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.