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Pete's Post - March 2005

As I write this, the end of the Antarctic summer season is almost here. The last flights from NZ are on 26 February. Almost all of our summer staff have gone home, and the incoming winter crew who will be fitting out the new Hillary Field Centre building arrived a week ago. Soon we'll be trapped here for at least five months, with no mail, newspapers, fresh vegetables, or (most importantly) no new toys able to be sent to us.

There are normally about 11 people wintering-over. This year we'll have 19 people, because of the construction project. The aim is to have the new
building ready for use next season.

Temperatures are dropping from the highs of about +3 degC in early January. This morning it is -17 degC. This is still comfortable when the wind is not blowing, but with windchill it would feel pretty cold. When we were doing our SAR training last Thursday, one of our team, Dave, was the "subject" in a scenario which involved a fall into a crevasse. He was in there for about four hours while the SAR team responded. By the time we'd got gear organised, sent out a hasty response team, found them all, and extracted Dave from the narrow crevasse he was starting to become hypothermic. He was quite grumpy as we hauled him out on a litter.

The biggest danger of a crevasse fall here is the cold. The Americans are totally focussed on possible spinal injuries - probably because in their country you might be sued if you didn't assume a spinal injury. However, with the statistical proportion of crevasse falls causing spinal injuries being about 5%, we argued that a more rapid rescue should have been made. Especially since our patient showed no sign of any spinal or neurological problems.

On Sunday we took the new crew for a familiarisation trip to the Imax crevasse. This is about an hours drive away in a Hagglunds tracked vehicle. Most of them had never been inside a crevasse, and they were very impressed. It is still permanent daylight, but we'll see our first sunset for about half an hour on 21 February. Then the nights will get steadily longer until we have three months of permanent darkness. I'm looking forward to experiencing the severe cold and a few Condition One storms during the winter. I want to capture on video some of the amazing experiences that only winter-over crews in the polar regions normally get to see.

More next month...

Pete de Joux from Antarctic