Have you ever met with those black and white photos shot during Marilyn Monroe’s visit to American troops in Vietnam? If it happens to you, take two minutes to look over them: she is wearing a short chenille jumper, she has got short and curly hair, a porcelain skin and a changing smile… all the requisites to be a Venus at that time and not only… The soldiers are fanning out around her, quite close to the photographer too, so that you can look at their faces: heads stretching in every direction, pale-blue, with short and very tidy hair, wide open eyes, emaciated but smiling faces.

It is a perfect moment, come out of the photomagician’s top hat. It talks about men in an infernal circle, about their impulses, sure, but also about their very human desire of normality and beauty, that, at least for a while, can snatch them from a too hard routine. She, Marilyn, slung there, in the Asiatic jungle, directly from the USA. Looking at that photo, I guess how it ran: the wait of previous days, the confirmation, the denial, then the organization to carry her safely, the officers’ greeting, the soldiers’ attempts to have a chat…In short, life at the base was upset, for one day, by the event. She, tiny in the middle, is looking, listening and answering, but with her mind away, far, unattainable.

I know I risk fans’ and geologists’ anger if I say that here, in Mc Murdo, it is a star: the drill core. OK, OK. I know it makes you laugh, but consider it a provocation, not as surreal as it may seem. They have been waiting for years, they minutely studied every detail, not only regarding the choice of the site, but also its cataloguing, its care; they even established real keepers watching over it 24 hours a day. They are the “curators”. Moreover, they sharpened every possible way to hear every syllable it will deign to pronounce in all the ways it knows: colour, thickness, consistency of sedimentary strata, microscopic fragments of fossils, composition and shape of clastic pieces, even the cracks and the fractures are recorded and interpreted in a maniacal, obsessive research of every possible feature. Concentrating all there, in a few centimetres width, in a cylinder of rock, mud and water. Because, let us be clear, in the end it is nothing more and nothing less than this… Hoping to read and interpret it correctly (see further explanations by ANDRILL research teams).

Certain and immediate is its lunar beauty and surely inexplicable everything researchers can get. It is a beauty that leaves nobody unmoved, you in Italy least of all, considering your e-mails about the images of the cores published. Two weeks ago our star arrived at last, troubling, from a very democratic point of view, every ANDRILL member’s life here at the base. Among the settlements adopted by the troop there has been my passage to night work. Actually, I have been working for some days and I rest in daylight. Because of the bewilderment Italy-Antarctica, I live and work according to your own rhytms there, even if most of our team live 12 hours before me…. or maybe after me and before you? Or after you and before them..Goodness knows! Let us say that there is a little temporal confusion, mixing, pleasantly, with the spatial one. These days I have got another proof regarding how cores direct the rhytm of our lives. In fact, last days the drlling stopped because of the need to change the drill bit. Thanks to the equation no drilling – no cores, they decided, guess? one day rest. It was the right moment for the traditional business trip and so it was. Some kilometres far from the base, there are some of the most important historical sites. We placed in little groups and like good tourists (our turn by night) we visited Schackleton’s hut – expedition 1907/1909 – and Scott hut – expedition 1911, the one made famous by the challenge, tragically lost, with Amudsen. One of the two huts was near a penguins’ area, and we had to have a look. So I prevent you from saying that I was in Antarctica and I saw no penguin… I admit they are as enchanting as adaptive creatures. It was a colony of a thousand individuals, Adele species, black and white, almost all lying towards wind and protecting their themselves.

But it was strange: the natural side, except the landscape, did not impress me at first. If you remember one of the first passages, where I talked about explorers, imagining them on a chair with a cup of hot coffee… well, I visited authentic historical places, where probably that scene really happened. I saw the chairs, the cups and the spoons I imagined. But also wool socks, egg-shells, sleeping-bags (real ones), oilcloth trousers, the smell of fat seal and horse. I can say I was wrong. I must confide: what does not scan, and I cannot imagine, is how they could live all there, the time of an expedition which, at that time, normally lasted two years. They arrived in summer, the whole winter (dark for 4 months and a temperature of -30°C), they rested there and the second summer started the real expedition:
4 months;
by foot, with some dogs or horses;
towards the South Pole (1400 km)
and return.
During my return, in the warm of the tracked vehicle, I made another effort to understand: the home road was a beaten track on the Ross platform, equal to the distance run by the explorers in a good day walk. Distance: about 35 km; time, at maximum, possible, speed: 2 hours! How can it be? Nothing to do; even maths repels my attempt to understand hard work, endurance, determination, dreams, ideas…yes, ideas and dreams…