The Crystal Desert: Summers in Antarctica

For Jean, Karen, and Tatiana

First Mariner Books edition 2002

Copyright © 1992 by David G. Campbell

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Campbell, David G.

The crystal desert : summers in Antarctica / David G. Campbell,

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-395-58969-x ISBN 0-618-21921-8 (pbk.)

ISBN 978-0-618-21921-6 (pbk.)

1. Natural history—Antarctic regions. 2. Summer—Antarctic regions. 3. Campbell, David G.—Journeys—Antarctic regions. 4. Antarctic regions—Description and travel. I. Title.

QH84.2.C36 1992 92-10583

508.98'9—dc20 CIP

eISBN 978-0-547-52761-1

v2.0421

Acknowledgments

No human can survive alone in the Antarctic, and one’s companions in that hostile continent become lifelong friends. I am deeply indebted to Dr. Renato George Ferreira Garcia for inviting me to conduct research at Comandante Ferraz, the Brazilian Antarctic station, for showing me the ropes, and for a fruitful scientific collaboration,. which continues today. I would also like to thank Captain Antonio José Gomez Queiroz, Dr. Alexandre de Azavedo Dutra, Dr. Mirian Maria Ferreira Garcia, Dr. Edson Rodrigues, Dr. Claude de Broyer, Gautier Chapelle, Dr. Johann-Wolfgang Wägele, Dr. Hans Gerd Mers, Dr. Phan Van Ngan, Helena Guiro P. P. Coelho, and Ézero Izidorio Tardin.

I am grateful to Pat Wilcoxon, University of Chicago Libraries, for access to that wonderful collection. I thank G. Douglas, Librarian of the Linnaean Society of London; and William Mills, Librarian, and Robert Headland, Archivist, of the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge, for providing records of the early exploration of the Antarctic Peninsula.

For making many helpful comments as to content and style of the manuscript, I thank Dr. Diane Ackerman, Charles Bassett, Lizzie Grossman, Dr. Charles Swithinbank, Dr. Jere Lipps, Dr. Susan Trivelpiece and, especially, Harry Foster and Peg Anderson, editors at Houghton Mifflin.

Prologue: Admiralty Bay

The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet,

Though to itself it only live and die.

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

I SPENT THREE SUMMERS in Antarctica, in places beyond the horizon of most of the rest of my species. The journeys all took place during that single long day that begins in October and ends in March. Sometimes, in the sere, glaciated interior of the continent, Antarctica seemed to be a prebiotic place, as the world must have looked before the broth of life bubbled and popped into whales and tropical forests—and humans. I was as lonely as an astronaut walking on the moon. But at other times, during the short, erotic summer along the ocean margins of the continent, Antarctica seemed to be a celebration of everything living, of unchecked DNA in all its procreative frenzy, transmuting sunlight and minerals into life itself, hatching, squabbling, swimming, and soaring on the sea wind.

My journeys were principally to the Antarctic Peninsula, a spine of rock and ice at the bottom of the Western Hemisphere that rambles north toward South America from the glacial fastness of the southern continent and then bends eastward, as if submitting to the prevailing westerly winds and currents of the Drake Passage. This is the maritime Antarctic, where the extremes of temperature are modulated by the sea. Explorers who have been to the frigid interior of the continent call the peninsula and its nearby islands the Banana Belt of Antarctica.¹ It rains frequently during the summer, and once, in late January, I watched the thermometer climb to 9° centigrade. The rest of the continent, ice-fast and arid, is a true desert and is mostly lifeless.

Northwest of the peninsula are the South Shetlands, an ocean-sculpted arc of islands, some with active volcanoes, that reminded the first homesick and frightened Scottish sealers of those treeless, windblown islands of the North Sea. The sealers named the new islands Clarence, Elephant, King George, Nelson, Greenwich, Livingston, and Snow, after various monarchs, captains, mammals, meteorological events, and hometowns. Set off from the archipelago is aptly named Deception Island, an active volcano with a secret caldera where ash-blackened snow mimics rock. These islands of ice and black basalt, now and then tinged russet or blue by oozings of iron or copper, rise over 600 meters. Their hearts are locked under deep glaciers, a crystal desert forever frozen in terms of our short life spans, but transient in their own time scale. Sometimes one sees only the cloud-marbled glacial fields, high in the sun above hidden mountain slopes and sea fog, Elysian plains that seem as insubstantial as vapor. The interiors of the glaciers, glimpsed through crevasses, are neon blue. Sliding imperceptibly on their bellies, the glaciers carve their own valleys through the rock, and when they pass over rough terrain they have the appearance of frozen rapids, which is in fact what they are, cascading at the rate of a centimeter a day. Sudden cold gusts, known as katabatic winds, tumble down their icefalls to the shore; sometimes the coast snaps from tranquility to tempest in just a few minutes. Just as quickly the glacial winds abate, and there is calm. Where they reach the sea, the glaciers give birth to litters of icebergs, which usually travel a short distance and, at the next low tide, run aground on hidden banks. Most of the ice-free land is close to shore, snuggled near the edge of the warm sea in places that are buffeted by both sea wind and land wind, where rain changes to snow and back. There is no plant taller than a lichen here, no animal larger than a midge—biological haiku. But on protected slopes, where the snow melts on warm summer days and glacial meltwater nourishes the soil, lichens and mosses dust the hills a pale gray-green, and the islands take on a tenuous verdancy.

The Pacific and Atlantic oceans meet at the South Shetland Islands. Indeed, all of the world’s oceans mix in the Southern Ocean, the circumpolar sea that so absolutely isolates Antarctica from the other continents. Only a few small islands fleck this globe-girdling sea, and the westerly storms that orbit the Earth at these latitudes, unimpeded by land masses and always sucking energy from the sea, develop the anger of hurricanes. These zones are the roaring forties and screaming fifties, which have commanded the respect and fear of sailors since the time of Francis Drake. Today satellite photographs show these low-pressure zones, spiraling clockwise, regularly spaced, separated by several hundred kilometers of calm sea—a flowered anklet on the planet Earth. But the Southern Ocean is a manic sea, and between the tempests there is tranquility and light. To the land-bound on the South Shetland Islands, the distance between cyclones is measured in time, three to five days apart.

If the bright ice and dark rock are the canvas of these desert islands, then light is the medium, and the Southern Ocean, ever fickle, often angry, is the artist. She swathes the islands in mist, or snow, or clarid sea-light, depending on her moods. Sometimes the sea rages for days, and you can lean against the wind, rubbery and firm. The wind lifts the round pebbles from the beach and flings them like weapons at hapless beachcombers. The cyclonic winds march around the compass, so at one moment they will herd the icebergs against the shore in a groaning cluster, and a few hours later waft them out to sea like feathers on a pond. At other times there will be a clammy calm, a disquieting purple grayness that smothers light and sound, punctuated only by the distant, muffled crack of a calving glacier. The days one anticipates are the tranquil ones that break the long captivity of cabin fever, when the sky is a transparent blue, and the deep, clear sea scintillates with shafts of sunlight.

King George Island lies in the middle of the South Shetland archipelago. Like the Antarctic Peninsula, 96 kilometers to the east across Bransfield Strait, it seems to bend slightly to the westerly currents. Ninety-five percent of the island is permanently covered with ice. The smooth domes of glaciers are the highest places on the island, all above 580 meters. Echo-sounding has proved that some of these glaciers have their feet at sea level. Along the shore the temperature is more or less constant, no more than 5° or 6° C above or below freezing, winter and summer. The seasonal and daily cycles of freeze and thaw create a disheveled landscape of wet landslides and cleaved rocks; some rocks are shattered in leaves, like sliced bread. There is precipitation three hundred days a year, and an equal probability of rain and snow during all months of the year. The northern shore of King George Island takes the full brunt of the wind and the sea; the breakers arrive unimpeded all the way from Tasmania. The coast is flecked by numerous rocky islets and scalloped by crescent bays. Many features are uncharted and unnamed. Others bear names of fancy: Sinbad Rock, Jagged Island, Tartar Island, Hole Rock, Venus Bay; or of tragedy: Destruction Bay.

On the north face of King George Island, the outer edge of Antarctica, cliffs of ice act as giant airfoils, pushing the sea wind up their faces onto the frozen, white plateau of the island. Once, during a blizzard, I walked along this shore and watched fat snowflakes fly skyward in seeming defiance of gravity. In the dark ocean below, the ricocheting swells converged on unseen banks, and the sea seemed to be spontaneously erupting. On clear days the summer sunlight refracts in these sea-lenses and the ocean appears to be glowing from within. In the half-moon bays below the cliffs, the volcanic basalt is ground to smooth pebbles. During the austral summer the seafaring flotillas of juvenile penguins come ashore to rest, and their white bellies look like stranded icebergs on the black beaches. The elephant seals, like huge grubs, wallow in their own oily excrement. If you walk amid the shuffle of broken algae and limpet shells, where the pebbles boom with each breaking swell and the icebergs ping and crackle offshore, you smell none of the familiar seashore odor of decomposition of more temperate climes; there are no beach flies or scuttling crabs. Everything remains frozen, immutable.

The southern, leeward shore of King George Island is not as rugged and steep as the north, and most ships arriving across the stormy Drake Passage from the tip of South America, 970 kilometers to the north, hie to shelter there. They skirt the North Foreland, on the eastern edge of the island closest to South America, and sail past Cape Melville, Sherratt Bay, Three Sisters Point, Penguin Island, and King George Bay, where in 1819 William Smith, commanding the brigantine Williams, planted the Union Jack and named the island after his distant and unknowing sovereign. And then a vast anvil-shaped bay opens to the northwest and invades the heart of the island. This is Admiralty Bay, a threefingered fjord that is one of the safest anchorages in all of Antarctica. It is also perhaps the prettiest place in Antarctica. The bay splits into three deep inlets: Mackellar, which suffers a southern exposure and is sometimes chopped by storm and wave; Escurra, which is scoured by sudden katabatic winds; and Martel, which offers safe anchorage in winds from all directions. All three inlets terminate in glaciers that flow down from the heart of the island, nudging spongy moraines along their flanks, and during the summer cluttering the bay with icebergs. The bay itself was born of fire and ice. A tectonic fault line, where two plates scrape against each other, is buried five hundred meters deep. The flanks of the bay were carved from timeless rock by the huge ice sheets of the Pleistocene ice ages, when sea levels were lower than they are today. Admiralty Bay may be a microcosm of all Antarctica. It is oceanic, it is terrestrial, and its heart is glaciated, but during the summer its shores are warm and rainy.

During the ever-bright Antarctic summer day, the sun marches around the northern horizon and only briefly dips from sight. The nights never really blacken but are long and often pastel twilights.² The summer bay is a huge nursery, denizened with all manner of life: humpback whales, elephant and leopard seals, giant petrels, skuas and terns. The Weddell seals spend the winter in the bay, chewing breathing holes in the pack ice. By October the females have climbed onto the ice to give birth, and for a few days the ice is stained red with natal blood. The penguins—first the Adélies and gentoos and then the chinstraps—arrive from September to December. The males stake out their little plots and shortly after are joined by the females. By the time I arrive in mid-November, it is already late spring. The big-eyed elephant seal pups are six weeks old and weaned. They lounge on the beaches, mustering the courage to venture into the sea for the first time. The Weddell seal pups, although still nursing, are not far behind.

In the mouth of the bay, which is five kilometers wide and subject to the passions of the open sea, penguins weave through the swells on their way to nesting colonies on the shore, looking like small piebald porpoises. The whole western entrance of the bay, from Demay Point to Point Thomas, is a guanoed penguin metropolis. During the summer, amorous penguins, each pair defending a modest cairn of pebbles, position themselves over the low hills and beaches with geometrical precision, exactly one pecking length in every direction from their neighbors. The rookeries are a cacophonous bustle of activity: bickerings, ecstatic displays, pebble robbing. By December the low volcanic hills are buffed pink with guano, and when the wind is westerly, the stench of the rookery wafts kilometers out to sea.

Behind the penguin rookery, the shoulders of the mountains rise in tiers of snow and black scree, capped with ever-present glacier. The Antarctic terns, black-headed and sharp-winged, lay their eggs in the shelter of these wind-roamed rocks. They course over the beach and sea, screaming at intruders, on their way to clip fish and krill from the bay. From prominent vantage points behind the penguin rookery, the skuas have set up their vigil for unguarded eggs and early chicks. They fly low and fast, just above the upturned heads of the nesting penguins, trying to evoke an inopportune lurch or other distraction to snatch away a hatchling and take it to the edge of the rookery, where two of them, tugging at the squealing baby, will tear it apart and eat it.

The bay has gradually warmed during the past century. Some of the glaciers have been reduced to small patches, isolated from the snowy interior of the island, and are evaporating, leaving in their slow wakes ablation moraines. Most of the ground surface is permafrost, but on warm summer days, earthflows of saturated soil and rock, upheaved by the cycle of freeze and thaw, ooze down the slopes. The stable areas of the mountain slopes are cloaked with fruticose, or branching, lichens. These are species of Usnea, and although only six centimeters tall, some individuals may be hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years old. Usnea, fretted and complex, look like basket sea stars at the bottom of a tropical ocean, and if it is snowing on the hillside—the big, moist, ephemeral snowflakes of summer—the flakes get caught in the tangle and are held, for a moment, until they melt. Relieved of the burden of winter snow, the lichens expand rapidly in the wet early-summer days. The new tissue of the growing edge of fungus is pale white-green, but the more mature spikes are dark green, and the very old, dead spikes are black.

Other parts of the bay have no beaches or mountain flanks but steep, cerulean glacial walls thirty meters tall. You risk your life taking a small boat near these facades, for they disintegrate without warning. The bay changes color according to the wind and the amount of wash from the glaciers. When the wind blows from the land, the water is rich in suspended sediments and is a pastel chalky green, but when the wind pushes choppy ocean water into the bay, the water is dark and clear. The ocean currents also bring swarms of krill, followed by the minke and humpback whales that graze on that pink bounty. Sometimes the humpbacks will loiter just offshore, indolently waving their white pectorals in the air and slapping the water.

The summer pulse of procreation lasts only a few months. By February the baby seals are independent, and the fledged penguin chicks, after long contemplation on the beach, are making their first forays into the sea. Fat and buoyant, they are easy prey for marauding leopard seals. Hard times set in for the skuas, which scavenge and bicker over scraps on the beaches, and by April the terns and the whales have migrated north. Once I lingered until late March and at last found darkness. Others have spent the winter at Admiralty Bay. Some winters the bay never freezes, but in most years snow begins to accumulate in March or April, and by late May the bay begins to glaze with ice, starting at the foot of the glaciers, where the water is freshest and coldest. At first the brisk glacial winds sweep the new ice out to sea, but by July the pack ice forms and the bay freezes solid. Now the day is a long twilight and the nights are black. The mountains that surround the bay become hoary with snow; only the tips of the volcanic nunataks and the sharp edges of the mountains remain brown.³ The penguins follow the expanding edge of the pack ice far out into the Southern Ocean. The terns migrate to the warmer margins of Africa and the Americas. The skuas soon follow, although a few may stay the winter, especially near human habitations, where they can feed on garbage. During July, August, and September, the bay is dead and white.

…

Beyond the hilly penguin rookery at Point Thomas, across a green, mossy plain, is Arcktowski, the Polish research station. Sheltered in the rock at the point itself is a wooden Madonna who stares unblinking at the snow-dusted sea. Her face is sorrowful. The rocky beach is strewn with crates and oil drums. The station, behind a cockscomb of Polish, Russian, and Belgian flags, declaring the nationality of the scientists working there, is a series of rambling wooden buildings, standing on stilts above the permafrost, which intersect in a communal dining hall and kitchen. Once, sitting at the long dining table there, I sensed an unspoken tension between the Poles and the Russians. We are all scientists and indifferent to politics here, a Polish biologist told me, between mouthfuls of pierogi. But he was wearing a Solidarność T-shirt.

Indeed, the primary purpose of every nation’s Antarctic stations is political; the science (even good science) is just an excuse for a presence on the continent. Britain, Argentina, and Chile all claim the South Shetland Islands and the Antarctic Peninsula as their territories or dependencies. Regardless, since the 1960s Antarctica, with unknown but potentially vast resources, has become a free-for-all, and King George Island, only a three-day sail from South America and surrounded by a sea that is ice-free for much of the year, is the easiest place to set up shop. In the 1960s and 1970s Chile, Argentina, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, Poland, the United States, and Italy all established (and in some cases quickly abandoned) bases or refuges on the island. And in the first six years of the 1980s, Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, South Korea, and the People’s Republic of China, all nations with negligible Antarctic heritage, also invaded King George Island. By necessity all of these facilities were built on the five percent of the island’s coast that is not glaciated.

Parts of King George Island are rapidly becoming the urban slum of Antarctica. Some people, optimistically, consider it a sacrifice so that other areas may remain pristine. The worst hit is the Fildes Peninsula, on the southwest tip of the island, where once there were extensive meadows of lichens and important breeding colonies of penguins. It was one of the largest ice-free areas in all of Antarctica, and large areas of the peninsula were designated to be specially protected according to the terms of the Antarctic Treaty. But then came the Soviet invasion. In 1964, having failed to establish a station farther south on inclement Peter I Island, and with winter fast approaching, the Soviets hastily threw together a station on the Fildes Peninsula, smack in the middle of a specially protected area. (The next year the treaty was modified and, in true Soviet tradition, history was rewritten.) They named the station after Admiral Thaddeus Bellingshausen, the pioneering Russian explorer who sailed in these waters in 1821. It was not a happy place. During my visits to Bellingshausen I sensed a spirit of burdensome exile, of hierarchy and pecking order. The corridors were long and empty. The only perceptible scientific activity was at the weather station, which received and printed photos taken by Soviet and American satellites. In the recreation hall, a gloomy portrait of Lenin peered down at the pool table, as if he were calculating angles and shots.

Next to Bellingshausen, across a seasonal creek, are Base Frei, the Chilean meteorological station; Teniente Marsh, the Chilean air force base; and La Villa de las Estrellas (Village of the Stars), the Chilean Antarctic colony. Frei Base was constructed in 1965 during the Marxist government of Salvador Allende at the invitation of the Russians, who considered the Chileans to be comrades in socialism. But then the neighborhood changed, and the two stations have since endured a chilly proximity. The Fildes Peninsula was doomed. The Chileans built a long airstrip, able to accommodate four-engine C-130’s, with adjacent hangars that sheltered a small air force of Twin Otters and helicopters. A hotel and cafeteria were built for the workers. Vast areas of the peninsula were graded for roads. And then came the colonists, hoisting the standard of Chilean nationalism. Their ranks include mothers and children, the families of the base officers, who sign up for two-year stints. They are Antarctic pioneers. The children, muffed in red parkas, bring the strange squeals of youth to the Antarctic. But they aren’t exactly roughing it; the base has a bank, hotel, and gift shop, and a suburb of comfortable, rambling ranch houses with satellite TV. One evening that I spent at the hotel, the guests gathered in the salon to watch Miami Vice.

…

I first sailed into Admiralty Bay on a sun-swept day in late November 1982 and made a landing deep in the interior of the bay at Martel Inlet, on the shore of the Keller Peninsula. Across the inlet was the Ternyck Needle, a nunatak of brown basalt that punched a hole in the glacier and rose 90 meters above the ice cap. The wind had scooped a trench 25 meters deep and 45 meters wide in front of the nunatak, which seemed incongruous and disturbingly out of place, an alien rock in the field of ice. Keller Peninsula was a spine of extinct, eroded volcanos, 600 meters high, that emerged from the glaciated interior of the island. To the east was Stenhouse Glacier, which originated in the ice dome of the island’s interior and slid down a valley of its own making to the sea. Like all of the glaciers on King George Island, it was shrinking, calving icebergs and evaporating faster than the snow could accumulate on the ice dome above. Years before, British glaciologist G. Hattersley-Smith journeyed on dog sleds and skis over this glacier to measure its rate of travel. He found that it varied during the summer from 23 centimeters per day high up on its heavily crevassed slopes to over 100 centimeters per day where the ice is warmed and softened by the summer sea. During the winter, when Martel Inlet is shaded by the spine of the island and the sea freezes, the glacier stops calving and rests.

Behind the beach was Flagstaff Mountain, an extinct volcano 600 meters high, and on its flank a vestigial glacier of the same name. Flagstaff Glacier was only a few hundred meters across and was not joined to the ice cap in the interior of the island, nor to the sea. With no new mass flowing into it, its only crevasse choked with snow, it was slowly evaporating. On this summer afternoon it was dusted with pink snow algae.

I found two derelict huts on Keller Peninsula: Argentine and British meteorological stations. Both were built in 1947 during a squabble over Antarctic territories. The Argentine station was abandoned in 1954, but the British station, which bore the uninspiring name of Base G, remained occupied, summer and winter, until 1962. The boards used to construct the base were scavenged from the old whaling station at Deception Island. The grain of the wooden planks was so etched by wind-blown ice and dust that every detail of the knots and whorls stood out. The hut’s windows and doors were stove in and its rooms were filled with snow. Rotten wooden tables and chairs, rusting bed springs, canned food with peeling labels, molten paperbacks, dissected motor parts, and tools were all frozen in their places, just as in the moment of abandonment twenty years before. On the floor of the hut was a dilapidated plaque that read:

The preservation, care and maintenance of these historic ruins has been undertaken hereinafter upon the aforsaid [sic] schedule by the Ministry of Perks [sic]. Permission to view from the Chief Magistrate

Behind the stations on the first ridge of rocks that overlooked the pastel bay were two freshwater ponds fed by melting snow. I peered into one of them. The water was dancing with copepods. Above the ponds four lonely crosses, memorials to casualties of the British station, were etched silently against the horizon. They coldly endowed the peninsula with a feeling of being peopled; one never felt quite alone there. I hiked up the ridge to read their inscriptions.⁴ On the first cross was written:

IN MEMORY OF

DENNIS RONALD BELL

BORN 15.7.34

WHO WHILST SERVING WITH F.I.D.S.

DIED ACCIDENTALLY AT BASE ‘G’ ON

26.7.59

The second cross:

ERIC PLATT

GEOLOGIST

BASE LEADER

F.I.D.S.

DIED ON DUTY

10 X 1 1948

AGED 22 YEARS

R.I.P.

On the third:

IN MEMORY OF

ALAN SHARMAN

BORN 29.12.36

WHO, WHILST SERVING WITH F.I.D.S.

DIED ACCIDENTALLY AT BASE G ON

23.4.59

I realized that these explorers, who had died on the rim of the earth, were just boys. This nursery bay, lovely on that still afternoon, could take life as well as bestow it.

The fourth cross was so eroded that it read only:

R   G.   N

B   L

F.I.D.S.

 B

L

The hero’s name had been lost to the wind, erased by blowing needles of sand and ice.⁵

The pebble beach in front of the huts was littered with stranded icebergs, sculpted into fantastic shapes by the spring thaw, and a covered wooden boat that had been used to haul water a halfcentury earlier by whalers who took shelter in the bay. Its iron chains were decomposed and bleeding rust, but the wooden rivets that bound the hull were still preserved. What I remember most, though, were the hundreds of whale bones—skulls, ribs, and vertebrae, looking like a giant child’s scattered jacks on the beach. They were far more permanent than any human-made structure. To the north, beyond the Argentine station, the twenty-meter-long skeleton of a baleen whale, a composite of many individuals of several species, had been reconstructed on a bed of moss behind the beach by Jacques Cousteau and the crew of the Calypso, which occupied Base G during the summer of 1972–73. The whale’s deflated ribs were splayed on the ground, its vertebrae looking like a white picket fence. It was late spring, and a shelf of melting snow and ice covered the beach below the whale. The silence was absolute, except when an iceberg calved from Stenhouse Glacier with a reverberation that ricocheted across the bay and the white snowbanks of Ullman Spur. This was followed moments later by a small tsunami, which surged onto the beach and shuffled the icebergs.

…

I next visited the bay in 1987. By then the Brazilian research station had popped up like a cluster of metal and plastic mushrooms on the beach, behind the highest tide mark, between the Argentine hut and Base G. I had been invited to the Brazilian station for the summer to conduct marine biological research. Events in Brasilia, 4,800 kilometers to the north, had motivated the politicians and generals to declare that tropical Brazil had a national interest in Antarctica. An illuminated crucifix had been hauled to the top of Flagstaff Mountain, transforming it into a miniature Corcovado. A pumphouse had been built next to one of the freshwater lakes to provide the station with water, carefully filtered of copepods (at the other end of the cycle, the sewage was pumped into a deep well). The station consisted of fifty-one insulated tractor-trailer containers, painted pale green, linked by narrow corridors much like railroad cars, giving it a boxy, unfinished appearance. The green and yellow Brazilian flag, bearing a globe on which was inscribed Ordem e Progresso (Order and Progress), shuffled in the wind from a mast on the beach. Behind it was a soccer field.

Huge rubber bladders of fuel wallowed on the beach, oozing oil into the bay. The industrial age had come to Admiralty Bay. The tranquility that I so vividly remembered from five years before was gone. A diesel generator, which ran twenty-four hours a day, shredded the silence, and I had to walk beyond the old Argentine station, 200 meters south, to be free of the noise. The generator was the metabolic heart of the station, an artificial sun that kept the personnel warm, incinerated their garbage, and provided the power to link them with the outside world.

Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised, wrote Apsley Cherry-Garrard more than a half-century ago.⁶ But we had fun. Visitors affectionately nicknamed the Brazilian station Little Copacabana. Its spirit was buoyant and welcoming. Just inside the door, one stripped off boots and woolen clothing in an arid, hot foyer and hung one’s clothing on the wall. The walls were lined with hooks, each designating someone’s little vertical territory: a pair of boots, a red parka,