Antarctic extremes

This month Antarctic New Zealand's Scott Base became our home for 12 days. We learned the ropes - the systems for survival, communication and travel in the coldest wildest windiest place on earth and after two days of field training which included sleeping in a polar tent and cooking in the open sheltered by a wall we built with sawn snow blocks, we were considered safe to be let out onto the sea ice alone to begin work on the Fine Line sculpture.

It is significant to us to link our work with the scientific climate research taking place in Antarctica and so we planned to incorporate ice sample cores into the sculpture. The scientific work taking place year after year to inform science of likely scenarios for the future climate in this hostile and forbidding environment is also extreme but a team from Otago University who had been drilling sea ice core samples had kindly left us a pile of spare ice cores. Once we had settled on a location on the sea ice near the ice pressure ridges we packed two sledges with the ice cores, equipment, cameras to begin our sculpture making project.

We began by accurately measuring and drilling holes in the ice to install ice cores at an angle. Cutting them to the correct height was tricky and the weather was overcast. When the wind picked up the cloud cleared from Mt Erebus to show its volcanic plume of vapour.  Weddell seals emerge from the ocean through the cracks and rested on the ice, oblivious. 

With no sunset at this time of year we worked on into the night hoping to finish the sculpture for photographing in morning light. The sculpture looked best with backlighting though the sun was extremely bright - no soft morning light in Antarctica. These light conditions are extreme for our work so I shot it with a polarising filter to increase contrast.

We are grateful to Antarctica New Zealand for selecting us to visit Antarctica which has enabled us to make the 10th Fine Line sculpture 20 years after we began. There is one more sculpture to make - on a Pacific Island - before we return to Mt Ngauruhoe to make the last one where we began, thus completing the line round Earth.

Off to work on the sea ice