Antarctic Thesaurus
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elemental elephant seal extreme Erebus
elemental
There's nothing hiding the ice.
The rock is bare, and the ice flowing around it opens and shuts as it makes its way down to the coast. The mountains absorb heat from the un-setting summer sun and melt the ice and snow lying on or next to them. These form melt-water streams which gurgle their way down the plateau ice towards the coast. The sound of water tinkling over ice is a delight to the ear.
Boulders, fallen from the mountains, also sweep off downhill along the flow-lines of the plateau ice.
The air in the wind blowing out from the plateau, the gradient wind, was once tropical air, drawn up high by the great heat-pump of the sun, and descending in the polar regions where it forms a huge high pressure region from which it too, flows out to ocean. As well, there is an additional wind, the katabatic, caused by the cold, denser, ice-cooled air rolling down off the plateau, thus augmenting the gradient wind.
In winter, the sea-ice covers an area as big as the Antarctic itself, yet the huge moon-driven force of the tides raises and lowers this huge weight. Where the ice meets the coast is the tide-crack, where one can hear, on a still day, the creaking of the ice as it rises and falls with the tide.
That is what I mean by, 'It's all laid bare.'
Fred Elliott, Weather observer, Australian Antarctic Division, Mawson, 1955
Kerguelen via Heard Island Feb. 26th 1955
The pleasure there is in being here is hard to define. I tried to draw it as an absence of petty limitations, non-ordinariness of everyday things; a more elemental living ...
Jack Ward, Radio operater, Australian Antarctic Division, Mawson, 1955
