Antarctic noodles
When my penguin pal, Madi, first turned to me and said, “Are you noodling over there?” I didn’t really understand what she meant. I had never heard the term noodling before, but I soon learnt that’s because noodling is an experience unique to Antarctica.
Noodling – when your brain stalls while trying to take in the insane vastness of Antarctica because there just simply isn’t enough computing power.
As a first-timer down south, I’ve noodled a lot—almost every day. But some noodles have been particularly notable:
Our first day out at Davis station, and my first day of field work in Antarctica. We spent the day conducting health checks of the Adélie penguin colonies on local islands. I had seen a few Adélies on the ice during our journey down, but this was my first time seeing (and smelling) thousands of them all at once. They are such sassy little gremlins—stealing each other’s rocks, yelling, rolling in poop, dramatically face planting into the snow. What’s not to love?! While I stood there thrilled that I’d get to spend all summer hanging out with these little weirdos, I looked up to see the Vestfold Hills with their rocky stripes and the continental ice shelf behind them, going on forever. And I noodled. My brain stalled and I couldn’t finish the sentence I had started; it was just so much everything and so much nothing all at once. Madi’s laughter and comment about me finally being lost for words helped kickstart the motor again.
Wrangling my first Adélie on Hop Island. Earlier that morning we had been dropped on the island via a heli ride over the stunning Sørsdal Glacier, so my brain was already primed and ready to noodle. We had spent several weeks in the Kingston office discussing how to catch a penguin and practicing with a taxidermied one, but catching an actual real-life penguin was a whole different thing. After watching Madi successfully sneak up, wrangle, and put a tracker on an unwilling Adélie, it was my turn. I selected a victim, took a deep breath, crouched down, and went in for the grab. Was it as smooth as Madi’s wrangle? No. But did I safely grab the penguin, take measurements, and attach a tracker? Yes! But not without calm and encouraging support from Madi and Flynn. I don’t know whose heart was racing more—mine or the confused Adélie’s. After releasing the little gremlin back to its nest, I stood up and looked down the gully full of penguins and across the sea ice, which was full of icebergs, and my brain turned to noodles—tangled like the tendrils of a sarsaparilla vine. It was simply too much to compute that I’d be spending the rest of the summer doing this job in this place. Lucky Madi and Flynn were there to snap me out of my meltdown and get me psyched for wrangle round two.
Seeing emperor penguins at Auster. Oh my, this was incredible. The Hägg ride out there, while quite long and bumpy, was through a landscape I can’t even begin to describe. Ice everywhere, in all directions—in flat form, cliff form, berg form, turquoise form, falling-from-the-sky form—the list goes on. We parked away from the colony, only to have the welcoming party and ID checkers tummy-slide over to see what was up. I didn’t expect the emperors to be so inquisitive and friendly! Nor did I expect there to be so many. Thousands of adults and chicks standing together surrounded by huge icebergs, skuas flying around looking for snack opportunities—the brain started to noodle. But what really pushed me over the edge into a full noodling episode was the adorable little chicks. Part of our work at Auster was collecting fresh scat samples, which, lucky for me, meant I had to get right in at the feet of penguins on the edge of the colony with my paddlepop stick and collection tube. While working my way along a section of the colony, I was followed—about an arm’s length and a half away—by a group of 10-or-so fluffballs and a couple of supervising adults, all watching me and chirping away. This had to be one of the cutest things that had ever happened to me in my life, and you better believe I had tears in my eyes behind my ridiculous sunglasses. Call me two-minutes because I was noodles.
Mawson mountains. This is less of a specific noodle moment and more of every time I go up onto the plateau and see the mountain ranges coming up out of the big forever whiteness. I love mountains, and I love climbing to the top of them. My first trip up to Rum Hut for survival training had me noodling all over the place—even spending the night dozing in the infamous chip packet wasn’t enough to wipe the goofy grin off my face. But the real mountain highlight so far has been climbing Mt Hordern, which involved ropes, ice axes, crampons, an off-width pitch, rappels—just all the good stuff! Standing on the lop-sided top and looking out over the vast everything-nothingness of Antarctica really made me feel small. But not in a bad way—in a way that made me unbelievably grateful for the opportunity to get out there and see amazing nature, and for the people I get to share these experiences with.
It’s likely that by the end of the season Madi will be scooping me into a bowl and carrying me onto the ship. I’ll be one content little bowl of ramen.
Jess Williams, Wildlife Ecologist, Mawson
