My MA reading list

One of the great things about being an academic is sabbatical, or as we call in at my university, research and study leave. I’ve got six months of it this year, from May through October, and I’m looking forward to writing lots of words and learning new things about writing and, I expect, myself.

I’m not done with the pumice yet: I think the world needs “12 ways to look at a piece of pumice”. (This pic taken on board the HMNZS Canterbury in 2012: that’s a piece of freshly erupted Havre-volcano pumice.)

I want to write new things about my trips to Antarctica and the Kermadecs, about pumice, and about my work with scientists studying climate change, biodiversity and natural hazards. I want to explore these topics without the restrictions or expectations of writing for a particular publication or to a book contract. For these reasons, and because I’ve found myself increasingly jealous of my creative science writing students over the four years that Ashleigh Young and I have been co-teaching science writing at the IIML, I decided that I’d like to spend my RSL time writing in a challenging and supportive workshop environment. I’ve also never done a Masters before and quite liked the idea of having four degrees in four different disciplines (my undergraduate degree is geology, my honours degree is in physical geography and my PhD is in history and philosophy of science).

So this year (yay!) I’ll be doing an MA in creative writing at the IIML, starting this week. I’ll be combining it with my other work for the first two months then, hopefully, focusing on it almost exclusively.  My genre is “creative non-fiction” (there are also poets in my workshop, and a group of fiction writers in another workshop).

One of the great things about this MA is that as part of your application you have to put together a reading list.

The books I mostly want to read (or re-read) have some elements of personal essay, travel narrative and science. Some of them I’ve read before, some I’ll be reading for the first time. Some I expect I’ll love, but even the ones I don’t love I expect will teach me things about structure, different narrative techniques, and what I like and don’t like about this sort of writing. Big thanks to all the people who responded to my Twitter requests for suggestions late last year. I look forward to this list evolving over the coming months and during the course of the Masters, so comments and suggestions are very welcome.

So here it is: a preliminary (and very long!) reading list.

Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind (2003), The Old Ways: A Journey On Foot (2007), The Wild Places (2012)

Hope Jahren, Lab Girl (2016)

John McPhee, Uncommon Carriers (2006), Annals of the Former World (1998), The Curve of Binding Energy (1974), The John McPhee Reader (1974)

Eve Kokofky Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love (2000)

Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road (2015)

Geoff Chapple, Terrain: Travels through a Deep Landscape (2016)

Jonathan Raban, Driving Home: An American Journey (2011), Passage to Juneau: A sea and its meanings (1999), Bad Land: An American Romance (1996), Coasting (1986)

Lee Gutkind (ed), Becoming a Doctor (2011)

Ingrid Horrocks and Cherie Lacey (eds), Extraordinary Anywhere: Essays on place from Aotearoa New Zealand (2016)

Gregory O’Brien, News of the Swimmer Reaches Shore (2008)

Geoff Dyer, one or more from: White Sands: Experiences from the outside world (2016), Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS H. W. Bush (2014), Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected essays and reviews, 1989-2010 (2011), Yoga for People who can’t be bothered to do it (2003)

Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby (2013), A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2006), A History of Walking (2000)

Melissa Broder, So Sad Today (2016)

Ashleigh Young, Can You Tolerate This? (2016)

Ingrid Horrocks, Travelling with Augusta: 1835 and 1999 (2003)

Joan Didion, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live (2006), The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)

Anne Fadiman, At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays (2008)

Gavin Francis, Adventures in Human Being (2015), Empire Antarctica: Ice, Silence and Emperor Penguins (2012), True North: Travels in Arctic Europe (2008)

Charles Fernyhough, The Voices Within: The history and science of how we talk to ourselves (2016)

Steve Braunias, How to Watch a Bird (2007), Civilisation (2012)

Brian Gill, The Owl that fell from the Sky (2012), The Unburnt Egg: More stories of a museum curator (2016)

Amy Leach, Things that Are (2012)

Anna Sanderson, Brainpark (2007)

Jon Mooallem, Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America (2014)

David Quammen, one or two from: Natural Acts: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature (2009), The Boilerplate Rhino: Nature in the Eye of the Beholder (2001), The Flight of the Iguana: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature (1998), Wild Thoughts from Wild Places (1999)

David Haskell, Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature (2012)

Annie Dillard, The Abundance: Narrative essays old and new (2016), The Writing Life (1989), Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982), Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974)

Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Life in the Woods (1854)

Anne Patchett, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage (2013), Truth and Beauty: a Friendship (2004)

Helen MacDonald, H is for Hawk (2013)

Henry Marsh, Do No Harm (2015)

Suzanne O’Sullivan, It’s all in Your Head: True Stories of Imaginary Illness (2015)

Tim Cahill, something from: Lost in My Own Backyard: A walk in Yellowstone National Park (2004), and one or more of: Not So Funny When It Happened: The Best of Travel Humor and Misadventure (ed), (2006), Pass the Butterworms: Remote Journeys oddly rendered (1997), Pecked to Death by Ducks (1993), A Wolverine is Eating my Leg (1989)

Jeremy Hall, Half Lives, Real Lives: Tales from the atomic wasteland (1996)

Lauren Slater, Opening Skinners Box: Great psychology experiments of the 20^th century (2004) and one or more from Playing House: Notes of a Reluctant Mother (2013), Blue Beyond Blue: Extraordinary Tales for Ordinary Dilemmas (2005), Love Works Like This: Travels Through a Pregnant Year (2003), Prozac Diary (1998), Welcome to My Country: A Therapist’s Memoir of Madness (1997)

Pico Iyer, The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere (2014), Falling off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World (1993)

Atul Gawande, Being Mortal (2014), Better (2007), Complications (2002)

Jenny Diski, In Gratitude (2016), What I Don’t Know About Animals (2010), On Trying to Keep Still (2006), A View from the Bed (2003), Stranger on a Train (2002), Skating to Antarctica (1997)

David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster (2005)

Scott Slovic, James Bishop, Kyhl Lyndgaard (eds), Currents of the Universal Being: explorations in the literature of energy (2015)

Lloyd Jones, A History of Silence: A memoir (2013), Biografi: An Albanian Quest (1993)

Siri Hustvedt, Living, Thinking, Looking (2012)

Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A plant’s eye view of the world (2001)

Roger Deakin, Waterlog: A Swimmer’s journey through Britain (1999)

Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead (2011)

Meghan Baum, My Misspent Youth (2001), Unspeakable (2014)

Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams (2014)

Tim Parks, Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo (2014)

Mark Greif, Against Everything (2016)

Kathleen Jamie, Sightlines (2012)

Eliot Weinberger, Karmic Traces (2000)

Nigel Cox, Phone Home Berlin (2007)

Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (1986)

Terry Tempest Williams, The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks, FSG, New York (2015)

Best American Nature and Science Writing series

Best American Essay series (especially latest one edited by Jonathan Franzen)

 

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Does New Zealand need a science book prize?

On Friday last week, I noticed that the Royal Society of New Zealand’s Science Book Prize was no longer. I don’t recall ever seeing an announcement about it, but the online information about the prize now reads in the past tense, saying the prize “was a biennial book prize to encourage the writing, publishing and reading of accessible popular science books in New Zealand.”

So the Science Book Prize has gone the way of the Manhire Prize for Creative Science Writing, which the Royal Society of New Zealand sponsored from 2007 to 2012, as a former prize.

I write books about science so of course I was disappointed to discover this. But there’s a good side. The same site says the Royal Society “now sponsors the General Non-Fiction category of the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards”. It goes on to say that “Our decision to fund this award reflects our multi-disciplinary coverage of science, technology and the humanities”. Fair enough. But …

What does that mean for science books? If you look at the longlist of the prize the Royal Society now sponsors, it looks like only one of those books would have been eligible for the Science Book Prize, and that’s New Zealand Rivers: an environmental history by Catherine Knight, which as an “environmental history” is also a work of humanities scholarship. The rest of the longlist (and it’s a fabulous longlist, I have no complaints about it) is all humanities: a mix of memoir, history and biography.

But this was no surprise to me. If you look at the books that have been on longlists and shortlists or have been winners of our main New Zealand book awards, the humanities are really well represented. Not so science and technology, the two other focuses of the Royal Society.

So why don’t science books get shortlisted for the main prizes? We certainly have a much longer and stronger tradition of, for example, accessible history writing than science writing.  But I would argue that if we want more and better science writing a dedicated science book prize is a way to encourage it.

I was chatting to Kate Hannah on Monday night and she pointed out that another great thing about the Royal Society of New Zealand Science Book Prize was the way it brought together works from different genres: poetry, short stories, novels, illustrated and general non-fiction – they were all eligible so long as they covered science in an interesting and accessible way. When Helen Heath’s book of poetry Graft was shortlisted for the prize in 2013 perhaps this prompted some readers only interested in science to pick up a book of poetry. Surely this is a good thing?

The “science” we talk about in science books is not just about “doing” science, it’s also about the planet, all its inhabitants, and the universe we live in which is a pretty huge topic. What’s more, in science, we’re trying to get better at engaging audiences with things that matter to their lives, like climate change, or water quality, and a prize that encourages creative approaches to engaging audiences in science is worthwhile continuing.

But of course I’d say that. I was the 2009 winner of the prize and a 2015 judge of the prize, so I have a vested interested in there being a prize I can apply for, and maybe be on the judging panel of again sometime (it was such a pleasure to “have” to read all those great books). Kate and I (and others) are scheming, but what does everyone else think? Does New Zealand need a science book prize?

 

Royal Society Science Book Prize 2009-2015

Shortlist for 2015 Science Book Prize

Tangata Whenua: an Illustrated History by Atholl Anderson FRSNZ, the late Dame Judith Binney FRSNZ and Aroha Harris, published by Bridget Williams Books (winner)

The Wandering Mind by Michael Corballis FRSNZ (Auckland University Press)

Gathering Evidence by Caoilinn Hughes (Victoria University Press)

Dolphins of Aotearoa: Living with New Zealand Dolphins by Raewyn Peart (Craig Potton Publishing)

Manuka: the Biography of an Extraordinary Honey by Cliff Van Eaton (Exisle Publishing)

Shortlist for 2013 Science Book Prize

Moa: The Life and Death of New Zealand’s Legendary Bird by Quinn Berenson (Potton & Burton) (winner)

Science on Ice: Discovering the Secrets of Antarctica by Veronica Meduna (AUP)

Graft by Helen Heath (VUP)

Shortlist for 2011 Science Book Prize

Kakapo: Rescued from the Brink of Extinction: Alison Balance (Craig Potton) (winner)

North Pole South Pole: The Epic Quest to Solve the Great Mystery of Earth’s Magnetism by Gillian Turner (Awa Press)

Poles Apart: Beyond the Shouting, Who’s Right about Climate Change? by Gareth Morgan and John McCrystal (Random House)

Shortlist for 2009 Science Book Prize

The Awa Book of New Zealand Science, edited by Rebecca Priestley (Awa Press)

Falling for Science by Bernard Beckett (Longacre Press)

Hot Topic: Climate Change and the Future of New Zealand by Gareth Renowden (AUT Media)

In Search of Ancient New Zealand by Hamish Campbell and Gerard Hutching (Penguin)

As far as I can tell, the only books on this list that also won prizes at the New Zealand Book Awards were Tangata Whenua: an illustrated history (winner, Illustrated non-fiction 2015),  Graft (winner, NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book of Poetry, 2013) and Moa: The Life and Death of New Zealand’s Legendary Bird by Quinn Berenson (NZSA E.H. McCormick Best First Book Award for Non-fiction).

Predicting the new normal

This article first appeared in The Listener, 26 November 2015.

“Climate prediction is not an easy job anywhere,” says Dave Frame, professor of climate change at Victoria University of Wellington, but “the southern hemisphere hasn’t generally been the focus for the world’s largest modelling initiatives, partly because the incentives are always to improve simulation near where taxpayers live.”

Frame is director of the Deep South National Science Challenge, a ­$24-million project that aims to help this country “adapt and thrive” under whatever climate lies in store. He says existing models, good at predicting average global temperature rises, don’t do well when it comes to predicting conditions in New Zealand. The challenge’s goal is to develop a numerical earth system model to simulate this country’s current and possible future climates.

Even under the best-case scenario being debated at December’s COP21 meeting, which would avert extremes of temperature increase and sea-level rise, there will still be a certain amount of climate change.

Deep South hopes to develop a better understanding of the climate processes that control New Zealand conditions. On November 25, the challenge announced $9 million of funding for projects that include observing Antarctic sea ice, assessing the effects of clouds and aerosols, analysing pre-Industrial weather observations from the 1800s and determining the effect of the recovering ozone hole.

“In the southern part of the southern hemisphere, recovery from the ozone hole is a really significant feature of our climate – it’s broadly comparable with the greenhouse signal,” says Frame.

A better model will help Deep South improve predictions of extreme weather, droughts, changes in growing conditions and sea-level rise. In a planned second phase, Deep South hopes to “help people plan for the future, so it’s an integrated modelling and adaptation project”.

One of the tools to be used alongside the new model is weather@home, a crowd-sourced climate-modelling experiment that uses personal computers to run thousands of weather simulations and provide hard numbers on how climate change might affect the risk of extreme events. (To sign up, go to climateprediction.net.)

A recent paper, published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society and led by Niwa climate scientist Suzanne Rosier, shows the odds of an event such as July 2014’s damaging Northland floods have doubled since pre-Industrial times.

“This project aims to get a handle on the new normal: if it’s happening twice as often now, when will it start to happen three times as often?” says Frame. “Deep South is primarily a model-based initiative – modelling is the only way to coherently assess a broad range of influences.”

For example, the expansion and collapse of Antarctic sea ice – the continent essentially doubles in size each winter – is one of the biggest annual geophysical changes on the planet. It plays a significant role in influencing our weather systems. Satellite observations show the maximum extent of sea ice around Antarctica has increased over the past three decades, which seems at odds with global warming. Earth system models used now can’t reproduce this increase in sea ice. A model that does will require a better understanding of the processes involved.

In work that will aid the Deep South challenge, Niwa’s Craig Stevens led a team that studied the sea ice for three weeks in October. The researchers observed turbulent heat and energy-exchange processes between the ocean and the sea ice.

Stevens says, “We have three or four different ways of measuring turbulence and the same number of ways of measuring the heat structure in the upper part of the ocean and the lower part of the ice.” At the research site – 25km west of Scott Base – they encountered a 2m-thick layer of ice crystals along with 2.5m of sea ice. Their work measures how these crystals dramatically change the nature of ice-ocean interaction.

Over the course of the challenge, a sea ice project led by University of Otago’s Pat Langhorne hopes to connect Stevens’ field-based observations with airborne detection methods to determine how to better estimate sea-ice thickness, along with any associated ice crystal layer, by satellite.

Warming signs

First published in The Listener, 10th April, 2014

Whenever there’s a major storm, heat wave or drought these days, people speculate over whether it’s because of global warming and climate change. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, issued on March 31, suggests the frequency of these extreme events is on the increase.“Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability” reveals that the effects of climate change on New Zealand are likely to be more floods, storms, landslides and droughts – alongside the well-established impacts of higher temperatures and rising sea levels.

We already seem to be experiencing some of these extremes – the start of 2013 saw a summer drought affect much of the North Island, with an average of almost 80 days without rain. This unusually dry summer was followed by the warmest winter on record.

In parts of Australia, a record-breaking heat wave saw summer temperatures exceed 48°C. But how can we know if the likelihood of extreme events like these is changing as a result of human-caused climate change?

That’s what Weather@Home ANZ, a crowd-sourced climate modelling experiment just launched by Niwa and its Australian and British partners, hopes to find out. This project is already using thousands of crowd-sourced personal computers to provide the massive computing power required to run thousands of weather simulations.

The present experiment is simulating weather conditions for 2013, says Niwa climate scientist and project leader Suzanne Rosier. Although 2013 has been and gone, what this project is doing is modelling what “2013 might have been like if we hadn’t emitted greenhouse gases”.

By comparing our actual anthropogenic 2013 with a “natural” 2013, scientists will be able to find out if the risk of heat waves or droughts, like those we experienced last year, has increased, decreased or been unaffected by human influence on climate.

Simulations will also be performed for other years, allowing scientists to assess the possible role of climate change in such events as the record rainfall in Golden Bay in 2011 and the Black Saturday bush fires in Australia in 2009.

One of the things Weather@Home ANZ can do that other climate modelling programs can’t is put some hard numbers on how the risks of extreme events might be changing with climate change. “Because our models are sufficiently detailed and run enough times, we have the chance of capturing very rare weather events that other modelling programs would miss,” Rosier says.

Weather@Home ANZ is the local version of climateprediction.net, a project started in Oxford in 2003 and already running experiments focused on Europe, southern Africa and the western US. If you would like your PC to contribute to the Australia and New Zealand part of the project, got to climateprediction.net to get started.

Once you’ve joined, you can sit back and let your computer do the work, or you can follow the progress as the simulation unfolds on your computer. “The more people who participate, the more science we can do,” says Rosier.

The frequency and severity of future extreme weather events will depend to some extent on how much greenhouse gas we add to – or remove from – the atmosphere over the coming decades.

The latest IPCC report makes it clear that if we want to avoid climate-related population displacement, economic collapse, starvation, disease and war, we need to scale up our efforts to move towards a low-carbon world, and we need to do it now.

The wind turbines of Scott Base

“Fuel is life in Antarctica,” Jonathan Leitch told me at Scott Base last month. Leitch is in charge of asset management at the permanent New Zealand station that sits near the end of Hut Point Peninsula on Ross Island. This volcanic island, dominated by Mt Erebus, is the most populated part of the frozen continent: Scott Base can sleep up to 85 people, and at the American McMurdo Station, just over the hill, the summer population can reach more than 1200.

For decades, it’s been fossil fuel that has provided the heat to keep people alive here at latitude 77° 51′, where temperatures hover around freezing point in summer and drop to minus 50°C in winter. It powers the aeroplanes, helicopters, Hägglunds and skidoos that take scientists and their gear into remote field camps.

It has powered the reverse-osmosis plants that turn seawater into drinking water, the waste water plants that treat the sewage, and the hitching rails that keep vehicles warm in the cold air. No wonder, then, that most of the freight (by weight) that is shipped to Ross Island is fuel for generators, space heaters and vehicles.

But things are changing. In a new project initiated by Antarctica New Zealand, up to 60% of Ross Island’s electrical energy is now provided by wind power. In early 2010, Meridian Energy installed three 330kW wind turbines – locally referred to as “the three sisters” – on Crater Hill behind Scott Base. Now they sit on the horizon between Scott Base and McMurdo, their gentle whirr adding to the soundscape of helicopters, monster trucks and the occasional seal roar.

“It’s been a huge success,” says Leitch. When the wind is blowing, the turbines provide all Scott Base’s electrical energy, with excess sent to McMurdo Station. When the wind stops, McMurdo’s generators provide electrical energy to Scott Base. “There’s been a change in thinking,” says Leitch. “Scott Base and McMurdo Station used to be run separately, but for generation and consumption of power we’re now one.” It’s no longer the New Zealand network and the United States network: it’s the Ross Island network.

Ross Island has the same issues with fossil fuel as New Zealand – it’s expensive, it has to be shipped from the northern hemisphere, and it releases CO2 into the atmosphere. But because of Antarctica’s remote location and pristine environment, these problems are compounded. In the heroic age, before the Antarctic Treaty protected the continent’s wildlife, explorers supplemented imported fuel by burning seal or penguin blubber. When Sir Edmund Hillary drove from Scott Base to the South Pole in 1958, he cooked food and heated his tent with paraffin and kerosene and powered his Massey Ferguson tractor with petrol.

These days, aviation fuel, which does not begin to congeal until minus 50°C, is used for Ross Island’s main generators and aircraft. Portable field generators and vehicles run on Mogas, a low octane unleaded petrol. By allowing Scott Base to shut down its main generators, the wind farm has so far resulted in collective United States and New Zealand fuel savings of more than 450,000 litres a year. But it’s not Ross Island’s first attempt at an alternative energy source.

In the summer of 1962, the Americans installed a 1.8MW nuclear power station, run on a mix of uranium-235 and uranium-238, at McMurdo. But the McMurdo reactor – dubbed “nukey-poo” by its New Zealand neighbours – was plagued with problems and in 1967 plans to add nuclear power stations at the American bases at Byrd Station and the South Pole were shelved. After a 1972 inspection revealed a crack in a water tank used to provide radiation shielding, the McMurdo reactor was decommissioned.

The dismantled reactor, along with more than 70 tonnes of soil contaminated with radioactive isotopes such as caesium-137, was removed and shipped back to the United States via Lyttelton.

That was Antarctica’s only foray into nuclear power, but Ross Island’s wind turbines are not the first on the continent. At Australia’s Mawson Station, in East Antarctica, two wind turbines supply up to 70% of the station’s electrical energy. Small wind turbines power some remote field stations. And in the Antarctic summer, solar power provides energy to some field camps and monitoring stations.

Mogas generators are still used in most short-term field camps, but Leitch says Antarctica New Zealand’s plan is to make the portable field units more energy-efficient. The new generation of huts will have better insulation, glass doors to capture the solar gain of the 24-hour summer sunshine, and either more efficient diesel generators or solar or wind power generators.

Fossil fuel still plays a big role in Antarctica. The fuel tanker is expected to arrive at McMurdo this month. An icebreaker will travel ahead of it, cutting a channel through the sea ice to let the tanker through to the ice pier at McMurdo. Once it arrives it will take two days to pump the fuel from the ship to the tanks at the base of Observation Hill above McMurdo.

But dependence on fossil fuel is changing. With some more turbines, along with new plant to store water and energy when the wind farm is operating at full capacity, and a switch to electrical boilers and cookers, wind could one day soon supply all the island’s electrical needs.

Rebecca Priestley travelled to Scott Base on Antarctica New Zealand’s media programme. www.antarcticanz.govt.nz.

First published in the Listener, 7 January 2012.

Ernest Shackleton’s 100-year-old whisky

When Ernest Shackleton was ordering provisions for his 1907 expedition to Antarctica, he made it clear that along with the requisite tins of herrings, mulligatawny soup, gooseberry jam and marmalade, he and his men required a supply of whisky. Not just any whisky, but a fine Highland malt. Twenty-five cases of it.

When Shackleton left Antarctica in 1909, after reaching 88° 23′ south – the closest anyone had been to the South Pole – he left some of that whisky behind. Now, thanks to an international team of conservators and chemists, we know what the whisky looked like and how it was made. And whisky-lovers willing to pay £100 (NZ$200) for a bottle of the replica whisky that went on sale last month will know just what it tasted like.

Shackleton’s whisky had been forgotten until 2006, when conservators from the Antarctic Heritage Trust (AHT) discovered the corners of five frozen crates beneath Shackleton’s hut at Cape Royds. After three seasons during which conservators painstakingly chipped away at a century of ice accumulation in the crawl space beneath the hut, three of the crates labelled “Mackinlay’s Rare Old Highland Whisky” were removed last year. One crate was flown to Canterbury Museum to be thawed and examined. According to AHT conservator Lizzie Meek, it looked more like a 40kg block of ice than a crate of whisky.

“Over the years, water had gotten into the crate and filled up every nook and cranny and the whole thing was a big iceblock,” says Meek. The first sign that there were bottles inside came when the crate went through airport security at Christchurch. “The bottles showed up on x-ray and we could clearly see liquid inside some of them.”

At Canterbury Museum, in a specially prepared cold room, the crate, which had spent 100 years at temperatures down to minus 40°C, was gradually brought up to 4°C to thaw. Once the ice, speckled with lumps of scoria, was gone, conservators recovered 11 bottles of whisky, carefully wrapped in tissue paper and protective straw. Meek describes them as being in “fantastic condition.”

The AHT decided that as well as preserving the whisky crates and bottles, it had an opportunity to find out more about what was inside them. The initial plan was for a small sample of liquid to be removed to find out more about historic whisky making, but when the current owner of Whyte & Mackay, the parent company of Mackinlay’s, got involved, the project took a grander turn. Three bottles of whisky were transported to Whyte & Mackay in Scotland for analysis by the distillery’s chemists. The bottles travelled in style, in a high-tech chilly bin filled with ice and gel packs, handcuffed to the arm of Whyte & Mackay master blender Richard Paterson, on the private jet of Whyte & Mackay owner Vijay Mallya.

In Scotland, chemists at Whyte & Mackay’s Invergordon distillery, with input from analysts at the Scotch Whisky Research Institute in Edinburgh, subjected the whisky to a battery of tests. Under sterile conditions, a sampling needle was passed through the cork of each bottle to remove a 100ml sample.

After the liquid was analysed for variables such as microbiology, alcohol levels, pH and acidity, samples were sent to outside laboratories for further analysis. After the mass spectrometers and gas and liquid chromotographs had done their work – including radiocarbon-dating the whisky and measuring levels of ethyl esters, phenols, cations, anions, sugars and metals – it was up to a panel of 15 expert “noses” from the Scotch Whisky Research Institute to profile the whisky’s flavour. Using a fixed vocabulary, they scored the whisky as having a balance of “peaty, mature woody, sweet, dried fruit and spicy” aromas. (That’s not too bad for a scale that also includes such less desirable descriptors as “goat” and “stagnant drains”.)

The first thing the analysts noted, in a paper recently published in the Journal of the Institute of Brewing, was how well the whisky was preserved. Whisky ages in the cask, not in the bottle, and temperatures at Cape Royds had preserved the whisky in its 1907 state. Analysis revealed a well-preserved malt whisky of 47.3% alcohol by volume – high enough to stop the alcohol freezing – made with water from Loch Ness and using peat from the Orkney Isles.

When distilled, whisky is clear, like gin, with the colour coming over time from the wooden barrels in which the spirit is aged. Analysis of compounds formed from the breakdown of lignins from the cask maturation of the whisky, along with the levels of fructose and sucrose, revealed a whisky matured for five to 10 years in sherry casks made from American Oak.

Paterson then attempted to reconstruct Shackleton’s 1907 whisky as a blend of modern whiskies. The result, according to whisky expert and writer Dave Broom, who has tasted both the 100-year-old whisky and the replica, is “bang on”. A percentage of global sales from the replica whisky goes to the AHT, which stands to raise $500,000 for Antarctic conservation projects. The bottles that travelled to Scotland will be back in New Zealand soon, and will be returned to the crate, which will be resealed and returned to its place in Antarctica, at Shackleton’s hut. As for the other two crates found beneath the hut, the label on the side says they are brandy, and word is they are next in line for conservation.

First published in The Listener, 29 October 2011