I held in my hands a very rare treat indeed: a can of soda.
Carbonated beverages are not always easy to come by at the South Pole; this one had been procured by a friend. I carried the delicacy carefully down my hallway before pushing the large freezer door open to the outside. Squinting against the sudden wash of bright light, I stepped gingerly onto the deck and set the can down on the stoop. With my hands tucked into my sweat shirt sleeves for warmth and my cheeks already burning with the frozen air, I hurried back inside, careful not to let any bare skin touch the metal door. It takes just five minutes to chill the can; any longer and it will explode.
Antarctica claims the coldest spot on the planet. While the North Pole and South Pole are equally distant from Earth’s warm equator, North Pole is a region of shifting, floating ice. South Pole is rooted in the middle of the Antarctic continent — a continent that is buried under as much as 2 miles of ice in places.
South Pole temperatures average minus 57.1 degrees Fahrenheit. The lowest documented temperature on Earth is minus 128.6 degrees Fahrenheit, recorded here on the East Antarctic Plateau at Vostok Station in July 1983.
I can’t even imagine what that kind of cold would feel like.
“Can you even feel a difference between minus 70 and minus 90?” I asked a friend who had spent the previous winter at South Pole. “Or is it just mind-numbingly cold at that point?”
His eyes widened briefly. “Oh yes. Yes. You can feel the difference. Minus 90 is very, very cold.”
In the wintertime, South Pole will see temperatures as low as minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit. “Ever heard of the 300 club?” one winter-over asked me.
“No,” I replied. “What’s that?”
“The 300 club happens when it hits negative 100 degrees. When it gets that cold, we boost the sauna up to 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Then you run from the sauna, outside, around the South Pole marker, and back inside into the sauna. That’s the 300 club — 300 hundred degrees in a matter of minutes.”
“What does that feel like?” I asked.
“I don’t remember. I’m not sure if my body even registered the experience,” he said.
As the temperatures drop steadily with the end of the season, we’re racing against the cold. The planes bringing materials in and out of the station will not fly when it’s below minus 58, or they might freeze. If they were to land, we wouldn’t be able to unload them — the hydraulics on our loaders stop functioning when it gets that cold. We need to move as much cargo as possible in and out of the base before then, as no supplies will be moved again until next October, when the station reopens for another austral summer.
We have an even earlier obstacle: at minus 40, we get contrails. Contrails are the white trails you see behind planes in the sky; it’s cold enough in the upper atmosphere for the emissions from the plane to freeze behind it, leaving that white line. At minus 40, it is cold enough on the ground here at the South Pole for the plane’s exhaust to freeze, leaving a contrail on the ground: a thick, blinding cloud behind the plane, right where we load cargo into the hold.
As you can imagine, loading a plane behind a contrail is like sailing into a very thick fog. You can easily get lost in this cloud, making it both difficult and dangerous for loading cargo. Only the most urgent cargo is loaded, and then with several spotters guiding the machinery through the cloud and up to the airplane’s hold.
A pool of everyone’s guesses for when contrails will hit has been written up on the corner of the flight board.
“February 6th,” reads one pessimistic prediction.
“No contrails at all,” reads another. We race against the lowering temperatures, trying to get as much in an out of the pole as we can before the winter truly cuts us off from the outside world.
Today is my one day off for the week, and I savor the rest, the warmth of being inside — and this can of soda. I watch it from the window, making sure that it’s not expanding, a sure sign that I have let it chill for too long. With five minutes up, I step outside, picking it up delicately and carrying it indoors. I smile at the satisfying sound when I pop it open. It’s perfectly chilled.
Meg Adams, who grew up in Holden and graduated from John Bapst Memorial High School in Bangor and Vassar College in New York, shares her experiences with readers each Friday. For more about her adventures, go to bangordailynews.com or e-mail her at madams@bangordailynews.net.