Two things to know: Werner Herzog has made a documentary about Antarctica that includes me, and I wrote about the experience on Big Dead Place.

Thing one: In the austral summer of 2006, Herzog, fresh off of filming Rescue Dawn, and still riding the success of Grizzly Man, came to McMurdo Station on a grant from the National Science Foundation. He made a film of his experience. Rather than focusing on the penguins or the climate, Herzog was fascinated by the people. Us.

Herzog scheduled interviews with many of us while he was on station. The Bavarian filmmaker was struck by the fact that I´m a trained linguist working on the only continent from which no languages orginate. We arranged to meet at the McMurdo greenhouse–I told him that I often go there to relax because green plants in Antarctica are rare, and the sound of the hydroponics is soothing. (During our brief conversation, I had a sudden realization that I was on the business end of Werner Herzog´s documentary lens, so I popped out my digital point and shoot and snapped off this picture of Werner and cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger while they were filming me. Cheeky? Fawning to celebrity? A little self-involved? yes. yes. and yes. But what can I say? I´ve never been in a film before–at least not one with a distribution deal.)

The film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival last summer, and my boss Karen (who also appears in the film) and I drove out from Denver with our friends so we could see the product of Werner´s Antarctic sojourn: Encounters at the End of the World. In addition to seeing ourselves on a giant screen, we saw Sean Penn standing in line to buy his own latte, and we hob-nobbed it a bit with Werner and his wife Lena. He was tremendously gracious, genuinely glad to see us again, and didn´t mind mugging again for my camera. (Here´s the picture. Can you pick out the subjects who live in Hollywood?)

Thing two: After the novelties of being recognized at a film festival and hanging out with a famous directory began to wear off, we talked amoung our Antarctic friends about the film. Pretty much everyone agreed that it was the most accurate film we’d seen, in the sense that it attempted to capture the sense of being there rather than playing to people´s idealism or pre-conceived notions about the place. But a few admitted that we also felt a bit funny about the film. While no one objected to the content, we maybe felt a little uneasy about how we had so willingly “showed off” for Werner´s camera. In fact, we agreed, we were able to recognize a distinctly (and delightfully) Herzogian bent in the film, and perhaps we had at time too willingly abetted that tendency.

I was rather off-handedly sharing such thoughts with the guy who runs Big Dead Place this season on the ice. Big Dead Place is essential Antarctic reading. Need to know what happened to the Santa who groped his fellow employees at the Christmas party or how the captain of the research vessel got into fisticuffs during a port call and you can´t seem to find the official press release? Big Dead Place. Want a glimpse into the psychological evaluation process, or a critical look at John Carpenter´s The Thing from people who actually work at Antarctic research stations? Big Dead Place. You can even have your emails answered by The Drunken Winterover.

The review that resulted is an attempt to reconcile two things: my sometimes sycophantic reaction to a famous European filmmaker coming to the remote corner of the world where I work (look! It´s me with Werner Herzog!) and my sometimes overly-serious striving to have sophisticated ideas as a result of living there in culturally aware manner. I hope it works. Check it out.

Oh yeah. And go see the film too.

When I asked a certain geologists who has performed research in the Ross
Sea what is known about the potential mineral wealth of Antarctica, he
listed a few locations where coal seams and oil seeps have been found.
Then, sparked by my curiosity, he turned to the marked-up map of the
seafloor that was rolled out on the chart table. With his finger resting
on a waypoint not far from where the conversation was taking place (a
location I won�t disclose here), He told me that this boat has pulled up
core samples with �shows� of natural gas.

He paused, noting that I had taken up my pen and notebook. When I
confessed my identity as a blogger, my geological subject matter expert
became abruptly less speculative and asked not to be named or quoted. I
had observed the shift from someone openly excited about science to
someone aware of the political ramifications of our conversation. The
NBP is a research boat. Oil and academia, apparently, don�t mix.

Antarctica is presently protected by international treaty that excludes
military presence and any economic development. Antarctica, the treaty
says, is for the peaceful pursuit of science. In the North, the land
grab is already underway in the Arctic. With retreating polar ice making
potential for navigation and mineral exploration, Russia, Denmark,
Sweden, Norway and Canada are all jockeying for their share of the post
melt-down pot.

In the southern polar region, most all of the countries which border the
Southern Ocean maintain claims on Antarctica, despite being signatories
to the treaty. (Google �Antarctic Territories� and you�ll see a map that
looks like a sliced up pie, wedges radiating out form 90 south).
Britain, Argentina and Chile all entertain slices that overlap (which
ought to be interesting when one or more attempts to exercise those
claims�recall the Falklands?) McMurdo and the Ross Sea are in the heart
New Zealand�s Ross Dependency. But even the Kiwis, like the Americans,
are entirely dependent upon the US Air Force 109^th Air Wing to support
the stations. God Save the Queen.

The US officially recognizes no territorial claims in Antarctica, and
has made no claims itself. Yet America deploys far more people to
Antarctica than any other nation, and Americans outnumber the next five
nationalities combined. The cynical examiner will point out that it�s
hard to imagine our nation (a nation that balks at universal healthcare
and funding for the arts) financing three logistical bases in Antarctica
at an annual operating cost of $300 million just so a few dozen groups
of scientists can take the planet�s temperature.

So my question to the geologist wasn�t entirely na�ve. The fisheries of
Antarctica are already being tapped illegally. I�m curious how long the
lofty restraint of the Antarctic treaty will last if significant
quantities of oil were discovered.

My unnamed geologist summarized diplomatically by saying that he would
be surprised if throughout this entire continent there were no oil or
gas reserves. The trickier bit is the expense and difficulty of getting
at them. I would be surprised if the oil industry hadn�t also figured
out the same thing.

Oil exploration depends on the same techniques that this boat uses to
decode the glacial history of the Ross Ice Shelf. Some of the people
operating the big toys on this boat have also worked for the oil
industry. The difference in resources is staggering. This boat costs the
National Science Foundation around $30,000 a day to operate (On a
personal level, if I accidentally lose some data, I can calculate
exactly how expensive the goof was). Big oil companies have fleets of
research boats that dwarf the NBP. For example, when we max out our
seismic survey operation (see 3a Whale Watch, earlier this month), we
are trailing two pneumatic guns and along side them, two streamers with
an array of hydrophones. We will drag them around for a week straight,
ice conditions permitting. In contrast, an oil company boat might have
an array of ten guns in the water and the same number of hydrophones
arrays in just one acoustic channel. A short cruise for them is measured
in months. Our database is a suburban branch library to their library of
congress.

We publish our results. Oil industry researchers do not.

You can also properly deduce that there are similar jobs for higher pay
aboard those industrial boats. So why not work for industry? I think it
has something to do with an attachment to this place, and at the risk of
sounding cheeky, the ethos of science. Scientific inquiry is based on
testable hypotheses which depends upon the free exchange of knowledge in
the scientific community. Industry hoards knowledge because it could
mean profit. For now anyway, even with the price of oil around $100 a
barrel, the political and logistic difficulties evidently outweigh the
profit motive. So we live in what seems to me to be a precarious stasis
that has produced the golden age of science in Antarctica.

One veteran of the oil industry now working under the banner of science
told me that she would just as soon not see Antarctica developed for
oil. If we discovered promising signs of oil, she said, she wouldn�t
hide the fact, but then she wouldn�t exactly run to her former employers
with the news either. I have a feeling they will know just where to find
all the people with the necessary experience when the time comes.

When I woke for my midnight shift a few days back, the boat was parked a
quarter mile from a long wall of ice, about 150 feet high that extended
out of sight in either direction. We were beside the calving edge of the
Ross Ice Shelf, the largest glacier on Earth. The Ross is the birthplace
of the behemoth icebergs like B-15. Imagine an ice mass the size of
Texas that occasionally calves off a Vermont or a Delaware.

If we had gone a little farther east, there is a natural harbor created
by the downstream flow of ice around Roosevelt Island. The Bay of
Whales, 78 degrees 32 minutes South. Shackleton named this bay in 1908
aboard the Nimrod for all the whales they saw. Although we�ve been
seeing Orcas and Minkes, the Bay of Whales this night was empty of its
eponymous inhabitants. This place is the farthest south you can go in a
boat (at least until another New England state-sized bit breaks of the
Ross) and incidentally, the farthest south I’ve ever been.

On deck it was a damp, biting ten degrees. It�s beginning to get dusky
around midnight at this latitude. A dense, icy fog was descending, and
our view of the ice shelf was occluded before I had finished my coffee.
The flat, black sea was glassy, and pocked with little frozen disks,
lenses of incipient sea ice. February is the minimum extent of sea ice
around Antarctica. Sometime about now, the sea begins to freeze and
Antarctica starts to grow her icy apron, doubling her size again by
October. I peered down into a sea of tiny mirrors. Summer is over, I
thought as I headed down into the warmth of electronics lab to start my
shift.

Everyday I log into a server named Fram. Fram logs all of the underway
data for this vessel: sixteen serial ports stream information like GPS
coordinates, timestamp from the atomic clock, depth in meters,
temperature, conductivity and salinity of the water, currents,
meteorological data, etc. Pretty much anything we do gets recorded by Fram.

Fram, our server, is named after the boat that brought Roald Amundsen to
Antarctica in 1911. Fram, the boat, was parked here, in the Bay of
Whales. This is where Amundsen found a natural rampart and built a base
camp on the ice and launched his journey to become the first to stand at
the South Pole. They built a hut and shelters to keep the dogs warm, and
called this place Framheim, �home of Fram.�

Back behind the server racks, it�s always a few degrees warmer than
anyplace else in the lab. It�s my own little Framheim. Warmed by the
myriad processor fans, I slapped another 40 GB tape into my Fram�s mouth
and started the daily backup of our underway data (if we loose the data,
this is just a cruise ship). In a bit, our twin diesels roared to life.
The biology team had their samples and we were moving north. Goodbye
Framheim, I said, and returned to my desk.

We’re doing geology in the Ross Sea, mapping the ocean bottom, and the
rock beneath the ocean bottom. To map the bottom of an ocean, you can
sail over it with various kinds of sonar, ping the bottom and listen to
what comes back. But that only gets you depth to the sea floor, the skin
of the rock. To really get an image of what’s down there you need seismic.
Seismic surveying goes like this: first get a big ship. Then tow a large
air gun thirty or forty meters behind it. Next send out a huge blast of
air, a percussion that hurls a shock wave through kilometers of water.
Now listen for seven or eight seconds as the cake layers of rock below
the sea floor reflect the shock wave back. Do all this again, and again,
and again as you sail back and forth for a couple of weeks over vast
stretches of the ocean like you’re mowing a lawn that’s hundreds of
miles across.

A bunch of computers with impossible software will turn fuzzy wave
signals into a picture of the cake layers. It’s magic: blank quadrants
on the map become shaded beneath you; the picture is filled in, and with
it, all sorts of inferences about geologic history, glacial cycles, past
climate (which seems to be the question everyone wants the answer to
lately).

Unfortunately the Ross Sea is also home to lots of whales this time of
year. Whales love krill, and the Ross Sea in summer, with continuous
daylight, is a big krill factory. What whales don’t enjoy are huge air
cannons that send shock waves for kilometers. In fact it hurts them. A
lot (internal hemorrhaging, maimed sonar–both bad if you like to swim
around and eat krill or happen to use sonar to find your way around and
talk to other whales).
So here’s how we fix that: we send someone (usually a lowly graduate
student) up the mast to the pilot house (picture a crow’s nest enclosed
with glass) with binoculars and a radio. That person perches eight
stories above the water, in the tipsiest part of the boat, and looks for
whales so we can sop ’shooting’ before we shatter shamoo’s eardrums.
This is my second seismic survey cruise on the NBP, and I’ve seen us
stop shooting for whales exactly zero times. I assumed whale watch was
one of the things researchers cooked up to test the mettle graduate
students: wrap them in Gore-Tex and make them climb eight stories up an
icy, swaying tower over frozen seas (also see the cell-phone buoy gag:
‘oh sure, we’re passing one tonight at 3am’).
Here’s a secret: I actually enjoy whale watch. You get some alone time
on a crowded boat. You watch the light change across the waves, the sea
birds soaring in our draft, the icebergs gliding by.
I was five minutes into my whale watch this morning at 3a (the
cell-phone buoy must have been Verizon ’cause my AT&T didn’t get any
signal at all). I hadn’t even caught my breath from climbing the ladder
when six minke whales surfaced 300 meters off the bow like a fleet of
Russian submarines shedding water off their black hulls.
My hand held radio somehow became the most complicated apparatus I’d
ever used; It seemed to take forever to hail down to the control room
where I knew people were lazing around with crosswords and Harry Potter
novels while the computers crunched signals. ‘Stop the guns!’
Protocol says we should stop shooting before the whales reach 50 meters
of the guns. Our minkes took off to our starboard before they came
inside 200m, but whales have been known to indulge their curiosity and
come closer to air guns (who says intelligence pays?), so we kept the
guns silent while the pod gamboled their way to the next krill buffet.
With the guns off, we left a few blank patches on the map, but I did
something I didn’t really think was possible, something that bumper
stickers have been exhorting me to do for decades: I saved whales.

This time next week, I’ll be pulling out of the world’s southernmost port aboard my old friend the Natty B (RVIB Nathaniel B Palmer). I’ve signed on for another quick sail as the network administrator on the US Antarctic Program’s flagship icebreaking research vessel.

The science cruise lasts most of February (the least-icy month in these parts). Check out the current cruise website here. I’ll return here to McMurdo in time to get back to Christchurch before the closing of the station for winter.

The Ross Sea has been called the last in-tact ocean ecosystem on the planet. Far from most sources of pollution (except for some rampant dumping by the US Navy in the earlier days at McMurdo) and so far safe from over-fishing because of its ice-bound inaccessibility, the Ross Sea is an attractive place to do ocean science. If you want to observe effects of climate change, for instance, you have to rule out the effect of things like pollution and fishing. You need an ocean undisturbed by human activity.

Not that we can take such pristine conditions for granted. Last month, the US airforce took the extraordinary measure of airdropping parts to a trawler after it became stuck in the ice. With prices climbing for Antarctic Toothfish, a huge predator that takes about a hundred years to reach full size and is sold as Chilean Seabass in the United States and Europe, many fishing vessels find the payoff worth the risk. Fish that occupied the same ecological niche in other oceans are long gone.

Also, you may have noticed last month’s showdown just north of us in the Southern Seas between the Sea Shepherd organization’s Antarctic Whale Defense Campaign and Japan’s fleet of whaling ships. Exploiting a loophole in the international whaling ban, the Institute for Cetacean Research harvests thousands of minke whales a year for “research.” (Mikes are common in the Ross; today, incidentally, from my office window in McMurdo’s Crary Lab, I can see Minke whales spouting in the brash ice (I’m just saying)). The center’s prodigious sampling of southern whales has, in it’s 25 years, yielded exactly zero research journal publications.

When I was last on the NBP in May, we tied up opposite the four hundred foot monster factory ship Nisshin Maru in Punta Arenas Chile and watched from our bridge wings while the Japanese crew unloaded palettes of processed whale for three days. Trucks ferried the product to the nearby airport where jets spirited the whale meat away to Tokyo markets.

Sea Shepherd is like the militant wing of Greenpeace. They aren’t squeamish about a little destruction of property when, as they see it, the rest of the world is failing to enforce international law. (The best profile I’ve read was in the New Yorker in November 2007). They haven’t sunk any Japanese whalers yet, but their flagship is equipped with a steel I-beam on her bow which might serve as a can opener if she were to ram another ship.

As long as they aren’t confused about who the real researchers are next week when we sail into these troubled waters.

The drive from Denver to Telluride is about six hours, on a weekday, in good weather. Tack on a fourteener and it’s an all day affair. We’re on our way to the Telluride Film Festival to see the premiere of Werner Herzog’s Antarctic documentary “Encounters at the End of the World”–but the chardonnay swilling and crashing the VIP tent doesn’t start till tomorrow.

After six months living at sea level, I inaugurated my return to Colorado with a trip above 14,000 feet–227 feet over 14,000–the day after the plane touched down at DIA. It was the fast track to acclimatization, and a fine way to return to Colorado for this visit.

Dateline: Punta Arenas, Chile. I’ve got boats on the brain: in Feb I was sailing in NZ. March was a kayak in Fiji. From sheets and paddles, it’s on to four big caterpillar deisels for my next wayfaring upon the waves.

Some particulars: She’s 15 years old, 308 feet long, bright red, and with nearly 13,000 horsepower she can break 3 feet of ice and still manage 3 knots. Tomorrow this boat will be my new floating office. She’s the Research Vessel Nathaniel B. Palmer, the NBP (and affectionately the “Natty B”), and I’m the junior system administrator on the biggest geek boat in the southern hemisphere (Steve Zissou eat your heart out).

For the next six weeks we will sail the waters in and around Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, the southern tip of Chile, conducting seafloor geology and oceanographic experiments. I hope to get a gander at the glaciers spilling down from the largest icefields in the southern hemisphere outside Antarctica, in the meantime not spilling my cookies while I keep my eyes on a command line that’s subject to the rise and fall of the swells of the southern seas.