Quest for Antarctica

Chapter Ten Vostok--Near the Point of Inaccessibility We landed after a three hour flight even more bumpily than we took off and once again I was amazed and ever conscious of the advances in polar travel since 1912. The aircraft cabin wasn't heated too well, but at least it wasn't -60 inside and we were always above the storms and the soft snows that Scott and his men had endured back at the turn of the century. I stepped out onto the polar plateau at an elevation of over 11,000 feet above sea level. The ice beneath my feet was two miles thick all the way down to the bottom where the land was about 1,000 feet below sea level, perhaps sunk beneath sea-level with the weight of all that ice. The C-130 sat like a giant green spider perched atop the snow plateau threatening any intruder with the ear shattering noise of her engines kept running against the -25 degree cold. Momentarily, I stood in the middle of a vast desert, where very little snow falls at all, seeing nothing out to the horizon for 360 degrees, nothing to break the monotony of ice and what the Russians had so long ago called “sastrugi,” those icy waves in the snow that made sled travel so miserable. My father would have looked out upon this landscape and seen a symphony of rhythmic cadences in these snowy breakers blown out across the plateau. He was always thinking mathematically, seeing numbers and patterns in Beethoven’s symphonies as well as in his balance sheets. I felt alone but wonderfully at home. Here was the center of all those closet dreams only twelve years ago, dreams of being a polar explorer alongside Byrd. But now I was standing under a cloudless blue sky with the snow almost blinding me. Watch out for snow blindness. I had wanted to suffer frostbite, but never snow blindness. Alone and excited, I wanted to run off in all directions just to explore, to get away from this tiny community of Russian scientists and experience the Antarctic desert, to be trudging off across the sastrugi to make a discovery, to camp out with the “fellows” and pull our sleds toward the horizon. . . I did not realize it at the time but two miles beneath my feet lay a fresh water lake never before seen nor touched by human beings. Lake Vostok is the size of our Lake Ontario and has been created over several million years as Antarctica moved from its more northern latitude near where Australia is today to its current position. The continent is not what she appears to be on the surface. I am continually amazed at the discoveries made along this immense journey of wonder and discovery, all of it initiated by my grandmother, Florence Wright Ferguson's suggesting I read a book by Admiral Richard E. Byrd called Alone (1935) This book led to all of the books by Byrd, Scott, Shackleton, Amundsen and Mawson. But more importantly this book fueled the imagination of a young thirteen year old who wanted to explore beyond his own limited horizons. And the explorations continue to this day. http://antarcticdreams.com