Extraordinary People

It is a puzzle for ordinary people to try to understand what motivates those rare others whose curiosity and intrepid sense of adventure compel them to risk their lives exploring parts of the world whose human-hostile environment presents as a clear and present danger to all living things other than those equally rare biological specimens which nature has equipped to sustain themselves despite the crippling cold and destructive winds that are to be found at either the top or the bottom of this globe we call home.


There are now those whose professional choices have made them select to live in danger for part of their lives, in the interests of science and further exploration. They spend their days performing scientific research in the Arctic and the Antarctic, north and south. Now, tour ships can take the curious whose pedestrian lives are absent of risk, to temporarily visit the Arctic. No such tours have yet been touted for the Antarctic, a far riskier endeavour.

And now, international news media have picked up a story of three men working for a Calgary-based airline, en route to the South Pole to visit a research station on Terra Nova Bay, lost in those vast frozen stretches, when their plane appears to have gone down. The pilot, Bob Heath, was said to have been one of Kenn Borek Air's most experienced, but he and two other Canadians in the Twin Otter are now missing.

New Zealand air rescue appears to have located the position where the small plane descended in the Queen Alexander Range roughly four hours by helicopter from the U.S. McMurdo Station. It was the small plane's emergency beacon that alerted authorities to the plane's likely whereabouts. But search and rescue operations have been placed in abeyance, with an intemperate weather system blanketing the area; heavy snow falling, minus-30-degrees Centigrade and winds raging up to 17- km/h.

"Soon after breakfast the ice closed again. We were standing by, with our preparations as complete as they could be made, when at 11 a.m. our floe suddenly split right across under the boats. We rushed our gear on to the larger of the two pieces and watched with strained attention for the next development. The crack had cut through the site of my tent. I stood on the edge of the new fracture, and, looking across the widening channel of water, could see the spot where for many months my head and shoulders had rested when I was in my sleeping-bag. The depression formed by my body and legs was on our side of the crack. The ice had sunk under my weight during the months of waiting in the tent, and I had many times put snow under the bag to fill the hollow. The lines of stratification showed clearly the different layers of snow. How fragile and precarious had been our resting place! Yet usage had dulled our sense of danger. The floe had become our home, and during the early months of the drift we had almost ceased to realize that it was but a sheet of ice floating on unfathomed seas. Now our home was being shattered under our feet, and we had a sense of loss and incompleteness hard to describe."
Sir Ernest Shackleton (1874-1922), attempting in 1912 to cross the southern continent of Antarctica, but ice crushed his ship the Endurance; he and his men were struggling to find their way across the melting ice pack in search of land.

2 December 1910 - Terra Nova, heading south from New Zealand
"White-out. Compared to the Great Ice Barrier, Ross Island is only a volcanic bobble. Across the sea-ice twenty miles south from Cape Evans, where the carpenters are still fitting out winter quarters, the Barrier seals the end of McMurdo Sound. Beyond, a huge plated wedge of ice larger than France fills the whole indentation in this side of the continent; a cracked white tabletop stretching poleward all the way to the foot of the Beardmore Glacier. Blown snow freezes into rippled ridges or sets to a crust that hisses sharply when your foot goes through, or gathers into powdered, floundery drifts. Moving fast to seize the remainder of the summer sledging season Scott and ten others leading ponies or driving dog-teams have laid a curved line of supply dumps out here for next spring. 'Let's leg it', he likes to say. Now, about 150 miles south of Cape Evans, Scott has decided that the ponies can go no further. They have built the bulk of their food and fuel into a neat heap called One Ton Depot, and turned for base, split into separate parties. They travel by night so that the ponies may rest during the warmer day-time hours. Northward in a thick whiteness, then, step Bowers, Oates and Tryggve Gran - a young skier who is finding it quite hard being Norwegian in this company just now, but promised Oates a few days ago he would fight for England in a war, and won a handshake. Each guides an exhausted horse by the head. The horses are roped together in series; their breath whiffles beside the walking men."
from I May Be Some Time, by Francis Spufford

Icy Traverse   Photograph by Herbert G. Ponting, National Geographic