Here's a shot of Boat Harbour on New Year's Eve, when a blizzard howled down from the polar plateau and waxed and waned during the day. Naturally I had to see the hut in these conditions - so I packed up my stereoscopic gear, rugged up, grabbed my survival pack and drove the quad with the trailer over to the hut - it wasn't particularly windy (unlike today) and so made shooting video and making photographs relatively easy. So - a spectacular view here from the small verandah of the Granholm hut - a slight lee in the blizzard - look to the right of the image and you see the Main Hut and before that the boot-shape of Boat Harbour - all the sea-ice blown away, the pressure-ridges vanished - now surrounded by ice edges before which the penguins gingerly queue before plunging into the rimy sea.
The foreground is the field of shattered ancient rocks that form the base of Azimuth Hill, upon which the cross to Ninnis and Mertz stands, and towards the left you see a huddled penguin colony. I wander for a couple of hours in the icy blasts, climbing a few hills and getting some great shots - so, of course, this was a mini-blizzard - in itself presenting some interesting technical difficulties, but quite manageable and beautiful and not too deadly - about 30-40 knots - chilling enough, with dancing arabesques of spindrift around the architecture, living fingers of snow streaming amidst the rocks.
The winds picked up substantially overnight to 60 knot gusts and I awoke to several loud bangs of things straining against their tethers - dressed up and early at 5.30am to plunge into the whirl to tie them down securely - everyone else asleep and the world a chaos of swirling white. Slept a few hours fitfully after that and headed off for my 10 metre walk to the main Sorensen Hut for breakfast - by which time my garments were clad in freezing ice, my face stinging. It's like this that you appreciate the power of a blizzard - even just my briefest of dips - and how unimaginable it must be to firmly grasped in its deathly grip. Yet despite this, our comical, stoic companions, the Adelie penguins, waddle their way over rock and berg and carry on as if it is normal - which for them, of course, it is.
For me the distinctive impression of the blizzard is one of energy: the katabatics driven by gravity off the plateau - the mass of the planet itself grasping the wind and drawing it down unto itself, the fine random mass of fizzing particles in the air, tiny frozen particles of water that melt briefly upon contact with skin and fabric and instantly refreeze in icy agglomerations of bright, hard ripples, weighing things down, all driven by their own physics of temperature and electrostatic forces, the dipole of water moving through its many states - remarkable stuff, quite amazing really - and extraordinarily beautiful - it grasped my imagination and filled my eyes.
- Peter Morse
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