What do you do when your ship is stuck in sea ice, devoid of coffee and toilet paper? Make art of course!
The aptly named Rowan Frost and Peter Kimball devised an icy art installation to keep themselves and the crew of their ship, the RSV Aurora Australis, from going stir crazy when they got stuck in Antarctic sea ice last October.
Of course, this little project only occupied a handful of people for four days. The RSV Aurora Australis was carrying more than a hundred people and was stuck for weeks.
Other diversions included a barbeque on the ice, reading, watching movies, bicycling (not a huge success, according to Clay Kunz, a Research Engineer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who was also on that research cruise), and observing a minke whale who frequented a nearby whole in the ice. Kunz says that, coffee and toilet paper aside, the hardest part about being stuck was not knowing how long they'd be there. Still, Kunz says he'd do it again ... just not this year.
