Antarctica

Also, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz2SeEzxMuE = Whoa.

Bloody hell, it's like opening the hatch of a spaceship in deep space.

i just saw werner herzog's new movie about antarctica. it's called encounters at the end of the world. some cool stuff in there.

ooh. i want to see that.

a few weeks ago i ran into a friend i hadn't seen for a while. we were talking and he told me he'd gone to antartica earlier in the year, or at the end of last year, i don't remember, but he'd gone to argentina and then taken a huge boat for two and a half days through rough seas. most of the people on board spent the entire time wanting to die but he was fine he said b/c of all the halfpipe/vert stuff he'd done when younger. by the time they got to antartica all anyone could talk about was icebergs though.

just read that, based on recommendations--pretty damn good

the bureaucratic nightmare stuff started to piss me off too much, though

Oopsy.

That link just comes back here. Perhaps that is what you meant by 'oopsy'?

Isn't tourism to the polar regions irresponsible?

Hahah, you're right at that, Alex. Here's the real link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/24/world/americas/24ship.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

When I read that I thought, "Oh damn. Hey, it would be neat to be crew on one of those ships."

I was on that same boat 3 years ago, in the Canadian Artic! Wierd to see it sunk. It seemed solid enough at the time.

They're pretty cool trips, in these smallish boats. They bring along historians, geologists, etc, to give lectures. Some of the folks on the trip I was on had been on the same boat to Antartica before, and said the Drake Passage was pretty hairy.

As to whether tourism in the polar regions is irresponsible, that's a good question.

No drunken brawling or we're kicking you off the continent! Oh very well...

One of my favorite things in Powell's is the Arctic/Antarctic shelves, because all the spines are blue and it's a really odd visual effect.

I know someone who went to Antarctica and wrote a book on it, but I don't know him well, in that I didn't get a free copy of his book.

They do particle physics down there these days. Here's the ongoing diary of one of the grad students working there, published on the Economist website this week:

http://www.economist.com/daily/diary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10711348

Meanwhile, my PhD office in a 60s tower block in south east England has no windows.

i wonder if i will ever visit antarctica
-- s1ocki, Thursday, March 22, 2007 6:11 PM (10 months ago) Bookmark Link

i want to go skiing and/or climbing on the peninsula

an acquaintance just went, but i haven't seen him since his return

From Unusual facilities for employees

in antarctica they had all kinds of crazy shit set up--bars, music rooms, a coffee house--but that was more about us being stuck there than the jobs.

we have pilates classes at my work now. you still get paid but it costs $50 so it doesn't exactly even out.

-- jergïns, Tuesday, 19 February 2008 23:17 (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

jergins you lived in antarctica???? did you "over-winter?"

i just read some website about living in antarctica. it was pretty funny! sounds like there was a lot of shenanigans down there. most of the stories sounded like college and/or being a ski bum

-- gbx, Wednesday, 20 February 2008 00:00 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

just one summer. yeah, lots of shenanigans, but also 54 hour work weeks. people drank a LOT. and crossdressed a lot. that was a work perk: anything anyone brought down there got left there, so we had a fine choice of wigs and halloween costumes.

-- jergïns, Wednesday, 20 February 2008 00:02 (59 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

SYDNEY, Australia - Scientists investigating the icy waters of Antarctica said Tuesday they have collected mysterious creatures including giant sea spiders and huge worms in the murky depths.

Australian experts taking part in an international program to take a census of marine life in the ocean at the far south of the world collected specimens from up to 6,500 feet beneath the surface, and said many may never have been seen before.

Some of the animals far under the sea grow to unusually large sizes, a phenomenon called gigantism that scientists still do not fully understand.

"Gigantism is very common in Antarctic waters," Martin Riddle, the Australian Antarctic Division scientist who led the expedition, said in a statement. "We have collected huge worms, giant crustaceans and sea spiders the size of dinner plates."

The specimens were being sent to universities and museums around the world for identification, tissue sampling and DNA studies.

"Not all of the creatures that we found could be identified and it is very likely that some new species will be recorded as a result of these voyages," said Graham Hosie, head of the census project.

The expedition is part of an ambitious international effort to map life forms in the Antarctic Ocean, also known as the Southern Ocean, and to study the impact of forces such as climate change on the undersea environment.

Three ships - Aurora Australis from Australia, France's L'Astrolabe and Japan's Umitaka Maru - returned recently from two months in the region as part of the Collaborative East Antarctic Marine Census. The work is part of a larger project to map the biodiversity of the world's oceans.

The French and Japanese ships sought specimens from the mid- and upper-level environment, while the Australian ship plumbed deeper waters with remote-controlled cameras.

"In some places every inch of the sea floor is covered in life," Riddle said. "In other places we can see deep scars and gouges where icebergs scour the sea floor as they pass by."

Among the bizarre-looking creatures the scientists spotted were tunicates, plankton-eating animals that resemble slender glass structures up to a yard tall "standing in fields like poppies," Riddle said.

Other animals were equally baffling.

"They had fins in various places, they had funny dangly bits around their mouths," Riddle told reporters. "They were all bottom dwellers so they were all evolved in different ways to live down on the sea bed in the dark. So many of them had very large eyes - very strange looking fish."

Scientists are planning a follow-up expedition in 10 to 15 years to examine the effects of climate changes on the region's environment.

JPGs of giant sea spiders?

OK, ugh

http://i50.photobucket.com/albums/f325/caek/PBB00149.jpg

i just saw werner herzog's new movie about antarctica. it's called encounters at the end of the world. some cool stuff in there.

-- s1ocki, Wednesday, 12 September 2007 06:17 (6 months ago) Bookmark Link

Opens june 11.

The galley at the South Pole, 1975

http://www.southpolestation.com/trivia/history/constgalley1.jpg

1979

http://www.southpolestation.com/trivia/history/galley791a.jpg

first picture looks like something out of LOST

More amazing photos: http://www.southpolestation.com/trivia/trivia.html

sounds great fun:

http://www.thehousenextdooronline.com/2008/06/great-ecstasy-of-icecarver-werner.html

this is one of my favorite threads ever.

http://i218.photobucket.com/albums/cc275/thehousenextdoor/2008/Movie%20Reviews/Encounters%20at%20the%20End%20of%20the%20World%20Rizov/EncountersAtTheEndOfTheWorld_scene0.jpg

http://www.apple.com/trailers/thinkfilm/encountersattheendoftheworld/trailer/

anyone interested?

http://minneapolis.craigslist.org/fbh/928514274.html

I have my suspicious on that. All the US Antarctic hiring is done through Raytheon:
http://rpsc.raytheon.com/Employment/

suspicions

I think it's legit. The contact e-mail is from the usap.gov site.

it doesn't make sense because they don't need to advertise. they get hundreds, if not thousands, of applications. and i'm talking just for dishwashing.

Apparently hiring is done through the NANA company that posting mentions as well as Raytheon...but the USAP and NANA sites say applications go to a general NANA HR email, not the specific name on that ad. So I'm also suspicious.

RIP Jerri Nielsen

BOSTON (AP) -- Dr. Jerri Nielsen FitzGerald, who diagnosed and treated her own breast cancer before a dramatic rescue from the South Pole, has died. She was 57. Her husband, Thomas FitzGerald, said she died Tuesday at their home in Southwick, Mass. Her cancer had been in remission until it returned in August 2005, he said Wednesday.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4a/TheSouthernParty.jpg/800px-TheSouthernParty.jpg

dude on the left is frightening me

Shackleton is an all-time bad ass.

Got that right.

apparently bad-ass enough to allow a zombie with no pupils on his expedition team

and the dog on the far left is a shapeshifter!

http://i55.tinypic.com/2ib12jr.jpg

has anyone seen this?

http://www.bfi.org.uk/lff/node/461

apparently it's been screening on discovery in the UK

Robert Scott's abandoned hut is just astonishingly beautiful and terrifying (you can see some high-res photos of it here and here: best viewed in full size). some of the furnishings came from the Shackleton Expedition, which reused the hut years after Scott met his doom.

that video looks interesting, caek. I hope it shows up on Discovery in the US at some point.

i read the worst journey in the world last year and posted this:

Will finish The Worst Journey In The World this weekend. Incredible book. Surprisingly funny. Not Jeeves and Wooster, but occasionally laugh out loud good. And obviously what happened is incredible and it can't help but be thrilling. It's a bit "one crevasse after another" (lol sounds like my friday night) for the first 300 pages or so, but from the winter journey to the penguin rookery onwards (obv. including the polar journey) it's just wonderful. And I really enjoyed the unusual structure of the last couple of hundred pages, which is assembled from diaries of multiple people in multiple parties and ends up jumping backwards and forwards revealing what happened in a rather crafty way (although obviously you know the basic story).

tl;dr version: read if u like antarctica

http://www.southpolestation.com/pole/oldpoleteam1.jpg

http://www.southpolestation.com/winter/3inbar1.jpg

south pole bar, winter 1977

http://www.southpolestation.com/spring/trio0.jpg

first sunrise after winter, 21 september 1977 just before flights start arriving again
and this is what they sang http://www.southpolestation.com/spring/c130.mp3

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/infocus/antarctica0304/s_a46_75202201.jpg

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/infocus/antarctica0304/s_a47_ONWALKER.jpg

the book is widely considered the best ever written about an antarctic expedition by one of the participants

ha ned that's wild. he is very very good. i expect most of the british accents of the original party were not too extremely far apart, but it is pretty clear when he is narrating say, scott's journal, rather than one of the seamen's, or even bowers's.

i've looked v briefly at readers commentaries. a couple of them complained of cherry-gerard's inclusion/melding of various participants' journals. i cannot disagree more, they are grafted in beautifully, are clearly distinguished, and add fantastic details. and this tale is one of almost innumerable details-- ones that blow my goddamn mind. amongst the many stories detailing the torturous lives of the ponies there is one in which one weakening pony has his hind quarters fall through the ice adjacent to a pod of taunting orcas the entire dilemma is just riveting.

Simon Vance does audiobook work regularly, I think. He read the Stieg Larsson trilogy.

He's done a lot of good books (which obviously excludes Larsson), and reads them really well.

the brr.fyi guy made it back home

"the many stories detailing the torturous lives of the ponies"

you get more of a sense of the character of Weary Willie than the humans at times, he's the only one sensibly saying fuck this nonsense, albeit through passive resistance. The passages from other fellow expeditionists journals definitely enhance the story. I can't remember whose journal it was, but there was a bit that made me chuckle that was butthurt at the positive advance of Amundsen's expedition party, and commenting that they have brought a good supply of potatoes with them he noted: "there must be a renegade Irishman amongst them".

ac-g’s slow boil fury at bureaucracy in his egg delivery to british museum or whatever showed v some amusing restraint, eh.

at least back the 1910's the explorer classes viewed orcas as the deadly predators they are, none of this anthropomorphic hippy shit about swimming with them, they knew that at times it only took one fateful misstep onto some fragile sea ice and they were lunch.

Vance’s recitation of this parody poem really is a delight:

THE PROTOPLASMIC CYCLE
Big floes have little floes all around about ’em, And all the yellow diatoms couldn’t do without ’em.
Forty million shrimplets feed upon the latter, And they make the penguin and the seals and whales
Much fatter.
Along comes the Orca and kills these down below, While up above the Afterguard attack them on the floe:
And if a sailor tumbles in and stoves the mushy pack in, He’s crumpled up between the floes, and so they get their whack in.
Then there’s no doubt he soon becomes a patent fertilizer, invigorating diatoms, although they’re none the wiser,
So the protoplasm passes on its never-ceasing round, Like a huge recurring decimal … to which no end is found.

From “The Antarctic Exploration Anthology: The Personal Accounts of the Great Antarctic Explorers (Bybliotech Discovery Book 1)” by Ernest Shackleton, Robert Falcon Scott, Roald Amundsen, Douglas Mawson, Apsley Cherry-Garrard)