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UNH scientist and expedition leader Paul Mayewski points out the best route for snowmobile travel as the team crosses Antarctica.

The screaming roar of the engine of a Hercules C-130 military cargo plane blows the sound of your voice into oblivion, shoves your breath back down your throat, leaves you gasping, eyes watering against swirling snow. And then it is silent. After the gear—all 20,000 pounds of it—has been unloaded. After the hatch has been shut. After the plane has turned on its skis, taxied across the frozen surface, lifted into the air and finally disappeared—then it is silent. Eleven men stand clustered in the cold, their red parkas bright specks against an empty canvas of ice and snow. No one speaks. This is Antarctica—the quietest place on Earth.

For Joe Souney '98, the silence is brand new. It is mid-November 1999, and this is the first time he has ever set foot in Antarctica. The 25-year-old University of New Hampshire graduate student was chosen for this polar adventure by expedition leader Paul Mayewski, who is returning to Antarctica for the 15th time. This is a place he knows and loves. He understands the silence.

To those few who return here often, Antarctica is known, simply, as The Ice. It is a land of riddles and extremes. The largest desert on the face of the Earth, the continent has locked within its frozen surface more than 70 percent of the Earth's fresh water. If West Antarctica alone were to melt, sea level would rise about 30 feet and Florida would disappear. One and a half times as big as the United States, Antarctica is also the highest and the coldest of all continents. In winter, the sea ice that rings the continent doubles its size. Seals and penguins thrive here, but no land-based vertebrate can survive. Lichen, moss and algae—the only vegetatio—cling to cracks and crevasses in the rock and ice.

The Lure of the Ice

First stop in Antarctica for the explorers is McMurdo Station, and old military base on the west coast.

In the early days of this century, another explorer sketched his vision of Antarctica onto a small napkin. Sparked more by imagination than by knowledge, Ernest Shackleton's drawing was simple and crude, suggesting only the rough outlines of a continent he hoped to explore. In Shackleton's day, getting to Antarctica was one of the hardest things a human being could undertake. Aptly named, the wooden schooner Endurance carried him and his men on their 1914-1917 expedition through ice-clogged waters until it was trapped, then crushed. Shackleton never achieved his goal of crossing the continent, but his story became one of the greatest epics of survival in polar history. Despite impossible odds, he did not lose a single man.

At the tail end of the same century that launched the Shackleton adventure, another expedition took shape on another napkin. One day in 1989, over dinner, Mayewski's wife, Lyn, an artist, sketched a "research train" of giant Sno-Cats, snowmobiles and sleds. This was Paul's vision—a series of expeditions of scientists from 15 countries, all working together to collect pieces of the same puzzle: the International Trans-Antarctic Scientific Expedition (ITASE).

Today's ITASE explorers set out armed with computers and radar. They can call home from outside their tents. They study satellite pictures detailed enough to depict ridges and shadows, even objects buried beneath the snow. Their mission is not so much to map the shape of the continent, but to discover its contents.

Some things, though, remain unchanged since Shackleton's time. Today's explorers still sleep in tents. They still bundle in layers against the cold. And sometimes they must endure the relentless boredom imposed by immobilizing storms that can last for days. Their survival still depends on meticulous planning. And they are driven by the same desire to see new territory, to make the first footprints on a still unspoiled continent. "The likelihood that you're standing where no one else has ever walked is still great," Mayewski observes. But "getting there" now has another purpose.

"When we first saw the Earth from outer space," says Mayewski, director of UNH's Climate Change Research Center (CCRC), "we realized that the climate, winds, atmosphere and ocean currents make us one world." Since then, scientists have discovered that, remote as the continent may have seemed to early explorers, Antarctica is actually part of a large climate system that affects the whole world.

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