Day 1. The plane lands on a blue-ice runway at McMurdo Station and we step out into a cold so absolute that it feels structural — as though the air itself has hardened. The temperature is minus 28 Celsius. The wind makes it minus 52. Everything outside the aircraft is white and blue and the color of shadows on snow, which is not quite purple and not quite grey.
I have been to cold places before. This is different. This is the coldest, driest, windiest continent on earth, and it has been this way, in various configurations, for 34 million years. You feel the age of it in the first breath.
Day 7. The sea ice extends from the shore in every direction, broken only by the dark channel the icebreaker carved on its way in. We travel by Hagglund — a tracked vehicle designed for ice — to our first field site, 40 kilometers from the station. The driver, a New Zealander named Alison who has wintered here four times, explains the protocol if a vehicle breaks down: stay with the vehicle, activate the emergency beacon, wait. Do not walk. Walking is how people die.
Day 23. A katabatic wind comes off the polar plateau at 110 kilometers per hour and pins us in our tents for three days. The sound is not like wind anywhere else — it has a lower frequency, almost subsonic, that you feel in your sternum. My tent partner, a glaciologist from the British Antarctic Survey, says she finds it meditative after the first eighteen hours. I believe her by day three.
Day 41. We core a section of the Siple Dome ice sheet that contains air from 120,000 years ago, from before the last interglacial period, when the climate was roughly as warm as it is now. The air smells of nothing. It is 120,000 years old and it smells of nothing. The CO₂ concentration in those bubbles is 280 parts per million. The concentration outside our tent, today, is 424.
Day 67. The light does not go away. At this latitude, in austral summer, the sun circles the horizon without setting. Sleep becomes a performance — you put on an eye mask, declare it night by convention, and try to believe it. After two months, I have mostly stopped noticing.
Day 89. A leopard seal surfaces in a breathing hole twenty meters from camp and regards us for a long time with an expression that I can only describe as philosophical. It is the largest animal I have seen in three months. It is not afraid of us. Nothing here is afraid of us. We are too temporary to be frightening.
Day 90. The plane comes. We leave.
I have been back for six months now, and I am still not entirely sure I have left.
