Bottom of the world

It’s not like you can squint your eyes and imagine you’re in the Rockies an hour from Denver. No, Antarctica is the most remote, foreign-feeling place on earth. Because the continent hosts the coldest and driest coordinates on the globe, reports suggest an overwhelming sense of isolation rushes like blood to the head with every breath of tongue-stinging air, every step on the hard ground that emanates foreboding chills, every glance across the gorgeously eerie landscape—pristine, white and undisturbed.

To a New Orleans native like 45-year-old Phil Bart, each day is shockingly cold. Now an LSU geology professor, Bart learned this lesson the hard way in 1990 on his first trip to Antarctica as a graduate student with Rice University. He toured the U.S. McMurdo research station wearing only socks and moccasins to protect his feet from the bitter earth below.

“They get frozen after walking on the ground for just a few minutes,” Bart says. “That’s why the U.S. Antarctic Program has heavy parkas and shoes for us. Street-issue stuff just doesn’t cut it.”

Recently Bart, who now packs plenty of cold-combating gear, returned for the third time with a group of undergraduate and graduate geology students for a nine-week exploration of the Ross Sea, a large inlet buttressed by an ice shelf on the southwest New Zealand side of the desolate land mass.

His group flew from Baton Rouge to Los Angeles to New Zealand, where a U.S. Air Force C-130 cargo plane carried them to Antarctica’s McMurdo station. There, they boarded the Nathaniel B. Palmer research vessel, an orange-hulled icebreaker that knifes through the Ross Ice Shelf like a cold Satsuma wedge through a desert of refined cane sugar. Though a number of scientific groups from the College of William and Mary to UC-San Diego mounts missions on the Palmer, the vessel is a Louisiana native, too, built in 1992 by Edison Chouest Inc. in Galliano.

Now aboard the Palmer, Bart’s students are busy working 12-hour shifts to reconstruct the history of the continent’s ice sheet, which may help predict future trends affecting sea and ice levels. Students monitor and analyze geophysical and seismic data collection, and take core samples of sediment from the seafloor. And they’re doing it during a long stretch of austral summer when the sun never sets, a startling polar phenomenon that only adds to the otherworldly nature of a continent occasionally omitted from global maps altogether. “It’s the stepchild of continents,” Bart jokes.

He says disconnecting from civilization also adds to Antarctica’s imposing isolation. No broadcast radio or cell phone signals can reach the Ross Sea. Expensive satellite phones and twice-daily Internet access are used to contact home. Students can, however, spend down time in the Palmer’s exercise facility or media room to play DVDs and CDs.

This is 24-year-old graduate student Vincent Adams’ first large-scale scientific excursion. He admits they don’t get much bigger than this.

“It’s a really good opportunity to see firsthand what is going on with glacial melting—a lifetime experience,” Adams told 225 before departing. “I expect close quarters and a lot of work with 12-hour shifts. With the constant daylight, I’m going to have to cover my windows pretty well to get some sleep.”

Being thousands of miles from the nearest doctor, Bart and his crew underwent extensive medical screenings before being cleared for the voyage. As Bart prepared for the expedition in November, a Canadian cruise ship struck submerged ice off Antarctica, pulled a Titanic and sank, sending all 154 passengers and crew into lifeboats before being rescued and taken to a Chilean military base. Bart calls that incident a rarity. He has full confidence in the Palmer’s ability to detect and avoid submerged ice. Still, he admits, studying Antarctica always presents challenges.

“I’m missing my daughter’s birthday,” he says, smiling, “and she doesn’t like that.”

The LSU team returns to Baton Rouge in mid-March, and this year a film crew from Passport

to Knowledge is documenting the entire adventure.