Michael Becker, a doctoral student at McGill University, was a scientific diver on an expedition to Lake Untersee, Antarctica.
There are no helicopters on this end of the continent. For someone as unenthusiastic about walking as I am, this news comes as a definitive blow to my goal of doing as little exercise as possible. But even an ultramarathoner would be chilled by the prospect of an 80-mile journey over treacherous glacial crevasses with several tons of gear. Back in the old days a similar journey might involve days of sledging and potentially eating a few of your dogs.
Luckily, back in 2008 a company by the name of Arctic Trucks started operating out of Novolazarevskaya station. These chaps will take us the six-hour drive to our field site. Arctic Trucks is a small automobile-modification company of about 25 people based in Iceland. Their vehicles are cutup and transformed from top to bottom ? massively raised and enforced suspensions, 44-inch ultra wide tires with custom three-piece rims, extra large gas tanks, front and rear winches, and the step bars to get into the cab can be taken off and built on the front of the truck to make a lifting crane. As one mechanic told me, modifications have to be your life?s passion since the cars are completely rebuilt.
But passion isn?t cheap or efficient down here. Expect to shell out around $150,000 for a modified Toyota Hilux. And once it?s down here and driving in the snow with large payloads, these gas-hounds will guzzle down and spit out a whopping two miles per gallon. You read that right ? 2 m.p.g.; that?s worse than the U.S military?s 38-ton Buffalo Mine Clearance Vehicle. Our shuttle service to camp wouldn?t be cheap either, running at about $30,000 for the round-trip ferry of gear and personnel. But hey, we ain?t walking.
These trucks can be difficult to drive, particularly for the average beaker in these parts. Driving over sastrugi (hard, wind-sculpted snow banks), deep snow, and ice makes for difficult work ? not to mention the constant concern for hidden crevasses that can swallow a truck and its passengers, leaving them a hundred feet down. Fortunately on our drive, the crevasses we crossed rarely spanned more than two or three feet in width ? large enough to eat an axle but not a whole vehicle. When we?d approach a visible crevasse we?d slowly cross tire-by-tire. And if a vehicle got stuck, the handy convoy was able to tow it free.
So after a remarkably tame trip across 80 miles of ice, our convoy drove down the nose of the Anuchin glacier and on to the frozen surface of Lake Untersee. We unloaded the trucks, and as they drove away, it dawned on me that they were leaving the five of us for a month in the exact center of nowhere.
So what is nowhere?
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Untersee is the largest surface lake in East Antarctica. It?s necessary to say surface since many lakes in Antarctica are covered by thousands of feet of ice, and it?s just not practical or possible to go diving in them. While not buried under glacial ice, Untersee is still covered by a 9- or 10-foot-thick perennial ice cover. It is surrounded on three sides by massive, sheer cliff faces that are littered with boulders and breeding colonies of ghost-white snow petrels. The north side of the lake that we arrived from is butted against the Anuchin Glacier, a large mass of ice that is slowly pushing into the lake as evident by the pressure ridges created by the movement of glacial ice into the ice-cover of the lake.
Few people have seen this area of the planet and it has been relatively unexplored scientifically. It was first discovered during the 1938-1939 German Antarctic Expedition, thus the name Untersee (?lower lake?) and neighboring Lake Ober-See (?upper lake?). Initial research was done by the Soviets in 1969 and a handful of German scientific expeditions in the 1980s and 1990s. There?s not many places left in the world where your scientific reference list is shorter than a McDonald?s dollar menu.
So it was with this air of uncertainty and excitement that we started the laborious process of building a field camp from scratch. The trucks had departed and would not be returning for a month ? the success of our camp and our research now rested totally on our shoulders. The five of us spent the next several hours establishing the bare necessities for survival: a handful of tents to sleep in, a bathroom, and the all-important cook tent. The rest of camp could be built tomorrow. As we rested inside the kitchen, exhausted from two weeks of being in transit, we could finally get excited about cracking open that frozen lake and getting to work.
Follow Michael on Twitter: @Michael__Becker or on his blog, ?The Dry Valleys.?
Source: http://scientistatwork.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/18/the-long-cold-slog/?partner=rss&emc=rss
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