Palmer is the smallest of the three American stations and the only one north of the Antarctic Circle. It sits on a few acres of bare rock on the south-western shore of Anvers Island, off the Antarctic Peninsula, with the hundred-foot ice wall of the Marr Ice Piedmont directly behind it and Arthur Harbor in front. No skiway, no runway, no road. Everything and everyone arrives by ship.
Nothing about it resembles McMurdo's volcanic grit or the flat white nothing of the Pole. Palmer is maritime: brash ice in the harbour most of the year, bergs grounding off the point, seals hauling out on the pier, and a marine biology programme that is the whole reason the place exists.
This page covers two seasons — 1996, arriving on the R/V Polar Duke and wintering over; and 1998, south again on her replacement, the ARSV Laurence M. Gould. The photographs are scans of the original prints and slides. The films are cut from the Hi8 tapes and are on YouTube.
South on the Polar Duke
April 1996 — staging at Punta Arenas, then across the Drake
The way in was Punta Arenas, on the Strait of Magellan: a few days at the contractor's warehouse drawing extreme cold weather kit — the big red parka, wind pants, boots — and watching cargo go aboard. Then lines off and south.
The Polar Duke was a Norwegian-built ice-strengthened research vessel, chartered by the National Science Foundation from Rieber Shipping of Bergen and run with a Norwegian crew. She worked the Peninsula for the American programme from 1985 until 1997, and she is the ship in every 1996 photograph on this page.
The Drake Passage is 500 miles of open water between Cape Horn and the Antarctic convergence with nothing to break the swell, and it has two moods. Then the sea goes quiet, pancake ice starts appearing on the surface, and low rock islands come up out of the fog ahead.
Palmer Station
May 1996 — the compound, the pier, and what the job actually was
The station is two main buildings and a scatter of tanks, containers and walkways on a rock point, with a timber pier at Hero Inlet. In summer the population runs to a few dozen; over the winter it drops to a handful. When the last ship leaves, that is the population until the next one comes.
The work was computing — the same job as at McMurdo and the Pole: programmer and senior analyst supporting the science programme. Small-station life being what it is, that was never the whole of it. Everybody boats, everybody flags the glacier route, everybody is on the search-and-rescue roster, and everybody turns out when a ship is alongside and cargo has to move.
Boats, brash and the pier
Zodiacs are the road network — there is no other way off the point
Everything beyond the station's few acres is reached by inflatable. Zodiacs go out to the islands for the bird and seal work, out to the moorings, and out to whatever the science programme needs looked at that day. They get craned on and off the pier, and they spend most of the season pushing through brash — the loose broken ice that fills Arthur Harbor and closes a lane behind you as fast as you open one.
The rules are simple and not negotiable: radio, float coat, a second boat or a shore watch, and you do not turn your back on the glacier. The ice cliff calves without warning and the wave it throws crosses the harbour.
Flagging the glacier
Green for the route, black for the crevasses — and the route moves
The Marr Ice Piedmont is the ice cap that fills Anvers Island, and it comes down to the sea directly behind the station. It is the only walking there is, so people go up it — for exercise, for the view, and to get to the hut on the ridge. It is also moving, tidally flexed at the edges, and full of crevasses that open and close and get bridged over with snow that will not hold.
So the route gets surveyed and re-surveyed, and marked with bamboo poles carried up by hand: green for a path that has been probed and walked, black staked around anything that has opened up. In a whiteout the flag line is the only navigation there is — you walk from one pole to the next and you do not leave the line.
Rescue training goes with it. Crampons, axes, screws, anchors, self-arrest, hauling systems. Eleven people on an island means the rescue party is whoever is not already in the hole.
Icebergs, and what turns up underneath
Calved ice drifting through Arthur Harbor and the Bismarck Strait
Bergs calve off the piedmont and off the tidewater glaciers along the peninsula, and then they drift, ground, melt and roll. Because the harbour is small and the traffic is constant, the same berg can sit off the point for weeks and be a different shape every morning.
The interesting ones are the ones that have turned over. A berg's keel sits in seawater for years; marine ice freezes onto the underside and traps sediment and dense layers of Antarctic plankton as it goes. Melting shifts the centre of buoyancy until the whole thing rolls, and what comes up is the part nobody normally sees: jade and emerald ice, wave-cut scallops, and dark horizontal bands running through it.
Midwinter at 64° South
May–June 1996 — four hours of dusk is the whole day
Palmer is far enough north that the sun still clears the horizon in midwinter, which sounds better than it is. What you get is a long blue twilight that brightens for a few hours around the middle of the day and then goes again. The camcorder's automatic white balance gave up on it entirely — every winter tape from that season is pushed hard blue.
When the last ship goes in May the station is on its own until spring. There is no aircraft option here and no sea ice runway; if the ice closes in, it closes in. So the winter is small: the same faces, the galley, the lounge with the pool table and the bookshelves, and whatever you make of the weather.
On the eve of the solstice the whole station went out onto the shore in the dark. Midwinter is the one date everybody south of 60° marks.
The fish, the pier and the seals
June 1996 — catching cod for the aquarium, and clearing the pier first
The reason Palmer exists is marine biology. The Bio Lab runs flow-through tanks fed with raw seawater straight out of Arthur Harbor at about −1.8°C, and a good part of the science is on the notothenioids — the Antarctic fish that live below the freezing point of their own blood because of antifreeze glycoproteins that stop ice crystals growing. Arthur DeVries at Illinois worked that out in the late 1960s and people have been at it ever since.
Somebody has to catch them. On 20 June 1996 the station went fishing off the pier — handlines, a contest, and an afternoon out of the galley.
Six days later the catch was in the tanks and on the bench: a tour of the aquarium room, fish passed around, sorting at the sink, and a dissection demonstration to a standing crowd that ran the better part of an hour.
None of this survives as photographs — it is all on the Hi8 tapes, which is where these three films come from.
South again on the Laurence M. Gould
April 1998 — a new ship, the peninsula, Port Lockroy and Vernadsky
The Polar Duke finished her last Antarctic season in 1997. Her replacement, the ARSV Laurence M. Gould, entered service for the American programme in November 1997: 230 feet, purpose-built, a proper stern A-frame and laboratories the Duke never had. She is still the Peninsula ship.
The second season south was on her, out of Punta Arenas on 14 April 1998. This run was more voyage than station: trawling and sorting on the after deck, days at sea along the peninsula, Zodiac landings, gentoo colonies, and mountains and bergs going past at golden hour.
Two stops are worth naming. Port Lockroy, on Goudier Island — the British Base A of 1944, its bunk room and stores preserved as they were. And the Ukrainian station Vernadsky, the former British Faraday, reached by Zodiac through the Argentine Islands. That one arrived after dark, so the tour, the desalination plant and the famous bar were never filmed — the visit survives as a handful of photographs, and they are on their own page.
The Vernadsky visit has its own page: Vernadsky 1998.