It is made up of a group of blue and white pre-fab metal buildings, with
two big fuel tanks, front loaders, snowmobiles and shipping contain-
ers scattered around. The two main buildings, Biolab and GWR
(Garage, Warehouse and Recreation), are separated so that if one burns
down, the other can act as a refuge for the twenty to forty scientists and
support personnel who work here year round.
The short oblong pier on Hero Inlet has giant rubber fenders,
where the Gould, a 240-foot supply and research vessel, docks every 6
to 8 weeks during the austral summer. January and February’s sum-
mer temperatures drift between a balmy 0 and 40°F, with 23 hours of
daylight to enjoy the views (during winter darkness temperatures aver-
age 50 to 100° colder). The weather is always variable with sun, clouds,
wind, rain, snow, and gale force winds, often on the same day, kind of
like the San Francisco Bay Area on steroids. Next to the pier is the boat-
house where we tie up our black 20-foot Mark 5 Zodiac next to a string
of other 15- and 20-foot rubber-hulled watercraft. They are ideally
suited for getting around in the surrounding ice-studded waters where
aluminum-bottomed boats would be crushed like beer cans.
After offloading our boat and gear, drying out, and grabbing some
food, Fraser’s crew heads to Biolab’s work area adjacent to the aquar-
ium tanks.
“Some of our birds are eating Chysanoessa Macrura, a smaller
species of krill, which means they might be having a hard time finding
their regular prey,” Fraser explains to me when I catch up with them.
He is using a tweezers to point into a tray full of partly digested krill on
the lab table in front of him. Patterson and Irinaga are tweezering
through similar trays.
They need to analyze about fifty little pink shrimplike krill to get a
good representation of each bird’s diet. The krill Fraser has collected
looks blacker and lumpier than Irinaga’s or Patterson’s because they
are from different species and more digested, he explains. I decide to
skip the jambalaya listed as tonight’s main course on the cafeteria
blackboard.
For the past 35 years, climatologists have predicted that global
warming linked to the burning of CO2-rich fossil fuels would occur
most rapidly at the poles, a fact now confirmed by scientists in Alaska,
160 David Helvarg