Questions

1. I enjoyed the book, but it got a little slow at times, especially when she would quote other peoples writings, so it was a little hard to get into.
2. I was happy about my book choice, I knew very little about Antarctica before this.
3. I liked the South Pole the best. I learned that there were two South Poles, one ceremonial and one actual.
4. Survival and research were the two basic themes of the book. When they were not researching, they were trying to stay warm.
5. I learned about all of the research that goes on down there, survival techniques, the history, and about the animals that inhabit Antarctica.
6. I liked learning about the fish with no hemoglobin in its blood and about how the huskies were removed from Antarctica.
7. The author would quote other people and tell about random bits of history, during that time I would become sightly uninterested in the book.

Her Feelings

Like most people first visiting Antarctica, she was upset and depressed about the things that were happening there, the bleak landscape, cold, and being homesick. She felt like she was "losing her faith" even though she had been a strong believer in God. She also experienced a certainty amidst the morass of thoughts and emotions seething inside her mind. She realized that it was something that put everything else in true perspective. She felt as if she was realigning her vision of the world through a telescope.She found that the landscape was intact, complete, and larger than she could ever imagine. She also found that it didn't suffer famines or social unrest. "It was sufficient unto itself, untainted by the tragedy of the human condition"


Sounds of Antarctica

Huskies

Huskies had been in Antarctica since 1945 even though they had not been used in support of scientific work since 1975. With the arrival of reliable snowmobiles, the dogs became even more obsolete and were retained there mainly for recreational purposes. Another argument for the exile of the huskies was that the dogs had passed on distemper to the seals, but more accurately, the dogs had grown accustomed to the seal chop, which was basically seal meat, and that was "inappropriate to the environmental aims of scientific organizations within the Antarctic." The owners of these dogs protested that they should be kept in because "you can't bond with a snowmobile" and they claimed that the huskies kept up their morale and made the Antarctic fell a little less lonely. Even with all of the protests, in 1991 the Antarctic Treaty nations that under the terms of the Environmental Protocol the huskies were to be "phased out" of Antarctica by April Fool's Day 1994.

The Dragon

After investigating ice stream dynamics in the chromosome zone, the place where crevasses change direction as the glacier moves and causing them to to turn into thousands of Y chromosome figures, she entered the place known as the Dragon. The Dragon is the transition zone between the moving and stable ice, ti is also the only part of Antarctica not bounded by mountains. The Dragon tells us of the ice streams that show us the interactive role of the ice sheet in global change. It resembled a windblown channel of the ice from the air, but it was really a two mile-wide band of crevasses running forty miles down one side of the island. The dramatic landscape was more appealing to the author due to the fact that fewer than 20 people had ever seen it.

The Igloo Experience

Instead of taking the chance to stay in a warm tent, the author decided to sleep in an igloo. Before she could even enter the thing, she had to dig out a trench to lead to the entrance. The igloo had rubber mats inside and a string across the top to hand up all of her goggles, glacier glasses, socks, and her thermometer. The way that igloos are built is the sleeping quarters is above the entrance and a trench is dug below it to create a cold sink. Even with the sleeping quarters elevated and the cold sink, the main priority is to keep your core temperature constant and warm. There was one night where she was trying to go to sleep and she encountered so many problems at once and she just gave up, she went into one of the tents in Jamestown and just went to sleep on the ground. That was the last night she stayed in an igloo, it had won.


This gives you an idea of how cold it is there.
Water freezing in mid air.

Central West

Central west antarctic camp.

Sara, the author, wanted to get out to Seismic Man's camp for New Year's Eve. He was working in a remote site called Central West Antarctica, this was a place so notoriously difficult to access the its acronym had been enlongated to Continually Waiting for Airplanes. She had said goodbye so many times that the people on base laughed when she came back. The camp had no generators, but a lot of snowmobiles. There were dive holes where they used a bright yellow machine that looked like a lawnmower. I went down into the seabed, below the ice, and took pictures that the group depended on for their research, they were studying the release of glacier debris into the marine environment. She said "It was like being in an extra in Star Wars" because she saw many strange creatures like a jellyfish with long, undulating strings threaded with tiny lights and shrimpy crustaceans circling a very tall sponge.

The South Pole

The only way to get to the South Pole is by the Hercules airplane, the South Pole was about 850 miles from the camp. On the flight she passed over the Beardmore Glacier and the Transantarcics. The first thing that you saw when you exit the plane is a poster board with Elvis on it and a signpost that says "Graceland". The bathrooms had strict rules about the restroom toilets and showers, you were limited to a 2 minute shower twice a week. The altitude at the South Pole is 2,850 meters or 9,300 feet, it is a piece of ice that is about one third of the height of Mount Everest. The atmosphere at is at its shallowest at the poles, so combined with the elevation and the shallow atmosphere, the body gets about half of its normal oxygen supply. At tho pole, there was the actual marker of the South Pole, which shifts about 30 feet each year, and the ceremonial pole which consists of a banner of flags with a chrome soccer ball on top of a striped barber pole.

The Arid Valley

The series of arid valleys that run off of Antarctica were created by retreats of glaciers through the Transantarctic mountains. These dry valleys have been free of ice for about four million years except for the few frozen over saltwater basins. NASA originally wanted to use this site to test robotic probes before sending them on interplanetary missions. "It's as close as Mars as we can get" one of the engineers said. While you were on the island you couldn't throw anything away without having to put it in a container to be shipped back to McMurdo. The waste regulations were so strict that you could even use the restroom or wash dishes without having to put it in a bottle.

Antarctic dry valley

Learning About the Fish

People fished on the West Antarctic ice sheet for fish who produced their own antifreeze. How they did this was by drilling holes in the ice and hauling them up to the surface. The bait that they used to catch the Dissostichus mawsoni- or Antarctic cod, was fish that were brought in from New Zealand. The fish were about 125 pounds and looked ancient. They mainly caught these fish for antifreeze, aircraft manufacturers want it to develop a product that keep airplane wings from freezing.

Antarctic cod.

Another fish that is found in Antarctic waters is the Aliparis devriesi - or ice fish, is a bottom feeder that has no hemoglobin in its blood; making their blood white.

Ice fish

McMurdo

This is McMurdo station in Antarctica.


The Cape Roberts camp was the place where Sara, along with her party, went to investigate the late Cretaceous to mid-Cenozoic history of the Ross sea region. This camp was the heart of the cooperative projects ever conceived in Antarctica. To study the ice sheets there, they had to drill into offshore rock cores, which would yield millions of years of climate and tectonic change. The base on the edge of Terra Nova Bay is Campbell Ice Tongue. Hanging over it was Mount Melbourne, the 2,900 meter (9,514 ft) volcanic cone named by the explorer, Ross, after the British prime minister at the time.On the other side of Mount Melbourne was Edmondson Point, this was home to the huge Adelie penguin colony. Researchers would capture the birds, weigh them, measure their beaks, pass an infrared wand over it, then finally paint a number on its back before releasing it.

Arriving in Antarctica

When I first started reading the book I was greeted by a giant map of Antarctica.

She gave us a list of things that she was wearing and that she was given to wear in the arctic. There were some white rubber bunny boots that were insulated by air, which I thought was really cool and interesting. When she first arrived in Antarctica, all she saw were bloodless ice fields and ice shards coming toward her. McMurdo, the largest of three American bases in Antarctica, looked like a small Alaskan mining town with roads, three-story buildings, the ill-matched architecture of a utilitarian institution, and a summer population of more than 1000 people. When you exposed just a small bit of skin, it felt like it was on fire due to the frostbite. The Survival School taught you how to survive if you were confronted with the dangers of the extreme cold.

Conversion table of Celsius to Fahrenheit