Antarctica
My oldest friend in the world just arrived in Antarctica last week for his eight-month stint at McMurdo Station. (I mentioned this here.) I’ve been e-mailing with him — it’s really strange to get a same day response from someone in Antarctica. (His location is on New Zealand time, so they’re 18 hours ahead of the U.S. East Coast, or 13 hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time.) He’s also sent me a few digital camera photos. Right now they have 24 hours of sunlight where he is. Quote:
so, the sun refuses to go away- you see, its daylight here 24 hrs, thats ALL THE FUCKING TIME. im really learning to hate it, dont even remember what the moon looks like. it wont start to set until about feb 20th, then we’ll have weeks of sunset and im not quite sure when it actually goes out, but im pretty sure it’s early may or late april.
This got me all inspired to play blog-boy, and dig up some Antarctica-related links:
* a map of Antarctica; his home for the next eight months, McMurdo Station, is located downward of the South Pole on this map.
* a very good introductory page to Antarctica.
* a pretty sunrise/sunset chart for McMurdo station, taken from this page, which lets you generate a pretty sunchart for anywhere in the world (the one for the South Pole looks pretty cool).
* a video of the sun revolving around the South Pole — instead of rising and setting during a 24-hour period, as it does in most other places on Earth, the sun appears to revolve around the sky during a 24-hour period (during the six-month period of sunlight, anyway).
* finally, the Earth and Moon Viewer.
I’ve long been fascinated by astronomy, by the way, so I find all this earth-moon-sun stuff really exciting. It gives you a different perspective on who we are. Night and day mean everything to us but they’re relative concepts, functions of our location on this insignificant chunk of debris as it wobbles around an ordinary star. We’re nothing!
Maybe a year ago i saw a documentary about living and social conditions at the US’s station at one of the poles. Things that impressed me at the time:
[] There is no privacy. You can “get away” from others, visually at least. But, within the bucky-ball style dome (where they erected shacks and other small buildings within), everything could be heard, from the sound of hair being combed to other, less silent things we tend to do as humans. For example, when asked who rolled over or moved most while asleep, the entire mission knew very well who it was. I can imagine living in a world where all my compatriots could hear me roll over while sleeping, no matter their distance within the dome.
[] Each person’s skill-set became very, very important. Should they lose their resident doctor, for example, they made sure that at least one other person was minimally capable of replacing the person incase of their “loss.” As a result, people learned how to do things they never had any desire to learn in the real-world.
[] They all agreed (some 50 of them) that humour was The Most Important to have their. They said that those without a very good sense of humour quickly went crazy.
[] It was the job of everyone to monitor the mental health of each other. Numerous people had to be medivac’d due to mental health issues (this seemed to be a sore point, so they were not too willing to discuss this aspect).
Anyway, what an opportunity.
Your friend is extremely lucky.
.rob
We’re nothing. Or we’re everything! The largeness of things can make us feel humble (in a good way). But it can also make us realize how we’re a part of this vast greatness. And that we really can make _our_ world as livable a place as we possibly can. I love the cosmos, too. One great thing about living in North Carolina is that I can actually see the night sky and the billions of stars….
how very true… no one ever realizes what it means to be on this planet until they spend a deal of time on the (to us anyways) northern or southern tips of it… I grew up in Alaska. I dealt with hours upon hours of sunlight and darkness for years upon years, i find it strage that people are unable to deal with lack of darkness for sleep.