View from the bottom of the world

Wisconsin science plays a key role in Antarctica
Stories and photos by
ERNIE MASTROIANNI
©Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Originally published January 7, 2001

McMurdo Station, Antarctica -- John Isbell is relaxing in the McMurdo Station dining hall with Paul Lenaker. Isbell, a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee geologist, and Lenaker, a UWM graduate student, have just completed a successful six-week stint in the spectacular Transantarctic Mountains.

The partners gathered rocky evidence of glacial movement during the Permian Era, more than 200 million years ago. Now, as one year ends and another begins, they are looking ahead to studying their samples.

But not without first looking back a bit.

"It's a place I'd love to come back to," Lenaker says.

The two spent the last day in the mountains listening. Just listening.

"We were at Alligator Peak, and we had a day to sit, and hear the glacier cracking," Isbell says. "It sounds like a whip cracking, then you hear the echo of the ice falling."

Welcome to life at the bottom of the world.

Isbell's work is just one of a host of Antarctic projects that involve Wisconsin equipment, Wisconsin research and design, Wisconsin scientists or some combination of the three. During the relatively warm months of the year -- which recently began in Antarctica -- Wisconsinites are literally all over the continent.

Antarctica is the last frontier on Earth, the driest and coldest place on the planet. Thousands of scientists from all over the world are drawn each year by the chance to work in what is as close to a pristine environment as the planet provides. To them, Antarctica is one big laboratory. World-class science is the norm; only the best can get the support and funding needed to make the pilgrimage.


Wisconsin's presence and influence is pervasive.


Just a few tables away from Isbell and Lenaker, Tim Paulson, a geologist from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, is explaining over dinner his research on the local volcano group. Mount Erebus, a 12,444-foot monolith that dominates the skyline, is the world's southernmost active volcano.

Paulson is trying to map out the stress points in the Earth's crust in the area by studying what are called parasitic cones, which grow on the side of large volcanoes.

And there are more. Numerous graduate assistants, researchers, engineers and support workers on the frozen continent come from Wisconsin.

-- Civil engineer Jerry Marty, who grew up in Monroe and graduated from UW-Platteville, directs the construction of the new South Pole station, a $150 million marvel of engineering. (He also made sure a Green Bay Packers flag was flying at the South Pole during the team's two most recent Super Bowl appearances.)



-- University of Wisconsin-Madison astrophysicists Robert Morse and Francis Halzen search for information on the evolution of the universe using a neutrino detector buried two kilometers deep in ice, directly under the geographic South Pole. It's the biggest single scientific project here.

-- Mechanical engineer Robert Pernic, educated at the Milwaukee School of Engineering and now based at Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, oversees a variety of exotic telescopes that exploit the dry and steady air above the South Pole to peer deep into the infrared and sub-millimetric universe.

-- UW-Madison wildlife ecologist Christine Ribic is in a remote field camp at Cape Bird, studying the shifts in range and distribution of Adelie penguins.

-- UW-Madison climatologist Charles Stearns leads the ongoing effort to build and maintain a network of automated weather stations that cover the continent.

-- Glaciologist Charles Bentley, a professor emeritus at UW-Madison, is the principal investigator for the Ice Coring and Drilling Service, based at the UW Space Science and Engineering Center. Ice cores from Antarctica contain clues to more than 100,000 years of the Earth's climate. Pulling scientifically valid cores from the ice is not only a science, but also a high art. Wisconsin ice drillers are among the world's best.

Almost all of the American work is funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, which in 1999 spent $183 million on polar research and $63 million on logistics in Antarctica.

The Wisconsin influence, much of it connected to UW-Madison, has grown over the years, with more scientists pulling in more research money, which in turn pulls in more scientists and more money, and on and on. Halzen, who has been based at Madison for 30 years, praises the one-of-a-kind precision instruments that come out of the UW-Madison-run Physical Sciences Lab in Stoughton, the resources available at the university's Space Science and Engineering Center and the money that pours out of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

"For people who want to do big science, there are very few places left to go," he says. "I came here because this was a world-class university."

Working in Antarctica is fraught with problems. Weather can wreak havoc on the best of plans, and getting material -- not to mention people -- in and out can be a nightmare.

Johnathan Thom, a UW-Madison atmospheric scientist, is spending the first part of this month preparing for an unprecedented mission: landing on a huge iceberg in the Ross Sea and wiring it up with instruments and a weather station.

Thom's work is part of Stearns' overall effort and is intended to shed light on the physics of large iceberg movement.

But his weather equipment is back in New Zealand, and he won't be able to test it in advance of his mission, and he and his partner, Rob Flint, have just been denied until mid-January the use of a Twin Otter airplane, which lands on skis and is popular with scientists taking equipment to remote locations.

This is Thom's second trip to Antarctica, and the glitches have him concerned. It's the 10th trip for Flint, a late replacement for UW-Madison researcher George Weidner, who suffered a hernia and could not make the trip. Flint is more accustomed to the supply-line problems.

McMurdo Station, where they are making preparations, is the largest of three U.S. bases; about 1,000 people are crammed into the station during the warm months. Some return again and again; Bentley has been to the continent 18 times.

Isbell says the first moments after being dropped off at a research site are mesmerizing.

"After the plane leaves, all you hear is the wind," he said.

No traffic noise. No planes overhead or trains in the distance. No interruption.

"When you get back to McMurdo Station," he said, "it's like coming to New York City."

Science agency funds journalist

Ernie Mastroianni, a former picture editor with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, was visiting Antarctica and the South Pole as a guest of the National Science Foundation. The agency, which funds most of the U.S. scientific research in Antarctica, selects a few members of the news media each year to travel the continent.

Because of the logistical difficulties in traveling to and around the continent, the foundation provides transportation, room and board from New Zealand. The agency has no input on photographs or stories.

Mastroianni, who left Milwaukee the day after Christmas 2000, was focusing his attention on the numerous Wisconsin-based scientists, researchers and engineers who are working in Antarctica or have projects there.

A history of Antarctic exploration

@Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Originally published January 8, 2001

Explorers give years, lives discovering harsh world
ERNIE MASTROIANNI Journal Sentinel staff

For most of recorded history, Antarctica was a question mark on world maps. Formidable barriers of sea ice and the world's stormiest seas kept all but the hardiest of mariners away.

The famed English explorer James Cook circumnavigated what is now known as the Southern Ocean in trips made between 1772 and 1775, encountering vast reaches of sea ice but no land. But the presence of impenetrable ice led him to surmise that there must be a continent to the south.

Crossing the Southern Ocean and spotting the Antarctic land mass did not happen until the early 1820s, when the lure of profit drew commercial whalers and seal hunters. They were the continent's first visitors, mostly along the Antarctic Peninsula.


But whaling was driven by profit, not exploration, so new discoveries were by happenstance.

In 1838, the U.S. Navy dispatched Charles Wilkes to lead an exploration of the seas around Antarctica. The voyage lasted until 1842. It was he who surmised, after a series of land sightings from 1839 to 1840, that Antarctica was a continent, and he mapped out more than 1,500 miles of coastline.

During the same time period, British explorer James Clark Ross led a mission that discovered the Ross Ice Shelf, Ross Island and McMurdo Sound. He also witnessed the eruption of a volcano, which is now known as Mount Erebus (named after a ship in Ross' fleet) and remains active, looming over McMurdo Station, the U.S. base in Antarctica.

At the dawn of the 20th century, two well-financed missions made runs at reaching the geographic South Pole.

Norwegian Roald Amundsen led four companions with tons of provisions pulled by dogsleds. He reached the pole on Dec. 14, 1911, helped by moderate weather and the hardy sled dogs that were bred for the cold.

British explorer Robert Falcon Scott arrived at the pole a month later, demoralized after his party of five hauled sleds themselves over a longer route, only to find a small tent and a short note of greeting from Amundsen.

"The pole, yes," wrote Scott on Jan. 17, 1912, "but under very different circumstances than expected."

But Amundsen did not get the fame that usually comes with the winner of such a feat. Scott, who died on his way back, only 11 miles from a depot of food and fuel, captured the imagination of the world. The account of his journey to the pole and the brutal trip back remains some of the most gripping writing on exploration ever penned.

Scott and his party endured an unusually cold February and March, and froze to death in their tents, pinned down by a raging blizzard and temperatures down to minus 60. A rescue party found their remains the following spring, and the contents of Scott's logbook were retrieved and published.

After Amundsen's victory and Scott's death, British explorer Ernest Shackleton declared that an overland crossing of the continent was the only remaining feat in Antarctica.

Shackleton failed gloriously.


His two-year odyssey ended when sea ice locked in his ship, Endurance. He and his crew spent one winter drifting, then abandoned ship in spring when ice floes crushed the boat. They took lifeboats to deserted Elephant Island, just off the Antarctic Peninsula. From there, Shackleton and a small crew made an 800-mile voyage to South Georgia Island in a makeshift, open cockpit sailboat. Once they reached South Georgia, they hiked over an icy, windswept mountain range to reach a whaling station.

Two years after the start of the voyage, Shackleton returned by steamer to Elephant Island to rescue the rest of the crew. Amazingly, no lives were lost. A book on the epic ("South: The Endurance Expedition," by Ernest Shackleton) was a bestseller, lavishly illustrated by the expedition's photographer, Frank Hurley, whose high-quality photos captured the gritty details of the two-year epic.

In the 1920s and 1930s, aviators dominated exploration, and leading the way were Richard Byrd and Lincoln Ellsworth.

Byrd led five Antarctic expeditions, starting in 1928 when he built the Little America station on the Ross Ice Shelf. He flew over the South Pole on Nov. 29, 1929, and made numerous geographic discoveries. Ellsworth, who had been the financial backer of Roald Amundsen, in 1936 became the first person to fly across Antarctica.

In 1946, the U.S. military, without a war to fight but with a new adversary (Russia) based in a cold climate, turned its sights on Antarctica. Nearly 5,000 men and dozens of ships and planes went to the continent to train in the cold weather. It remains the largest military exercise in Antarctica.

A decade later, Navy aviator George Dufek landed a plane at the South Pole in 1956 as an advance to establishing a permanent U.S. base. It marked the first time a human had stood on the spot since 1912, when Scott and Amundsen were there.

The following year, 1957, an international effort -- dubbed the International Geophysical Year -- was launched to explore the continent. Since then, the South Pole and McMurdo Station on Ross Island have been occupied by the U.S., in a program funded and organized by the National Science Foundation.

Tourism began in the 1960s, mostly with cruise ships exploring the spectacular scenery of the Antarctic Peninsula. In 1979, a chartered plane from New Zealand crashed into Mount Erebus, killing 257 tourists on a sightseeing flyover of the continent.

Minnesotan Will Steger led an international dogsled expedition in 1989 that crossed the continent, from the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula to the Soviet station Mirnyy on the opposite coast.

In 2001, two high-profile missions crossed Antarctica. They include the International Trans Antarctica Scientific Expedition, an overland journey by Sno-Cat to gather information about the West Antarctica Ice Sheet.

And two teachers, American Ann Bancroft and Norwegian Liv Arnesen carried out a privately financed mission to ski across the continent using wind sails as aids.

Pole serenity rivals McMurdo bashes

By ERNIE MASTROIANNI Journal Sentinel staff
©Milwaukee Journal Sentinal
originally published January 8, 2001

McMurdo Station, Antarctica -- You won't find any drunken drivers around here on New Year's Eve, and the hour of midnight strikes in broad daylight.
So in general, the holiday celebration at the bottom of the world tends to be civil.

But there are a couple of major exceptions.

One of them is two miles down a dusty black road from the U.S. base in McMurdo: New Zealand's Scott Base, a cluster of lime green buildings on featureless black volcanic soil. This is party central, and shuttle buses full of revelers run back and forth all night from McMurdo.


The crowd at the party, in a vehicle maintenance garage, is a mix of the tattooed and pierced support workers, slightly more staid scientists and even a few in formal wear. Canned beer is one dollar, U.S.

I take a shuttle bus back to McMurdo a little before midnight -- in time to see dozens of people lined up along the icy shores of McMurdo Sound.



One is a dishwasher from Chicago named Salvatore Consalvi, who says he just wanted to be outdoors to celebrate. "If you're inside at New Year's, you could be anywhere," he reasons. "If you're outside, you're in Antarctica."

Out in the sound, the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Polar Sea is smashing a channel through harbor ice. At the stroke of midnight, its horn sounds a long blast.

-- -- --

The other big party down here is on New Year's Day at McMurdo, and Sturgeon Bay, Wis., native Bill Meyer is in charge.

"Traditionally," says Meyer, referring to the New Zealanders, "they do the New Year's Eve party, and we do New Year's Day."

Meyer's in his second season as director of recreation here. His party is called Icestock, and it features live music, plenty to drink and a chili cook-off.



* * *

Antarctica is a vast unspoiled wilderness, but McMurdo Station is as gritty as a mining town.

If you wish to escape, the road goes through Ted Dettmar, lead instructor for the field safety training program, also known as Happy Camper School.

The course involves an overnight stay on the snow-covered Ross Ice Shelf, and is a requirement for the hundreds of scientists and workers bound for remote field camps.

Over two days, we learn to assemble camp stoves, operate high-frequency radios, build walls out of snow blocks and even make an igloo-like shelter called a quincy. At one point, 15 people crawl into our quincy at once.

We also hang from ropes into deep blue ice crevasses and hike six miles in the long, crisp shadows of the midnight sun.

The camp is hard work. There is a lot of shoveling and lifting. "The nurses at the medical center complain to us that no one comes back with frostbite," says Dettmar. "But there are a lot of pulled muscles and thrown backs."

University of Wisconsin-Madison atmospheric scientist Jonathan Thom is one of the campers; he will soon be traveling to remote locations to service and install weather stations.

He helps build the quincy, constructed by tamping down a 2-foot layer of snow on top of everyone's piled-up bags -- and then extracting the bags.

Thom sleeps in the shelter, which he says is warm and very humid. I'm among those who sleep in sturdy Scott tents.

No one gets very cold. The clothes issued to us by the U.S. Antarctic Program are extremely warm, and while we're there, the temperature never dips below zero.

The Pole, at last

Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, Antarctica -- If McMurdo Station is a mining camp, South Pole Station is an oil rig in the middle of a white ocean. Or perhaps an outpost on another planet.

And the cold is not the first thing that hits you (that comes later). It's the simplicity of the place. No growing plants, no animals, no dirt or rocks underfoot. No lakes, no running water -- and not much wind. Stepping on snow makes a creaky sound that is quite different from the sound of Wisconsin snow.

Odd-shaped blue buildings, domes and antennas dot the flat landscape. Upon arrival, a van with monster truck tires brings you to the geodesic dome of the South Pole Station, around which a bunch of decrepit buildings are arranged haphazardly.

Inside the station, the furniture is worn and in need of replacement, but no one seems to mind. There's a warmth to this place, and it is not measured in degrees on the thermometer.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists I talk to relish being here. Grad student Katherine Rawlins tells of taking a walk outside on Christmas Eve and savoring the utter silence.

"I could only hear my heart beating," she says. Part of the appeal, Rawlins says, is that this is "the ultimate way to simplify your life."

Yes, it is cold. But the dryness seems to blunt the chill the same way it makes a hot day more bearable. Twenty below felt like about zero to me. But when I kneel on the steel framework of the new South Pole Station building, the cold surface is painful, even through a few layers of insulated clothing.

To actually stand at the geographic South Pole is like being at the end of an incredibly long road. It is an absolute destination, a final point. You can go no farther than this.

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