I turned on my iPod as we headed out of town and one of the first songs it played was “Go Speed Racer, Go”. Anyone who has driven a Pisten Bully would chuckle at the juxtaposition. These machines do not go fast. In town, on the dirt roads, we’re limited to 5 miles an hour, but on the sea ice, we can crank them up to about 12 to 15 miles an hour. Slow, but very rugged for the type of terrain we deal with out on the sea ice – snowdrifts, refrozen cracks in the ice, and many other sorts of irregularities.

I offered to be the driver, seeing as how several other team members have been driving the long haul to Cape Evans. It takes between an hour and an hour and a half to get there, depending on whether we’re hauling a trailer, forgetting items, or the conditions.

Me at the wheel listening to tunes

For some reason I now imagine Steve Jobs riding in a Pisten Bully when he came up with the idea for the iPod. They work perfectly together. The situation is that the sea ice is flat for miles around, you’re moving slowly, and there’s practically no traffic around. You can actually get reading or knitting done while driving on the sea ice. If you wander off the road too far, it gets a little bumpy and you’ll notice.

The view of Tent Island up ahead along with a rarity - other traffic!

The same view ten minutes later - ok, it's really the same picture, but it gets the point across - between the slow driving and huge horizons, the scenery changes very slowly

It seems like blues work really well for listening. Train-chugging blues, old-style, gritty, travelling blues. The sunlight is so brilliant some tropical songs seem to fit as well.

This may be our penultimate dive, assuming that everything goes well tomorrow. With one week left in Antarctica for me, I’ve been trying to remember the experiences more. Years ago I went to the library at night. The air was cool, the scent of pine needles was in the air, and then I unzipped my jacket. That combination of sensations – the cool air, the pine scent, the sound of a zipper – instantly sent me back to a camping trip I had taken years earlier. This trip is providing many of those same kind of mental cues.

The sound of flags flapping so fast they’re actually humming, the taste of the fresh water from the dive hole at Heald Island, the smell of the dry gloves we use when we haul up the tether, the salty taste of my leather gloves as I pull them off with my teeth because my other hand is busy holding the wet, cold drill flights from plunging through the ice to ocean bottom, the sight of Mt. Discovery or Erebus dominating the horizon that seems to extend forever. Add in the sounds of the Pisten Bully whirring along, the generator chugging because the choke was left on, or the Jiffy Drill bogging down as it gets stuck. There’s also the feel when the Jiffy Drill finally breaks through to the saltwater, the incline of the main ramp in Crary Lab that connects all the phases (we enter at the top and the lab is in the bottom phase), the slickness of the salty slush the drill creates when it pulls up the seawater. Also the intense cold of the wind against my face as I stand out of the lee side of the Pisten Bully at a dive site or drive a snowmobile across the landscape. Sensing the many different kinds of snow underfoot – rotten, loose stuff, hardpack so dense that snowmobiles don’t make an impression, soft, fluffy stuff that makes you feel like you’re walking across a beach, thin crust that cracks in six different directions as you step on it.

Yes, the senses have been getting a workout here.

Work today went rather smoothly. We were at the small iceberg again and got our transects done before moving on to another site near another iceberg that Bob and volunteer Aaron had started drilling. We finished up the holes at the new site, unhitched the trailer, and headed back to town.

Stacy is going to continue her media star status! The Exploratorium, a really, really cool hands-on science museum in San Francisco, is putting on a series of interviews with polar researchers. The live webcast will be on December 11 at 1pm PST.

http://www.exploratorium.edu/webcasts/index.php