Ross Island

Anything that changes in one part of it affects another.

Above the Ross Sea at Cape Crozier on Ross Island, along comes this blue fishing vessel and begins to deploy a long line.

True cost for ordering toothfish in a New York restaurant is that essentially you're destroying an ecosystem.

We have a chance to protect it or to lose it forever.

This was an opportunity to keep building on what we knew and to learn new things.

And so as long as I could continue to learn new things, I was attracted to keep going.

I did a lot of work at Ross Island, but also some over at Palmer Station and

I

I've been to the Antarctic Peninsula, which was the first trip.

And then while I was working at Scott Base, I was in the Ross Sea, mainly on a place called Ross Island, which you know very well because it's named after your ancestor.

So around Scott Base, McMurdo Station, I went off to the continent to a place called Cape Roberts, which is on the other side of McMurdo Sound.

Lots of places around Ross Island, so to Scott's Hut at Cape Evans, Shackleton's Hut at Cape Royds, Cape Bird, around to the Ross Ice Shelf in Cape Crozier.

And then I've also done a trip out of South Africa.

So I flew south from Cape Town to a place called Dronning Maudland and stayed at a place called the Schermacher Oasis, which has a couple of other stations from different countries.

and then we went around there to two emperor penguin colonies called the astrid and the lazarev emperor penguin colony and then i've also been to the geographic south pole i've covered quite a range of different places they're all amazing they're all unique in their own type of way but i've got a special place in my heart for scott basin ross island just so much time there

it's also a place that not many other people get to go to either

because they were so well camouflaged.

And I'm sitting on this rock waiting to go into Shackleton's hut on Ross Island.

And this little Adelie comes charging out and squawking at me right next to me.

They're so bold.

And again, as somebody who's traveled a lot and done the blogs and things, it's the more experience you've had, you've seen the bigger picture of the impact.

I mean, there is, it's IATO that actually manages the tourist side of things.

I had the same experience because I went in January this year, going to Ross Island.

So I had this lovely encounter last time.

You see all of these places.

And Ross Island is which again is Ross Island, has two volcanic peaks named after his two ships, Erebus and Terror.

So there you are.

And also, of course, this place was where the later expeditions came.

These peaks were obviously the Admiralty Range, discovered by Ross, and it would now be our task to round Cape Adair and sail down the east coast of Victoria Land to our contemplated base on the shore of McMurdo Sound, at the foot of the volcano Erebus, in south latitude 77 degrees, nine minutes.

the last lap of the voyage was vivid and fancy stirring great barren peaks of mystery looming up constantly against the west as the low northern sun of noon or the still lower horizon grazing southern sun of midnight poured its hazy reddish rays over the white snow bluish ice and water lanes and black bits of exposed granite slope through the desolate summits swept raging intermittent gusts of the terrible antarctic wind whose cadences sometimes held vague suggestions of a wild and half-sentient musical piping with notes extending over a wide range and which for some subconscious mnemonic reason seemed to me disquieting and even dimly terrible something about the scene reminded me of the strange and disturbing asian paintings of nicholas and of the still stranger and more disturbing descriptions of the evilly fabled plateau of ling which occur in the dreaded necronomicon of the mad arab abdul al hirsred i was rather sorry later on that i had ever looked into that monstrous book at the college library on the seventh of november sight of the western range having been temporarily lost we passed franklin island and the next day descried the cones of mounts erebus and terror on ross island ahead and the long line of the parry mountains beyond there now stretched off to the east the low wide line of the great ice barrier rising perpendicularly to a height of two hundred feet like the rocky cliffs of quebec and marking the end of southward navigation in the afternoon we entered mcmurdo sound and stood off the coast in the lee of smoking mount erebus the scoriac peak towered up some twelve thousand seven hundred feet against the eastern sky like a japanese print of the sacred while beyond it rose the white ghost-like height of mount terror ten thousand nine hundred feet in altitude and now extinct as a volcano puffs of smoke from erebus came intermittently and one of the graduate assistants a brilliant young fellow named danforth pointed out what looked like lava on the snowy slope remarking that this mountain discovered in eighteen forty had undoubtedly been the source of poe's image when he wrote seven years later of the lavas that restlessly roll, their sulfurous currents down Yannick, and the ultimate climes of the pole that groan as they roll down Mount Yannick, in the realms of the Boreal Pole.

Danforth was a great reader of bizarre material, and had talked a good deal of Poe.

I was interested myself because of the Antarctic scene of Poe's only long story, the disturbing and enigmatical Arthur Gordon Pym.

On the barren shore, and on the lofty ice barrier in the background, Myriads of grotesque penguins squawked and flapped their fins, while many fat seals were visible on the water, swimming or sprawling across large cakes of slowly drifting ice.

Using small boats, we effected a difficult landing on Ross Island shortly after midnight on the morning of the 9th, carrying a line of cable from each of the ships and preparing to unload supplies by means of a breeches buoy arrangement.

Our sensations on first treading Antarctic soil were poignant and complex, even though at this particular point the Scott and Shackleton expeditions had preceded us.

Our camp, on the frozen shore below the volcano's slope, was only a provisional one.