belly slides and paddle walks away, looking somewhat indignant, as
penguins often do.
Returning to the bucket, Fraser, Irinaga, and Patterson use kitchen
strainers to drain and pack down the post-penguin krill, slipping it into
ziplock baggies.
We then head back to our Zodiac, tied up on the north side of the
island. Here we collect our orange float coats where we have draped
them over several large rocks. I undo the raft’s line that is tied around
a jagged granite spur. I take a seat on one of the raft’s hard rubber pon-
toons as Fraser fires up the outboard and puts the engine into reverse,
crunching through some chunky brash ice that has floated in behind
us.
As soon as we are clear of the ice, Fraser puts the raft into forward,
spins us in a tight circle, and guns it. “Palmer this is Schnappers. We
just left Torgersen and are headed back to station,” Patterson reports
on her hand radio (Fraser has named his boat team after a Wisconsin
Polka band).
“Schnappers, I roger that,” replies the mellow voice of the station’s
communications man. The air temperature is a mild 34°F, but the
wind and spray off the cold, odorless Southern Ocean makes it feel a
lot colder, reminding us of where we are, as does a flight of blue-eyed
shags racing across the subfreezing chop of the sea.
Squinting through the spray, I can see our destination hunkered
down in a boulder field below a blue-white glacier.
Palmer Station is one of three U.S. Antarctic bases run by the
National Science Foundation. It is located on Anvers Island, 38 miles
of granite rock covered by hard ice up to 2,000 feet thick. Anvers is
part of the Antarctic Peninsula, a 700-mile-long tail to the coldest, dri-
est, highest continent on Earth, a landmass bigger than the United
States and Mexico combined, containing 70 percent of the world’s
freshwater and 90 percent of its ice. The peninsula, where polar and
marine climates converge, is also a wildlife-rich habitat that
researchers refer to as “the banana belt.” And that was before global
warming.
Palmer itself, where I spent 6 weeks one austral summer, has the
look of a low-rent ski resort next to an outdoor equipment dealership.
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