today's theme: White

Antarctica is a Vast place. The sky is open like the plains of Montana, where you can see hundreds of miles to Mt Ranier floating in the distance; the land seems to stretch on forever before bucking up into mountains, which, even from this distance, attempt to make the Rockies look gentle. And into all this vastness, on a clear day the sun pours down, glinting off snow, ice, and glacier, and the eye is attracted to the few dark, exposed rock spots. Just a few miles away from McMurdo, C-17 airplanes which sat ferociously bulky on the runway in Christchurch look like toys on the Ice runway. A single person standing outside cannot fail but to appreciate their own insignificance in comparison to all this.

The clouds began rolling in yesterday, erasing the brilliant blue with a dull grey-white and leaving the world almost dim enough to do with sunglasses on short jaunts out. A few of the Transantarctic Mountains still poked their peaks through the blanket beginning to blur out their sisters and brothers; the camera has trouble with the flat whiteness of the scene. Today the clouds have completely consumed the distant peaks, and many of the closer ones as well: Terra Nova, Mt Terror, and Mount Erebus, in the volcanic island chain just a few miles away in the sea ice, come and go. And the person standing outside begins to be amazed that one can feel claustrophobic in such a huge place. The sky closes in, and the landscape washes to nothing but shades of white.

...

This evening, after yoga and a dinner of cereal, Amy and I noticed a bit of sun pushing through the clouds on the horizon. The snow glowed a warm gold and the sea ice shone like a polished flat sheet. We watched until the cold began to bite too deeply. I have retreated to the Crary Science Library which has a wall of wide windows overlooking the frozen sea where I can just make out sunbeams continuing to highlight bits of the landscape.