My Adventure Continues...

I’ve gotten into the work groove here now and also had a chance to take more photos over the last 2 weeks or so. The weather forecasts here are fairly accurate, and feature such surprising elements as snow, ice, wind chill, and max and min temperatures, all well below zero for the time being. The trick is to wear your clothing in layers. All of them. And then still bitch about the cold on the 5 minute walk to work because it really is THAT COLD. I now wear synthetic silk long underwear that I bought at The Store (the only one in town) and that I swear by. In fact, when we were all trying on our ECW gear at the CDC in Christchurch, we were all issued clothing deemed necessary for our particular jobs, and mine includes a lot of time in a man-made walk-in freezer at -15 degrees Fahrenheit, still warmer than most days get here outside. In my downtime I’ve taken the following pictures.

Mt. Discovery, named after the ship of the same name that brought Robert Scott and his crew to Antarctica from 1901-1904.
The Royal Society Range of mountains very near Mt. Discovery, named after the Royal Geographical Society which sent Scott to the South Pole.

Scott’s actual hut built by him and his crew.

It’s only about a ten minute walk from Hotel California to the famous hut.
Just beyond the hut an icebreaker will carve a path for the main delivery vessel (container ship) which shows up in late January. They unload most all of everything we use here from that one ship every year. Sell by dates don’t have the same meaning down here for a lot of things. They just finished “building” an ice pier to unload the ship with. It’s actually made of ice and thick enough for heavy duty loaders to drive on and remove cargo with and floats on the ocean beneath. The previous one lasted 13 years before breaking in two, one half rising over a meter above the other (over 3.28 feet).
One of Scott’s crew drowned here and they placed a cross to commemorate it just above the hut on a higher ridge.

The view looking “west” from the cross. Again, directions are a bit superfluous here. Somewhere that direction is Shackleton’s Hut, as well as Amundsen’s Hut, two other famous South Pole explorers.
This will all either be melted by warmer weather or broken up by the icebreaker in January.

Another view of Scott’s Hut and McMurdo Station in the background.

Our foodservice party in Hut 10. This hut used to be the commanding officer’s, when the US Navy ran the show in Antarctica. It is the swankiest building on station, as you can easily tell. After the Antarctica Treaty was signed in the early 1990’s, the National Science Foundation took over control. Part of my job is inventory control, and I can still look up rather large ammo in the inventory system, even though it’s no longer on station.
Nacreous clouds, unique to the poles, which look this way because they are so high (over 55000 feet) up that they reflect sunlight from underneath. More to follow in a few weeks or so.

My Antarctic Experience

Well, this is my second ever blog and I now have a topic that truly engages me on a very personal level. I never dreamed that I would, in the matter of several months, go from just another laid off member of the great unwashed masses to be able to cover such unique, stark, and seemingly otherworldly experiences as The Antarctica Experience continues to be. Upfront I will tell you I am an amateur photographer at best, but you will get a sense of what I have seen.

Here I am waiting in Denver International for the first of 3 flights to get me to Christchurch, NZ via LAX.

This is the first thing you see after your 13.5 hour flight deplaning in Auckland, and it either means welcome, or maybe more like those yellow signs coming up the back way to the Grand Canyon- Friendly Indians Behind You! After all, the Maori killed more that their fair share of Japs during the Second Great Misunderstanding 60 odd years ago.

After a seemingly mile long walk outside to stretch the legs from the International Terminal to the Domestic one, I was happy to note that the British Commonwealth weather appears to be constant throughout the world, regardless of latitude or longitude.

My room in the Hotel So, as in so where is the rest of the room? The whole thing measured maybe 11 feet square.

Cathedral Square, the middle and heart of Christchurch.

This picture says it all.

This could be the High Street in many an English town, except for the palm trees (not pictured).

The ubiquitous Bailies, where many an adventurer to the land to the south ventures for one last taste of something that wasn’t frozen for transport via ship or cargo plane.

I put this one in for Lissa.

South Pacific flora with English weather.

Sumner, a suburb of Christchurch. That’s the Pacific Ocean!

Two new friends that showed me around, Curt and Christine.

3:30 am cattle call, which is actually 9:30 am the day before in Denver. Today we fly to the ice.

A famous visitor at the CDC (Clothing Distribution Center).

Beyond these doors, you are asked all the normal airport security questions, only this time by the NZ military. Bomb sniffing dogs and the lot.

The white bus to the C-17 after one more x-ray of your gear.


Showtime. We were also issued earplugs for the flight.

This flight is called a Winfly (winter flight) and features mostly cargo with humans stashed on the sides of the plane in jump seats. Being a military plane, I did notice several signs and controls for Halo drops, which are High Altitude Low Opening parachute drops for the Special Forces. Full oxygen masks are required for those. We’re just civilians, so we get to actually land using the wheels and everything.

Our stewardess was a Sgt in the NYANG. The in-flight movie sucked. There wasn’t one.

Some of our more important cargo.

About an hour and a half out we where allowed to go up the stairs to the cockpit for the views. You can’t see it through the windshield, but the continent was visible in the distance.

Icebergs.

The Ice begins.

We’ve landed. It was a very strange experience to wait for minutes on end with the engines howling mutedly through the earplugs, changing pitch as the pilot adjusted his approach which you couldn’t see through any of the 6 portholes strewn throughout the aircraft. The landing felt normal, although we landed on the Ross Ice Shelf itself. Throughout the flight, the pilot had the heat on keeping the C-17 at a comfortable 70ish degrees. About 20 minutes out this was shut down. Once we had taxied to a stop, we were told to wait until transport could pull up. They began unloading cargo immediately out of the cargo ramp as we waited. You could see your breath 2 seconds after they opened the doors.



The true Antarctica Experience begins. I liken it to landing on the moon. With your earplugs still in and all of your ECW (Extreme Cold Weather) gear on, you grab your orange carry-on bag and climb down the short military issue gray C-17 stairwell. Your white moon boots crunch on South Polar ice and you listen to yourself breath steadily behind heavily tinted goggles and a balaclava designed to contain your body heat. Everything is starkly quiet and it’s just you and the cold with some vehicles barely visible through the ice strewn wind. You walk past the first vanguard of emergency vehicles to your ride about 200 yards past the plane. They have a huge bus with tractor pull sized enormous tires called Ivan the Terrabus (unfortunately not pictured).

Inside Ivan.

My new home for 6 months looking back toward the airfield too far to see under these conditions.

Walking to work at 7:30 am my first day.

An airfield rescue vehicle parking at the Fire Station.

Honestly, most of the people that get to the bottom of the world spend most of their time working at whatever jobs they have been hired/assigned, to the tune of 6 day, 9 or 10 hour days with 2 breaks and a lunch, always undercut with the knowledge that you are actually There, and It can kill you if you don’t follow a healthy dose of common sense mixed with teamwork, which in a very personal way can make the experience outside of work all the more interesting, and perhaps even apt. The jobs here are a studied application of drudgery, boredom, and waiting to get back to civilization (this nugget from some of the old hands) for a well earned and deserved vacation in maybe New Zealand or Australia or the Cook Islands, just to name a few. And yet there are people returning here year after year to go through it all over again. When I got back to my dorm room after work, we were at weather Condition 2 (3 is “normal”, and 1 means you do not leave whatever building you are in), the temperature at -24° F with winds gusting at 24 knots bringing the wind chill to -49° F, ice in the air making everything a hazy blizzard. As I write this now 3 hours later, the winds have picked up a tad into the freight train sounding range (still condition 2), where our building (number 166, but everyone calls it Hotel California) with windows that have withstood this normal occurrence for decades actually conduct the cold so that it feels like a light breeze while you are doing your laundry.

Hotel California with Observation Hill beyond. The rooms are overall heated comfortably, but there is nothing like a “Southeaster”? to put it into some sort of perspective.

Building 155 where I work.

Since I’ve run out of pictures, I will sign off for the time being. I will either update this blog or create another one as needed to keep you all up to speed as time progresses.

US Foreign Policy and Communist China

This is my first ever blog, and being so I thought I would tackle something simple like US Foreign Policy, in this case as pertains to the Peoples Republic of China. Where to begin? To start with, America is essentially an isolationist country that at the same time really wants to help right the wrongs of the world, as long as that doesn’t conflict with our dogma of the moment (read containing Communism here). We are frequently misread by others because of this. As for China, I will assume most know a bit of Chinese history, and how it has come to be today after the 1949 revolution. We somehow “lost” China to the Communists after WWII, and didn’t quite know what to do about it. Well, looking at how we demilitarized immediately after the Japanese surrender in September 1945, it really shouldn’t come as a big surprise.

Japanese aggression is the key. During WWII Churchill and Roosevelt decided that Europe was the bigger threat, and treated the Pacific theater as a close and sometimes distant second cousin to the main effort in Europe. No one had bothered to watch the upstart Japanese first play catch-up, and then in many areas surpass the West in military prowess and design. Or at least notice how they were able to dominate much smaller adversaries, and demand a hand in Pacific Rim foreign affairs, which really just meant attaining their goal of unfettered access to the bountiful raw materials surrounding them. During the war, pretty much all of the former colonies of the former “European Powers” had been overrun by the Japanese, including China, and after the war those powers were now all bankrupt, even with the Marshall Plan in place. To fill the power vacuum, enter the US as the only real arbiter of stability in the Pacific, a job we had to grow into. The Cold War was beginning to heat up, and Communism was The Big Problem, so we really didn’t seriously hunt down the Nazis hiding in plain sight in Europe and South America, because we now needed them to figure out the Red Menace coming from Moscow. The Nuremburg Trials were only partially successful in that regard. In the Pacific, we allowed most of the atrocities conducted by the Japanese to go unpunished, stuff that would make some Nazi nastiness pale in comparison. Read up on Unit 731 for a sprinkling of their creativity. That US Foreign Policy decision, to quickly forgive past “follies” because those involved lived on really useful geography, became the dominant Foreign Policy directive of the Cold War. Contain (Soviet) Communism through any means indeed.

Now back to China. After Mao’s Hordes took over mainland China, the US floundered about for a policy, Europe again being the main effort, this time in the Cold War. At this point, I should briefly discuss Taiwan, and how the remnants of Chaing Kai-shek’s Nationalists escaped to that island and set up shop as a “democracy” (over time they got it right). The US has never really known what to do about them, and neither do I. They are again situated in a most useful geographic location, which helps explain why we always have at least 1 US warship in port at any one time, and a carrier group usually a day or two distant if needed. Mainland China claims them as part of their territory, but so far has not pressed the issue with us. Taiwan is also a great source of deep cover spies into Communist China to try to figure out their mindset, and sell that ability to us in trade, essentially, for protection. Let’s return now to the mainland. We had quite enough of a problem penetrating the Soviets, and the “peasant” version of communism practiced in China just wasn’t sexy enough to be noticed, or certainly understood. Mao took over a decade to solidify his control over the vast territory of China with its conflicting political, social and religious viewpoints constantly at odds. Having been carved up and treated like a colony by the European Powers and Japan, China was now turning inward, avoiding all overt clashes with the West and allowing Moscow to set the tone. One caveat to this, and the only one I know of, was their choice to come to the aid of North Korea when our troops reached the Yalu River bordering their country during our Korean War. MacArthur wanted to go nuclear on them, but Truman said Hell No. I consider their take over of Nepal more of a muscle flexing exercise than anything else. They did it because they could, and the Nepalese couldn’t stop them. Truth be told, the West didn’t really even know where Nepal was, and had no commitments with them. After the Cuban Missile Crisis took the US and Moscow to the brink of a nuclear war, and Vietnam became a self-imposed slogging match between the US and another peasant communist regime, enter Richard Nixon. Nixon had cut his teeth on anti-communism, and at that time lumped all communism into one tidy bundle, as did most of his peers. He did possess a rather keen foreign policy mind, and noticed the fallout between Mao and Khrushchev when K treated M as an altar boy to his obvious Cardinal. M was not amused, and a rather intense border skirmish smoldered for years. Sometimes foreign policy really can be personal. Could the US somehow capitalize on this widening chasm?

The concept of Tripolar Superpowers was born. China had joined the nuclear ranks in the 60’s, with the then aid of the Soviets, but times were now changing. Mao sarcastically thought Khrushchev was wimping out to the US, but then he didn’t have to worry about US nuclear brinkmanship. Through repeated Sino-US ping pong tournaments, the US and Nixon gradually developed a back room rapour with the Chinese that eventually flourished into full-blown discussions. By the Reagan Era, Vice President George Bush the Elder was visiting China, and overtime China agreed to allow top secret listening posts to spy on the main threat to both of us, the Soviets. After we ignored the Tiananmen Square democracy movement, again because our primary foreign policy focus was on containment, and the Chinese weren’t being outwardly belligerent, the Chinese began a more open movement not toward democracy, but toward consumerism, which we liked a great deal. Starting in the 80’s and through the 90’s saw an increasing economic shift from raw materials production (following the old Soviet model) to consumer goods, and their export to a West hungry for cheaper disposable income “stuff”.

Here is how we now find ourselves today. Our domestic policy is now directly linked to out foreign policy. The Chinese Yuan is devalued artificially low, and our soaring federal spending means we want its value raised to thereby lower our dollar value and limit the true cost of our flagrant spending. The Chinese have purchased over time nearly a trillion dollars of US Treasury Securities (our debt) and use that as one hell of a bargaining chip. One lever we hold is that we could simply write that debt off, thus leaving them holding the bag. The rest of the US TS holders would be aghast, but probably go along with it. There is a saying in America- as California goes, so goes the nation. Well, America is the California to the world. And California is in pretty deep doo doo. Militarily we are the only Superpower, and that goes a long way at the bargaining table. But we don’t normally flex our muscles or get into a war until someone attacks us, or one of our friends (Vietnam was that caveat). We could enter into an economic pact with the Russians to counter the Chinese onslaught, but I have visions of the Russians behaving like the Mexicans with NAFTA. The EU has enough problems with absorbing the former Warsaw Pact nations, and paying for Greece’s Summer Olympics hosting. And they like to focus on getting next year’s oil and natural gas quota from the Arabs and the Russians. South America is as isolationist (as a group) as we tell ourselves we are. Their militaries are designed to prevent internal chaos, not threaten an outsider. Their economies are heavily in debt like ours. Africa is for sale to anyone that is willing to pay for its resources. That leaves the Arabs. $10 a gallon for gas, anyone?