NEWSLETTER

FOUR MEN WHO WORK IN ANTARCTICA - PART 2

INTERVIEWS BY ROCCO CASTORO, PHOTOS BY CHRIS LINDER, WOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTION

Science writer Hugh Powell prepares a dispatch from a snow cave.

Chris Linder, photographer, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Vice: And why are you freezing your balls off in an unpopulated ice desert?

Chris: I started out in science but I’ve always run my own photography business. My fieldwork and photography kind of came together in March of 2007 when I wrote a proposal to join five different polar expeditions with the intentions of doing some embedded journalism. So far I’ve been to the North Pole, the Arctic Ocean, Greenland, and Antarctica. It was my first time anywhere near the South Pole. The main components are a website that documents our travels and talks at museums via a satellite feed. A moderator feeds questions to us from a live audience.

What kind of research were you documenting in the Antarctic?

We decided to divide our time between monitoring an Adélie penguin population and some oceanographic research on relic lava flows. They’ve been studying these penguins for many years and recently the lead investigator, David Ainley, has been using the birds as a measure of Antarctic animals’ responses to climate change. In the lava project they measured how long it’s been since the solidified lava was buried under a glacier. This also has a link to climate in terms of being able to figure out how long rock has been exposed and when the glacier was here and when it was not.

How’s the grub down there?

In the field it’s basically camping food. You rely heavily on stuff that’s easy to make. In some places we had to melt our water from super-frozen snow. It can get really tedious. There’s a lot of pasta because it’s easy but there are also things like frozen fish fillets. I’ll never forget the scallops because they leaked in our coolers and everything stunk for the rest of the week. They shipped Cadbury candy bars from New Zealand and I ate two or three of those a day. You actually end up losing weight by the end of the trip because you burn so many calories to stay warm. And fresh stuff is in short supply. Vegetables are at a premium, but you could get them if you knew the right people.

Anything really weird or spooky happen to you during the trip?

Everything is perfectly preserved so when you come upon a seal carcass from a hundred years ago it doesn’t look all that different from its original state. The dead penguins littering the colony are still all intact. Then there are things like Ernest Shackleton’s hut, where there’s canned food and shoes stuffed with straw in relatively perfect condition. It’s kind of like being stuck in time.


CONTINUED
FOUR MEN WHO WORK IN ANTARCTICA | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | >