Honors Link

During the 2011 winter break, Kimberly Kenny, an HC sophomore majoring in biology, visited Antarctica through an American Universities International Program. This unique study abroad experience earned her nine credits – and was a biologist’s and photography lover’s dream.

On December 17^th, 18 of us flew to Ushuaia, Argentina, a small city wedged between the Andes Mountains and the Beagle Channel at the southernmost tip of the Americas. After two days of exploring sites that all described themselves as “at the End of the World,” we crossed the famed Drake Passage aboard the Akademik Ioffe, a Russian ship specially designed for polar research. After reaching Damoy Point in the Melchior Islands, we voyaged northeast up the Antarctic Peninsula. The One Ocean Expeditions ship staff took us on two excursions on each of the five days we spent exploring the Peninsula, bringing us on Zodiac cruises around icebergs and landing us at penguin colonies for hikes to the birds’ rocky nests. We visited ten sites in total, my favorite of which was Neko Harbour, where a Minke whale surfaced within twenty feet of our small, ten-person Zodiac. After eight days aboard the ship, we made the two-day trip back across the Drake Passage, passing Cape Horn and returning to Ushuaia, which seemed spectacularly colorful after our brief time of sensory deprivation in the white, silent Antarctic seas. We visited the Tierra del Fuego National Park, admired whale bones at a marine mammal museum, and sampled the traditional local lunch of lamb, before our group of 15 students, one teaching assistant, one post-doc, and one professor flew home on December 30. Throughout the trip, we worked in small groups on two learning modules: the first concerned bird species diversity and abundance, and we spent time on deck with the ship’s ornithologist recording our observations of birds. The second module considered sustainable tourism, and we interviewed ship passengers and Ushuaia residents about their opinions of Antarctic tourism. Each participating student submitted two three-page essays addressing our findings at the completion of the program. I was one of two students representing OSU on the trip, and the rest were from the University of Oregon, Virginia Tech, SUNY Brockport, and the University of Florida. The course instructor was a professor from Virginia Tech named Lori Blanc, and she was a spectacular mentor and inspiration for each of us.

Antarctica is inspiring on an entirely different level of magnitude than anything in my experience. It is impossible to describe how exciting it is to see a pod of nearly 50 humpback whales slapping the water playfully from the deck of a ship, how comical a gentoo penguin looks emerging from the water like an awkward imitation of Baywatch, or how tiny you feel when confronted with a continent of ice. I was surprised that in my brief time in Antarctica I was impressed less by the fragility of a pristine place threatened by global climate change than by the wordless power of the land’s colossal beauty, which demands anything but pity. It is like being in a snowglobe, or on an alien planet, or in a black-and-white film shot through a blue filter. Swiveling your head entirely around, there is nothing to orient you to the “real” world – no indigenous human culture, no pungent aromas (except penguin guano, the only smell I’ll associate with Antarctica); no noticeable vegetation (lichens, symbiotic organisms made of fungus and algae or cyanobacteria, are the only forms of terrestrial flora that can survive such a harsh climate); none of the sounds we are familiar with, no speeding cars or humming appliances, only the accordion operettas of penguins and the occasional splash of ice avalanching into the water. In my “real” world back at Oregon State, so much of my attention is focused outwards, on ideas and conversations, on the people around me and the culture we all share. There is a structure to everyday life, a general code of what a day’s accomplishments should include: attend class, do homework, visit gym, answer emails, make calls. There are things you are expected to think about: your education, your future career, how you will contribute to the world. And there is information you must absorb: from your professors, your university, your peers. But then to be in Antarctica, the most isolated of places, is to be suddenly removed from all of this and confronted with an unnerving lack of external pressure. The clear landscape offers no distractions except the ice – the ice that presses nothing upon me, only reflecting back to me my own impressions and thoughts. My attention is focused inwards, and I am vividly conscious that I am the one exerting my presence into the white void. When you are forced to pull something out of yourself to occupy a space, you realize what substance in you is your own, separate from the accessories of conditioned thought that accrue – necessarily – in normal everyday life. It may have been just my imagination, but the air felt crisper and cleaner, the edges of mountains more sharply defined. There is the water, the ice, the sky – and you, who must appear a strange visitor to the fauna that inhabits this seemingly uninhabitable place. When the engines of the small inflatable Zodiacs were turned off, the silence felt like a meditation or prayer made in deepest solitude.

When friends ask, “How was Antarctica?” it feels impossible to craft a brief summary that can do justice to an experience like this. Here, though, is my best (albeit sentimental) attempt: The ice, mountains, and oceans were humbling in their silent authority, and the wildlife was arrestingly charismatic by merely existing in conjunction with the nature around it. These combined to impress upon me the minisculeness of my existence, while simultaneously injecting some portion of that colossal power into a soul freshly inspired.