I just had one of the biggest rushes of my life. I spent the last hour of the five-hour flight from Christchurch sitting on the flight deck with the pilot and co-pilot of the C-17 Globemaster III carrying my colleague Ola and me to Antarctica for a week.

Soaring into Antarctica.

Dr McWaine will tell you that I am not by nature an effusive person. I don’t jump up and down with any regularity. I tend to take things – even great things – in stride in a way that I fear sometimes disappoints those around me.  I was raised to be cautious, controlled, matter-of-fact, and skeptical. When I was quite young, I recall an elder relative stating authoritatively that blocking every silver lining is a thick dark cloud.  That impressed me.

Dr McWaine will also tell you that I instinctively make lists in my head.  I don’t think about them.  I don’t write them down.  My brain simply compiles and sorts data, whether I want it to or not.  For example, I can tell you the ten best meals I ever had, in order.  Even though I have never thought about it, I know that if you asked I could tell you my 25 favorite places on earth, or my 7 preferred breeds of dog, or the 11 biggest surprises I have experienced (thus far).

My colleague Ola and I in Christchurch, about to board our flight south.

So, when I tell you that the past 90 minutes or so have been one of the three biggest thrills of my already full life, I really mean it.  (Since you are asking the question in your head … the other two biggest thrills were seeing the clouds suddenly clear after days of rain to reveal the sunny summit of Mt. Everest from base camp on the Tibetan side, and looking up from a pinball machine to catch a first glance of my spouse to be.  The precise order is a personal secret.)   But I digress.

Ola, enjoying the comforts of the C-17 Globemaster III as we head south.

This report is about today.  About catching my first glimpse of the wondrous continent of Antarctica on the horizon through crystal-blue skies.  About seeing ice floes and ice bergs beneath us as we soared low over the Ross Sea.  About seeing majestic, volcanic Mt. Erebus up close to our left as we approached McMurdo Sound.  About the dazzling green-blue of the vast stretch of ice where our plane would be landing.  And about the absolute thrill of stepping out of the airplane onto the edge of what remains the most pristine, mysterious, and glorious piece of our over-populated, over-exploited planet.

The view from the C-17 as we flew along the Ross Sea.

Coming here has always been one of my dreams.  I quite distinctly remember discovering  the continent at the Mahanoy City Public Library when I was seven years old.  Its existence, of course, was suspected much farther back than that, in the time of the ancient Greeks.  Aristotle himself theoretically posited the existence of terra australis incognita, an unknown southern land, to complete the symmetry of the lands known at the time. The likely existence of such a continent was more specifically assumed beginning in the 1400s, when European explorers first crossed the equator, thus proving that the “known” and “unknown” worlds were not divided by a ring of fire.

Our direct, due-south route today.

The actual search for Antarctica took centuries.  British explorer Captain James Cook was the first person to cross the Antarctic Circle, but he apparently never saw Antarctica itself.  It is generally believed that the first person to see the continent, in January 1820, was Fabian Gottlieb von Bellinghausen, a Russian naval officer of Baltic German origin.  An American sealer named John Davis, from coastal Connecticut, is generally believed to have been the first person to actually set foot on Antarctica, in January 1821.

Ola and me, feet newly planted on the ice.

What ensued were expeditions to explore the vast continent and to reach the South Pole, a quest that cost many lives and broke many hearts. In a dramatic race, Norwegian Roald Amundsen became the first person to reach the Pole, in December 1911, just ahead of Englishman Robert Falcon Scott.  Scott and his party sadly perished on their way back to the coast.

Dinosaur fossils have been found on Antarctica.  Norwegian Captain Carl Anton Larsen was the first explorer to find fossils on the continent, in 1892.  Two completely new species of dinosaur were discovered in 2003, bringing to eight the number of dinosaur species shown to have lived on the now ice-covered land.

View from McMurdo Station of the Dailey Islands, Cape Chocolate, and Blue Glacier. The end of the ice runway where we landed is visible in the foreground.

A few additional facts might be in order.  Antarctica is the fifth-largest continent and is larger than the United States, measuring in at more than 5.4 million square miles.  The vast majority (approximately 98%) of the land is covered in ice … thick ice averaging about a mile deep.  If all the ice on Antarctica melted, sea level the world over would rise more than 200 feet.

Stop and think about that.  In fact, click over to Google and check how far above sea level your current house now sits.  And then recalibrate sea level up 200 feet.  Could you still use your screen doors in the summer? If not, give some thought to how we prevent all that ice from actually melting.

Mt. Erebus, visible from our landing strip, is an active volcano and site of the tragic crash of a New Zealand sightseeing aircraft with 257 people aboard during a sector white-out, 31 years ago yesterday.

The coldest temperature ever measured on Earth’s surface was -89 degrees Celsius, or -128 degrees Fahrenheit, recorded at Vostok Station on Antarctica.  The average temperature data that I have found conflict, but all of the sources seem to agree that the average temperature even during summer is well below freezing.  Such temperatures are incomprehensible to an Angeleno like me.  After just a short time off the airplane, I am already very grateful for the 4 layers of extreme-cold-weather clothing that my friends at the National Science Foundation loaned to me.

In addition to being the coldest place on Earth, Antarctica is also the driest and windiest continent.  Considered a desert despite all the accumulated ice, it has annual average precipitation of only about 200 mm (eight inches) along the coast and far less inland.  I was most surprised to learn that Antarctica has the highest average elevation of all Earth’s continents.  As of today I have stepped onto all seven continents, and I probably would have ranked Antarctica sixth rather than first in elevation.

McMurdo Station, our stop for the night.

I am very much enjoying lingering here on the ice of McMurdo Sound … breathing deeply, enjoying the bracing fresh air, soaking in the glorious view of Mt. Erebus, and beginning to formulate plausible denials for when Ola tells people that I actually jumped up and down when I stepped off the airplane.  But the jeep is waiting to take us up onto Hut Point Peninsula on Ross Island, to McMurdo Station.  We need some food and a little sleep because there are even more jaw-dropping adventures ahead.

Tomorrow we head to the South Pole.  I’ll tell you about that tomorrow night.