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During the early 1900s, explorer Frank Wild journeyed five times to Antarctica with various expeditions. When he returned from each voyage, curious people asked him what had drawn him yet again to the most desolate region on Earth.
He replied that Antarctica’s “little voices” urged him to continue to explore the continent’s unknown geography. And so, with grueling treks across mountains, glaciers, and the Polar Plateau he did just that.
My own “little voices” are memories of quintessential Antarctic moments. On Campbell Island, I observed a colony of about-to-fledge royal albatross as they stood on cone-shaped earthen mounds.
The birds flapped their gangly wings as though to call forth the wind like feathered Merlins. Then there was that quiet evening near Cape Adare in the Ross Sea region when Polar light bathed
the ice-honed Admiralty Range in exquisite pastels that not even the most sensitive digital camera could quite capture. And I remember the intense poignancy I felt inside Robert Scott’s
Cape Evans Hut as I stood in the middle of the room, wishing that somehow history could be rewritten for Scott and his four men who perished in 1912.
These and other “little voices” persuade me to stuff my suitcase again with long johns, fleece pullovers, and knee-high boots to cruise across tempestuous seas toward a land unlike any other.
Even before the first of my eleven voyages to lecture and research these books, Antarctica had worked its magic on me as I listened to enthusiastic geologists at Ohio State University rave about a continent few had seen.
As an undergraduate geology student, I was selected in 1969 to work as a field assistant with an all-woman research team at McMurdo Station and at a field camp in Taylor Dry Valley. Just a few months before our scheduled departure,
I had to turn down this opportunity because of a family member’s sudden but serious illness. Throughout the ensuing years, I believed that someday, somehow I would find a way to go to Antarctica and to see this land beyond imagination
that I had dreamed about for so long.
And I did finally visit Antarctica for the first time in 1993. Today, those “little voices” still whisper whenever I write, lecture, or show slides about Antarctica’s geology, history, or wildlife.
Even now, as I write this brief note about myself on a crisp autumn day in the Colorado Mountains, I mentally escape to a favorite beach on Paulet Island where the full-throated, kazoo-like voices of Adélie penguins fracture
the silence as they pop from the surf like black and white corks. Sparring male fur seals whimper and yelp like dogs while they patrol the perimeters of their female harems. Farther down the shore are slabs of basalt that in 1903
formed the sturdy walls of a stone hut, the unplanned winter home of Captain Carl A. Larsen and his crew after pack ice had crushed their ship, the Antarctic. If I close my eyes, I can imagine the doomed Antarctic surrounded by seamless pack ice,
its white sails taut against the cold, cold winds. And now these images merge into a perfect “little voice,” one that will lure me to Antarctica once again.
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The Ice
