For three profs, a journey to the bottom of the world

It has been called Terra Australis, or “the unknown southern land” by European scholars. Its span of 14 million kilometers is almost completely covered by ice. With temperatures that can plunge as low as 130 degrees below zero, the only things that can live there permanently are animals that are specifically adapted to the bitter cold.

Perhaps this is what fascinated Dr. Paul Schueler and his colleagues Dr. Ellen McArdle and Dr. Stephen Kaufman to go to the farthest point south on Earth.

“Dr. Kaufman’s wife owns a travel agency, and she put [the trip] together,” McArdle explains. Besides, reasons Schueler, “How many times do you get the chance to visit Antarctica?”

Between the fall and spring semesters, the three RVCC professors made a trip to the coldest continent in the world, stopping briefly at Argentina along the way.

“One of the only ways you can get to Antarctica is through Argentina,” McArdle explains. “From this area you generally fly to Buenos Aires and take another flight down south to a town called Ushuaia. From there, we got on a ship and sailed to Antarctica.”

En route to Antarctica, they stayed six days in Argentina near the waterfalls of Iguazu. “We could see the falls from our hotel room,” McArdle remarks. They also spent time in Ushuaia before they boarded the boat that would take them to Antarctica.

“It was the summertime there,” McArdle remembers, “so there was a lot of greenery. The landscape was very impressive. … It’s not that inhabited because it’s so far south.”

“[It] looked a lot like Canada,” Schueler adds. “The landscape didn’t look all that unfamiliar, but it was very pretty.”

Because of the massive amounts of ice blocking the way, the team was able to go only as far as the northern peninsula of Antarctica. But there still was much to see. “We stopped at one place—there was a Chilean military base, and five or six people stayed there periodically.”

They also saw a scarce but diverse assortment of wildlife, such as penguins, leopard seals and a few seabirds. “There aren’t that many animals in Argentina,” Schueler says. “There are no land animals—at least none that we’ve seen. Everything mostly lives in either the water or the air.”

It was the summertime when they made their trip, and so the climate hardly got below 30 or 40 degrees. “We never got down farther south,” McArdle explains. “We only got as far as the Antarctic Circle. It was comfortable, although you always needed to wear a jacket or coat when you went outside.”

Because the land is protected, there are no hotels, restaurants or any sort of facilities located in Antarctica, so the team lived on the boat during that time. “It was sort of like living in a hotel,” Schueler remarks. “We went on the shore an hour at a time in these little boats called Zodiacs.”

Despite the apparent hardships of staying in Antarctica for a few days, Schueler does not want to discourage tourists from going. “It would take a very hardy person to be a researcher for three or four months. Being a tourist wasn’t hard, because you were on the ship all the time. In fact, many of the people that went with us were elderly, so it wasn’t really hard for us to just visit Antarctica for a couple of days.”