Scott Base, New Zealand's Antarctic outpost , is on a small cape on the other side of Observation Hill from the small American city that is McMurdo. It happens to be on a bay where the seasonal sea ice is trapped between the immovable object of the Hut Point Peninsula and the unstoppable force of the slowly advancing Ross Ice Shelf, so the ice gets pressed up in all sorts of interesting and dramatic ways there. During the part of the season that the sea ice is still safe for walking, there are regular tours of the pressure ridges from McMurdo, and I lucked into one in my first week, when a kind soul offered me his spot.
Shortly after arriving at McMurdo, my DSLR's autofocus stopped working. I had just met a camera crew who had arrived to shoot a documentary, and my minder made the very good point that I should go see if one of them might be able to fix it. They were keen to be helpful, but the solution was not immediately apparent, so one of them generously lent me one of his serious professional cameras for the excursion. So, these photos are what you get when an extremely middling photographer gets her hands on a weapon of great power, to capture information that might unlock the great secret of how ice interacts with light – in other words, there are a lot.
The tour set off, if I recall, around 8pm – well after dinner, and when the sun was low enough in the sky to set things off nicely. There was a clear walking route marked off that had been determined to be safe, and for the most part we stuck to that pretty closely. The main attraction was, of course, the pressure ridges that had thrust up and cracked, but as with any wave, there are also troughs, and these were where the real risks were. After the warm start to the summer, they had filled with meltwater, which would warm up in the sun and melt the ice under it. Similarly, if there was a crack in the ice where it had been pressed down, seawater would rise through it and fill the hollow. It was practically impossible to tell a freshwater surface melt pool from a saltwater upwelling pool, and either way the ice under them was likely to be less stable, so we were strongly discouraged from larking about in the puddles, however inviting they may be. (It was about -12°C when we were out, so that was not a temptation anyway.)
One of the first things I learned about sea ice is that if you see a seal, there is probably a crack nearby, and there were definitely seals.
When historical parties were camped at Hut Point, they used to come down here to hunt seals. It was nice to see them still sunbathing here
With the bright red parkas and the deep blue shadows, the other mammals in the area were pretty photogenic too.
Out here, also, was a phenomenon I was familiar with from reading. When one walks in fresh snow, the snow under one's feet compacts, then when the winds come and blow the fresh snow away, the compacted snow of the footprints is left elevated from the surrounding surface. Anything that stands up in Antarctica collects a snowdrift in time. I thought these were just sastrugi when I first crossed their path, until I looked closer.
Ice is a peculiar substance in that, while it is solid with a crystalline structure, it is slightly plastic. When it buckles, it will do expected things like break into slabs that pile up on each other, but given the right conditions, it can also bend, and the thin sea ice from the warm and windy winter just past was, in places, malleable enough to give the impression of walking on pie crust more than ice.
Aside from the low angle of the light and the hall-of-mirrors effect of angled snow surfaces bouncing photons off each other, there was intermittent thin shade from some patchy light clouds drifting overhead, which made for all sorts of interesting abstract studies.
I don't know what was going on there with the ice blocks, but it made me think of Nelson's marine biology ice hole, from which he'd have to hack a 'biscuit' of re-frozen ice every time he went out, and made a little wall of all these biscuits all around the hole.
When I tell people I'm doing a graphic novel set in Antarctica, they frequently laugh and say 'Well at least the backgrounds will be easy! ... White!' But as I hope the pictures above illustrate, it is a lot more complicated than that. As a certain junior geologist found out when trying to paint a scene from memory:
One of the amateur painters on that expedition once showed Wilson a snow scene which he had just painted in which the snow was mostly a dead white. Wilson said, 'Is that what you really saw, white snow? It's very rare, you know.' There was an argument round the table and at last Wilson said, 'Let's go and have a look at it,' and took his friend outside. They talked for a while and on going in again, the friend told the others, 'Blow me if Bill isn't right, it's gone pinkish since I painted it.' (Frank Debenham, Antarctica, p.200)