Cape Royds

In 1907 Shackelton arrived in Antarctica and searched for suitable place to start his attempt on the pole from. He found Cape Royds. Rich with penguin life at the rookery perched on the tip of the peninsula and with easy sea access he built himself a small hut nestled in the volcanic stone and readied himself for the trek ahead.

[The Barnes Glacier Crack]

On Sunday, we headed out from Scott Base in our Hagglund filled with people and lunches and ECW gear. We rumbled along in the Hagglund, a Swedish tracked vehicle built for warfare in desert environments. It is not a smooth or quiet ride, but rather unique to the whole experience of being here in this place. Padded with jackets and foam mats, and fitted with ear plugs and headphones, you can actually make yourself quite comfortable. Which is good as the drive to Cape Royds takes about 3 hours. We stopped every so often to drop things off at various field camps on the way and to do sea ice profiles at the cracks we encountered to make sure they were safe to cross. But mostly it was the deep rumble on the machine under our bums that kept us going.

[Driving on the sea ice]

[Barnes Glacier]

[A seal hole chewed in the crack]

[Weddell Seal]

[Drilling a sea ice profile]

Finally we arrived at Royds. We stumbled out of the Hagglund, grabbed our bags and headed for the peninsula. We started by hiking up a slope to find two frozen water lakes. Their surfaces frozen to a smooth glassy sheen that rippled like liquid water. Parts of the surface were pocketed with holes made by dust and stone blown onto the surface and causing differential melting. It was great fun to carefully slide across the surface. At one point I bent down to lick the ice to see if it was fresh or salty, I discovered much to my companions delight that it was quite salty and didn’t taste all that great.

[Frozen lake at Cape Royds]

We then moved on to the coast. What a view. Seeing open water was much more exciting than I had expected. Just the amount of life that seemed to teem there surprised me. We watched penguins fly through the water and up onto the sea ice below us. Seals lazing on the coast and watching as penguins waddled by in long lines. It was phenomenal. We hiked down to the waters edge and just took in the total difference that it offered from our experience on the Ice Shelf (which doesn’t melt each year). Even the presence of fluffy cumulous clouds was different, as there are none out by Scott Base because there is very little moisture to produce them.

[The Ross Sea]

We wandered along the coast and took pictures of penguins and seals. We found a really neat pressure dome to climb inside and explore. And we eventually made our way over to Shackleton’s hut nestled beside the penguin rookery and out of the prevailing wind by the surrounding volcanic hills. The raucous sounds of the penguins filled the air almost as much as their fishy smell. To think that these are the same smells and sounds and sights that Shackleton and his men shared is a neat feeling. It was a neat feeling. The inside of the hut was pretty amazing as well. The musty light filtering through the old glass windows playing with the dust moats in the air. It was very still and quiet there, filled with the tedious memories of cooking dinner on a wood stove, eating dehydrated eggs from a can and fiddling in the dark room with cold fingers to produce the images we can see today in books and museums. Very cool indeed.

[Penguin prints]

[Adelie penguins]

[Adelie penguin]

[A pressure dome in the sea ice]

[Walking along the sea ice]

[ASPAs - or Antarctic Specially Protected Areas - are meant to protect things like penguin rookeries, important ecological sites and scientifically significant areas]

[Shackleton's Hut in the shadow of Mount Erebus]

[The inside of Shackelton's Hut]

[Mmmmmm - preserved cabbage]

Soon our times was running short and we still had a 3 hour trip home. So we climbed back into the Hagglund and rumbled across the sea ice to our own little oasis on the other side of Ross Island.

Fun in Antarctica

When we’re not chatting with scientists or writing up our thoughts afterwards, there are plenty of great things to do here at Scott Base. One of my favourite has been to go out skiing.

[Out for a ski]

I have been out a few times, once by myself which was a neat experience and twice with people here on base. It is neat to ski through a completely treeless environment with very little on the landscape to give you a sense of scale – or how far away things are. So something that looks only one kilometre away might actually be 6 kilometres away. It is an interesting feeling – mostly it makes you feel very, very small. But at the same time, by exploring the environment around Scott Base I am starting to feel more at home and more located in the Antarctic environment, it is less out there, less unknown, a more a part of me.

[Do you remember what the green and red flags mean? - a safe route, always follow the flags]

[Skiing out to Castle Rock. It seemed so far away on my first trip here, but it only took an hour to ski to and there was a fun hill to go down on the way back]

Another great pass time here is the observation tube. Over in front of McMurdo, the Americans have set up a metal tube through the sea ice and under water. You climb down the tube using a wee ladder and emerge into a tiny room surrounded by windows. There is even a little box to sit on as you stare out through the windows into the blue, green, yellow seascape filled with fishes, krill, jelly fish and more. If you listen you can hear the rumbling boom of the big heavy vehicles as they drive over the ice a kilometre away and the voices of the people above you as they wait for their turn. After your eyes adjust to the darkness of the sea, you can begin to see the silver flash of fish, the watery shapes of sea stars on the bottom and the ghostly figures of delicate diatoms as they swim by. In Antarctica, it is the ocean where life flourishes. The greatest form of life here is the algae that live on the bottom of the sea ice, making it the glowing yellowy-green that it is in the pictures. After 15 minutes of staring in awe and wonder at the alien beauty of this flourishing environment my time was up and I climbed back up the ladder to my friends waiting for their turn down the tube.

[Anyone know why the ice looks like this?]

[Opening up the Observation tube]

[Looking out the windows]

[The algea makes the bottom of the sea ice look bluey-greeny-yellow]

[Coming back up the tube for the next person to head down]

Pressure Ridges

Just off shore in front of Scott Base is a sinuous line of tumbled ice blocks the size of cars and houses. The line follows the curve of the shore, running parallel to it as it goes. These are pressure ridges – where the dynamic, or moving, ice of the sea runs up against the static, or unmoving, ice glued to the shore. As the two solid surfaces of ice are pushed together by wave and tidal action they become plastic and deform into the dramatic shapes seen out our windows here.

There is a flagged route that leads you through the maze of sculpted figures, taking you past one that looks like a horse rearing up, around another the size of a house, and between two that resemble waves about the crash together over top of you. On the other side of the major thrust you can see new ones just beginning to form. Low rolls in the ice that appear to grow in size as they approach the line of crashing ice. The small ones look almost like seals buried in the snow, while the big ones could be the backs of whales as they come up to breach. In the really big ones you also start to see cracks running along the length of their spines, splitting them in two and allowing them to be thrown up against each other to make new shapes for the wind to sculpt.

Commonly found on the other side of the pressure ridges are seals. Because of the ongoing action with the ice, there are often cracks and holes open to the sea below. This allows the seals to come up. On our walk we came across one mum and her pup resting by a hole. The Weddell Seal is the most commonly seen seal in these parts and proves to be rather unafraid of humans. However the New Zealand Antarctic programme has rules about how people are supposed to act around seals (and all wildlife) to make sure we don’t bother them too much or cause them stress. We can get no closer than 10 metres and cannot try to make them move out of our way. Since they were sunning themselves right in the middle of the pathway, we had to move our way around them, being careful not to disturb them and trying not to fall in any holes ourselves. Once we were around the mama seal huffed at us with her nose and went back to sleep. We wandered back into the stunning landscape of wind sculpted ice.