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The Missouri Review 28.2 (2005) 44-61


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The Song of Hypothermia

Jason Anthony


Click for larger view		 Figure 1

[End Page 44]

There's no such thing as being out of the wind in the Antarctic. We inhabit a barren continent buried under mile-deep ice and shaped by the cold gales of millennia. Katabatic winds plunge down to the frozen coast like an endless train falling off its tracks. Here on the Odell Glacier, sleep comes under a steady barrage of twenty-five-knot gusts that struggle to erase our little nylon home on the ice.

It's early November, and Julian and I have set up camp in the Transantarctic Mountains, two men isolated for three months of the Antarctic summer. The south polar sun will not set during our three months, instead spinning above us like an anemometer. And already it seems that the wind will be a very busy neighbor: our little tents creak, our little tents hum.

We have two goals out here: first, to build and maintain an emergency runway on the glacier. McMurdo Station, the main base for the USAP (United States Antarctic Program), needs an alternative landing site for the large Hercules aircraft that bring cargo from New Zealand or move it around the continent. Several times each summer, storm or fog make Herc landings in McMurdo too dangerous. [End Page 45]

Our other goal: to keep each other sane, with only ourselves for company for the next ninety days.

Our camp is on the edge of the five-mile-wide Odell Glacier, snug under the shadow of a steep dolomite ridge of the Allan Hills. The sloping edge of the glacier and a curve in the hills make a small cove that offers us some protection. The gusts baffle around our neighborhood of blue ice and brown stone; winds shudder and fall into the cove rather than racing through. Because of the shuddering, snow drops out of the flow and drifts up against the rocks. This we shovel out and melt for water.

We don't know how difficult the katabatic winds will be this summer, but we have to plan on the worst—day after day of tent-thrashing. Though Julian and I plan to look around further, in a few preliminary trips out here last summer I found no better hiding place on the glacier. Which is too bad because after only a few hours on the Odell, everything we own is tied down and shaking.

Katabatic winds are avalanches of air. They are the characteristic winds of Antarctica, far more common here than elsewhere. The word derives from the Greek katabatos, "descending." The high reflectivity of the white ice sheet reflects most of the sun's heat, leaving intensely cooled air on the surface, which then slides down along the curve of the ice domes. These gravity-driven air masses fall hundreds of miles down from the bitterly cold East Antarctic plateau over smooth surfaces of snow and ice. They howl most fiercely when squeezed down narrow glaciers (like the Odell) between nunataks, the visible peaks of mountains otherwise submerged by ice. The Allan Hills, like other nunataks, shape and are shaped by the winds.

Katabatics begin and end abruptly. They are ragged and gusty, arrive under clear skies and may easily last days or weeks. They blow nearly continually in the most afflicted areas: Douglas Mawson's 1912 winter quarters in Commonwealth Bay shook constantly in katabatics averaging fifty miles per hour through their first year, with gusts of over two hundred miles per hour. In Home of the Blizzard, Mawson wrote of this time that they "dwelt on the fringe of an unspanned continent, where the chill breath of a vast, polar wilderness, quickening to the rushing might of eternal blizzard, surged to the northern seas. We had discovered an accursed country."

As I lie in my only slightly accursed tent on our first Odell evening, on the fringe of our now-spanned continent, I mull over my last harried words to friends in McMurdo: "You can go to MacOps...

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