#erebus glacier tongue

[wikipediapictures]

Erebus Glacier

“The Erebus Glacier in Antarctica comes down from Mt. Erebus and protrudes off the coast of Ross Island forming an 11-12 km long ice tongue out into McMurdo Sound. An Ice Tongue is a long and narrow sheet of ice projecting out from the coastline. It forms when a valley glacier moves very rapidly out into the sea or a lake. When the sea thaws in the summer, the ice tongue floats on the water without thawing. It also calves off in places forming icebergs. The Erebus Ice Tongue is only about 10 m high so its icebergs are small. When the ice around the tongue melts in the summer the waves of sea water constantly batter the edges of the tongue, carving very elaborate structures in the ice. Sometimes these pieces will calve off and sometimes the waves will cut very deep caves into the edges of the tongue. In the winter the sea water freezes once more around these new shapes. This ASTER image covers an area of 20.8 x 22.9 km, and was acquired 30 November 2001. It is centered at 77.6 degrees south latitude, 166.75 degrees east longitude.” - via Wikimedia Commons

[tealin]

The Road to Cape Evans

This is a crosspost from twirlynoodle.com/blog. If you're reading it in beta mode on NeoTumblr, the remote-hosted images won't show up, so please either turn off beta or see it at the original location, linked above. Enjoy!

Having done Sea Ice training at last, I was clear to head out on snowmobile. My coordinator’s intent had been to do a ‘shakedown’ one day – a practice run, to get used to the vehicles, how to load and tie down the sledge, a chance to get things wrong when it doesn’t really matter – and go to Cape Evans the next, but the morning of the shakedown she said ‘It’s a beautiful day, let’s combine the two.' Thus was initiated a de facto rule of my month in Antarctica: One Must Only Ever Go To Cape Evans By Surprise. I ended up going three times, all by surprise, while every excursion that had been planned, even the night before, fell through.

Having been the headquarters of the Terra Nova Expedition, Cape Evans was obviously central to my research and the most important location for me to visit: I’m going to be drawing people doing stuff there for the next decade, probably, and I need to be able to place myself in that space to depict it truthfully. The hut itself is copiously documented, and while dropping in there was obviously valuable to me, the urgent holes in my knowledge were the less photogenic but no less important surroundings of the hut. How far was it to walk up Wind Vane Hill? How far to the Ramp? What was the Ramp? What did the named landmarks between Cape Evans and Hut Point look like, and how did they relate to one another? There was a lot of travelling done over that route – perhaps not quite as frequently as you’d visit the grocery store, but it needs to have that degree of familiarity.

So when we set off on a bright and amazingly balmy November morning, aside from learning the basic practicalities of snowmobile driving, I was keen to document as much of that route as possible.

You can’t see Mt Erebus from McMurdo, but I knew from Sea Ice training that only a little way out on McMurdo Sound, the Ross Island panorama comes into view. Once we’d made our turnoff onto the main road and had a clear shot of our objective, I captured it.

A little further on, I got one facing the other direction. This is what you would have seen any time you were setting off for a grand adventure to the south.

Once clear of Arrival Heights, I got a panorama of the whole of Erebus Bay, with several features I was finally seeing for the first time. Probably the biggest surprise of this trip was finding out just how low Glacier Tongue was. When you see it on a top-down map, or a satellite photo, it’s a hugely prominent feature, but unless you’re very near to it, it is perfectly possible to look right over it to what’s beyond.

Here we were further into the bay than the usual route would have been, but it means we got a better view of the Hutton Cliffs than we would have done otherwise. They are not so much cliffs as hills which, between them, create a cliff of ice and snow. In the frustration of waiting for the sea ice to freeze and allow them back to Cape Evans, the Terra Nova men frequently discussed alternate overland routes back, often starting up the Hut Point Peninsula and going down the slope north of the Hutton Cliffs, so it’s nice to see what they meant.

As we approached Glacier Tongue, the ice effects on Erebus really started to shine. The Sea Ice Master had previously been a mountaineer, and the other person training with me was a skier; when the latter saw how much ice was visible under the snow on Arrival Heights, he commented on the bad skiing. “Yeah, there’s a lot of bad skiing in Antarctica,” the Master replied, quite a historically relevant observation from someone with plenty of expert first-hand experience.

If you look closely, just under the ‘horizon’ line at the base of the slope is a line of undulations that cross the image. These are the saw teeth of Glacier Tongue, the top of which forms the apparent horizon. You see, quite low!

The road took us around the tip; this was the closest I got, but it was close enough to see the height, and how the drifted snow to leeward would provide a ramp from which to climb onto the firmer ice. This was about as far south as the Terra Nova got, when scouting a location for the hut in January 1911, and they weighed up building the hut here vs. on solid ground at Cape Evans. The latter was considered the more sensible option, and rightly so, for only a couple of months later, the end of Glacier Tongue broke off in a big swell and floated out to sea!

From here you get a million-dollar view of the ice falls down Erebus. Reading Cherry-Garrard’s description of them in Worst Journey, after seeing them in person, I have to give him full marks for descriptive power.

Here are the southern slopes of Erebus; but how different from those which you have lately seen. Northwards they fell in broad calm lines to a beautiful stately cliff which edged the sea. But here—all the epithets and all the adjectives which denote chaotic immensity could not adequately tell of them. Visualize a torrent ten miles long and twenty miles broad; imagine it falling over mountainous rocks and tumbling over itself in giant waves; imagine it arrested in the twinkling of an eye, frozen and white. Countless blizzards have swept their drifts over it, but have failed to hide it. And it continues to move. As you stand in the still cold air you may sometimes hear the silence broken by the sharp reports as the cold contracts it or its own weight splits it. Nature is tearing up that ice as human beings tear paper.

All the schemes for finding an overland route to Cape Evans had to contend with crossing these ice falls, and none could think of how to do it. So the sea ice it had to be.

I have been directing all your attention to the view to the right of us, but there are some interesting things to the left as well. Once we pass Glacier Tongue we are almost alongside Tent Island. I have no photos from this end of Tent Island because the road was horribly chewed up around here so all our concentration was on ploughing through, but here is one looking back at it.

Tent Island’s neighbour is Inaccessible Island, named for its steep slopes affording no access. I was surprised how big it was, something I struggled to capture on camera. Having spent many hours of my childhood on I-15, it reminded me of nothing so much as the top of a mountain in the Mojave, lopped off and stuck in the snow. Some of my photos from Cape Evans give a proper sense of scale, but seeing it end-on shows why it was called ‘inaccessible.’

This is also a good vantage point for Great and Little Razorback. They are aptly named: both are a straight and narrow with a very sharp ridgeline. Great Razorback is the larger of the two; Little Razorback is very wee indeed.

While on the subject of scale, Erebus was always a problem. It never turned up as large in a photo as it seemed to be in real life. The trouble is, trying to get all of it in one shot, you have to zoom so far out that it is inevitably small in the frame. This is more what it felt like to be at the foot of Erebus:

We’re nearly there! I’ve seen an awful lot of the Barne Glacier as seen from Cape Evans; the pieces were in front of me now, and I knew that with only a little change in parallax, Cape Barne would slide behind the glacier face and then we’d be home.

Finally the road rounded a low promontory of blobby lava, and it came into view for the first time:

. . . And seeing it here, in its full setting, in 3D, I realised properly how this is just a shed in the middle of nowhere, and that, for all the stories it contains, it is so very very small, in a way I had never imagined.

But as I pulled up to the snowmobile parking area just offshore, it still felt like coming home.

[awidevastdominion]

[mostly-history]

A hexagonal ice crystal in the Erebus Ice Tongue (Ross Island, Antarctica).

The Erebus Ice Tongue is a mountain outlet glacier, and the seaward extension of the Erebus Glacier from Ross Island.  Glacier ice crystals can grow to be as large as baseballs.

[tanadrin]

Reordberend

(part 25 of 30; first; previous; next)

The rest of the journey passed with little conversation, but now the silence was more comfortable. Katherine mulled over the conundrum of how to get the elders to listen to her. She watched Leofe, as they walked, and tried to imagine what it must have been like to have been born in the Valleys, to have grown up here amid the ice and stones. It was difficult, to say the least.

They spent the night at the mouth of the valleys, and in the morning they switched to snowshoes, to gently descend the long glacial tongue to the surface of the ice shelf below; from there, it was a straight shot across McMurdo Sound to Mount Erebus, which loomed now in the darkness only as an absence of stars. The open ice was the most treacherous part of the journey: cracks could open up here, as the ice shelf was squeezed through the narrow passage of the Sound, big enough to swallow you whole, and they had to go carefully. They spent two nights camping on the open ice, crammed into one tiny tent, huddled together for warmth. On the morning of the third day, though, they found their path forward blocked by an enormous crevasse, which forced them to go south, to try to circle around it. Eventually, they realized, it ran all the way to the coast of the island; the quickest thing to do was to head straight for McMurdo Station, and go overland up the mountain.

At first, Katherine was kind of excited to see the ruins. Once upon a time, McMurdo Station had been a major scientific and transport hub for a huge part of Antarctica, a waystation on the way to the South Pole. But it had been abandoned a long time ago, and it was one of the few old scientific sites that hadn’t been reclaimed by the Antarctic Authority. On closer inspection, though, Katherine could safely say it was the creepiest place on the continent. It didn’t help that the aurorae australis were glowing a sickly green hue as they approached. Skeletal buildings, ravaged as much by the People’s salvage as by the weather, stood out the slopes, and old radar domes cracked and open to the sky. They spent the night in a mostly-intact building on the edge of the base, and Katherine could have sworn she heard what sounded like animals scurrying around in the ruins.

The actual mountain ascent was not so difficult, although it took another two days. The People had cut a path on the western side of the mountain, so they approached from that side. The ground was icy, but the weather was good. “We would have to wait for it to clear if it was not,” Leofe said. “You cannot climb the mountain in fog.”

On the second day of climbing, by midafternoon--right when Katherine’s legs were threatening to give up for good--Leofe held out her hand to stop Katherine. “We’re here,” she said. The last hundred meters or so were up wide stone steps, which ended at a great tunnel mouth, bored straight into the mountainside. “We go carefully from here,” Leofe said. “If the wind is bad, dangerous fumes can rise from the crater.”

“This is where you build your temple?”

“If the wind is favorable--well, you’ll see.”

The tunnel ran straight for fifty meters; it opened out onto a wide porch that had been cut back into the side of the crater, with a protective stone overhang. Rough pillars supported it, and pairs of steps off to either side led up to narrow paths around the inside of the crater rim.

“Jesus Christ,” Katherine said. “How was this place built?”

The view was clear, for the moment; clumps of steam or vapor clung to the stony slope here and there, gases leaking from vents that led to Mount Erebus’s fiery interior. Far, far below, and almost at the other side of the crater, there was a sullen red glow visible from within a cloud of smoke.

“Is that--”

“Molten stone, yes. The fire rises to the surface here; it is often restless.”

“Is this safe?” Katherine asked.

Leofe rolled her eyes. “It’s a volcano.”

Katherine walked to the edge of the stone balcony. Here and there--possibly at regular intervals, although it was hard to tell because of the clouds--great pillars with tops shaped like animal or human heads gazed out over the scene. There were steps that led further down into the crater, although Katherine couldn’t see how far. It was an austere and threatening landscape; Katherine could also appreciate its beauty. A bright aurora glowed in the sky overhead, illuminating the whole thing in pale light. Katherine could see why they called it the Fane of Awe.

How long had it taken to build this place? Even with handheld laser cutters, the stone pillars had had to be hauled up here, had to be raised in the smoking crater, when the fires were low and the wind was strong enough to dissipate the volcanic fumes. The climb up the mountain had been exhausting enough unencumbered. Katherine couldn’t imagine hauling enormous blocks of shaped stone up the slope as well. How would you even begin to do that? Or maybe they had quarried it close by, but that was still heavy work. It would have been many, many years of labor. Seasonal, probably. Done in summer. The tunnel itself and the porch of stone would have taken even longer to cut through, but the evidence of her experience so far was that the People were patient, and were not afraid of difficult labor.

She found Leofe back near the entrance, kneeling down and taking some small objects out of her pack.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I have some… things I must do.”

“Sure. The rites. Wulf said. I’ll, uh, come back later.” Katherine thought about exploring the crater, but she didn’t know much about volcanoes, and she didn’t like the look of the clouds coming up from the ground. Instead, she went back out, and decided to go for a walk up near the crater rim. The ground here was steep, although not terribly treacherous. She tested each step carefully, bracing herself with her staff in case her footing failed. After another thirty minutes or so, she was at the crater edge. 

The lava lake was still visible, far below, although partly shrouded in clouds. McMurdo Sound was a pale swathe of ice, ten or fifteen kilometers off. The mountains along the coast were just barely visible. The wind here was fierce, bitterly cold, colder than anything she’d felt in her life. But God in Heaven, it was a beautiful view. In some ways, perhaps, she had shared the experiences of the People, clutching as a child after something sacred in a world in which the sacrosanct seemed to hold little meaning. But in other ways, their perspective was completely different. Katherine’s experience of church was the plain, low meeting house, whose only adornment might be a picture of Jesus on the wall. Simple wooden benches, a hard concrete floor, a plain white exterior. Some of the meeting houses in Sand Mountain didn’t even have running water. God--awe, if you like--was an internal experience in those places. A thing you contemplated, which rose up within your mind and your heart, which grew out of your faith and your desire to feel it. Here, though, the sacred was an immutable and implacable fact of the world. It would be here, whether you cared to experience it or not. And if you did, it would shout itself forth from every hill and every stone and every patch of ice, and it would overwhelm you. Even the great cathedrals of old Europe could not match this. They were in comparison the feeble attempts of human hands to imitate what nature had been doing for millions of years. Or billions. To imitate a thing which shot through every atom of the universe, every star and every planet, the fractal majesty of existence that you only really appreciated when you stood in a place where survival was almost, almost--but not quite--impossible.

Katherine had read once, in her high school science textbook, that there was a rock they had once found in Australia that was four and a half billion years old. It was so old that it had formed when the surface of the Earth was half-molten, when the air was still toxic, when the oceans had just begun to form. There was a picture. And something about that picture suddenly made everything the book was talking about feel real, in a way that dry numbers like “four and a half billion” never could on their own. A sense of the enormous weight of time had staggered her, and she had stared at the photograph, trying to understand. For millions of years afterward, the Earth had no continents, only craggy islands of rock that had not yet accreted into the ancient cratons. Even once life emerged, for three and a half billion years--for three quarters of the span of life of the entire planet--it had been single-celled organisms confined to the seas. If you had been an observer on the ancient Earth, fixed in place at the dawn of time and forced to observe the slow march of geologic time across the surface, then for the overwhelming majority of the world’s history, for a span of time longer than the human mind was capable of understanding on any level, the world had been empty. Barren. Bereft of voices. Bereft of names. Silent provinces, whole nameless countries, continents, cataclysms had come and gone, with no one to see them, no one to name them, no one to record their passage. And only late--in the last five hundred million years or so--had a riot of life burst forth. And only in the last eyeblink, since the retreat of the glaciers, had humans swept across the world to give all these things names and meaning and histories, but of all these places, Antarctica had been empty the longest. And even then, for a long time, we had come and gone as phantoms, she thought; not until the People came did they begin to let their names and their stories sink into the Earth. Not until the People came did anyone call Antarctica home.

She stood there as long as she could stand it--ten minutes, maybe, no more--before making her way back down the slope to the entrance of the fane.

By the time she returned, Leofe was apparently done with her business. She had set up their tent in a sheltered alcove in the passageway, and Katherine was terribly grateful they would at least be out of the wind tonight. They built a small fire on the stone floor, and warmed their hands for a little while, before making dinner, and settling down to bed.

Katherine lay awake that night, listening to the wind howl against the tunnel entrance. It felt wrong, somehow, to try to sleep at the summit of an active volcano. The kind of act of hubris the Greek gods would punish you for.

“Leofe?” she said quietly. “Leofe. Are you asleep?”

“Grnk.”

Katherine rolled over, doing her best not to jostle her bunkmate. She lay there a little longer.

“Hey Leofe. Do you want to come with me in the spring? We can leave together. If you want.”

The wind howled louder.

“Leofe?”

“Hbble.”

Katherine closed her eyes, and did her best to sleep. Her dreams that night were jumbled, and the next morning all that she could remember was that they were filled with fire.

[oaepauli-blog]

Secret Ecosystem In Antarctica?

Secret Ecosystem In Antarctica?

Anyone know Dr. Ceridwen Fraser, the scientist who have discovered this, “secret ecosystem of plants and animals”?  Would be fascinating to hear more about her discoveries and research.

Researchers find secret, warm oasis beneath Antarctica’s ice that could be home to undiscovered species

A second article here too:

Antarctica’s ice caves could be hiding undiscovered species of plants and…

[asyoulikeitnow]

Inside view of an ice cave on the Erebus Glacier tongue, Ross Land, Antartica JOEL BENSING/AFP/Getty Images (source)

[asktheadeptus]

Cadia, officially known as Cadia Prime, is a terrestrial, Earth-like planet that has been classified as both a Civilised World and as the Imperium of Man's most important Fortress World by the Administratum. It guards the only known navigable route to and from the massive Warp rift known as the Eye of Terror, a passage called the Cadian Gate. The world's dangerous proximity to the Eye of Terror has made it necessary for the people of Cadia to heavily fortify the planet. Cadia is always the first target of the Chaos Warmaster Abaddon the Despoiler's assaults and Black Crusades, when the Forces of Chaos Undivided launch themselves from the Eye of Terror every few centuries in an attempt to break out and invade the Imperium proper as they did during the Horus Heresy.

Cadia's natural environment is much like Terra's was millennia ago, with a large ocean covering 70 percent of the planet's surface. The land mass that does exist is divided between incredibly thick pine forests and vast glaciers. The planet is slightly cooler than most human-settled worlds but not to the point that it adversely affects growing conditions. Settled before the onset of the Age of Strife by a branch of humanity that eventually fell to the worship of the Chaos Gods and played a major role in the ultimate corruption of the Space Marine Legions, Cadia was re-settled sometime in the early 32nd Millennium by Loyalist humans of the Imperium. The world's landscape is dotted by strange black pylons of clear xenos origin called the Cadian Pylons. These devices were actually constructed by the Necrons millions of years ago to hold back the psychic energies of the Eye of Terror from the world, which was an ancient Necron military base during their war with the Old Ones.

The Cadian Pylons are what create the unusual area of realspace stability known as the Cadian Gate near the Eye of Terror that is unaffected by the constant Warp Storms that surround that Warp rift. Cadia's location directly adjacent to the dangerous Eye of Terror has made it necessary for the people of Cadia to fortify the planet to an extent where almost the entire population lives in massive fortress-cities known locally as "Kasr". Thus Cadia has an odd mix of dense urban areas and vast open tundras and other natural landscapes. It is always against Cadia that Abaddon the Despoiler, the Warmaster of the Chaos Space Marines and the Forces of Chaos, fields his continual assaults or Black Crusades from his hold in the Eye of Terror.

History

Pre-Heresy

Some 40 standard years before the outbreak of the Horus Heresy, Cadia was a world inhabited by a primitive race of violet-eyed humans who worshipped the four Chaos Gods, probably a remnant of Mankind that had turned to the Ruinous Powers during the hardships of the Age of Strife. Prompted by the so-called Pilgrimage of the Primarch Lorgar of the Word Bearers Legion to discover whether or not the Gods once worshipped by adherents of the Old Faith of the Word Bearers' homeworld of Colchis actually existed, Lorgar journeyed with his Word Bearers Legion's Chapter of the Serrated Sun to what was then the fringes of known Imperial space as part of the 1301st Expeditionary Fleet of the Great Crusade. At this time, Lorgar had not yet fallen to Chaos, though he had turned against the Emperor of Mankind as a deity no longer worthy of his worship after the Emperor and the Ultramarines had personally humiliated him and the entire Word Bearers Legion on the world of Khur 43 standard years before the start of the Horus Heresy. The Emperor had come to Khur personally with Malcador the Sigillite after ordering the Ultramarines to destroy the Khurian city of Monarchia where the Emperor was worshipped as a God as a result of the teachings of the Word Bearers. He made his displeasure known to Lorgar about the Word Bearers spreading the religion of Emperor-worship to every world they brought into the Imperium, in direct contravention of the rationalist, atheist philosophy of the Imperial Truth. The Emperor forced the entire Legion to kneel against their will through the use of his psychic might and then explained that they were the only Astartes Legion to have failed his purpose on the Great Crusade. After this humiliation Lorgar, on the advice of his First Captain Kor Phaeron and the Word Bearers First Chaplain Erebus, decided to undertake a Pilgrimage to discover if the Gods worshipped by the ancient Old Faith of Colchis were real and worthy of the Word Bearers' faith and allegiance.

The Word Bearers were also accompanied on this Pilgrimage by 5 members of the Adeptus Custodes who had been set by the Emperor to watch over everything the Word Bearers did to prevent them from falling back into error once more. The 1301st Expeditionary Fleet exited the Warp near the largest Warp Storm in the universe, later known as the Eye of Terror. The Fleet's Master of Astropaths advised Lorgar that unusual "voices" in the Warp were heard in the vicinity of the great Warp rift, voices that spoke directly to the Primarch as well, the voices of the Chaos entities within the Immaterium.

The decision was made to hold orbit over Cadia and for the 1301st Fleet's elements to make planetfall on the unknown world, designated as 1301-12. The landing force was comprised of Imperial Army, Word Bearers, Adeptus Custodes and Legiones Cybernetica elements. The landing party, led by Lorgar, was greeted by a large number of barbaric human tribes, tribes described as "dressed in rags and wielding spears tipped by flint blades...yet they showed little fear." Most notable were the barbarians' purple eyes, which reflected the colour of the Eye of Terror itself in the spectrum of visible light. Despite the Custodian Vendatha's protests and request to execute the heathens, the Word Bearers approached the natives. A woman emerged from the crowd and addressed the Primarch directly, calling him Lorgar Aurelian and welcoming him to Cadia. This woman, the priestess Ingethel, would ultimately lead the Primarch down a path of spiritual enlightenment that actually marked the beginning of Lorgar's fall to heresy and Chaos. Later, Ingethel of Cadia would lead the 1301st Fleet's scout vessel Orfeo's Lament into the Eye of Terror and thus change the Word Bearers forever as they were exposed to the Ruinous Powers of Chaos and slowly corrupted, the first of the Legiones Astartes to worship the Chaos Gods and become Traitors to the Emperor. The Cadians, primitive as they were, used a language which was akin to the Word Bearers' own Colchisan tongue. Many traditions of the Word Bearers were mirrored by the culture of ancient Cadia, leading Lorgar to believe that the original settlers of both his own homeworld of Colchis and Cadia shared a common heritage.

Following the visits into the Eye of Terror, Lorgar ordered a cyclonic bombardment of the planet, wiping out the Cadians and leaving the planet abandoned, so none within the Imperium would know what had transpired there.

Post-Heresy

Following the Battle of Terra that ended the Horus Heresy with Horus' death and the internment of the Emperor of Mankind in the Golden Throne, the defeated Traitor Legions and their allied forces among the Imperial Army and the Dark Mechanicus fled from Terra. Some of the exhausted Loyalists rallied and gave chase, but most remained on Terra to consolidate their great victory over the Forces of Chaos. Many of the surviving Traitors were put to the sword, but the majority of the Traitor Legions escaped into the great Warp rift known as the Eye of Terror in the Segmentum Obscurus, a region of space where reality and the insanity of Chaos collide as the raw psychic energy of the Immaterium pours into real space-time.

Within the Eye of Terror, the Chaos Gods rule over uncounted numbers of planets, all warped to reflect their own dark aspects. It was there that the Traitor Legions found refuge, isolated from the rest of the galaxy by potent Warp Storms. Each of the planets within the Eye is a Daemon World, warped and twisted by the whims of the Ruinous Powers and the powerful Daemon Princes who rule over them in the Dark Gods' name. The Chaos Space Marines regrouped and nurtured their hatred of the Imperium, planning for the day when they would wreak a terrible vengeance on those who had defied them and their foul masters. Within the Eye time flows differently than in realspace. Those same Traitors who fought on Terra 10,000 standard years ago still fight today in the service of Chaos. They fight against each other to prove their supremacy and against the forces of the Imperium when the Warp Storms calm enough to allow them to emerge into Imperial space.

Imperial fortifications on Cadia keep every vigilant watch on the Eye of Terror

The Imperial sectors surrounding the Eye of Terror are heavily militarised to resist these frequent invasions and none more so than Cadia, the Imperial Fortress World that stands at the very mouth of the only stable navigational route leading out of the Eye of Terror, the dreaded Cadian Gate.

As a result of Abaddon the Despoiler's 1st Black Crusade in 781.M31, the planet's strategic location was deemed vital to the defence of the Imperium, and so, in the 32nd Millennium Imperial colonists were dispatched to resettle the world, becoming the ancestors of the present-day population of Cadians. Perhaps as a result of the Eye of Terror's proximity, this later population of Cadians also soon developed the unusual violet-coloured eyes that had marked the first human inhabitants of the planet.

The early defences of the newly resettled Cadia proved to be woefully inadequate. Its major cities were extremely vulnerable to enemy assault as they had been constructed in the traditional High Terran style, with broad, ordered avenues. Following the 2nd Black Crusade in 597.M32, sweeping changes were carried out worldwide to improve the planet's overall defensive capabilities, and massive fortifications were constructed across the world until the planet's cities had been rebuilt into their current form.

Cadia stands upon the only known reliable route out of the Eye of Terror and thus is one of the most strategically vital worlds in the entire Imperium of Man. There are other routes out of the Eye, but none are stable like the Cadian Gate and no military force of any true size can venture forth from the Eye without first passing through it. The exact reasons for the existence of this unusual region of stability is unknown, though many Magi of the Adeptus Mechanicus believe it is due to the presence of the famous Cadian Pylons. These mysterious black monoliths, now known to have been created by the Necrons millions of standard years ago to hold back the psychic influence of the Warp that was so feared by their C'tan masters, dot the landscape of Cadia and their origins remained mysterious until the time of the 13th Black Crusade.

Cadia itself is a bleak, merciless and wind-blown planet, where only the strongest survive to adulthood and discipline is learned from the moment a babe takes his or her first steps. Cold winds howl across wide, sundered plains where armies train with live ammunition and every day not spent training is believed to be a day wasted. Every Cadian fortress-city, or "Kasr", is a great citadel, with the streets and buildings fashioned with great tactical cunning by the finest military engineers and siege specialists of the Imperial Guard. Every Cadian is taught the skills of the warrior as soon as they can walk and they are much sought after by commanders throughout the galaxy. Cadian military gear is considered top-rate and is used as the standard for all Imperial Guard Regiments. Such a world breeds hardy and determined warriors and the Cadian Regiments of the Imperial Guard have a well-deserved reputation for both honour and fighting spirit. From the earliest age, Cadians are taught to field-strip a weapon with their eyes shut and tactical doctrine is taught before basic literacy. One soldier in every ten is recruited into the Cadian Interior Guard, regardless of ability or achievements, and as a result some of the most able soldiers spend their entire Imperial military service on Cadia and the soldiers of the Cadian Planetary Defense Force are amongst the most skilled fighting men in the Imperium, the equal of many other worlds' Imperial Guard Regiments.

Society

Cadia is the home of the Imperial Guard's Cadian Shock Trooper Regiments, widely regarded as the best soldiers in the Imperium short of the superhuman Space Marines, as a result of their upbringing in Cadia's martial culture. Their leader is the indomitable Lord Castellan Ursarkar E. Creed, the saviour of Cadia and hero of the 13th Black Crusade. Since Cadia is the capital world of the Cadian Sector and is often raided by various alien civilisations like the Eldar and Orks as well as the Forces of Chaos, the planet has been heavily fortified. All Cadians must serve at least a four-year-term in the military, and the amount of military presence on the world has lead to the civilian population becoming focused on weapons production. 71.75% of the Cadian population is under arms, either in the highly-skilled and very well-equipped Cadian Planetary Defence Force that is known as the Interior Guard or in the numerous Imperial Guard Regiments drawn from the planet's people. Chaos Space Marines from the Eye of Terror make frequent forays onto the surface of Cadia and must be hunted down. The bulk of the Cadian army is made up of the Shocktroops, with the remainder made up of the Whiteshields (conscript soldiers recruited at the age of 14 and trained to take place in Shocktroop regiments) and the elite Kasrkin soldiers. Cadian Regiments are consistently on average the most well-disciplined and most effective in the entire Imperial Guard. Because of its heavy concentration on military matters, Cadia's global economy is dominated by the manufacture of various weapons systems and exports vast numbers of weapons to its neighbouring Imperial planets, while importing very little other than food. Many other worlds use Cadian equipment to arm their own Imperial Guard Regiments, which explains how the Cadian Patterns of personal armour and infantry weapons have become the standard for the entire Guard.

Cadia has a special and honoured place in the history of Mankind. Cadia stands upon the edge of the Eye of Terror within a narrow corridor of stable space called the Cadian Gate. This forms the one and only predictable passage between the Chaos-infested daemon worlds of the Eye of Terror and Terra. It seems that although many Chaos fleets have ventured out of the Eye, very few Imperial fleets have ventured in. No battle fleet of any size can rely upon other stable passages from the Eye of Terror and they must pass through the Cadian Gate. Cadia is therefore one of the most strategically important planets of the galaxy. On several occasions the Forces of Chaos have moved against Cadia and raging battles have been fought in the depths of space. Such huge battles are rare, but the constant intrusion of Chaos raiding craft is commonplace.

Before the later Imperial re-colonisation of the world in the 32nd Millennium, Cadia was the home of a lost fragment of humanity that worshiped the four Chaos Gods, probably since the onset of the Age of Strife. This society was encountered by the then-still-Loyal Word Bearers Legion 40 solar years before the outbreak of the Horus Heresy, and the prevalence of violet eyes amongst the populace was seen as a mark of mutation caused by the proximity of the Eye of Terror, which also appears violet in the visible light spectrum. This civilisation was eventually wiped out by the Word Bearers Space Marine Legion in the late 30th Millennium at the conclusion of the Pilgrimage of Lorgar some forty standard years before the outbreak of the Horus Heresy. Cadia was then resettled by Imperial humans of all creeds and genetic stock. The Cadian people today are naturally tall and solidly built. The fact that this new line of Cadians of untainted Imperial stock also sport violet eyes lends credence to the theory that the proximity of the Eye of Terror causes this mutation.

Cadian society in the 41st Millennium is more martial than civilian, mostly due to the disproportionate ratio of soldiers to citizens in its population. The birth rate and the military recruitment rate are synonymous. Most Cadian children learn to field-strip a lasgun by the age of ten, and many young Cadians serve in the Imperial Guard as Whiteshields. Cadian society is so martial that camouflage patterns have made their way into the everyday fashion of even the wealthy and successful. It is very easy to determine who is an outsider or local on Cadia simply by what they wear.

Being a constantly embattled world, Cadia suffers numerous casualties in the defence of Cadia and the Imperium. Cemetery space on the planet is at a premium so the local priests of the Imperial Cult routinely check the grave markers of the honoured dead for legibility. When a section of a Cadian cemetery's grave markers are deemed illegible, those graves are exhumed and the bones are added to a communal pit. The Cadian belief is that once the names on a grave marker are illegible, the honours are forgotten.

Long ago Cadian cities changed from a plan of broad avenues to one where the streets of its cities were arranged in zig-zag patterns meant to make any intruding enemies fight for every block. At the heart of each Cadian city is a fortress called a Kasr in the local dialect of Low Gothic. The largest Kasr as of 241.M41 was Kasr Derth. Cadia's earliest Kasrs had been built in the High Terran Style, with the wide streets laid out on a grid system. Early in the 32nd Millennium soon after the planet's resettlement, during the first of the Black Crusades, most of the Cadian Kasrs were destroyed. The broad, ordered avenues of the Kasrs had proven impossible to hold or defend. Since then, the Kasrs have all been built in elaborate geometric patterns, the streets juking back and forth like the teeth of a key. From the air, Kasr Derth looked like an intricate angular puzzle. Given the Cadians' mettle and their skills at urban warfare, a Kasr could be held street by street, meter by meter, for months if not years.

[everythingantarctica-blog]

Exploring the unique caves that form within the floating Erebus Glacier Tongue. A really unique characteristic of these caves is that the floor is actually sea ice! You can hear seals swimming underneath you from inside the caves! (at Erebus Ice Tongue)

[dadsontour]

Dads on tour: One day in Antarctica

My dad loves to write a holiday letter. And they’re usually too funny not to share. Names have been changed to protect fellow passengers (you’ll understand why)...

This letter was received after a sightseeing flight to Antarctica.

This was never going to be a typical flight, albeit Melbourne to Melbourne (via Antarctica) non stop for 12 ½ hours depending on what happened along the way.  

The instructions were quite simple – bring the camera and not much else, no check in, no luggage,  just a lanyard and two boarding passes (one for the trip to Antarctica and a different seat for the return).  I opted for the back section of the 747 where viewing was as unrestricted as it can be through plane windows.  Good choice.

The passengers

Three hundred and something people boarding a jumbo in domestic – well it worked and there was not a spare seat!  I couldn’t help but notice a school group decked out in their uniform.  Of course my thoughts went straight to which private school was this and then counting the rather good teacher to student ratio! 

 It was only later that we found out that the school was a government one and was one of three (the others from Hobart and also Invercargill) as part of a scientific research program in schools. I suppose no overseas travel documentation required on a Melbourne to Melbourne flight!

Not having extravagant luggage to squash into the overhead lockers might have simplified boarding considerably had it not been for the couple in row 46 who just could not work out which seats they had, but we got there.  Off and in the air by 8.20 a.m. in the safe hands of “one of QANTAS’s most experienced captains” with two other captains and a second officer along for the ride.

Remembering the first rule of group travel “if they are not talking about someone then watch out it could be you!” we weren’t even past take off when it became obvious I was surrounded by some of the potential talking points of the outbound journey.  

Yes my neighbour (let’s protect the innocent and call him Bert) and his daughter (let’s call her Beryl!)  Well Bert did manage to ensure that everyone around had an individual explanation of his hernia op and his knee replacements before Port Phillip Bay had disappeared. 

 And Bert was a contractor in building the runway too!  But wait Beryl, they have the flight path on the screen “I’ll show you how to read it” And read it he did, aloud! Photos, he had to get a few so off to a window before announcing that his phone was just about full somewhere across Bass Strait. To some relief he found himself trapped behind the drink carts and unable to get back to his seat until somewhere around Hobart.

We also had a film crew on board from the Places We Go (channel 10 in October) - the Clint Bizzell one.  I saw Clint at one stage come down to  the next galley but they didn’t trouble themselves with the rear cabin!

Brunch

Its brunch time over the Southern Ocean and of course being seated down the back, the food options were reduced by the time the trolley came around, but no problem. We didn’t come for the food.  

Bert got half way through his meal when he informed us that he had a Japanese tenant at one stage and she sends him photos of food still. He decided it was time to return the favour, so took a photo of the meal to send to her.  Next time Bert perhaps before you start it rather than half way through??  The food served, the young gentleman in the seat in front of Bert took the disruptive step of putting his seat into full recline (the only one in the whole cabin) and settling into a movie as you do on a sightseeing flight to Antarctica. 

Now my solution to that as previously trialled on long haul flights is quite simply to undertake very regular knee and leg exercises into the back of the seat of the offender.  Not really a possibility for Bert with those knees (“titanium you know”). 

Valentines day passion

I had joked previously about all of the Valentines Day couples who would be on the plane.  Well let’s put the record straight.  By 10.30 the queues for the toilets certainly reflected the demands of ageing bladders, not Valentines Day passion!

The plane was a real mix of people, but there was certainly an over representation (in my part of  the plane at least) of daughters around 50-70 taking one or both of the elderly parents along for the ride.  Not sure who was paying!

“Beryl, how about we have a selfie” says Bert and so lots more NQR photos before a woman in front ends the misery by offering to take the photo of them.  “They call this a selfie” says Bert to the helpful lady. “ I have a couple of selfie sticks at home but they are broken”  For that we could be grateful as I told him!

The first icebergs

By 11.20 the first sightings of icebergs appeared amongst lots of clouds,  announced by someone walking the aisle as “I just saw an icicle!” Much excitement and photos of course.  

By this stage we were not at the Antarctic Circle and still cruising along at just over 10,000m ASL.  Apparently the weather all week in much of Antarctica had been really bad and although they had 19 alternative flight paths, it was quite clear they were hoping to some extent on this occasion.  

Typically it all starts to open up about 4 hours into the flight as the ice takes over. That ice on this occasion was below a very thick cloud cover.  The most common flight path is apparently to head for the South Magnetic Pole and then on hitting the coast travel west along the Australian section of Antarctica, but not today.  

We were aiming for the Ross Sea and Ross Ice shelf where the weather was expected to be better.  On passing over Cape Adare we dropped down to just over 5000 metres which was to be the level we flew at whilst down there.  Remembering of course that much of the land is over 3000 metres ASL. Only -26 degrees outside which I expected to be a bit colder!  

The clouds have cleared

And then 4 and a half hours into the flight the clouds cleared and the most amazing sights appeared. At this point the whole dynamic of the plane changes.  Even the movie goer is out of his seat taking a photo or two.  Bert has managed to squeeze out a few more photos.  

Virtually no one is in the centre bank of seats and everyone is in the aisles or squashing into the 3 or 2 side seats.  We then spent the next four or so hours cruising around the Ross Sea with the plane doing figures of 8 to ensure everyone saw plenty.  

Concurrently two former Antarctic Expedition Leaders provided continuous commentary over the P.A., which was good although difficult to hear at times.  I was very appreciative of an exceptionally generous couple (my seat rotation pair) who were happy to share their window views on the way down.  That was the sort of atmosphere that prevailed once the views appeared.  

Spotting penguins (not quite)

We flew over the Korean base and the Italian one (the Italians had gone home for winter) and although McMurdo was down there I did not see it.  One of my real highlights was flying adjacent to Mt Erebus and actually being able to look into the smoking crater of the volcano as we flew just 1500 metres above it. 

Pristine ice tongues extending out into the ocean looked amazing, stunningly sharp and steep mountains and some great glaciers but let the photos speak for themselves in that department.  We got down to 78 degrees south. 

No, we didn’t see any penguins, but as I am reminded by the fans of Happy Feet the girls have done their bit and left the eggs with the males whilst they go back out to sea.  My view on these flights had always been that a flight and could not match the ground experience.  How that has changed.  

The distance we flew over and the sights we saw from the air were just amazing.  Such a fantastic experience.  And of course each flight is different.  The one the week before from Sydney had passed over Mawson’s Hut and other places that were off limits to us due to the weather, but then the comment was made that they had not seen parts like Mt Erebus as clearly as this flight on any previous one.  I don’t think anyone felt left out of the viewing or the experience.  

Heading back to Melbourne

When the cloud set in again about 4 hours later we went back up to altitude and started heading for Melbourne.  We weren’t finished though as the Balleny Islands (right on the Antarctic Circle) popped out of cloud – an uncommon phenomenon apparently.  Of course that meant a 30 minute detour to take these in as well. That was the sort of flight that it was.

The return flight was a much more subdued as dinner and the fundraising raffles (for Mawsons Hut restoration) were underway.  A head wind back as well as our detour around the Bellany Islands meant that the 6500 kms was a bit slower, with a late arrival, but who cared!  Certainly not me.  

It certainly did not feel like a 13 hour flight.  As everyone had been thanked and we cruised into Melbourne there was one more experience awaiting.  Our much praised Captain (under the watchful eyes of his two peer captains) misjudged the last few metres of the descent and we arrived with a (huge) thud.  

The passengers in front who were suddenly presented with a whole bank of oxygen masks falling out of the roof certainly got a huge shock!  The Captain came on the P.A. and apologised for the landing, assuring us though that there is a silver lining to every cloud – the sudden stop meant that we had a much shorter taxi to the terminal!  

What an unbelievable experience!

Dad

[tealin]

Arrival Heights: The Forbidden Zone

You saw my midnight hike up Arrival Heights some time ago.  What I failed to disclose in that entry is that I didn't go all the way up to the bit specifically known as Arrival Heights, in part because it was midnight but also because a great deal of it is within an ASPA (Antarctic Specially Protected Area).  The historic huts and Cape Crozier are also ASPAs.  I had applied for and received the permit to visit them with authorised personnel, but my coordinator had suggested I put Arrival Heights on the list as well, so I had permission to go there, too.  The authorised personnel in this case was in the office right next to mine, but it wasn't until fairly late in my visit that our schedules and the weather aligned for me to go up there with her.  However, it turned out to be a spectacular day, and fortuitous timing as it turned out – but I will get to that later.

Shelley, my native guide, is Keeper of the Antennae, and Arrival Heights is all antennae – that's why it's Specially Protected; with guy wires and exposed wiring everywhere people could get into all sorts of trouble by accident, plus one isn't supposed to get near the sensitive equipment with certain types of insensitive equipment, lest one interfere with the results.  Our first stop of the day was actually in the opposite direction: Between McMurdo Station and Scott Base is an array of antennae rigged to detect meteors entering Earth's atmosphere.  It's a project of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the extra fun thing is that you can follow the data coming in live from the comfort of your own home: https://ccar.colorado.edu/meteors/meteors  

Shelley, Keeper of the Antennae, was in charge of this site too, and she had received a notification shortly before heading out which demanded she solve a problem in person, so that is where we went first.

The computers that process the information from the antenna array live in this little hut.  That's Observation Hill in the background – we're on the other side from McMurdo here – with the Scott Base road marked by the orange bollard at upper right.

Here's Shelley about to load the UCB website to make sure everything's running OK:

And here’s the processing unit:

The reason she'd been called out was not anything exciting like an emergency antenna repair or technology problem, but rather that the hut was getting too hot.  Like any shed in a sunny garden, on a clear calm day it collects heat, and the computers don't like that.  The research budget did not extend to installing an automatic climate control system, but did stretch to pinging Shelley to come over and wedge a roof hatch open with a block of wood.

Job done!  (I'm telling you, the Trucker's Hitch is the knot to know.)

Temperature moderated, we retraced our steps to McMurdo and then took the access road up to Arrival Heights, where Shelley was due to do her weekly inspection of the antenna in Second Crater.

As I said, there are a lot of antennae up in the ASPA, and both the US Antarctic Program and Antarctica New Zealand use the site for their research.  So, naturally, they each have a hut up there.  Here is the Kiwi one, in their signature green:

The US hut was on the other side of the car park, with its signature Ford F-150:

The two countries' choice of vehicle was amusingly symbolic of their respective cultures but is, perhaps, a post for another day.  We've got antennae to tend, here!

First, another nip into the hut to check everything was OK.

The reason I had been encouraged to go up to the Arrival Heights ASPA was because it afforded excellent views of the whole McMurdo Sound.  It was also a site of historic interest as the Terra Nova men returning from the Depot Journey would come up here from Hut Point to check whether the sea ice had frozen between them and home base at Cape Evans.  There is a marginally better view from Castle Rock, which they visited occasionally, but Arrival Heights was much closer.  It's still a good hike from Hut Point, though, so accounts that make it sound like a short stroll are to be taken with a grain of salt.

Second Crater (above) is a hill on top of the heights which had, once upon a time, been a volcanic cone.  That is long past, though, and now it serves mainly to provide a sheltered alcove for a very sensitive radio antenna.  While Shelley did whatever antenna tending needed to be done, I climbed to the top of Second Crater and took photos.

First, the all-important view to Cape Evans.  From this altitude one gets a better view down to the bays, to see just how much ice had formed – and one can just see over Glacier Tongue, to tell whether the ice is in on the other side, which certainly can't be done from Hut Point.

In 1911, the end of Glacier Tongue had broken off and floated away, so it would have been an even clearer view.

McMurdo Station's situation at the base of the Hut Point Peninsula means that massive Mt Erebus, which dominates the landscape, is blocked from view by the hills close to base.  Up here, one got a proper sense of how the geography all fitted together.

While Shelley was occupied in the hut and I was watching the big plane, someone turned up at the Kiwi hut in that Toyota you saw above.  She turned out to be Shelley's ANZ counterpart, and asked if I might lend a hand bringing a canister of liquid nitrogen into the hut.  Never in my wildest dreams had I anticipated helping with liquid nitrogen, so of course I said yes.  In the course of the enterprise, she ascertained that I was the visiting artist who had worked at Disney, and she commented on how cool that was; I replied that I never got to haul liquid nitrogen around at Disney!  She invited me to come give a talk at Scott Base, which felt like getting the Golden Ticket – aside from the limited 'open hours' when Americans are allowed to visit, Scott Base is invitation-only, and now I had an invitation!

Before long, Shelley was ready to go, so we trundled back down the hill to base.  I had a camera full of photos to sort, and another presentation to put together ...