How do you travel across the ice?

Travelling across ice, it depends what the ice is. Have a look on the LEARNZ website, there is actually someone drilling with an auger bit they are actually drilling down into the ice. Now if you are on the ice shelf, remember I said it was as big as France, well that’s pretty straight forward, it’s all nice, flat, even, no real pressure on it, you just drive. It’s not an issue really you don’t have to worry… here we are we’ve got one image of scadoo travelling across the ice shelf. Quite straight forward. If you are on sea ice that is different. And it’s really the boundary where one meets the other that you have to be careful of, and careful around icebergs. Icebergs roll over, you never know when its going to happen and because the sea moves, the tide moves in and out, and the icebergs don’t move the same way you get fractures and breaks, and when that happens you don’t see them. They can drift over with snow and you just don’t know. You end up walking….one day I walked to Cape Hallet I only made this mistake once, and I was about five kms off shore and I walked across some snow on the sea ice and I looked back and there were black marks, and I thought I had something on the bottom of my boots. I actually looked at the bottom of my boots thinking why am I leaving black footprints, and when I looked at them, in the footprints I could see a slight movement, and I had actually walked off the sea ice onto some drifting snow near and iceberg, and I was actually standing on about 30, 40, or perhaps 50 cms of snow on sea that was probably a kilometre deep. And there was only one thing to do and that was to quietly walk back. I got away with it but never again. And you have to watch that with Antarctica. So travel in Antarctica, over glaciers I’m always going to be roped up, all the time. And in this particular image on the website I’m actually on the Ross Ice Shelf there. There is a vehicle travelling and that ice remember is around about 80 to 100 meters thick, and in the distance is Mt Erebus. And that’s floating on the crust of the earth, so that is pretty safe and easy travel.