December 16, 1992
Hello,
Maybe this will be my last letter from Antarctica. Right now I am scheduled to fly to Christchurch on January 2, 1993. It has gotten quite warm around here lately. (it especially feels warm after my time at South Pole.) I have given up on wearing long underwear it is so warm. It feels real bizarre not wearing them. I had gotten quite used to them. I wear normal old clothes; a t-shirt, pants, running shoes and my light-weight jacket. The temperature has reached all the way up to forty degrees.
Many, (in fact most) of the men who come down here grow a beard while they are here. I'm not sure why, but it just seems the natural thing to do. I was not amongst the masses in this case. I though about it, but never did get around to growing it.
In honor of going back to New Zealand soon I will take this part of the letter to give my assessment of the "New Zealand Accent." It is, of course, similar to the British one, but there are many striking differences. The most notable feature of the accent is that the letter E is always pronounced as a long vowel. This turns "I had eggs for breakfast" into "I had eeeeggs for breeeekfast." Having short E's turn into long E's sounds most peculiar because it jumps out at you, and can not be ignored. Another thing I noticed is that the accent is not consistent amongst different people. My mother told me that Aukland was pronounced Oakland by the Kiwi's, but I was quite skeptical since I had heard Kiwi's pronounce it as we would. Well, I have discovered that it is pronounced both ways in New Zealand, depending on which Kiwi is saying it. I have found a similar occurrence with many other words. I heard one Kiwi pronounce "The Maori People" like "The Meerry People." I was quite confused for a while as I tried to figure out what they were talking about.
This summer there is a group from Norway trying to find the tent Amundsen left at the South Pole when he discovered it in 1911. What makes this difficult is that the ice is constantly moving and snow is accumulating. Therefore the tent is no longer sitting exactly on top of the South Pole and has been buried under the snow. They can predict fairly well its location, in all three dimensions, but they had not found it yet while I was there. The current South Pole station is not the first one. There is an old station mostly buried and a ways away from the current station. The same two conditions apply as for the tent. It will work its way to the ocean in a few million years (or there abouts) at it's rapid pace of a few feet a year.
December 28, 1992
Well, I survived a Christmas in Antarctica. It wasn't too much different than at home. Just not as many relatives around. We got two days off in a row for Xmas. Such a treat. Today is an incredibly beautiful day. It is almost 50 F outside today. Right now is about the height of Summer here in the southern hemisphere.
Here are some unusual items that I feel I must mention. In another month a ship will come down here to offload and onload a bunch of cargo. An icebreaker will make a path for it to get here. When it is here it will dock at a pier that is made out of ice with some dirt on top of it. The ice pier was a rather unusual sight before they put the dirt on top of it. It is, of course, still surrounded by normal ice. That won't melt away for a while yet. I have included a map of the local area around McMurdo. The shaded in area is the permanent ice shelf. It never melts, therefore it is real thick. The rest of the water area on the map is covered right now with what is called seasonal ice, which will melt soon. The land that McMurdo is on is an island, Ross Island to be exact. Therefore, we are not actually on the Antarctic Continent, but an island about 40 miles off its coast. There is a spot on the map called Castle Rock, which I talked about hiking to in a previous letter.
Cruise ships will also be making their way down here sometime soon, I am told. They will be sending people ashore to visit wonderful Mac-town. The National Science Foundation (NSF, who is in charge here) has taken a much more benevolent attitude towards these visitors than they had in the past. We will be giving them tours of the town. I guess that the NSF feels that they need some good publicity to keep Congress approving the budget.
I think that I have definitely inherited some of my Mothers allergies. The dust here is absolutely awful, and it is wreaking havoc on my sinuses. They are doing medium well right now, but when I first got here they were miserable. One good point is that I have not been sick since I have been down here, despite the predictions of many people otherwise.
While I was at South Pole I met a couple of people that I have some historical background in common with. First, I met the daughter of the man who was the Dean of Admissions at the Naval Academy while I was there, her name is Katy McNitt. His signature is on my letter of acceptance. Next, I met a guy who grew up in Newport Beach, although he is a few years older than I am so we didn't know anyone in common. His name is Jeff Johnson.
I have been doing a little bit of reading during my stay down here. I had not completed reading a book in the previous two years, so this is a significant item. The books I have read are: "A Prayer for Owen Meany" by John Irving, "Into a Desert Place" by Graham MacKintosh, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" by Philip K. Dick, "The Discovery of Slowness" by Sten Nadolny, and I am a little bit over half way done with "The Brothers Karamazov" by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I am getting bogged down a little bit in this book, also it is 700 pages long so there is lots of room to get bogged down in.
Since most government type organizations are quite complicated and confusing I will explain how this place is organized and run. There is a name for the entire program here, which includes all the groups involved. It is the United States Antarctic Program, or USAP for short. The big honcho in the USAP is the National Science Foundation, or better known as the NSF. The NSF doesn't just play around in Antarctica, they play all over the world. Therefore, the NSF personnel here are from one branch of the NSF called the Division of Polar Programs, or DPP for short. NSF provides all of the rules and all of the scientists for the program. There are two groups that work for the NSF to provide everything else, First there is the military, who provides the transportation and some of the logistic and material support. Finally, there is the company I work for, Antarctic Support Associates (better known as ASA.) We provide everything else that is needed. Just recently the military decided that it did not need to be in the Antarctic, so as they leave here bit by bit we pick up the roles that they have left behind. For instance, we started preparing the meals and coordinating the movement of cargo this year instead of the Navy doing it. This is why we, all of a sudden, needed a computer program to track the cargo. In a few years the military will be completely gone. Here is a chart of the agencies involved with the program here.
ASA = Antarctic Support Associates (the company I work for)
NSFA = Naval Support Force, Antarctica
VXE6 = Antarctic Development Squadron Six (Navy)
There are a few Army and Marine personnel here, also. They are part of NSFA. NSFA is in charge of Medical; the base store; all of the fuels for the vehicles, power plant, water plant, incinerator, etc.; the Chapel; the ice pier; and a few more smaller items. VXE6 flies all of the aircraft on Antarctica. They fly LC-130 Hercules cargo planes and UH-1 Iroquois (aka Huey) helicopters. The LC-130s have skis on them for landing on the ice. ASA is a company that was created just for this contract with the NSF. Our entire budget comes from the NSF.
January 2, 1993
As you can see, I have not left on my scheduled departure date, yet again. My new departure date is January 14th. Well, it is a new year. My New Years was pretty commonplace. Not many people were into celebrating it. I guess that everyone was still recovering from Christmas. We got two days off again for this holiday. Today is the second of the two. I watched television most of the day yesterday. I wasn't feeling up to too much more than that. Today I climbed Observation Hill. It is a tall hill right next to town which affords quite a nice view. I could see the ice breaker in the distance. It should be here soon. The fuel tanker is supposed to get here in eight days and the cargo ship in a month.
One nice thing about my staying here longer is that I will have my one year anniversary at ASA, which means that I get two weeks of vacation time coming my way. This means that I will be able to do some exploring on the way home. Two weeks is not very much, but it's better than nothing. I thin that this will be my last letter from the Ice. I will most likely send another one when I get back to Denver, which will not be for at least a month and a half from now. So, good-bye for now from the coldest, windiest and driest continent on Earth.
