Antarctica - First Impressions

It’s hard to say what strikes you first; the beauty or the silence. A silence which is not the absence of sound, but those indescribable moments where there is no discernible noise. And a beauty which, if you try to speak about it, brings you to the brink of tears time and time again. This place is beyond anything I could have possibly imagined; the wildest of dreams in the wildest of places. There is nothing in the world I have had to question half so much as to whether it’s all real.

The flight from Punta Arenas to Rothera was very much a part of the whole experience. Flying on a Dash 7 is nothing much at all like your usual commercial flight. There were 14 of us on the plane, and in front of the passenger seats were all our bags strapped down by cargo nets. Once we’d taken off we had pretty much free reign to wander around the cabin. I think Lyndsay might have regretted taking the seat next to me as I was either incessantly talking or getting up to find a better window to look at the view. Perhaps she didn’t mind too much though as she didn’t stop offering me the unnaturally coloured sweets that she’d picked up at the airport! I went up to the cockpit to chat to the pilots – they said you could go an entire year, an entire lifetime, and you’d never see Patagonia looking so clear. It was utterly breath taking, and it completely dwarfed any representation of the Andes mountain range seen on a map or in photographs.

The flight lasted in the region of 4 and a half to 5 hours, and the cloud cover started to steadily increase as we neared Rothera and the Antarctic Peninsula. It was getting a bit bumpy at this stage so I closed my eyes and remembered to breathe – the second part of which is always useful. A few minutes later though Lyndsay gave me a nudge and told me to look out the window. My first glimpse of Antarctica – and I wasn’t able to utter anything more comprehensible than ‘oh wow!’ Snow covered peaks rising straight out of the ocean, clouds drifting to reveal mountainous icebergs, and then, tiny amongst it all, the scattered buildings of Rothera Research Station.

Considering that the runway was covered in snow & ice, and that it’s a mere 900m long, the landing was incredibly smooth. I was making a conscious effort to take it all in – this was my moon landing, and I’d never be able to do it again for the first time. For obvious reasons – mostly with it being an international airstrip – we didn’t hang about long on the runway. Before we could set foot on the continent though we had to walk our boots through a disinfected mat. Issues of bio security are taken extremely seriously – this is the most pristine environment on earth, and we want to do everything possible to reduce our impact here.

We were met by Jess (Station Leader), welcomed to Rothera, and taken inside for a cup of tea. It soon became apparent that the structure of each day seemed to pretty much resolve around having a brew – “we are British after all!” There was then a few briefings – information to supplement what we had learned in pre deployment back in Cambridge. And before we could begin our work it was necessary to have two days of specific onsite training. This would include everything from how to access the computer system, to using gators and a skidoo!