Thanksgiving on Ice

Happy Thanksgiving! For those of you sitting warm inside, watching football and smelling the turkey roasting I want you to send a warm thought to our friends on the ice who are not eating turkey. To give a glimpse of what Thanksgiving can be like on the ice, I'm offering up the first few paragraphs of Traci  McNamara's richly detailed essay from Antarctica: Life on the Ice. The woman in blue with the marvelous warm smile is Traci. Enjoy!

                We Ate No Turkey: A Holiday on Ice

Traci J. Macnamara

    Instead of spending Thanksgiving Day as I usually did in Colorado Springs—watching the Macy’s parade on TV in my pajamas--I was shivering in my work clothes on the McMurdo Ice Shelf, learning how to make a storm-worthy shelter by cutting dense snow into blocks with a paper-thin saw.  Snowcraft, as our mountain-savvy instructor called it, was only one portion of McMurdo Station, Antarctica’s two-day survival skills course optimistically called Happy Camper School. 

The course, required of all workers and scientists at McMurdo, started

on a Thursday morning in the Field Safety Training Program conference

room, where our instructor Brian led twelve first-timers to Antarctica

through the lecture portion of the course.  Novices, we were.  But it

was Brian’s job to get us into Extreme Cold Combat Shape in less than

forty-eight hours, and by the end of our tenure on the ice shelf, we

would be firing up stoves and lashing down mountain tents, all—of

course—with great rapidity in order to outsmart the gale-force winds

and popsicle-death scenarios he concocted in order to keep us moving

quickly.  When he wasn’t in Antarctica, Brian—tight-bodied and exuding

a spirit of adventure--worked as a guide in Alaska, but at McMurdo, he

was a member of the highly respected Field Safety Training Program team

(F-STOP for short), a group of sexy men and women who spent their lives

in rugged environments and then migrated south for the austral summer

to teach McMurdo’s scientists and support staff how to survive them.

After Brian introduced us to our Happy Camper objectives, he briefed us

on cold-weather health hazards, their symptoms, and their remedies.

Before lunch, I felt confident knowing the basics of hypothermia and

its telltale signs—the fumbles, mumbles, and grumbles.

“Talk to your partners to determine their LOC,” Brian said while

pointing to a white board scribbled with notes about how cold weather

affects a person’s level of consciousness, “and help them out before

they get into that irreversible phase.  If you notice that anything’s

off, start with some food and water and get them moving around.”

Besides those suggestions, Brian offered a few other ideas about how to

prevent and treat hypothermia while he gestured with his hands and we

watched, motionless and mostly bored, from our chairs.   

Of hypothermia’s remedies, one above the others captured my

imagination. F-STOP Brian told us that it is possible to warm up a

hypothermic body by stripping it naked and putting it in close

proximity to another naked body. “In extreme cases,” he clarified, “you

can use direct body heat to re-warm a hypothermic individual.”

Ideally, the second naked body would be warm, and these two naked

bodies together would be skin-to-skin within a sleeping bag so that an

ailing individual could reap the thermodynamic benefits.  A few giggles

followed and a few glanced around the room.

To read the rest of the essay you have to buy the book! www.susanfoxrogers.com

Ululations Have Been Increasing

David Ainley reports that he has just arrived at Cape Royds, where it is egg laying season. Here is the great surprise: penguin populations are going up! David's lyrical essay in Antarctica: Life on the Ice is about contemplating the future of Adélie Penguins. There is a webcam at Cape Royds, which you should not miss.

David introduced me to his penguins at Cape Royds in 2004-2005. He even let me pick one up--they are the size and weight of a large football--while he injected it with a pit tag. Needless to say, I was overcome by the cuteness of penguins. Two of my essays about my time on the ice posted here on the blog and my essay in the anthology describe the miraculous life of penguins that I experienced at Cape Royds.

Here is David's description of what they are researching, titled "Ululations Have Been Increasing":

16 November 2007

We have set out in the 12th year of a project in which we seek to

understand the answer to the question of why Adélie Penguin populations

have been increasing in the Ross Sea since

the early 1980s, and why the

increase has mostly been exhibited by smaller colonies. The Ross Sea

contains about 38% of the 6 million breeding Adélie Penguins in the

world, and 3 of its largest colonies (3 of 6 exceeding 120,000 breeding

pairs). We know about this increase from the frequent and, in some

cases, annual counts being made of the colonies by biologists of

Landcare Research New Zealand, using aerial photography.

The  reason it is taking us so long in this quest for answers to our questions is that we need to accumulate the individual histories of know-age birds, acquiring information for each such as year of hatching, year of first breeding, and subsequent breeding success. We also need to know the proportion of each age group that survives from one year to the next, and whether or not as young adults they return to the colony of their origin or emigrate elsewhere to nest at another colony. We’ve been doing this by banding chicks (metal band with unique set of numbers) at 4 colonies every year: Cape Crozier (150,000 pairs), Beaufort Island (45,000 pairs), Cape Bird (40,000 pairs), and Cape Royds (4000 pairs). We spend a lot of time walking, with binoculars in hand, looking for penguins wearing bands at those 4 colonies. They don’t first come back for a visit until 2 years old, and they don’t begin to breed until, on average 4 or 5 years of age. The penguins reveal their secrets slowly, and so we must be patient. We are pleased that folks at the National Science Foundation, which funds our project, are patient, too.

Polar Disorder

No, don't worry, penguin chicks are not suffering from Polar Disorder. The chick comes from Nicholas Johnson's marvelous website, Big Dead Place, that is dedicated to Antarctica and to thinking about Antarctica. This penguin comes from an essay about the proliferation of cuteness...Nicholas, whose essay in Antarctica: Life on the Ice is about going "toast" offers a real insiders view of life on the ice in his book, also titled Big Dead Place.

At his site, Nicholas serves up stories and interviews and this month Harper's excerpted an interview with "Nero" an independent contractor who has worked in Antarctica, Iraq and Afghanistan. This is the polar disorder...

Nicholas reports from the ice:

I'm in McMurdo, working in Fleet-Ops.  Today I'm dozing snow out at Pegasus.

From the interview:

Into the Cold: Antarctica travels to Minneapolis

Don't we look like cousins? Katy Jensen on the left, me on the right. We read together from Antarctica: Life on the Ice on November 11 at Mager's and Quinn (a fabulous bookstore--both new and used) on a balmy early evening in Minneapolis. Katy--whose essay is about wintering at the South Pole--finds Minneapolis too cold...

We had an extraordinary audience. My real cousins Polly and Deborah Talen were there with their three girls Grace, Lydia, and Eliza (in reverse order of age). Polly is the funniest woman alive and Deborah is a founder of Rainbow Families. Victoria Nohl, a former student from Bard, showed up still looking like Queenie (her name while at Bard). But most of the standing-room only crowd was Katy's family and step-family. They stretched back into the stacks of books and listened, enraptured, while Katy read her beautiful and emotionally complex essay. When I first met Katy it was through her essay, which has an amazing grace and intelligence to it. Meeting her was that rare moment of person living up to their writing...and then adding that special something that comes only with sitting down and having tea with someone.

Here is Katy's account of the reading, which I post with a blush.

Katy writes: "For

me, there were two best things about the event at Magers and Quinn. One was

the overwhelming range of emotions associated with being on “this side” of

a reading... from apprehension to acceptance to the rushes of adrenaline

that kept me awake all night. But my favorite best thing

about the event was finally meeting Susan in person. Nobody understood how

we could have collaborated on a book without even talking on the phone, but

when we stepped into Lucia’s for tea, I felt like it was something we did

every week. And when the ball of leaves in my tea glass expanded into a magical

flower, it was both wondrous and appropriate. Susan has that effect on people:

she disarms them with candor and then delights them with vivid adventures.

I can’t wait to see what’s next!"

And I can't wait to see what's next for Katy, who has just started working for Lockheed Martin. She shared one story of meeting an astronaut she admired. She was a bit tongue-tied until he shook her hand and said, "I never thought I'd meet someone who has been to the South Pole." Katy hasn't just been to the South Pole, she has spent more than four years in Antarctica, including three winters at the South Pole, where, for two seasons she was the station’s first female area manager.

Here is a cool fact about the Antarctic: geographical features can be named for living people (unlike in the rest of the world where you must be dead to be remembered in this way). Five contributors to Antarctica: Life on the Ice have features named after them: Uberuaga Island, Joyce Peak, Ainley Peak, Guthridge Nunataks and for Katy, Jensen Rampart, a set of cliffs in the Darwin Mountains. Some day she hopes to visit her cliffs. And I want to tag along.

You can read more about naming on the continent in an Antarctic Sun article from November 12, 2000.