Solstice 2009
The caking on the ice
Chances are that most of you reading this have never experienced real cold. Most people don’t feel anything worse than minus twenty, or for you Fahrenheit fans, a few degrees below zero.
If you live in the plains, or the mountains in the west, or most of Canada, then you’ve experienced some pretty uncomfortable temperatures. At forty below, exposed human skin can freeze in a matter of minutes. And the wind chill would grow teeth. I remember mornings when it was -29C, a degree too warm to close down the schools, when I would wear clothing, snowpants, overshoes, a sweater and a heavy wool snowsuit with funky wooden peg fasteners, a scarf to cover nose and mouth (breathing in at that temperature was to invite pneumonia), and petroleum jelly to cover the six square inches of exposed skin in order to ward off frostbite. The worst part was the wind; it almost always blew from the direction of the school toward my home, and even a gentle 10 mph breeze was unendurable. You wound up walking backward into it because it left the exposed parts of your face, grease notwithstanding, burning and then numb.
There’s a brilliant 1975 Kurosawa movie (Dersu Uzala) about some Russian explorers who are mapping Siberia at the beginning of the twentieth century. One of the explorers, and a local guide, are caught out on the frozen surface of a shallow lake. The evening wind is coming up, it’s about forty below, and the wind chill be close to -80 by morning. The explorer and his resourceful guide Uzala construct a shelter of sorts from the frozen reeds poking up through the ice of the lake and survive the night. The scenes are shot, as many of Kurosawa’s were, with telephoto, and when it pans back, it removes all doubt that the actors and crew really were out on a Siberian lake at sunset, with ferocious and dangerous winds.
Minus eighty, a 16 hour night, and nothing but reeds to protect you with. That’s pretty damned cold.
But it’s not real cold, either.
For real cold, of a type that only a few thousand humans have experienced in the history of the world, you have to travel to Antarctica. Late December is the best time to visit, because it’s summer solstice down there, and even though the south pole will likely be colder than anything you’ve experienced in your life, it will at least be light. But the warmest temperature ever recorded at the South Pole is -13.5C, or 7.6F. That was the nicest day recorded in the 50 some years that humans have been at the South Pole. Usually in high summer it’s about -26F. That would be considered a cold winter night in Ottawa. It’s a nice summer afternoon there. The pole is at about 9,300 feet up, nearly all of which is ice. Here in northern California, that would be 1,000 feet above the tree line, and in the arctic ecological zone. In Antarctica, sea level is where the arctic zone begins. After that, it just gets worse.
You don’t want to know about winter. It’s very dark and very windy, and things freeze that you didn’t know -could- freeze. The handful of scientists that winter at the pole crouch in their well-insulated huts, burning incredible amounts of fuel to keep warm, and don’t venture out unless on a tether and then only if it’s absolutely necessary. With giant fan-heaters like the ones they use to keep aircraft hangars warm here, they can manage room-temperature – and there will still be white dust skittering around on the floor, ice spicules, because the heat doesn’t make it to floor level.
The people who explored Antarctica just over a hundred years ago are known to most people: Scott, Amundsen, Byrd, and so on. Robert Falcon Scott is probably the best known, if only because of his doomed expedition in 1911.
But when it comes to experiencing real cold, and perseverance in the face thereof, the explorer who stands out is Ernest Shackleton.
Shackleton is best known for his incredible odyssey in the Endeavour, locked in pack ice for the better part of a year as the ill-fated ship was slowly ground to splinters, and then a remarkable journey to Elephant Island, and then to South Georgia Island, across the volcanic ridge of the island, and eventually to safety.
Shackleton got his first taste of real cold on a late winter day in September of 1902, when he and Robert F. Scott left their shoreline base camp to scout out the local glaciers to see which would be the best for the 2,000 meter ascent to the ice cap itself. On the second night, with temperatures well below zero, an 80mph wind came up and nearly destroyed their tent, and gave both men a good case of frostbite.
They eventually set off for the South Pole: Scott, Shackleton, Wilson and the dogs. The dogs, mostly Samoyeds, seemed a good choice, but Scott, for reasons that surpasseth understanding, had the dog’s tails bobbed. The dogs, bereft of a built-in scarf to protect their faces and lungs as they slept, weakened and eventually started dying. All three men suffered frostbite, and Wilson had a severe case of snowblindness. Shackleton, however, fared the worst, deeply sickened by scurvy. He was coughing up blood, and finished the last three days of the journey in a sled, being hauled by the other two men.
The expedition had been a failure, as they had had to turn back from the South Pole whilst still some 600 kilometers from their goal. Even though Shackleton’s illness hadn’t been a contributing factor to their turning back, Scott blamed him bitterly, and sent him home in only thinly disguised disgrace.
After that, there was a deep enmity between the two men, and they never spoke again. But, being British, they competed.
Scott, the more gifted of the two at public relations, was lionized in England, and it became clear that he was widely regarded as the Englishman who had earned the right to be the first to the pole. Because, in part, of his contempt for Shackleton, Scott was caught flat-footed when it was announced that Shackleton was to make a second attempt for the pole himself in 1907. His reaction is a masterpiece of Antonian double-speak: “..it is our duty to work together as Englishmen, I mean you, I and Shackleton and all concerned. The first thing is to defeat the foreigners. Whether Shackleton goes or I go or we both go, we must let Arctowski clearly understand that the Ross Sea area is England’s and we will not appreciate designs on it”. He was actually about as happy as a dog is when the other dog steals his biscuit. Fair enough, given Scott’s dietary habits whilst in Antarctica.
Shackleton only had six months to prepare to leave for the Antarctic. He bought a sealing vessel sight unseen (in fact it was 2,500 miles away, off the coast of Newfoundland, when he bought it) and was dismayed, when it came chugging back to England at its top speed of six knots, to discover it needed new masts, the fuselage itself was damaged, and it reeked of seal oil. The Nimrod didn’t qualify as a luxury liner.
Despite all this, he managed to get the ship – and a team – together, set sail, and make it to New Zealand by the not-too-late date of November 23rd. Government grants – £5,000 from his government, £1,000 from the New Zealand government – ensured provisions and extra crew. He had the Nimrod towed south, both to save fuel and to improve his time, and all went well until, on January 1st, they unhitched from the ship they’d pooned and ran into the first of the interesting weather Antarctica specialized in. January 3rd saw a storm of such severity that everyone on board – seasoned seamen all – got seasick. [Try saying that sentence 10 times in six seconds!] The weather continued like that for the next four weeks, killing one of the ponies and maiming the third in command, who lost an eye to a wildly swinging mast hook. They made it to the shore of Antarctica by February 3rd, which is a bit latish in the tourist season. Temperatures stayed at a constant -10F, usually a sign that summer is over.
The fifteen men wintered there, in a tiny cabin. By mid winter, it was almost constant dark, temperatures hovered around -60F, and the winds at the nearby bluff were routinely in excess of 100mph. It will come as no surprise to learn that Shackleton and the men celebrated the winter solstice – June 21st – with what Shackleton described in his diary as a kind of a “mild spree.”
Winter cabin fever set in, leading to scuffles among the men. Shackleton, not temperamentally suited to leadership, stayed out of sight during such fights, coming out later and talking about how he might shoot the next transgressor. This damaged morale, and led one of the men to write in his journal, “[Shackleton} is so easily frightened that he is not to be trusted with a pistol…”
Spring finally arrived, and the men were divvied up into three teams. Southpole.com, the website that provided valuable information for this piece, gave a hint of the difficulties that lay ahead. “Edgeworth David (aged 50) would lead the Northern Party on a 1260-mile journey towards the South Magnetic Pole, with Mackay (aged 30) and Mawson (aged 26) as teammates. The Northern Party had no experience of polar exploration. They would have to pull sledges and supplies without the help of dogs or ponies. At the start, they used the motor car to establish two depots 10 and 15 miles from the hut on Cape Royds. On September 25 the engine overheated and they actually had to wait in the blistering cold for it to cool down. When the party finally left winter quarters the next day, Mackay’s wrist was in a sling after an accident with the car’s starter. It seemed a rather ominous beginning to a journey into the unknown with the doctor’s arm in a sling!”
Nobody in their right mind would try using ponies in the Antarctic today, and even dogs are banned by treaty. And even now, internal combustion engines must be either constantly running or under shelter, or they would freeze. But Shackleton and his men were learning all this the hard way.
The Northern Party nearly lost all three men to incidents over the first few days while they learned about the dangers of ice crevasses.
Despite this, and the “normal” Antarctic hazards of frostbite, sunburn, snow blindness and running out of provisions, they thought they had attained their goal, the South Magnetic Pole, and made it back to the ship by early February. The magnetic pole, which moves about, was at 72° 25’S 155° 16’E and their records indicate they missed that by some fifty miles. The magnetic pole is presently at 64° and off the continent altogether. Compared to most Antarctic explorations of the time, it was an uneventful trek, and at least the men thought they had succeeded.
That team had it easy compared to Shackleton and his men, who were aiming for the South Pole itself. It’s pretty much where it was in 1909, although the spot on the ice that Amundsen reached is now about a kilometer from the pole, because the ice is drifting toward the Weddell Sea at the rate of ten meters a year. One of the men got kicked in the shin by a pony, exposing the bone.
Then there was an ice fog. Those are terrifying. The sky and the landscape are the same color or lack thereof, and all features vanish. You have no idea where the horizon is, especially if there is a wind strong enough to make your sense of up and down mostly a matter of guesswork. There are no shadows, no hints of rises or falls. Given the perpetual hazards of crevasses and the fact that they were walking on ice, it slowed progress to a crawl.
In most years, the katabatic winds ease up during the brief “summers”. 1909 was different – frustratingly so for Shackleton. Once on the icecap, he found himself leaning into a steady head wind of 40 miles an hour, with temperatures usually about twenty-five or thirty below.
We can’t even imagine what conditions were like. Even as a kid 50 years ago, I had access to dress that was warmer than what those men had, and I wasn’t trying to sleep in bright, bright sunshine in a tent for weeks on end while the temperatures dropped to “cold by Canadian standards.” Delayed by the winds and the ice fog, they were racing not only the calendar – nobody could withstand being trapped on the ice cap after mid February – but the supply of rations. They had made a few caches in the first couple of hundred miles, but they had to have enough rations to make it back to the most recent cache in the first place – and then trust to luck that they would be able to find it in that vast white nothingness when they got there. An ice fog at the wrong time and they could walk past it, missing it by less than 100 feet, and never know. Or have the opportunity to find out.
Shackleton counted biscuits (literally) and concluded that he had to reach the pole no later than January 6th. That was assuming all went well. Nothing went well. But in the Antarctic, things rarely go well.
South Pole com describes the last of the trip: “On December 27th they reached the polar plateau at an altitude of 10,200 feet. The weather was severe as a strong headwind chilled them to the bone. On December 30 a blizzard held them to only 4 miles traveling. They were weak from a lack of food and their hands and feet were always on the verge of frostbite. By January 2, 1909, Shackleton was near the breaking point. ‘I cannot think of failure yet. I must look at the matter sensibly and consider the lives of those who are with me…man can only do his best…’ Two days later he wrote, ‘The end is in sight. We can only go for three more days at the most, for we are weakening rapidly’. They fought through a blizzard on January 4, 5 and 6. On January 7, only 100 miles from the pole, a howling blizzard kept them in their sleeping bags all day. It was the same on January 8. The end of their southern journey began at 4 am on January 9. They left the sledge, tent and food at the camp and took only the Union Jack, a brass cylinder containing stamps and documents to mark their farthest south, camera, glasses and a compass. Their farthest south was reached at 9 am: 88°23’S, longitude 162°–just 97 miles from the South Pole.”
Shackleton had to turn back. It was further south than any man had ever gone, but once again, he had been stymied.
Shackleton had spent six years of his life entirely devoted to trying to reach the pole, and knew, even as he was turning back, that one of his rivals was likely to reach it before he would get another chance. And that’s just what happened, two years later, when Amundsen became the first to reach the pole.
Was that the end of Shackleton as an Antarctic explorer? No. Four years after he counted biscuits and made grim calculations, he had a new ship, the Endurance, and a new mission, to cross the continent from one side to the other, going from the Weddell sea across unexplored terrain to the pole, and then on to Ross Sea in his own footsteps. The Endurance, in the meantime, would explore the coast of the new continent, going around to meet them on the other side.
In a way, the Endurance expedition was his most spectacular failure. He never even made it to Antarctica, becoming ice-locked before the continent was even in sight. But it was the situation that made him a leader, and forever removed the taint of personal weakness that he had unfairly acquired on the first Scott expedition.
The Endurance expedition is one of the greatest stories of perseverance and fortitude in the annals of human history. The story can be read here (http://www.south-pole.com/p0000098.htm) if you aren’t already familiar with it.
What is less known is that Shackleton engaged in two more polar expeditions. The first, near the end of the war, was a sensitive operation to take out a German meteorological station in neutral Finland, at Spitzbergen. A gleeful Shackleton described this as a “job after my own heart…winter sledging with a fight at the end”, However, Shackleton was stymied again, this time by a health problem that was realized later to be a sign of severe heart disease. He recovered, and went north again, this time to be turned back from his goal by the fact that the war ended. His frustration with the situation – and, I suspect, his life in general, was expressed in a letter to his son: “”This day 3 years (ago) the ‘Endurance’ was crushed in the ice,and we all were…sleeping on, rather moving about on, the moving ice with no home to go to. I have been to many places since then, now it is the other end of the world”
He finally returned to Antarctica in 1922, in a strange odyssey. He had secured backing from the Canadian government to explore the north, and lost that backing when he suddenly decided to explore the south instead. Historical accounts suggest that he was honestly surprised that the Canadian government lost interest. An old friend, Rowett, gave him the financial backing, and he set of for South Georgia island, the beginning and end of his storied Endurance journey. His shipmates were shocked to discover he had no plans beyond just reaching South Georgia.
It turned out he didn’t need any. He had a massive heart attack and died shortly after reaching the island. He was 47.
It’s impossible to say whether he expected that or not. Certainly he had been assiduously hiding evidence of heart disease for some years, and he had had several major episodes, including a serious heart attack, already.
Was the still a challenge he hoped to fulfill? Or did he want to die in the Antarctic region, perhaps as propitiation to the land that had striven so hard to kill him for so many years?
He died in the brief summer that follows the December solstice. He died in a place where he wanted to be, facing a land that often stymied him but never defeated him.
Happy Solstice.