'Wondrous Cold': Burke exhibit shows there's much more to Antarctica than penguins

Pay a visit to the Burke Museum's new exhibition, "Wondrous Cold: An Antarctic Journey," and just try not thinking about "The Thing."

Between "Wondrous Cold's" austere images of isolated research stations set in inhospitable conditions on Antarctica and its display of extreme-weather gear used in remote camps, a visitor is naturally reminded of the monsters running amok through iced-over outposts in both the 1951 and 1982 versions of the scary film.

I choose not to say anything about those movies while on a tour with Dr. Christian Sidor, curator of the exhibition and of vertebrate paleontology at the Burke. Sidor has been to Antarctica twice in successful searches for fossils — some of his startling finds are on display here — and he well knows the Hollywood-free reality of living and working in such a dangerous, hostile environment.

Still, he chuckles toward the end of our visit. "I've got to watch 'The Thing' again," he says, unprompted.

Judging by the American public's passion for penguins the last few years, one might think the aquatic bird is the only sign of life in Antarctica. While "Wondrous Cold" has several photographs of penguins crowded against the bleak majesty of glaciers and craggy cliffs, the museum's display is really about humankind's relationship with Earth's southernmost continent.

The exhibition's centerpiece is a series of photographs shot in Antarctica by Joan Myers from October 2002 to January 2003. Sidor supplements Myers' work with the aforementioned fossils and camp gear, as well as a running soundtrack of ambient noise (penguins, cracking ice). There is also a video of researchers at their jobs, shuttling in and out of field camps via helicopter.

The Myers collection, 50 photographs organized by the Smithsonian Institution, provides several levels of context for our presence in Antarctica. Most immediate are images that introduce three busy U.S. stations at different places: McMurdo, the largest facility, on Ross Island; Palmer, on Anvers Island, midway down the Antarctic Peninsula; and Amundsen-Scott at the South Pole.

Myers' wide shots, from a distance, of these stations are reminiscent of Old West towns getting by on basic infrastructure for survival and commerce. Taking her camera closer to the action, she discovers facilities and personnel for everything: cooking, carpentry, painting, waste treatment, etc.

But Myers also reveals how Antarctica is its own museum of human efforts to stay alive in brutal surroundings.

Old, abandoned huts of long-dead whalers and explorers are scattered everywhere, including Sir Ernest Shackleton's hut at Cape Royds, built in 1908 as a base to reach the South Pole. The frozen remains of one of Shackleton's sled dogs, including its collar, are both fascinating and nightmarish.

Sidor's fossils include an extraordinary, 240 million-year-old skull of a giant crocodilelike amphibian, and bones from a Cryolophosaurus dinosaur, both from times when Antarctica was warmer. Sidor says that for most of the last 300 million years, Antarctica was not covered in glaciers and snow.

"Wondrous Cold" is testimony to scientific determination to discover the hidden history beneath all that ice.

Tom Keogh: tomwkeogh@yahoo.com.