Meanwhile, I accepted an invitation to spend a day hiking across the sea ice under Hutton Cliffs with a New Zealand scientist studying Weddell seals. Wearing crampons and carrying ice axes, we started across the pressure ridges formed by the ice pushing up against the continent as the tide rose and fell. Once on the slick sea ice, the person in front probed the space ahead with a long stick to find unstable ice or crevasses. I immediately sank up to my knee in a crack in the sea ice and was scolded for not noticing it. Some of the cracks had water washing up through them onto the ice. The seals, like the penguins, had been tagged the previous year, and we were checking to see which ones had returned to the same place and whether they now had pups.

The big slugs lay on the ice and couldn’t have cared less about the group of humans tiptoeing by on crampons. They had never known a predator, and had no reason to fear people, so they were completely relaxed. I could have petted them. We spent an hour watching one seal playing in a tidal crack.

Meanwhile, American seal scientists were at sea aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer on a research cruise called APIS (Antarctic Pack Ice Seals). Marilyn Koski, an exotic animal veterinarian from Concord, was one of two vets on board to help study the pack-ice environment. "It was one of those life-changing experiences," Koski told me afterward.

The first time she got off the ship happened to be the first day of the new millennium. "As we stepped onto the ice, our feet disappeared because of the low-blowing snow that covered our tracks right up. Through this low-blowing snow we saw these lovely coffee-brown, big doe-eyed seals. We saw one of the most rare animals in the Antarctic"–the Ross seal–"as our New Year’s present. We all came back floating."

During the cruise, Koski was on call 24 hours a day. Each day the ship’s helicopters went out looking for seals while divers checked underwater conditions and the krill population. Other scientists tested for temperature and salinity.

Once a seal was chosen for "sampling," Koski was transported by Zodiac, a small inflatable boat, to the animal. She would help physically restrain it, usually by capturing it in a net or "seal bag." Then the seal would be weighed on a tripod, and Koski and other scientists would take fecal and DNA samples, vocalization and ultrasound recordings, and photos of the animal’s wounds. After performing a physical exam, they would put a small tag on the seal.

Koski reported seeing "four stunning species. The most rare was the Ross seal, of which we saw fifty. And we saw a leopard seal with a head the size of a watermelon, and crabeater seals and Weddells. The leopard seals were the only species it would have been unsafe to handle." Those they restrained with tranquilizers by remote dart.

"The experience that made me feel most mortal and insignificant was darting an 800-pound leopard seal," Koski noted. "She was sleeping on the edge of an ice floe. We came up in the Zodiac, darted her, then zipped away. We were absolutely eye-level to this animal, she above us on the ice floe, when she sleepily started to wake up. She arched up completely, gave us a good look. She was just magnificent, with amazing musculature."

Koski and her cohorts always waited with the drugged animals until they were completely functional again. If they didn’t, the skuas could eat the eyeballs right off the living seals. Some of the longer moments of Koski’s journey were those when she and her colleagues stood by, stomping their feet and pacing back and forth on the ice floe, waiting for a seal to regain consciousness. One time a fish biologist, who was also a violinmaker, brought his fiddle out to the ice floe and played right there to entertain Koski and the others as they waited. Unfortunately, he played only a couple of pieces before the intense cold put his instrument out of tune.

"I never knew how beautiful white, blue, and gray could be," Koski mused.

I hurried back to McMurdo to check on the Coast Guard icebreaker, the Polar Star, due to arrive soon. It was close to McMurdo, visible most of the time, but still hadn’t broken through to Winter Quarters Bay.

So I set off to find the "balloonatics"–Berkeley scientists who were launching an enormous helium-filled balloon to gather atmospheric data. Like so many of the others who work in this wildly difficult environment, with only a small window of time in which to complete their work, Robyn Millan was elusive. I had sent her a couple of e-mails and received no reply, but I was now learning the be-here-now ways of Antarctica. A kind of floating persistence, a letting-go of what you want while still being open to wanting it, seemed to be the law of the land.

I found Robyn Millan quite by accident at Derelict Junction.

I was standing at the tiny hut waiting for the van that shuttled back and forth between McMurdo and the Williams Air Field, intending to visit a friend who drove big bulldozers out at Willie Field, when I noticed that the small woman sitting at the bus stop was none other than Millan, the Berkeley scientist I had been trying to find. I introduced myself and she invited me out to Willie Field, where an enormous shed housed her balloon. It turned out the balloonatics were about to have a party.

Millan is a graduate student and researcher in UC Berkeley’s physics department. Her project, MAXIS (MeV Auroral X-ray and Spectroscopy), detects and measures electron precipitation from the magnetosphere into the ionosphere. This electron precipitation creates the aurora (Northern and Southern Lights) along with X-rays that can be observed with the balloon’s instrumentation. People are interested in these particles because they may damage satellites–damage that might be prevented if we knew how these particles became so energized.

Out at Willie Field, I also met Rick Sterling, an engineer at the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory who designed the software system for collecting and presenting the balloon-flight data. Sterling and Millan were enthusiastic about the advantages of doing this kind of research with balloons rather than satellites. The obvious advantage is the huge price difference. Sterling pointed out that because balloons "produce good science at low cost, especially compared to satellites," they provide great training labs for young scientists. Millan has spent the last two years on the project, and she has been central to every aspect of it, from presenting the proposal to readying the balloon for launching in Antarctica.

Another advantage that balloons have over satellites is that they can carry heavier payloads in their gondolas. The 100-yard-long MAXIS balloon is made of 3,000 pounds of plastic, and is inflated with truckloads of helium. The payload weighs about 3,200 pounds. With satellites, scientists must shave off grams of weight.

Finally, balloons are advantageous because they can be recovered, although that’s never guaranteed. At the time of my visit, the MAXIS balloon had been ready to launch for three weeks, but Millan, Sterling, and their colleagues were waiting for the right weather conditions. Once launched, they hoped the balloon would circle the perimeter of the continent and not end up over open water where they wouldn’t be able to retrieve it. "There is no guarantee that we’ll recover the payload," Millan said, looking glum at the prospect of having spent two years on something that might disappear into the ocean.

The party hadn’t even begun, and I’d only been chatting with Millan and Sterling a few minutes when a breathless meteorologist busted into the barn that housed the MAXIS balloon. "It’s a go!" he cried.

"When?" Millan asked. "Now?"

"Now."

Millan jumped, literally, into action. Like a monkey she scrambled up onto the gondola and started readying her computer and other equipment. After a three-week wait, the MAXIS balloon would take flight at last. There was a flurry of excited preparation. Then, within just a few minutes, the weather changed–and the launch was canceled again.

(Later, I learned that on January 12, 2000, the MAXIS balloon was launched from Willie Field. From January 12 to January 30, on a 450-hour flight, it successfully circumnavigated the South Pole. The balloon was cut down over Victoria Land about 390 nautical miles from McMurdo, and on February 2, Robyn Millan and her colleague Steven Peterzen reached the payload via Twin Otter. They found the gondola in relatively good condition, considering that it had come to a stop upside down following its landing. The data vault containing the hard drive, the UW X-ray imagers, the BGO detector, and three of the four sun-sensor arrays were among the components successfully recovered.)

<<previous next>>