11/30/02
Walking over to Crary lab movie
Up at the crack of dawn to catch Flight PO68
to the South Pole! Well, no, on several accounts:
i) room at McMurdo dorm has no windows, therefore no light, which
is good because
ii) there's no difference in the light outside here, 24 hours
a day. Well below the Antarctic Circle at 67 degrees south, the
sun moves in a 24 circle around us (when it's visible)
iii) the flight was delayed (after we got up dressed, and breakfasted,
then cancelled until Sunday evening or Monday morning.
What to do? No point in showering, even though
I'm a sweaty, stinking hunk of funk. The clean clothes, the razor,
and even the toothbrush are on the airplane, 2 miles out on the
sea ice.
Computer work seemed in order, and of course I ran into an annoying
problem with turning powerpoint presentations into movies, something
I've done hundreds of times before. I finally suspect some devilish
incompatibility between Powerpoint, QuickTime, and Mac OS 10.2.
I made a great slide show of the sea ice and snowy wastelands
on the flight in, and spent hours trying to make it export. Grrr.
Finally just used QuickTime and made a journeyman's slideshow,
no crossfade transitions. It's on the website Tomorrow, I'll get
computer permission (not allowed to connect without getting seal
of good anti-viral housekeeping from tech folks here), and get
updates and see if I can get that fixed.
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A British explorer died near the hut, and this cross was erected. We were warned to stay off the sea ice near Hut Point, and it looked treacherous and fractured and shifty. I don't remember the dead guy's name. The wind picked up by about 40 mph from the hut to the cross, a distance of 100 yards. I was too blasted and cold on my face to even get the camera out. |
Philipe & I walked over to Scott's hut out on Hut Point, and
snooped around. This is where the OTHER guys on Shackleton's expedition
landed and began the work of making supply caches nearly 1,000
miles inland for Shackleton's transantarctic push. Well, Shackleton
never got to do that. His boat, the Endurance, was crushed by
ice, and he & his men accomplished amazing feats of suffering
and endurance getting back to civilization.
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Yum ! A lovely biscuit box left over from 1910. |
These other guys, on the other side of the continent? Well, they
got back from their first cache run to find THEIR supply ship
GONE (blown out to sea by 120 mph winds)! They hung around for
2 YEARS, waiting to be rescued: unlike Shackleton, they had no
boats to even attempt to escape. And while they were waiting,
they decided they'd better keep up the job, and finished laying
the caches for Shackleton's expedition (though he never came).
And you what? That hut STILL smells like cooked seal, even in
temperatures well below freezing. It's an unbelievably bleak place.
No plants, lots of very cold wind. On the walk over, I found it
crucial to adjust my hood to keep the wind off my face. I wasn't
cold, the parka and pants were fine, but if that wind touches
skin, it sucks the heat right off in moments.
Nice dinner, wiped out afterwards, so I fell
asleep and missed a lecture by an astronaut. I woke up later on,
searched for Andy Caldwell, another TEA who's going on a meteorite
hunting expedition. It turned out he's here at McMurdo. But I
tried emailing him, and the mail bounced back. But wait: the astronaut
is here to hunt meteorites also! And there's still people there!
So I walk in, and there's Andy!
We talked until nearly midnight (easy to do, still bright daylight
out).