The following is the personal account of a single, long-winded individual’s experiences living and working in Antarctica. No part of it has been reviewed or in any way endorsed by the United States Antarctic Program or the National Science Foundation, or any other public or private organization, institution, contractor, or company associated therewith. The views expressed herein are the author’s alone, for good or for ill.
March, 2025
McMurdo was a different station by the time SPOT 3 returned. The summer population was rapidly thinning—most of the large passenger flights that mark the end of the season had already gone—and the mood of the place was rather more subdued than it had been when we’d last seen it at its most spirited peak around New Year’s. All of the seasonal sea ice had vanished, blown out to the Southern Ocean by some storm or other while we’d been away, and now much of the island was surrounded by open water the dark, rich indigo of brand-new blue jeans. The living liquid sea lapped continuously against the outer wall of the permanent McMurdo Ice Shelf, and every so often, when the wind picked up and set the water to work against the vast sheet of ice, great chunks calved off and left the sound full of snow-white bergs that looked deceptively small in the vast blue basin until something happened by to bring their gargantuan scale into its proper context. At one point shortly after our return, a relatively small berg was grounded just below the dirt road where it turned to meet the ice shelf, and it easily dwarfed the long rows of shipping containers staged by Antarctica New Zealand along the shoreline close to their base. Throngs of seals gathered along the broken lip of the ice shelf, frequently crowding onto small floes, where they basked in the sun and were ignored by small colony of penguins that kept mostly to themselves. Occasionally, one of the seals would slink its massive, sluglike body as far from the water’s edge as SPOTSA, where they joined large flocks of skuas gathered to watch us meticulously break apart the caravan we had taken twice across the continent to the South Pole and back, and put it into storage for the winter.
The US Antarctic Program refers to the transitional period between the winter and summer seasons1 as winfly, but there is no such official name for the liminal time at the opposite end of the calendar. Probably this is because the term winfly, an abbreviated bastardization of the more archaic winter fly-in, has been with the program for decades, at least—if not since the USAP’s inception in the mid-20th century—whereas the practice of offering work contracts into the extended season is a relatively recent development. In the old days, the start of winter was a hard line marked by the departure of the last flight of mainbody. Now, the two are split by a fuzzy boundary that lasts, depending on whom you ask, anywhere from one month to two or even three. This intertidal zone between the high-water mark of summer and the low ebb of winter is colloquially called win-fall by the locals, in what I assume is a play both on the word winfly and the idea that a few extra weeks of work amount to some sort of financial bonanza for the average seasonal worker—you know, like, a windfall. In the current iteration of the program, this is when most of the preparation for coming Antarctic night at McMurdo is done.
For the South Pole (overland) Traverse, the return of SPOT 3 in late February or early March heralds of flurry of activity—as there is a push to get tucked safely into storage anything that might potentially become a sail in the violent storms common to this mercurial time of year. The priorities on arriving back to the station are to secure the now-empty fuel bladders and the long sheets of HMW plastic, which return to SPOTSA with rigging that has been calcified into a frozen goddamned mess by 4,000 miles worth of snow and ice. The operators from SPOT 3 are, after spending almost the entirety of the main working season apart, reunited with those from SPOT 2, and together they work in the growing cold to arrange all the component pieces of the fuel loads into tidy stacks that will spend the long winter (mostly) out of reach of the wind-driven snow atop a series of storage berms just behind the main staging area on the ice shelf. Meanwhile, the mechanics quietly harvest the hard-ridden tractors from their parking spots around the SPOT 3 camp, prepping them for their own journey to a pad in the hills that look down on McMurdo proper, there to wait for the return of the sun, and another long trek across the great southern wilderness.
While these were the most pressing jobs to wrap up before the bulk of our team was scheduled to leave the ice aboard a cramped and miserable Kiwi C-130 propeller plane in mid-March, there were a million other small tasks that also needed to be done. All the food needed to cleared out of the camp freezer and pantry, and every piece of communication, field, or medical gear had to be returned to its department in town. When each of the mods was barren and clean, and the plumbing from the snow melter purged of water, the generators would be decommissioned for the season, and the cold and worn buildings themselves would make their way atop the berms beside the flattened bladders, stacked HMW, and strings of married CRREL tools. The variable each year is not so much the work that needs to be done, but the amount of time there is to do it. The window between the return of SPOT 3 and the March flight can, in bad years, be as narrow as a couple of days. We had pushed hard enough all season long that we would have weeks to reduce our living, rolling camp with its long rows of fuel bladders into a ghost town, wrapped up and bundled so tightly it would be nearly impossible to see from the snow road less than a half mile away. Then we would don the overstuffed red parkas none of us had touched since the worst and windiest days of SPOT 1 and board our overstuffed, turbulent flight north, with only a small carry-on on our laps—and in our hearts, the vague and desperate hope of our return in a few months’ time to this wonderful and terrible place, this brutalist palace of snow and rock and wind and ice.
Contract employees with the US Antarctic Program live with uncertainty: like the perennial risk of frostbite and a general lack of access to fresh food, it just comes with the job. Even with a contract in hand for work the following season, there is no guarantee that you will pass your PQ exam, or that some personal catastrophe won’t keep you at home that year. When operations throughout the program were scaled back in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, contracts for almost everyone in the first or second year of their job were rescinded, leaving hundreds of Antarcticans stranded in lockdown in the States, without a source of income. After I publicly shared a few choice words about the actions of an on-ice HR rep who was deliberately shielding a violent predator from even the most tepid repercussions of his behavior, I found it incredibly difficult to get another contract approved for employment anywhere within the program—until that HR rep was called out by name in the press, after which she was quietly reassigned to another part of the company having nothing to do with Antarctica and the pressure to keep me off the continent suddenly disappeared. But of course, that strange coda could just as easily never have happened. Once you leave the ice, there are always a million reasons you might not make it back down.
I never really, truly thought that I would get to Antarctica in the first place. I can remember clearly the phone interview I had for my first job on the ice, an overflowing ashtray parked on my empty kitchen table as I chain-smoked a parade of american spirits in an alcove of my tiny, non-smoking Seattle apartment. The woman who would be my first Antarctic boss2 gave me her own version of a tinder-date summary for the program, and I could not believe that any such organization would possibly be willing to hire me. I had worked for nothing my entire life but the personal enrichment of a series of shitty business owners,3 to the point where the ingrained belief that I was not fit for any purpose loftier than that had long begun to harden in the very roots of my psyche. There was little about that first job that seemed of much interest—a warehouse drone whose primary responsibility would be counting bolts in a large unheated shed. But the warehouse was in Antarctica, and that all the work undertaken by the program for which I would be working, even the counting of bolts in the cold, was done to make possible the practice of science.
I had graduated high school in a time of peace, when local recruiters apparently had the luxury of telling a kid like me that I was unfit for the US military—which was just as well, given my general distrust of violence as means to any end beyond further violence, and my deep, deep, deep-seated and lifelong contempt for figures of authority. Service in the armed forces is exceptionally hard and dangerous work, something I would never dispute; but it is not, as all the recruitment commercials seem to imply, the only way to serve your country. A nation needs infrastructure at least as much as it needs defense; it needs diplomats and accountants, educators, engineers, and people to manage public access into the wild places that allow a country to preserve its character and its soul. If a culture and a people want to continue to exist in a world with a changing climate, subject to the ravages of pandemics and a rising tide of worsening natural disasters, it needs science—and in Antarctica, working in support of the USAP’s mission to make possible across the world’s least hospitable continent an environment for what the literature referred to as world-class science, I had, at last found a job where I could do something greater with my labor than make some rich asshole a few extra dollars they didn’t actually need. I had found a way to serve my country.
And I was proud to do it. For years before my first deployment to McMurdo, and continuing well into my career on the ice, the USAP was viewed as a leader in the global scientific community. The robust infrastructure of the American program allowed for a vast pool of data collection and let us as a country participate meaningfully in research around the world focused on crises affecting all of humanity, as well as questions that sparked the curiosity of people all over the globe. Even as a series of budget cuts during the first Trump administration hobbled the program and ensured that as the years rolled on it would fall steadily behind its peers across the continent, as its crumbling equipment and overworked staff struggled to provide a fraction of the support it once had offered, still the USAP’s participants gave their time, their passion, their blood, and their creativity to make the work of science possible, even if at lower level than the program’s heyday only a decade or two before. By the time I joined the South Pole (overland) Traverse and embarked on my first expedition into the great frozen void of the Antarctic interior, the scope of what America was able to offer the scientific community was a shell of what it had been even during my first deployment among the bolts hidden in the continent’s cold and dusty shelves—but even so the hundreds of contract employees laboring under the Antarctic Support Contract worked their frozen asses to the bone to keep as much of the science flowing as they could manage.
But the second Trump term brought with it a level of uncertainty for which no Antarctican was prepared. The illegal but largely unchallenged appointment of a crass billionaire to destroy the functioning of the federal government with rank cruelty and stomach-churning glee was something I don’t think any of us had quite expected even a year before it happened. Musk sold himself to the public as a prophet of the technocratic age, but, like a slow bird or a drunk child—or like Trump himself—had always been far too distracted by the nearest shiniest thing ever to truly be a visionary. The value of community, of strenuous and difficult work done in pursuit of goal bigger than yourself, of service to your country: these things are greater than the beta-male impulse to hoard wealth can ever be, and so have been easily overlooked by an administration whose primary goal has been the looting of treasure, in whatever form, from the American people. Nobody whose work or community was even tangentially connected with the civil service could reliably be sure to what degree their work would be affected, or whether they even would still have a job in few months’ time. As the SPOT crew worked to wrap everything up for the season, we could already feel the sticky, grubby, prodding fingers of DOGE, as the handful of workers who would be staying on another month to work on special projects waited in suspense for their contract extensions to be approved by that illegitimate cartel of greedy children. Of course, losing job security was only a small piece of a picture that was more grim, more violent, more bleak, and altogether more monstrous than most of us could ever have wanted to imagine.
As McMurdo Station readied itself for the coming months of darkness, those of us returning to the states likewise were braced for a long and cold night. We were going home to a different country than the one we’d left during the dog days of the previous summer, one that celebrated cruelty and abasement to mindless authority, and had now officially adopted a puerile disregard for its own greatest accomplishments. Though many of the SPOT crew planned to return to the ice in only a fistful of months, not one of us could say with great confidence whether we would actually make it back—or if we did, what shape the program would be in by the time we once again felt the hushed crush of the dry, bitter snow beneath our oversized insulated boots and took our first long lungfull of the frigid and sharp air. We could only hope as we waited to board the fateful aircraft that would carry its human cargo stacked like cordwood to the lush green islands of New Zealand, and thence onward to the strip malls and office parks of the United States, that when the brutal, bitter, interminable night was finally at its end, we would once again be given the chance to serve our damaged country by traveling back to our strange home at the savage, crystalline heart of the greatest remaining wilderness on Earth.
You’re a good man, Al. And a great wordsmith.