Forum; Deborah Byrd: Three Weeks in Antarctica

from the longhorn radio network the university of texas at austin this is for him you feel on by helicopter engine saw hundreds and hundreds of england's and that we landed the helicopter got out walked up to him and you can walk right up the predators on land another provision in the ocean science writer and producer to spend three weeks in antarctica for bird talk productions syndicated program earth and sky monday so far from home the great southern continent of them never went to antarctica all the way to the south pole in late november and early december the national science foundation oversees this country's science program in antarctica and every year they invite journalist down the united states has three year round stations down there one of the south pole the whole continent is bigger than the united states but there are only a few thousand people on the continent at the height of the summer season so it's a really empty place

an amazingly untouched wilderness the southern hemisphere has its seasons opposite ours so when i was there for three weeks in late november and early december people in antarctica were enjoying the season of spring this is olive green today foreign teachers earth and sky producer deborah bird the two minute segments that air weekdays on commercial and noncommercial radio stations across the country are narrated by ms bird into a block and produced by burt block productions materials for the antarctica segment were gathered on her national science foundation sponsored trip to mcmurdo base how do you get there from here with great difficulty i basically took a commercial airline to new zealand to christchurch new zealand these overnight flights we fly over the ocean and line by line was longest night of my life and i got to christchurch and i was there for about eighteen hours and then you go to a little airport that's

run by the us navy because the navy is in charge of all the transportation in antarctica on the us transportation and you get on these old military transport planes there from maybe the fifties and you sit in the slaying seats analysis there's this crack of the load master it's very contrary to the notion of a nice stewardess who brings you nice things to drink it it's very pleasant and smiling and please let us know we can do a lot of ministers this grumpy guy who says everybody stay in your seats and if you have to go back and tell me how you and so is its eight hours from christchurch to antarctica and he's very uncomfortable seats as this creepy guy certainly also want to give you as you got on the plane yet a sack and in the sack is the strikeout sandwich a box of juice and then some chips or something you get very used to those meals because you're flying much of the time or i was flawed in the air flying much of the time i was down there and eat those same sack lunches again again again but there it was an uncomfortable truth it's very

noisy you have to wear earplugs on the plants but when we got there we landed and getting off the airplane was just one of the most striking an amazing feelings i think i've ever had to realize that i was actually standing on the bottom the very bottom of the earth and there was i got out i looked and there was just white everywhere just the guy that many said well we're standing here and seventy five inches of sea ice because the planes actually land on the ocean the ocean is frozen in the planes land numbers frozen ocean where the runways there is the runway and the runway is a little bit farther from mcmurdo so they land in the ocean until the sea ice melts in the three weeks i was down there i did start to melt and so they close the ice runway for the most part the plan that i left on was one of the last times to fly out of memphis that ice they have thermometers an end various it's mostly it's not so much around the middle word starts

to break but along the transition between the water and the land will start to break first and they did mention that once they lost in a vehicle not a plane but a bulldozer something slipped down the internet but as we left the diverse places and where the ice was obviously melting was a little nerve wracking but we gotta have no problem why is an arctic are an important place well the significance of that space it's one of the most pristine places i would put probably the most pristine place left on earth antarctica is the size a larger than the united states and their only several thousand people on the whole continent at the peak of the summer season and send the landmass itself the land now is any measure this place and given that the edges are often ice of choir way so they know where the ice ends and starts you know it the ice melts in fact mcmurdo art with a space where the main base i went to was

is the farther south that you can go buy show up at some times of year after the ice melts which would be say in january february i was there and late november early december but urahn january february after the ice has melted that's the farther south you can go by ship on the whole earth so so it's a very historic place because robert scott who was one of the people who raced for the south pole on around nineteen ten when they're by ship and established his camp and you can still see is scott's hut they're right next to mcmurdo where he and his men win over before taking off for the pole and they didn't reach the pole that they found that the norwegians edmonson had been there about a month before them so they weren't the first to get there but it's it's a very interesting and historic place for that reason did those explorers raised their national flags over that space who's in charge here there and when you go down they know they're a girl there too polls actually there's what they call the geographical poll which is the

actual south pole i and it's just a stick a metal stick in the ground there's a sign next to it that says geographical south pole grocery because their picture taken there i have my picture taken there is also something called the ceremonial poll which who will it's about forty feet away from the geographical paul it's much more scenic it's much more picturesque it has a sort of a barber pole looking thing with the silver ball on the top and then a semicircle of flags of the nations who have bases in antarctica but there is the base at the south pole is a us base and i suppose i kept asking people why are we the ones with a base at the south pole instance a special place on the earth lies the united states here and i think the reason is just that the united states had the money and the will to go there and establish a place so the base that's there now is the expense so there are no terrell territorial claims by any of the countries that are close by right and it is well there are claims that you know they are debated on antarctica is

that there's an antarctic treaty and occasionally its amended and updated and so it was recently there was a year or two ago they added in a clause having to do with no exploitation of minerals in antarctica for the next fifty years so it's a very much a live document that is used to just legislate what goes on in america is you looked around his hair was white everywhere what we really looking at that mountain ranges caymans plains where you are that's auret van mcmurdo you're next to a volcano active volcano the most active volcano in antarctica in fact it's called not care of this and the summit of matter of this is that something like thirty and fourteen thousand feet it's this huge unbelievably huge now and then you look up then you see little puffs of smoke coming out i sometimes white smoke they said that there was some black smoke and some cash that spewed out a month or so

before i was there so there are volcanoes and there are fabulous mountain ranges they're just the most amazing looking things course there's no there are no plans of any kind on the entire continent so cold there is awesome algae and some very low forms of plant life but when you look around you don't see any grass or trees or flowers or anything like that we had very barren so the mountains that are there the light is so striking at the contrast between the shadows and the sunlight as you're flying over these mountain say it's very very striking it's very beautiful gorgeous continent and as i said very pristine it's it's the only time i think in my whole life that i've been anywhere where i was looking down at places that you could pretty much say no one had ever set foot and probably it will be all or anyone sets but they're because the conditions they're just so hostile for animal life as well as animal life along

the edge of a continent there are seals and penguins and there are some odd nuisance birds called schooler that get into garbage cans and people really dislike them or become big siegel looking birds but there's no animal life inside the continent because there's nothing for them to eat there the plant about icebergs we saw a few icebergs there was an iceberg but i didn't see many ice bridge that there was an iceberg that had come in are to mcmurdo sound right in from of mcmurdo and gotten trapped in the ice and people were driving out in the strategy of calls people drive all kinds of strange vehicles but people from mcmurdo work we're getting into the strategy of cars and driving out over the ice to see the size or we flew by then a helicopter one day and it was very thrilling but it was a small iceberg and i could though has has a large number of icebergs because the snow falls there every year and it causes the way of the ice causes the whole that and act if you imagine

this round massive land and it's completely covered with ice and every year more snow falls on top of it and just do wade of all that ice and snow causes the ice to be flowing outward toward the shores of the continent constantly so the isis constantly moving and the ice breaks off at the edge of the common forms icebergs cece harbors port when you say basic services something really internal is a thing to try to do to maintain jurisdiction at the edges and thesaurus the ice just murderers at the itch it's at the edge of the law it's on land that's a good job is a pork yes it's a poor it's not a port for most of the year because it's frozen and but as i said in say january february when the ice melts and icebreaker will come through there and they had this there was a what could i caught a dock i guess it was that they had built up out of

snow and ice and dirt that when the ice melted it was so sick with snow and ice that would melt says the rest of the ice did and they would float it out to the icebreaker in use it for unloading they're very pro hunt in thinking about how christina place that was as said been through the efforts have any green peppers patricia marx organizations really it's like greenpeace had a big presence in america for a number of years and they have now dismantled the days that they had there that had a place near mcmurdo i met a couple of the people who were very active in green peas and they seemed very hopeful about an hour ago they seemed it as though they felt that the greenpeace had done a good thing down there by and making people aware of the need to preserve the continent and they loved the comets so much that when they you know when greenpeace itself dismantled what they had there and

left and when they went by the way they took everything that's part of the antarctic treaty is that when you build something down there can't be permanent everything that goes into antarctica hast to go out again so any building or anything you bring in any kind of garbage any kind of anything that's there has to go out again and the people from greenpeace we're very proud that they had absolutely dismantled every building and taken away from the comments of that there was no trace of left behind that yes they said they felt very strongly i think that there was such a beautiful place and need to be preserved such and such an untouched wilderness really like nothing else i think that exists on earth today and they are they love the play so much that they had joined on a scientific expedition we're doing science the sheer because even though greenpeace was no longer than they wanted to come back when they put a building barrier i guess i can assume that there are no excavations is something that sits on top and they can carry off without any visible signs of having been there were

i really don't know how they did the foundations of the buildings the one that construction job that i did with that i was shown was at the south pole and they were building they're putting up some sort of an ex type building there's a there's a ged zig done down there and and many of the buildings are inside the dome that at the south pole they are building some new buildings now that are be used as offices mainly and there was a very interesting design they look like beach houses they were up on the stilts and the reason for that is that the snow drifts so heavily down there and judy's it down that houses many of the other buildings they have to keep the bulldozers running constantly to keep the snow cleared off so they were building these buildings up on stilts and the hope that the snow would and drift around the buildings at the snow would just blow through underneath so they were playing beach beach homes down south oh what kind of energy sources do they use there they showed me these huge archives what to call them they look kind of like water beds that they were just you know fifty times bigger full of fuel

and they run generators basically a generator power that we're now attempts and solar power i didn't see any attempts at solar power over things as solar power would be difficult because although in the summer sunshine all the time and the winner the sun doesn't shine at all so if you did use solar power you wouldn't be able to use it but half the year so are the long nights of the arctic now and it's still you know science fair yes while i was there the sun was shining twenty four hours a day and that was a very shocking thing to the system to get up at three in the morning the first couple of months i was at the first night that i was there i couldn't sleep then we're in mcmurdo only restrain assert a dormitory type place where you just you're with a roommate and you just really cram them there's actually no floor space at all and i got the three more in a walk down the hall and was kind of shocked to see somebody walking along wearing sunglasses because i looked out the window and it was blazing sun some people sleep it's disrupted their they

said that your first few nights there you'll tend to have a problem with it and then you can sleep fairly regularly for a couple of weeks but then after two three weeks you get entered the real serious sleep disruption and i was there for three weeks i was just beginning to feel as just beginning to feel that my body was really rebelling against this twenty four hours of sunlight and i was i was very struck when i came back to austin by a twilight i was driving out into the country the day after i got back i was very struck by the beauty of the twilight how wonderfully restaurant was to have the sun go down what is that they're actually doing a year doing just so many different things i mean it would be impossible to secure and describe it all but individual research scientists will apply to nasa or the plight of the national science foundation to do whatever product it is that interest them the most and while i was there when allen visited probably a dozen or so different science projects and they ranged from

things like are there was a population study of the seal colony odd there were people at a field camp studying the ice were called ice stream ms which are very rapidly moving rivers of ice that as i mentioned are all of the ice in america is flowing toward the ocean but it might be flowing at a rate of a few meters a year whereas the ice streams are moving at more like say a meter and a half a day so they look they're very rapidly moving rivers of ice that are flowing no one knows why what why they start flowing or or you know what what's happening there but they just flowing in the midst of all the other rights they were people who were setting up some remote observatories that were gonna be set out on these very remote places on the continent to look at the southern lights the aurora ostrow us which is the counterpart to the beautiful northern lights that we see in this hemisphere there are just people other people doing underwater think i'm a mars analog thing i don't know if you've heard

of that but antarctica is the the place on earth it's most like mars in our solar system so a number of projects have gone on there too just test things that might eventually be used on mars an issue they were doing a project where they have this underwater robot they were using sort of a virtual reality system where you would put on these special gloves and helmet to steer this robot vehicle that was under the water of course there's no water on mars that this would be analogous to if you had a base on mars you could sing one of these robots out to explore anne and they were testing the way that it could be driven and steered and so on so just so many different projects i mean people looking at lakes in antarctica and different things going on under the cia's san oh just you know people sitting glaciers than just a whole variety of course the ozone hole on those astronomy there's quite a bit of astronomy going on at the south pole there are people

doing a big neutrino experiment down there where they're planting a light detectors in the ice that are granted detect a certain kind of radiation that that gets invaded when neutrinos from energetic things like super know the impulse are some so odd these very energetic objects in space unit neutrinos and the neutrinos pass through the earth then cause series of things to happen that ultimately causes some like to be invaded and these detectors hopefully will be detecting the flight so just an amazing array of scientific activities going on but none of this is private enterprise with her well you're a private enterprise that i saw and there was the antarctic support associates which is the group they're based in boulder and if you wanted to go work in an article you would contact him if you want to be a plumber a carpenter or a cook or a lawyer had something you know you had you would contact them that's a private group and

they are the contractors with the national science foundation which runs the whole show basically the whole ui show and antarctica you mentioned earlier that the treaty denies any what experts are exclusion before him enrolled mineral exploitation case which is to say a mining not not supposed to be any of that going on and then not every country has signed the treaty i don't think that the united states has signed it yet but i'm going to put this into the treaty and it is a very general agreement across the horrific that i can use to be preserved but no doubt there are resources down they're also so odd so it's a touchy subject because it's the same same debate that goes on in many places about the need for resources versus the need for preservation you said that they have to remove everything wants anybody astir are there any plant fear in that somehow

change the condition of what are expected in other words are there huge protest in the flags being carted away those are some way to treat what they deal with their oh yeah they do some treating of the stuff that said when the first thing that happens is before you go dan you get a little pamphlet on recycling and they're sixteen different categories of recycling so when you're staying in the dormitories yield on the first thing you see when you walk in the door of the sixteen different bands and its verve we know not just our newspapers in glass and aluminum but it just was sixteen different categories of things that you know food waste and bio waste and just this incredible array of things so people are the first mechanism use their destroyed the recycling process where separate the source i would take my little trash can and i don't turn down there may soften just empty it into the spin it's to separate out you

know what once the things are that are in the dam's i heard that they had a whole group of people who took the things in the bands and separated them to make sure that they were really as they were supposed to be odd and then things were packed and these huge crates and you can go up to this one place above mcmurdo an issue is this huge incentive there be a landfill dishes this huge place where there's all this stuff waiting for the icebreaker to come in for that season and haul it back to where it's going to go you know presumably the united states or elsewhere it really makes you aware when you see that and when you go down and then the earth is really a finite place in this garbage gets generated it's got to go somewhere in the middle or take it out of an article that they're going to take it somewhere and it's not just can't disappear so it's going to end up hopefully recycled or are you know who knows what's going to happen to some of that stuff what are you going to do with the information that you drew from the trip well

we're already doing it we started in february airing shows about the trip we had maybe ten or so of our twenty two or twenty three shows and february were on antarctica and now every month since and we've been doing more shows did you do interviews where you were there you were who were some of the people that shared information with you or touching it and el he's out on a plea yes right in the aisle is one the people that i knew from being here in austin before i went down there and that ran into him in his research group in new zealand before i got to the cotton and i she has a he's working on a very interesting idea that antarctica the land mass that santa monica used to be connected to the landmass that's north america and they're looking for are fossil

remains of things that could prove that hypothesis so he is down there he went out to a mountain range and where he would beef with his group for six weeks and before he left i interviewed him in and used you know the tape of that interview on the show it's an article a noisy place oh it's so quiet it's it's interesting because well we're in mcmurdo it was kind of like that mining town in some ways incentive image of the old west a lot of ways what's the population i think they're about to when i said there were just over there some people there and at the peak of the summer season and in the winter when know planes flying around a lot if you're down there for the weary or down there there are about two hundred people there that arose at mcmurdo is noisy because there are trucks rolling by an end it's just you know a lot of big machinery and that sort of thing but one of the interesting things we did was i had two days of survival training or we went out

to the ross ice shelf which is a permanently frozen part of the ocean and we went out there and it was all covered with ice and snow it's very flat and off in the distance you can see these beautiful mountains that we build snow shelters one whole day we spent building an igloo and then i got our old stoves lighted then boiled some water and hand cocoa eight things out of these more bags of survival and math and then we slept up there that night of course the sun never went down so even when it was eleven o'clock at night we were still using sunlight and another woman an eye i took advantage of some cross country skis that were there that the leaders who teaches at a dual of this disappeared i went back to some nice warm place to sleep leaving the sounds very cold ones that they're this other woman who is a graduate student and there and i are took some cross country skis in and neither one of us had ever done that before would never skied before but we skied out it have to follow the flag the road so you don't fall into a crevasse are some things that

some really dangerous and they tell you don't leave the road to leave the road that's it that is very isolated and we skied out always an at one point we both stopped and just listen to the silence and it was the most profound silence i'd ever heard of could i can imagine a place that quiet it was a beautiful sound while i was in antarctica late last year it went to a field camp where scientists are studying and i stream i stream be flows across west antarctica it's been closely studied for half a dozen years by scientists from several institutions including ohio state university of wisconsin university of alaska and cal tech they've learned that ice streams are something like glaciers except that they don't flow through valleys they are contained by mountain walls instead these rapidly moving rivers of ice seem to pick their own paths across relatively flat ground also the ice streams come and go i stream see in the same general region in antarctica as

i stream be seems to have been flowing a hundred years a guest on form has been peppered bird a bird blind productions producers of earth and sky the views expressed on this program do not necessarily reflect the views of the university of texas at austin or this station technical producer for forklift hargrove production assistants likely been a slutsky and christine johnson i knew producer and host olive green that's because so your network communication austin texas seventy seven one to two percent says longhorn radio network communications building the ut austin austin texas seventy seven wanted

to play from the centre for telecommunication services university of texas at austin this is the longhorn radio network producer deborah burke you we flew along by helicopter into saw hundreds and hundreds of england's in the land of the helicopter and got out and walk over to him and you can walk right up to him and they have creditors on land three weeks in antarctica this week