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