Author: worstjourney
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Sea Ice Basics
Antarctica is, as we all know, a continent of ice. But the ice isn’t just the ice caps and glaciers on the continent itself – it extends off the coast in all directions as the Southern Ocean seasonally freezes over. This fringe of frozen sea gives the penguins a place to escape their predators and…
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Arrival Heights
With the heavy schedule of trainings and breakfast meetings, I fought to get every ounce of sleep I could. Word on the street was that the light was much better for photography at ‘night’, when the sun was lower in the sky – the angle making the light warmer, and shadows longer and richer –…
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Discovery Hut Photo Tour
My first full day in Antarctica was the coldest of the whole trip. I noted in my journal that it was -4°F/-20°C – I don’t recall if that was with wind chill or without, but it was definitely windy that day, so you can imagine. The previous day’s flurries were still blowing around, so the…
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The Story of the Discovery Hut
The Discovery Hut is named such because it was built on the Discovery Expedition, in early 1902, when the ship had found its permanent berth in the small inlet at the end of the southernmost peninsula of Ross Island. This was imaginatively dubbed Winter Quarters Bay, and the spit of land adjacent to it was…
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Induction McMurdo
Here’s the thing about arriving at McMurdo: It’s kind of like diving into your first week at college. You have a series of orientation sessions, a bunch of classes in different buildings with random numbers, and you meet a lot of new people with names and roles that are hard to keep straight, while also…
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Getting There
For such an enormous bird, the landing was admirably smooth, and once all post-landing checks had been completed, the hatch was opened. Long before we felt the cold, we could see our breath in the air, as the moisture levels in the cabin met the declining temperature. I had read about how stepping off the…
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The C.D.C.
The plan was that I would be on the flight from Christchurch to McMurdo on November 11th. The morning of November 10th, then, I had to be at the Clothing Distribution Center to be outfitted with my Extreme Cold Weather gear (hereafter known as ECW). A few months previous, I’d sent in my sizing for…
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Christchurch
Thursday, 7 November 2019 The last time I was in New Zealand, I was making what I thought was the trip of a lifetime. It was January 2018, and, assuming a trip to Antarctica was unlikely, this was the last gap I had to fill in my research. New Zealand being the jumping-off and landing…
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Geography of the Terra Nova
First, an overview of the Antarctic continent. It’s really big. To get a sense of the size, it is larger than Australia; it could fit the U.S. and Mexico together; if you drew a circle around the whole of Europe, that’s roughly the size and shape of the Antarctic continent. Our action revolves around the…
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Make Your Own Mitts
One of the iconic visual cues of early polar exploration is the white H over the chest made by the straps of the fur mits. Here is the outfit they have on display at the Polar Museum in Cambridge: I knew that I would be doing a lot of sketching in the cold and that…