It can seem like there are no mundane
tragedies in Antarctica. The perceived call of the wild makes our explorers’ earthly suffering
look like a meeting with destiny. We don’t hear of people choking on their
dinner or accidentally slipping in the shower, breaking their necks. Neither do
we imagine malice or lunacy, though the hothouse environment in the polar stations
can twist minds and, sometimes, end in the kind of degradation no mission
hagiography can obscure. In the 1950s a man on the Mawson base spent most of
the winter season imprisoned in a storage room after becoming deranged and
indiscriminately violent. It is also said that, in 1996, a cook at the McMurdo
station turned on his colleagues, attacking one of them with a hammer. A
Russian once cleft a man’s head in two with an axe after losing a game of chess,
and, in 1983, a staff doctor burned the Argentinean Almirante Brown station to
the ground when the setting sun announced the onset of winter – apparently the
thought of spending the next seventy days without light was unbearable and so
he decided to evacuate himself and other residents.1
1See Scott Harris Friend, SUSTAINABILITY AND
HABITATION IN ANTARCTICA, PhD, MONTANA STATE UNIVERSITY, 2009
The Blood Falls are a slow-weeping wound on face of a
glacier in the McMurdo Dry Valleys – a rusty column of water saturated with
sulfur and iron emanating from a deep laceration in the ice, bubbling up from a
prehistoric lake some four hundred metres below.Harvard scientists
recently discovered that the hallucinogenic plume delivers emissaries from primoridial ooze; a
bacteria colony that has been isolated without oxygen, light or heat for more
than one and a half million years; microbes that have evolved independently of
the rest of our living planet, whose metabolisms do not require photosynthesis
but live off the acrid minerals themselves – a seeming portent of what life
might be like on Mars.
