After over a month in the field at Cape Evans it’s about time for an update on the season.
Once we get underway and into the summer work programme time flies by very quickly and the outside world recedes somewhat, and only Fran’s Christmas advent calendar marked the passing days.
The first couple of weeks were spent at Shackleton’s 1907 expedition base at Cape Royds. Now that the conservation project there is complete we have begun an annual monitoring and maintenance programme. This year we took an extra week to audit every single artefact in the hut, checking location and description data against the database. It was 2 weeks of complete contrast – from counting artefacts inside, to Condition One storms outside, to calm sunny days filled with Emperor penguins and Lucy scanning the sea for orca fins at every break. Seen once!
After the remote and wildly beautiful environs of Cape Royds, Cape Evans by comparison seemed a most luxurious set up. Our own tents! A conservation lab with solar power! A kitchen wannigan that is not on a slope, and stays warm when the wind goes above 10 knots. And a lot more visitors – Cape Evans is within easy reach of both Scott Base and McMurdo station, and many people make the most of the opportunity to hop on a skidoo, or join a trip to see the historic huts. Many of the visitors are up this way for work reasons – drilling holes in the ice for divers, installing equipment, monitoring weather stations, counting and tagging Weddell seals.
We had a few different tasks over the 3 weeks we spent at Cape Evans. During January there will be building work on the walls and roof of the stables. Fran, Lucy and I moved a lot of very heavy provision crates out of the way of the building work and into a storage container, and also documented and packed all the artefacts in that area. Along the external wall, where a new waterproof membrane will run down the inside of the wall and into the ground, we excavated artefacts at risk of damage during the membrane installation. One of these was the iconic dog skeleton. Chained to the wall sometime in the last few decades, the skeleton has been disintegrating a little more each season as the ice forms and then melts around it. Lucy’s blog describes the dog in more detail.
Meanwhile Fran conserved the historic acetylene plant that provided gas lighting – a tricky job due to some flaky paint and a hard-to-reach back side requiring Fran’s best contortionist skills.
And of course we returned 1300 artefacts to the hut that were conserved over the last year, and collected another 1500 to be conserved over the upcoming winter season at Scott Base.
Temperature: -5°C
Wind: 3 knots
Temperature with Wind Chill: -5°C
We have now moved onto the next phase of our work programme in Antarctica. Lizzie, Lucy and I have traversed over 30km of sea ice, through Erebus Bay to the North of Scott Base, to Sir Ernest Shackleton’s expedition base at Cape Royds where we will be working in situ for the next 2 weeks.
We have set up camp in 2 wannigans (containers that work on the principle of refrigerators, but instead of keeping the cold in, they keep the cold out).
There are many considerations to bear in mind when camping in Antarctica, particularly when the aim is to ensure that your presence leaves no mark when you pack up and leave. Scott Base, where we have spent the last three months, is very ‘sustainability’ conscious, with a successful recycling and responsible disposal policy, and we are very much adhering to this standard in our small camp.
We separate all our waste appropriately for later transportation back to Scott Base. It really does make you think how you could be more ‘green’ back home - I do try to do my bit, but often complain that there’s no space for separate bins for differing material in my kitchen back home.
Here in our little camp all 3 of us use the same small wannigan for cooking, dining and relaxing, and still manage to have 4 types of separated waste. It makes my excuses seem a little lame!
A couple of days ago, Lucy, Fran and I packed up 1,500 artefacts associated with Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s 1910 – 13 expedition base at Cape Evans. They were conserved by 4 of our conservators over the Antarctic winter and we intend to return them to Cape Evans. But first we will be spending a couple of days on conservation work at Sir Ernest Shackleton’s 1907-09 expedition base at Cape Royds.
We took off from Scott Base (New Zealand’s science facility) with a small team of helpers, a hagglund (an all terrain vehicle) and a train of sledges laden with all our belongings, plus a little green portable cabin which is to be our home for the next 3 weeks while we are working at Cape Royds.
At present the frozen sea between Scott Base and Cape Royds is stable and safe for driving on. This year however the sea ice is breaking up early. One of the first things we did when we arrived at Cape Royds was to walk up to the top of the hill between our camp site on the ice and the historic hut. We were pretty surprised to see open water and pack ice floating 500 metres out from the shore.
The open sea with its mountain backdrop is quite a spectacular site to behold – each morning the sea is getting noticeably closer.
The Adelie Penguins nesting on rocks nearby will probably reap the benefits of having their fishing grounds within easily waddling distance this early in the breeding season. The closeness of the open sea may be more of a concern for our operation however, because we shall be moving our conservation camp south again in 2 days time, to Cape Evans.
Weather: clear blue skies; -18 degrees C; less than 10 knots of wind.
When I first looked at a map of Ross Island, Antarctica, I was surprised to see that the historic huts of Captain Scott and Sir Ernest Shackleton at Cape Evans and Cape Royds are only about 5 kilometres apart. They are both built by the seashore of McMurdo Sound, convenient locations for the expedition members when they were off-loading the ships. For us living at Scott Base (New Zealand’s science base) the huts can be easily visited in a day by hagglund (an all terrain vehicle) - provided the sea ice is thick and strong enough to drive across.
Last weekend we took a trip to see the historic huts. It was a visit which both Fran and I have been looking forward to impatiently since arriving.
I have seen so many photos of the huts that when the time came to visit them I had the impresion they might seem somehow familiar. In reality, the huts and settings are quite different from expected.
Shackleton’s 1908 hut at Cape Royds is smaller, more sheltered and much cosier than I ever thought possible in Antarctica. Whereas the hut at Cape Evans, built by Captain Scott in 1911, is much larger and the outlook is more open than the impression I had from the photographs. Standing in front of the hut, the vista is wide open, over the Ross Sea towards the Royal Society mountain range and Mount Erebus (the southernmost active volcano) towers behind.
Inside Scott’s hut it is quite messy, which gave the slightly eerie feeling that the survivors of the expeditions were in such a hurry to leave Antarctica on their ship, the Terra Nova, that they didn’t have a chance to tidy up. Shackleton’s hut at Cape Royds on the other hand is much more orderly and still feels almost lived in.
I don’t know which of the 2 huts I like the best at the moment but I am sure that after living at both for 3 months, by the end of the summer I will have made up my mind.
Weather on day of visit: -28°C; wind 10 Knots: clear sky & full moon
With the end of the Antarctic winter drawing near we recently had to undertake an inspection trip to Discovery Hut to see how it is holding up to the wind and weather.
Discovery Hut was originally designed to be the expedition base for Commander Robert Falcon Scott’s National Antarctic Expedition (1901 – 04). But in the end the team decided to stay on the ship as the hut was too difficult to heat.
We chose a beautifully still, moonlit day for our visit and it gave us a great idea of what the building would have felt like for those who stayed in it during those long cold winters early last century. Now I can quite see why they chose to stay on the ship, as the temperature in the hut during our visit was only 2°C warmer than that outside!
Because the hut was so cold it was only used by the expeditions for scientific observations, drying equipment, repairs and as an entertainment venue.
Discovery Hut is often seen as the poor relation to Captain Scott’s second base at Cape Evans (associated with his 1910 expedition) and Sir Ernest Shackleton’s base at Cape Royds (associated with his 1907 expedition) as it holds so many fewer artefacts, but historically speaking it is probably the most significant of the 3.
While spurned by Scott’s first expedition it was later found to be a very welcome refuge by both Scott and Shackleton’s subsequent expeditions when the sea ice conditions kept them from returning to their main bases.
It is a privilege to be, in some small part, responsible for the maintenance of such a historically important structure and its contents.
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