Gifts from a harsh continent – by Tehnuka
ISLAND | issue 169
I wake lying on my back, staring up at a bright Antarctic sky. Although I don’t understand how I got here, I’m not surprised at having been unconscious on the ice. A childhood spent reading tales of Shackleton and Scott has left me believing Antarctica is where scientists and explorers go to die, or at least lose their toes.
Despite, or perhaps because of, this conviction, I leapt at the opportunity for fieldwork on a volcano on the edge of Antarctica, in what then seemed the wildest place on Earth. And over the next few weeks, whenever things go wrong – snowmobile accident, frostbitten nose, internet malfunction – we will say to one another, making light of it: ‘Well, what did you expect? It’s a harsh continent.’
Now, though, as I lie on the ice, there’s a voice over a radio, the phut phut phut of helicopter blades, scissors snipping through my new neoprene facemask, and then I’m in a bed in McMurdo Station’s small hospital.
They can’t tell how serious the concussion is, and facilities here are limited.
‘There are three planes on the runway,’ a doctor says, ‘and any of them could take you back to New Zealand.’
I don’t bear any resemblance to the men of those early expeditions I read about. I don’t consider myself strong, practical, or the stuff heroes are made of. Deep down, I don’t believe a South Asian woman can be those things in such an environment, because adventures aren’t for the likes of us. But more than all of that, I haven’t even been here twenty-four hours, I haven’t started my research, and I don’t want to leave.
I’m here to study a remarkable volcano, but this harsh continent will teach me as much about humans: the humour and kindness that help us survive here, and also cruelty, and the colonialism that pervades every aspect of our lives. It will be the place where I begin to navigate the effects of human civilisation on people and planet on a personal, rather than an intellectual, level. These gifts will continue to unfurl over the following years, determining who I become.
My flight to Antarctica, the day before the accident, is like nothing I’ve experienced before. Beyond the round plane windows spreads a white vastness in which shapes can only be seen by dimming your eyes. Through new sunglasses I see hummocks, mountains, shades of blue-white, and not a single recognisable feature for scale.
After stepping down from the ladder onto the sea ice, I’m shown the low slopes of distant Erebus volcano where we’ll work, a thin gas plume streaming from the tiny summit cone.
This cold is different to any winters I know, and nothing in this landscape looks familiar – not even my companions. Bundled in big red parkas, we drag our orange duffle bags towards Ivan the Terrabus, a giant of a vehicle that bears us at a crawl over the frozen sea to McMurdo Station. Roads are made of crushed volcanic rock. Vehicles have tall wheels or caterpillar treads. Pale green and dark blue, blocky, utilitarian buildings sprawl up from the sea ice edge. It could pass for a small mining town but it is nothing like suburban Aotearoa New Zealand. It’s nothing like anywhere I’ve seen on childhood trips to visit family scattered around the globe.
I follow others into a wooden cabin for a briefing, none of which I can recall afterwards. We’re sent to collect our bags and find our dormitories before meeting in the galley for dinner, piling our trays with canteen food. This is our institutionalised existence for the next two weeks, until we move to the field camp. The natural and built environments here are both disorienting – it’s the only time since my birth that everything has been so new.
Our first morning begins with snowmobile training. We learn about maintenance and care indoors, before we are driven to where the machines are parked in their black jackets. We’re to uncover and start them, then follow the instructor out across the sea ice.
I don’t remember how to start the snowmobile – or perhaps we haven’t been told how – and another student comes over to turn the key in the ignition for me. The ice is thick, with rugged ridges and cracks. We are following a known route; I don’t know yet about how sea ice starts to break up later in summer so that we have to use an auger to test its thickness, or I’d be more frightened. At every bump on the ice surface, my weight falls forward onto the throttle and I accelerate.
Somehow, I reach the slope where the others wait. We will practise zig-zagging upwards, shifting our weights to prevent the skidoos from rolling. I’m advised to stand on the uphill footplate, hang off the handlebars. In boots that feel like bricks, buried in my stiff, extra-small parka, legs trapped in windpants on top of fleece pants on top of thermals, I can do little more than sit clinging to the handles, and lean sideways. This makes negligible difference to a snowmobile that weighs at least five times what I do.
In later years, I will learn to move my body, and thus the machine, effectively. But today, the desert landscape of Antarctica and the creations we use to access it are equally bewildering.
Sweating, amazed at an accident-free descent, I wobble down to rejoin the group. I’m ready to return to McMurdo and sleep off the jetlag. Instead, we continue over low hills to the base of the steepest, iciest slope. It’s so high that from the top of the ridge, we would be able to see the other side of the island – dark volcanic rocks reaching to sea ice, and the continent beyond. Here, we are to learn ‘high marking’: driving to a high point, at speed so as not to lose traction on the ice. Then we will turn, descend, and repeat.
As my turn comes, the instructor approaches to say, ‘Gun it.’ So, in a rare moment of confidence, I gun it.
My false memories tell me I made the turn and awoke looking at the volcano, but this is impossible – I was facing the wrong way. The other students later inform me I flew off and the snowmobile continued. No one tells me what became of the machine.
Unable to fathom being medevaced home before fieldwork has even started, I make a remarkably swift recovery – though, over the next decade, I will occasionally question whether I’m not still lying unconscious on the ice, having dreamt everything that has happened since.
Now, after four field seasons on Erebus, I’m confident that the greatest dangers to a person working on an active volcano in Antarctica are neither Antarctica, nor the volcano (hazardous though they are in their own right), but snow-mobiles crashed thanks to shyness, fatigue, being small and overwhelmed; tent guylines tripped over while watching for erupting volcanic bombs; freezing liquid nitrogen splashed while on tip-toe refilling an instrument at the steep crater edge; repetitive strain from cold-welding copper tubes of gas samples; or a too-big harness that fractures a rib while rappelling into an ice cave.
Initially, I blame several of these events on my incompetence. Only much later do I realise Antarctic exploration and research are designed for the average white man, both in the equipment available – invariably too big – and in the culture to which we must conform. The Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration began during the height of the British Empire, after all. ‘Civilisation’ is intertwined with colonisation. It’s a word used as a weapon against those it sought to oppress. While I learned from my childhood reading that heroic white men lost toes and lives in Antarctica, I also learned that elsewhere, at the same time, unassuming brown women cared for the children of their colonisers. Both offer models for my behaviour. In everyday life I am to be gentle and caring, but in Antarctica – and indeed during any fieldwork – I must become hardened, outdoorsy, stoic. The commonality is that I should modulate my emotions to suit those around me.
From my time in Western academia, in volcanology, in spaces that force me to contort my personality to suit their cultures, I learn that civilisation is the authority claimed by white men over the land and the bodies dwelling on it.
These – culture, equipment, clothes we are forced into – are a jumble of colonial remnants and survival tools that we bring with us into the natural environment. As I sift the former to find the essentials, I begin to appreciate the latter.
There is so much to appreciate. Camping in the ice-covered caldera in the unique certainty that you three are alone on this volcano, that there is not a single other living macro-organism you could encounter here at 3500 metres altitude. Looking down from the crater rim at the slow shifting of crusted-over black lava, and glimpses of an orange glow beneath. The crack with which a gas bubble rises to the surface and bursts; watching, wide-eyed, the bombs that spin up into the air and descend into the crater. Hot steaming vents, or cold air blasting from the ground, sucked in and spat out by the volcanic edifice. The slide through an ice tower into a blue-tinged world, or still-darker caverns that, when illuminated by headlamps, reveal a chamber filled with intricate ice crystals.
Erebus becomes home, for a while. But making a home in Antarctica comes with a different danger, a type of colonisation that I must perpetuate.
Survival is imported. Everything taken to the field camp arrives by helicopter. Not only that: it must first reach Antarctica. Fossil fuels formed in the Cretaceous and extracted in the Anthropocene from far-off sedimentary basins are used to transport us, our food and equipment, and the fuel we’ll use on the volcano. It is all shipped or flown to Ross Island, then thousands of metres up the volcano to Lower Erebus Hut.
For drinking water – showers are not an option – you must step into the snow with a shovel and fill a stockpot to place on the stove, feeling the hut grow chilly as heat is diverted to melt the ice, and filter the water to limit traces of the volcano entering your body. And when it comes out the other end? All waste must be removed, and that includes human waste. Whereas cargo arriving in camp contains fuel or food, that leaving contains barrels of urine and plastic buckets of solid waste.
We have the privilege, on Erebus, of quantifying our environmental impact in the transfer of heat from the warmth of the hut to melting water; in the weights of recycling, rubbish, and faeces scrawled in permanent marker onto each container so that the helicopter’s load can be accurately calculated. In this rarefied setting we are confronted with the costs normally hidden from us in an urban environment, knowing we only export them in order to protect the local environment (this is not truly achievable; the amount of human debris left in Antarctica defies the idea of a pristine landmass).
An Antarctic researcher is extremely aware of their impact on the planet. I am not alone in being brought to this awareness by my presence and impact on the continent. It’s not a place in which you can ignore what humans have done. The gases measured over a decade at Erebus’s crater rim record not only emissions from the volcano, but also the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Looking down from the rim at the sea ice – the stuff we drove across, earlier in the season – we observe how a white sheet breaks up to disappear into dark blue open water. This happens every summer, but on the other side of the island the Ross Ice Shelf, holding back the loss of continental glaciers, is also melting.
We know the costs of our time there are imprinted on the planet as fuel burnt into the atmosphere, or as plastic and human waste returned to the earth on our home continents. We know that we export these products to lands we consider less wild, and thus less deserving of our respect, although ultimately, it affects the entire world. In that context, what we call civilisation is inseparable from the ransacking of nature.
This violence is not solely directed at the environment. An unspoken rule for those who can’t or won’t drink, trash-talk, or grow a beard, is that you should adapt silently without questioning this culture. In some, fieldwork brings out the worst of the individualism and competitiveness I later become all too familiar with in academia, which is only amplified by physical isolation. Not just in Antarctica but also on subsequent field trips, where I am trapped living and working in close quarters inside a group bursting with machismo, I begin to find more comfort than fear in time spent alone on a volcano. At such times, the wilderness is my refuge.
But there is another phenomenon in lonely places, epitomised by the burly ‘fuelies’ from McMurdo Station who help with my snow-trench on our training course when, swollen- lipped and black-eyed from the accident, I’m still digging late into the sunny summer night. Others have crawled into their trenches to sleep, while I struggle to lever snow blocks out of the hole I’ve created. The fuelies make sure mine is ready before they climb into their own. One of my new acquaintances, without hesitation, wipes my dripping nose with his sleeve.
The conventions of human society, as I knew them, fall apart here. This is clearest at the field camp on Erebus, where we spend weeks without seeing anyone outside of the small community. We begin to recognise that it doesn’t matter if you reuse the same tea bag for two weeks, or lick your plate clean. It doesn’t even matter if you have to hang up your frozen pee bottle, tinted red with menstrual blood, to thaw in a plastic bag pinned above the stove in a shared tent after naively leaving it outside the warmth of your sleeping bag.
Here, many of us become more patient and compassionate. Though this may not always be apparent, it manifests when most necessary. Survival is an everyday task, and you must look after each other. Weeks pass without seeing rain, sunsets, or anything green. Some cannot sleep; others are afraid, or exhausted, or homesick. You learn to live and work together while your senses of reality are shifting, sometimes in different directions.
That might be the greatest way in which the wilderness tames us: by reminding us what is important and thus, how to be kind.
Antarctica led me to a disregard for social expectations, and a regard for those who live outside of the norms, that I would not have developed readily elsewhere. Others find this in built, populated environments, but both the kindest and the most intimidating behaviour I’ve experienced from others was while working in remote places.
Thanks to the peace I found there – the quiet moments working in the dark of an ice cave, or standing at the crater rim watching distant bubbles rising through the lava lake – I now value time alone wandering mountain or forest trails, free from social constraints. This comes, though, with the awareness that these natural landscapes, too, have been modified by humans, directly or indirectly. ‘Civilisation’ as I know it – currently inseparable from capitalism, colonialism, and the runaway environmental changes we have set in motion – stands in opposition to nature. This understanding, too, is a gift, if a painful one. The realisations Antarctica brought me are a privilege and burden that have changed every aspect of how I live as an environmentalist.
The final gift I received from the Antarctic was confidence to live and walk in wild places despite this, and to place ethics over social expectations. The civilisation I am familiar with is constantly shaping me into a colonial mould. But though it accompanied me into that glorious, frightening environment, I left conscious of what I valued: kindness and compassion; the natural world and its ecosystems. I learned the importance of treading lightly, both in the wild environment and around fellow humans.
With confidence that the wilderness is a place to experience life, not a place to fear death, I have since found myself running alone in the mountains of New Mexico in winter snowfalls; as spring rises and flowers unfold first in the arid foothills, then in their thawing summits; through monsoon thunderstorms reverberating in the canyons, and the golden autumn aspens. I have spent days crossing moors and tracing the coastal cliffs of England, escaping cows and lightning and peat bogs, seeking opportunities to learn, in my short lifetime, about what our planet has spent billions of years growing, and to share that love of the growing world.
Antarctica gave me the boldness to confront entangled perspectives on nature and humanity that I could not separate from daily existence elsewhere. In doing so, I have begun to better understand myself as a woman of colour, a scientist, and a person who has found belonging in the natural environment. The civilisation we’ve created consciously asserts its power over all of us caught in it, as well as over even the most remote wilderness. I am fortunate that this ‘harsh continent’ has gifted me routes to freedom. ▼
Image: details from photos by Trey Ratcliffe and James Eades
This essay appeared in Island 169 in 2023. Buy your print copy.