Morning after the storm: the author’s tent

Snow Day

If you don’t like the weather in New England, you wait a minute. The same rule often applies in West Antarctica, with the corollary that if you do like the weather, you shouldn’t get too comfortable. A few months ago, I traveled to the region as a field technician with the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide project, a multiyear effort funded by the National Science Foundation to study the climatic and biological record contained in samples of deep ice. As I discovered firsthand, a blue sky can quickly become a whiteout.

Two days after I stepped off the plane, a storm hit hard just as most of the 40-plus people in camp were finishing their work shift. We had to hole up together in a Jamesway building (a wood-and-cloth quonset hut). I immediately thought of my toothbrush, stowed back in my tent, and decided to go get it. The weather was approaching condition 1—the least auspicious rating on the three-point scale used in the Antarctic, carrying a specific warning to stay indoors and avoid unnecessary travel. But working in my favor were the “flag lines”—colored flags on tall, sturdy bamboo poles placed every 20 feet or so—that marked all of the regular routes around camp. The whole purpose of the flag lines was to help you navigate in rough weather.

I set out, following the flags, never able to see more than two ahead of me. It took me 20 minutes to reach the outhouse in the middle of our tent city, a distance I usually covered in less than 5. And there the flag line ended. From that point on, I’d be going tent to tent, and the tents were roughly 50 feet apart. I could see only one tent in the direction I needed to go. Once I got to it, I could not make out the next tent.

Standing there with nothing but white in every direction, I remembered how one time, in our lake at home, I had lost my bearings and swum in a complete quarter-mile circle. Now I was in West Antarctica, in a near whiteout that was only getting worse, with temperatures that, factoring in the wind chill, had to be at least 20 below zero. The winds were 30 or 40 miles per hour, nearly strong enough to knock me over. What if I experienced something like that swimming episode out here? It was easy enough to imagine my frozen remains being excavated from a massive snowdrift days later. And all for the sake of a toothbrush.

I turned back, retracing my already disappearing footprints. The wind was loud in my ears. Certainly no one would hear if I yelled out. Peering through my goggles, huddled in my parka with my arms wrapped around my chest and the hood pulled tight around my face, I felt claustrophobic in the middle of thousands of miles of empty space. Spindrift flurries crept into every opening in my clothes and did not melt. I pressed on, mesmerized by the wind and the blowing snow, until I heard a reassuring sound: the violent flapping of flags.

That night the winds maxed out at 41 mph, enough to ensure a lot of shoveling the next day but not enough to topple buildings. We all made it through. Since the Jamesway to which we had fled happened to be the galley, we had plenty of food and water. A generator powered the heaters and stoves. There was a deck of cards, a cribbage board, a handful of magazines. Everyone had a sleeping bag of sorts: the oversized down parka from the ECW (extreme weather clothing) that workers in Antarctica are required to have with them at all times. The only real inconvenience was the inability to get to the outhouses. A few coffee cans would have to suffice.

As I drifted off in my slightly damp ECW, my thoughts returned to my experience out in the blowing snow, and even now I can’t help reflecting on the extreme natural forces that lie right outside our flimsy buffer zone of civilization. Most people are familiar with the story of Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his crew, who perished on their way back from the South Pole in 1912. A cross erected on Observation Hill, overlooking the present site of McMurdo Station, the American base, is inscribed with words from Tennyson’s “Ulysses”: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” My toothbrush adventure pales beside what those men endured as they sledged across the continent. Even so, I think I know what desolation is.

ZACH SMITH is the program coordinator for the Wright Center for Science Education at Tufts.