Antarctic UAVs

22 January 2014

One of the things I really enjoy doing while in Antarctica is going for hikes around McMurdo. Not getting out for my regular evening hikes while at the Tall Tower field camp was something I was not looking forward to while at the camp.

Although we’ve been busy with our research and UAV flights and helping keep the camp running smoothly I have found time to get out for a few evening hikes around our field camp. We are camped on the Ross Ice Shelf – a France-sized floating part of the Antarctic ice sheet. It is about as flat here as anywhere else you could find on the planet so the hiking isn’t all that exciting, at least in terms of what I normally think of when I go for a hike. Normally I like hikes in the hills and mountains that provide stunning views of the landscape I am traveling through. For my Tall Tower hikes everything for miles in every direction looks exactly the same – flat and white. Despite the lack of visual variety I’ve found my evening hikes here to be enjoyably and definitely a new experience.

Walking away from camp all that you see is flat, white snow in front of you. If it clear or partly cloudy a single, flat line marks the horizon but without any features between you and the horizon you have no sense of distance. In some ways walking across the ice shelf is like walking on a treadmill – the view never changes.

If it is cloudy then even the visual reference of a horizon disappears. Under these conditions you find yourself walking through a world of featureless grey. With a thick overcast sky the small features that define the snow surface here – snowdrifts and sastrugi – disappear making the ground look completely flat and you find yourself stumbling over even the smallest drifts. Looking up from the ground at your feet you see no change as your gaze lifts to where the horizon should be and then to the sky above. In every direction all you see is a flat, grey void. You have absolutely no sense of distance. Your gaze could be fixed 10 feet or 10 miles in front of you but you’d never know the difference.

The walk I took this evening was under these conditions. Rather than trekking blindly across the ice shelf I chose to walk along the South Pole traverse snow road, which is marked by flags on bamboo poles every 1/8^th of a mile.

 

As you can see in the photo above other than the single flag (which was only 30 feet from me when I took this photo) there is nothing else to see. Being in an environment like this is something that is completely alien to me. It makes me feel very small but at the same time I take comfort in that, in realizing that I am small and the world is a very big place with huge expanses barely touched by humans. In the end, it is that sense of my small place in the natural world that I look for when I go hiking and so hiking here at our Tall Tower field camp maybe isn’t so different from the experience I seek when I’m hiking or biking in the mountains or deserts I so often visit .

Thanks for reading.

John