Antarctica Read Free Page A

ANTARCTIC COAST
Alien World

1
Welcome to Mactown
    McMurdo Station lies on a volcanic island, as far south as you can sail from New Zealand before bumping up against Antarctica—which is how the earliest explorers discovered it. These days, however, most people fly there, in big, noisy, military troop transporters, strapped into webbing seats and packed around with cargo.
    If you’re lucky, you’ll get through first time. If you’re unlucky, the weather will turn bad just before the plane reaches the ‘Point of Safe Return’ at which there is still enough fuel to make it home, and you will boomerang back to New Zealand, for another long, uncomfortable try tomorrow. (The far end of the boomerang used to be known as the ‘Point of No Return’, but was changed for purposes of reassurance.)
    Known to its inhabitants as Mactown (or just ‘town’), McMurdo is the operational headquarters of an American research programme that reaches out from here to the entire continent. But if this is your first sight of Antarctica, and you’re expecting great sweeping vistas of snow and ice, you’re likely to be surprised.
    Coming in from the sea ice runway, on a massive bus whose wheels are taller than your head, 1 you bump endlessly over invisible obstacles, craning your neck to try to peer through the windows. But they are hopelessly steamed up by the crowds of people around you, who are all quietly overheating in the many regulation layers of clothes they have been obliged to wear in case of breakdown.
    And then at last you arrive, and tumble down the steep steps of the bus to see . . . a grubby, ugly mess. McMurdo itself has no ice and little romance. It is more like a mining town, planted squarely on dirt. The buildings are squat and mismatched, with tracked vehicles and heavy plant lumbering along the roads in between, churning up the black volcanic soil and spreading dust and grime. There is nothing to soften that hard industrial edge. You will find no trees or other vegetation here, and nor are there children or non-native animals. All foreign species other than adult humans are banned.
    I remember my first few hours at Mactown, but they were also strangely blurred. There was a constant buzz of helicopters overhead; trucks were shifting materials from one building to the next. People were running past, dragging the big orange bags that were issued to everyone back in Christchurch, to carry the regulation red parka and wind pants, and thermals, and water bottle, and a bewildering array of gloves and mitts and scarves for every occasion. Others were heading down to the sea ice on skidoos that roared like motorbikes. And we newbies were trying to fill in the many, many forms, and take in the dizzyingly detailed instructions about where we needed to be, when, and why, and with what.
    At one o’clock in the morning when everyone else had finally got off to their allocated dorm rooms to sleep, I stole away in the bright midnight sunshine to the edge of town and climbed up Observation Hill, a local cinder cone shaped like a child’s drawing of a volcano.
    The path was rocky but clear and after about an hour I reached the summit, marked by a tall wooden cross. This was erected back in 1912 by the colleagues of the doomed Captain Scott, after he lost his life on the way back from the South Pole. It was inscribed with the names of the five men who perished, along with a line from ‘Ulysses’ by Alfred, Lord Tennyson: ‘To search, to seek, to strive and not to yield’.
    Scott based his two Antarctic expeditions on Ross Island. The second expedition, the more famous of the two, started from Cape Evans, around the coast from here. But the first was built at ‘Hut Point’ at the end of the peninsula in front of McMurdo. I could see it now over in the distance, near where the icebreaker ship docks on its annual resupply. With its clean wooden walls and tidy low roof,