One of the benefits of being on a smaller vessel with a well connected crew was being invited to some of the local facilities around the Antarctic peninsula. Here's a map of facilities across Antarcitaca to show you what I mean.

This also helps to give a sense of scale to Antarctica: we didn't get much further south than Vernadsky (third text box down on the upper left) across our entire one month trip. It's a very big continent, about 40% larger than Europe and near the size of South America.

Arriving at the Chilean military base

So for some reason, penguins seem to love human outposts. I'd guess that the human presence deters (very minorly as we'll see shortly) leopard seals, their main predator.

Unfortunately, this means that the ground becomes layered -- 13 cm on average according to the base commander -- in pengpuin poop and the whole place stinks like the penguin facilities at many zoos. But they are still so cute and both sides seem fine with the other, so I guess it works out in the end?

But it certainly makes for some weird pictures as you'll see below.

Our parking spot

Stern tied to rocks along the shore.

The base gift shop

I expect this is a big reason we get invites to the barbeque: so the troops (and base?) can make a little side money with their patches, coins, and other memorabilia. Win-win! And they get some excitement beyond the penguin antics.

Counting penguins

One of the jobs of the local air force personnel is to do a weekly penguin count around the base. They used to do this by manually counting penguins from drone footage but the commander was describing his new process to me: since they'd just installed a new starlink antenna they are now able to give the images to ChatGPT and ask it to count the penguins for them.

I shudder to think of the hallucination rate for this measurement methodology but I really love the enthusiasm of this new tech adoption! To be fair, I don't actually know how LLM's fare on this type of image segmentation and counting problem. It's possible it's fairly accurate. But just like the famous "strawberry R counting" problem, tokenization (in this case of image patches) is fraught with danger.

Far away from everything

I think the reason they build these down here is that Antarctica is very far away from everything. A fact used for the title of a recent memoir I saw at the bookstore: "Outer Space Is Closer Than Antarctica".

Here's a plot Gemini made for me to show the point:

A view of the barbequeue

I'm definitely just tired here... or blinking... or both. Four of the Argentinians came over from their base (a 30 minute dingy ride away) and one of them in particular was very eager to pour us lots of the Arginitinian spirits (like the Russians on Amazone). I managed to fend him off for a while by putting a giant ice cube blocking the top of my mug (so he could neither see nor pour me anything). Until he finally "helped" me by breaking up my ice cube and filling my drink back up to the top.

And the thing above me is a pull-up bar for exercise. I really wanted to climb it, but it was too crowded and our Argentinian friend did not socially lubricate me enough for that.

Out of Gas

Literally, we ran out of diesel in the middle of the party, and one of the base operators had to run over to switch us to the other tank. All electricity on the station comes from a diesel generator that runs 24/7.

My brain boggles at the amount of fuel they could likely save with a battery pack and intermittently running the diesel at a more efficient duty cycle for their loads.

Grill

Their barbeque grilling skills and results did not disappoint!

Another thing weird about this barbeque was the stark contrasts between how weird and normal it simultaneously was:

• Normal
  • The friendly guy at the party trying to pour you more drinks
  • The small talk and awkward "getting to know each other" topics.
  • The further bonding of the core group that you came to the party with
  • Someone making a fool of themselves doing karaoke by picking a song they didn't know (glad I wasn't that guy... how embarassing that would have been...)
• Abnormal
  • Running out of diesel fuel for building's generators
  • Looking out the window and seeing a field of sleeping penguins
  • Having to park your dingy on the way to the party (okay for the sailors this goes in the normal category, but for 99% of the readers of this blog it's very weird)
  • Knowing that you are incredibly isolated. Arguably at the "edge of the world"
  • Having an incredible variance of nationalities and life experiences represented (Chile, Argentina, USA, Australia, Ukraine, Russia, UK, were the ones I personally talked to)

Antarctic Camping

The next day, we anchored next to a spot of land where it was flat enough for us to camp on for the night. This way, we could all say we had slept on the Antarctic mainland.

Three out of four of our tents pictured here.

Navigation aid? Both visual and perhaps radar return signal (corrugated metal?).

For entertainment before bed, we made up some games with some rocks and extra boards we found from the navigation aid. The group was really creative in remixing the clasic games of:

• Tic tac toe
• Boceball
• Marbles
• Horse/four square

into many genuinely-fun new arrangements.

Sleeping and waking up in the morning

Sleeping on Antarctica was weird. It was:

1. Incredibly quiet. It was a low wind night, so without bugs, cars, airplanes or waves, it was so quiet that the only thing I could hear far, far in the distance was the sound of whale's breathing every few minutes. And then in early the morning I heard some curious penguins come closer to our tents to investigate.
2. Cold. Okay I'm just a sissy, I have a "5 degree (Fahrenheit) bag" and I wore most of my long john layers but I still was cold. Non-shivering luckily. We didn't have any outdoor thermometers, but I'd guess it was in the low 30's or high 20's. I can't even begin to imagine what it would feel like in the -80 regime which is what it gets to in the interior during the wintertime.
3. Fun!

And then waking up and being surrounded by views like this kept the surreal unreality of the trip going.