdo Station.

Colonel Gary James, operations commander, Air National Guard—109th Airlift Wing

Vice: You’re a pilot who specializes in flying giant planes into and out of barren tundra.

Gary:

I’ve been flying C-130 Hercules aircrafts for about 20 years, but around 2000 I elected to get out of active duty and joined the 109th as a technician. I was stationed up in Alaska for six years and intermittently airlifted supplies to Antarctica. The mission in Alaska was to support the army infantry division at Fort Richardson and also to support all the early-warning radar sites that were spread throughout Alaska. Most of those sites have been closed and now the pilots of the 109th are the sole operators of the ski-equipped Hercules airplanes. The reason we have these planes is to support the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic- exploration missions.

So there are no proper runways in Antarctica?

Not in the traditional sense. It’s so cold that if there were paved runways you’d have to deal with all the breakups and cracks as the permafrost beneath it melts and sinks when the temperature changes. For the first half of the season we normally operate off the sea ice. It’s a lot less expensive to maintain and as it degrades you just land on the permanent ice shelf using ski equipment.

A C-17 delivers fresh researchers and supplies to McMurdo.

What kind of cargo do you transport?

The South Pole is getting an entirely new station and every piece of equipment that’s used in its construction was designed to fit in the back of our airplanes. We’ve brought in telescopes and research gear; in fact, we’ve flown in the construction supplies for almost everything built in Antarctica in recent times. Three years ago they traversed some fuel to the South Pole, but that was first land traverse of anything since the 1900s when they were trying to set up an outpost. The Russians do something like that at Vostok Station. It’s a very old and unsanitary facility that looks like a junkyard. In the ten years that I’ve been going to Antarctica there have been two outbreaks of tuberculosis there. The reason the Russians are still there is that they’ve been trying to figure out how to tap into Lake Vostok, a freshwater lake underneath the ice, without contaminating it.

Are the Russians the laughing stock of Antarctica?

I wouldn’t say that—the Russian camps just don’t have any money. When we pull guys out of Vostok they’ve been there for at least a year and they look very gruesome. I don’t know how to put it delicately, but there’s a difference in the programs from the United States, where things are done the right way, and the Russian programs which are run on shoestring budgets with not a lot of thought about what’s going to happen ten years from now.