Images of

ANTARCTICA

Local Scenery

Photos © 2002 Seth White

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A C-141 taking off from the sea ice runway, with Mount Discovery in the Background. A great picture, but my digital camera can't resolve the various subtle shades of blue and white. Color-wise, Antarctica is a subtle place. The whites, blues, and greys blend very gradually into one another. It is very beautiful, but does not lend itself well to representation by a mid-grade digital camera. I hope my 'analog' 35mm pictures turn out better.

The same picture, more or less.
Another take off, this time seen from Arrival Heights.
A pretty lake contained inside Crater Hill - which is an extinct volcanic crater and is the high point around McMurdo.
Mount Erebus and Castle Rock from Crater Hill.
Same as last picture, but different proportions.
Sea ice runway and the Transantarctic Mountains as seen from Arrival Heights.
Ditto.
This cross is located at the top of Observation Hill. It honors Scott's party, who all died on the return from the South Pole in 1912. The men who found their final camp returned with photographic film, scientific specimens, and other materials. They had to leave Scott and his men in their tent, and subsequent parties could not locate the campsite, since that area had been covered in snow. So, Scott's party will eventually end up drifting out to sea as part of an iceberg as the ice shelf makes its way to the sea. The men who erected this cross did not think it would EVER be seen by other men. Very profound that they would put this cross up to honor their comrades with that thought in mind.
Standard marker designating a historic site, printed in four languages.
A sun dog seen from McMurdo.
My camera was smoking this day, and got a trippy image of the sun.
Another pic from Crater Hill, showing White Island and a radome on T-site.
The sun produced a beautiful reflection off the glacier on Mount Discovery. It is an extinct volcano, and although it is on the mainland, it surroundings lands are similar in shape to Ross Island. I have heard that this mountain is over 2 million years old, and that anywhere else in the world it would have eroded down to a little mound by now. But here, it's frozen solid and has stayed well preserved.
Mount Discovery from Arrival Heights. The clouds were really bizarre around the mountain this day. This was taken January 6 2003. It was the nicest day of the entire season. Measured at Arrival Heights, the temperature was 34F, with no windchill. But the crappy weather returned right away. It has been a cold and windy summer here, according to people who've been here before.
These clouds were formed as a series of arcs, evenly spaced, and at the same height. They looked like a standing wave. Although my camera does not resolve fine shades of white/grey/blue very well, there are 7 of them visible in this pic. I was told it's due to the higher winds essentially bouncing off an inversion layer. Sounds good to me...
Here's the top of Observation Hill, as seen through the telescope on the upper part of the Crary lab. After the words describing whom it was built for (Scott and his party of 1911), on the cross there is the inscription "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."
Eh, this is kind of a lame picture: Ob Hill with a little moon above it. But seriously, little things like this seem interesting down here. Even after 6+ months, life here is still new, interesting, and unique. Well, most of the time.
The Transantarctic mountains as the sun is going down.
Another shot of the same thing.
Another one....only a little wider angle this time. See? Things like this would not have been picture-worthy before I came down here....sunsets over the Rocky Mountains are pretty spectacular sometimes, but I have never taken a photo. But I just felt the need to capture this image. Don't quite understand it, but what the heck.
Here's Minna Bluff. It's the bluish thing sticking out from Black Island, which is on the right. The neat thing here is the mirages of Minna Bluff. It is common to see such things here, since when the air is still the temperature gradients in the air above the sea ice will refract light and create false images. A typical effect is the appearance of cliffs along the mountains where there are none. This mirage was higher up, though. The top of Minna Bluff seems deformed and jagged on the leftward edge.
Here's White Island during twilight. My camera has been having issues lately...the auto-exposure is all wrong and I can't force the shutter speed to do what I want even when I'm in full manual mode. Crap! But, ths one turned out OK, even though the exposure is too short. The fine, delicate transitions in colors above White Island this evening were perfect. It would be impossible to duplicate the shades, no matter how talented an airbrusher you are! This doesn't really show up that well in this pic, but it it's still a good one. White Island is so cool....
A sunset late in the fall season, as seen from McMurdo station.
Here is a short video clip taken during a very cold and windy day, just outside of the McMurdo Ground Station building. It was very impressive to see the clouds moving along so fast, and to feel the cutting bite of the wind on my face. There is some serious power in this place!
This is a view looking NE from the Crary Lab on a fall day. It's a little blurry (because of me) and a little grainy (because of my camera), but it's a nice picture with some incredible colors. The large building is 155, the main building at McMurdo. Various offices are here, the galley is here, and some dorm rooms. I'm living here for the winter.
I took this picture driving home from Arrival Heights one day. There was a lot of fog over McMurdo, and the orange lights were illuminating it. I thought the radarsat dome and the flags looked nice against this background.
While working at Radarsat one day with some antenna issues, I saw these neat clouds just sitting stagnant (for hours) out over the sea. This is one of the clouds with the corner of the dome.
One of these clouds by themselves. The antennas on the left are pointed towards Mt. Erebus and receive seismic data from stations on the mountain.
Another one of the cool clouds.
On a winter trip to Crater Hill with my friend Steve, this was the view to the North. The antenna masts to the right hold antennas for the Differential GPS transmitter, the Optaphone to the apple hut on the Castle Rock loop, and an anemometer experiment.
This is the view from Crater Hill looking toward the NE horizon, on the same day.
Here's me on Crater Hill, with the big city in the background. (Photo by Olivia Billett)
And this is a wintertime birds-eye view of the sprawling metropolis that is McMurdo Station.
Another view looking down at the station, this time with the moon.
Here's another perspective of the station at night, from Radarsat. These pictures, along with the ones at Crater Hill above, were taken on very cold windy days...the clearest days are always the coldest. It is easy for your hands to get cold, fast, when you're standing around holding and manipulating a camera. Especially for me with poor circulation. Your fingers tense up as you hold the camera and press buttons, restricting the blood flow.
A closer view of the station from Radarsat.
June 21, 2003....the Winter Solstice! Darkest day of the year. Around 2 pm I decided to drive up to Arrival Heights and take pictures of the incoming light from the North. Around mid-day you can see a little glow on the hills above McMurdo, but the view from Arrival Heights is unobstructed all the way to the horizon looking North over the Ross Sea. The light today was amazing. Usually it's a bluish glow with maybe a little red/orange right on the horizon. Today, there was brilliant red over a good part of the view. Here is a panorama of the solstice lighting. On the right is the barely visible Mt. Erebus.
Here is one of me...in the RED PARKA...with the red sky in the background. It was very calm this day, so it wasn't too bad to stand around on the roof of the Arrival Heights hut and take lots of pictures.
Here is another one from the solstice, looking back toward McMurdo. The bright light on the right is Radarsat, Ob Hill is in the middle, and T-site is on the left (both lit up by McMurdo).
These next few pictures are from today, June 23. I was driving up to Arrival Heights and noticed some auroras off to the South and East. I stopped the truck and took a few pictures. They turned out OK, but this day was cold and very windy. The best I could do was sit in the truck and steady the camera on the dash or window. But still, the wind was pushing the truck around a little, so the photos aren't that steady. Plus, the auroras move around so much during the long exposures that they appear blurry, since my virtual film speed settings end at 400 and very long exposures are required for this stuff . The Canon A-40 I bought before coming down here has worked very well, but if I ever come back here, I'll bring a better camera which is more capable of doing low-light photos! Still, this was probably the best display I have seen. The green comes out really well in the pictures, in fact even better than in person.
More auroras.
This episode lasted for about a half-hour. According to the magnetometer data from Arrival Heights, it seems the typical aurora displays last about 30 to 90 minutes. During good solar activity, they can pop up several times per day - usually 2 or 3.
Here are a few more aurora pics, this time with Ob Hill in the background. The lights today extended about 1/4 to 1/3 of the total horizon at their peak. Definitely the largest (and most intense) show I've seen. The black things sticking up in these pics are flags along the road. I almost want to photo-shop these things out of the pictures, but laziness prevails....



Here's another one of midwinter McMurdo, taken from atop Crater Hill. Crater Hill is referred to as Crater Heights by Apsley Cherry-Garrard in his book "The Worst Journey in the World". I bought this from the store a while ago and have been reading it off and on. He was the youngest member of Scott's Terra Nova expedition. He was one of the three who undertook the winter journey to Cape Crozier to get Emperor Penguin eggs (this was the Worst Journey which gave the book its title), and was one of the party who found Scott, Bowers, and Wilson frozen in their tent, only 11 miles from a depot of food and supplies. This is a great book, and I highly recommend it. It is a factual, honest, insightful, and very realistic account of their days in the Antarctic. The stories from that expedition are beyond the realm of my comprehension. It's worth a read. During the book he constantly makes reference to landmarks which are familiar to me - Castle Rock, the Erebus Ice Tongue, the huts at Cape Evans and Hut Point, Erebus, Arrival Heights, Ob Hill, etc. etc. And this never loses its effect.
Here is Crater Hill again, with a Pisten Bully parked next to one of the huts at the summit. I came up one day with my friend Steve, who had some work to do on the optaphone system. It was pitch black this day, so I took a long exposure and shined the flashlight over the hut and PB.
A mid-July view looking north from Arrival Heights, around midday, with nice red colors.
I took this one last week (July 25) from Arrival Heights. There was a bit of fog above McMurdo, and so I was treated to the rare and spectacular Aurora McMurdis. This is a streetlight-orange colored aurora which forms at very low altitudes, directly above the station. Wow! Do scientists know about this?
On July 25, we saw the first nacreous clouds of the season. I didn't bring my camera with me to Arrival Heights, as I wasn't expecting such a nice sight. I hurried back down to McMurdo, but in the 20 minutes it took me to do this, the sky had clouded over with a low level of crap. For a few days it was crappy weather, but on July 29 it cleared up and we could see these clouds again. Here is a panorama looking northward from Arrival Heights around midday. These clouds are actually in the stratosphere, about 15-30 km in altitude. The sun is still well below the horizon, but they are illuminated because they are so high up. In fact, that's how people first figured out that these are stratospheric clouds. They had to be that high in order to be seen with the sun so low! Anyhow, these are a class of Polar Stratospheric Clouds, which are the main object of our LIDAR measurements at the Crary lab. They are essentially composed of icy crystals, and they appear in the late winter and spring in the polar regions. These clouds were incredibly bright and beautiful in color. I had heard about them, and had even seen some pictures. But this still took me by surprise. They seem so delicate and wispy, and the colors are very vibrant. However, since this day the weather has been absolutely horrible and so I haven't seen any more. They are supposed to continue for another month or two, and I am told that they will fill more of the sky as time goes on. Mount Erebus is on the right in this picture by the way, covered in a layer of fog.
The next few pictures are more of the nacreous clouds, with various exposures, views, etc....all taken on the same day.


This one turned out particularly nicely.

These last two are from the roof of the Arrival Heights hut, with the roof dome of the Fabry-Perot Interferometer system in the foreground. This system has been remarkably well-behaved over the winter, which is much relief to me.
I like this pic - the interferometer's hero shot!
Yesterday was Tuesday, August 12...perhaps the prettiest day I have seen here so far. The sun still isn't above the horizon (and won't be until August 19), so the light was still very diffuse. It was clear as a bell, and there was a full moon. There was zero wind (!) and a layer of frost had formed on just about everything. And best of all, there were more nacreous clouds. I took my camera up to Arrival Heights, so here is a picture looking back toward town.
This is a panorama of the view from Arrival Heights. Yesterday was awe-inspiring.
Finally, after about 2 weeks since we last saw them, nacreous clouds reappeared yesterday. It had been absolutely awful weather for about 10 days, but recently we have had a string of 4-5 great calm days....and yesterday was the best of them. These nacreous clouds appeared lighter in color compared to the dark red of the last ones, and presumably this was because the sun was a little higher. But they were equally as stunning. In fact, this time there were several of them which looked like wispy prisms, with rainbow colors.
Photographs (or at least those taken by yours truly) don't even begin to do justice to these things. They are incredibly delicate and pretty, and slowly shift around in the sky. The colors are indescribable. My friend Joe (the lead fire tech) came up to the hut yesterday to check on the fire alarm panels etc., and so we had a cup of coffee and hung out for a while. He mentioned about it looking like a Van Gogh painting outside - and that's exactly right. The clouds are very surreal looking, as if they were painted in the sky. And they're very bright, too. I think perhaps nacreous clouds are the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in nature.
I took a ton of pictures - so here are a few more of the better ones.


Back in town, I put my camera on a tripod in front of the telescope in the Crary lab and took this picture of Scott's cross on top of Ob Hill.
A few nights ago, just after a storm had subsided, there were lots of tiny ice crystals in the still air. The light from street lamps and buildings formed these vertical pillars as light reflected off the ice crystals. So I walked around town with my camera and managed to get a few OK images (of the two dozen pictures I actually took). This one is the best, I think. The building in the middle of the picture is Gallagher's club, the non-smoking bar, and some above-ground heated water pipes are at the bottom of the picture.
More of the light pillars, with sparkles from other lights nearby. From reading on the internet, it seems the reason these form vertically and not any other direction is due to the orientation of the ice crystal faces themselves as they float around in the air (with their flat surfaces parallel to the ground). I was thinking about this while I was taking the pictures, and couldn't figure out what was so special about the vertical direction. There is a great page on atmospheric optics here, which explains and shows examples of the various things you can see when water, dust, or ice play with light. Antarctica is a good place for seeing a lot of these things. I never really paid attention to the sky or sun too much before, in fact I had never even noticed sundogs. But after being here I will probably take the time to look upwards now and then when I get back home.
The pillars tended to fan out like funnels at their tops.
One more of the light pillars. It has to be very cold for these ice crystals to settle down in the air near the surface - it was about -30 F or so when these appeared. They get some amazing displays at South Pole - it's always very cold, and ice crystals are present quite often in the air.
I hope you're not sick of nacreous cloud pictures yet...because here are a bunch more of them. The difference with these is they were taken with the new camera. It does a much better job of capturing the subtle lines and shades of the clouds, but still nothing like reality. The day after the first flight of Winfly, the most spectacular display yet arrived over McMurdo. I walked out of Crary mid-afternoon and was just stunned. So I drove up to the old water plant on Ob Hill and took some pics. Here's one of me with the clouds.
Here's one of the view overlooking town. It wasn't possible to get McMurdo lit right, since the long exposure time would have turned the clouds into bright white blobs...
...kind of like this.
Another one, with some power lines and McMurdo lights in the foreground.
This is how the clouds look zoomed in. No, really, this is how they look. I'm not that good with photoshop to create this kind of image.
I made a little movie file (.avi format) with some commentary from the old water plant. It must have been quite the spectacle for first-timers who arrived on today's flight to see this scenery above the station. Personally, I was absolutely giddy. This was a very strange day for me - the onslaught of Winfly was in full force, my new camera had just arrived, the clouds were unbeliveable, and I was having a chew (which arrived on the flight too). So with all this weird energy, I was buzzing like a bad TV.
Later in the day I went up to Arrival Heights with some people from around the lab to take more pictures. This is one with the Kiwi telecom dome. I like this one.
This might be the best picture I've ever taken...thanks to the Canon G3. I just bought a 4 megapixel camera, and now I want 10....
Another similar picture.
Some little wispy clouds off by themselves, taken on a different day from Arrival Heights.
Sunset from Arrival Heights with some nacreous clouds.
Another nacreous sunset...this one is a little better pic.
A wider view of the same sunset.
One solitary prismatic cloud here.
This is a view from the bottom of Crary, looking toward building 165. This is where the weather offices, communications centers, and Navy offices are.
A herd of nacreous clouds moseying their way across the sky.