Location: Recovery Lake “B”, northern part, 82º 37’ S, 17º 52’ E
Weather: Partly cloudy, -26 C, wind 10 kts.

Four kilometres out of the main camp, just after a stop for gravity measurements, the oil pressure warning lamp lit up.  The driver, Stein, jumped out to check and found a large pond underneath the engine – and a long, black trail in the snow.  The hydraulic oil tank was empty, and the rest of the content was nicely distributed as a thin film all over the engine compartment and the rear wagon.  There was only one thing to do: park the vehicle and call home for assistance and 60 litres of refill.

As it turned out, a hydraulic main hose had slipped off the oil pump.  The system is under pressure, and the oil sprayed like a fountain the moment the hose slipped.  How could this happen? Well, it’s an ordinary rubber hose fitted with a hose clamp.  A few years of wear and tear, temperature changes from minus 70 C to plus 90 C, a pressurized system – and Murphy’s law can be applied.

The Antarctic Treaty and its Environmental Protocol demand that Antarctica be kept unaffected by human activities, as far as this is possible.  All waste should be taken out of the continent, all spills should be picked up – in particular oil spills like this.  This aside, we do not want to leave behind such traces, and we are of course equipped to deal with them.  The mess on the vehicle itself had to be cleaned off with absorbents; later to be shipped off the continent and treated as special waste.  And then there was the oil pond and the trail in the snow…

We took our shovels to work, and in the end a cubic meter of contaminated snow was collected and taken back to the main camp, where engine and environment manager Svein applied further measures.  We can hardly take a cubic meter of snow back home, so the next step was to melt it.  Oil and water separate quickly, and relatively clean water could be drained from the bottom.  In the end we were left with some 50 liters of spill oil.  All in all we were able to collect about 80 % of the mess.  This is now on a drum, and will be shipped to South Africa for further treatment.

One delicate question remains. If the oil had been left where it was, it would have snowed down quickly.  It would have been buried deeper and deeper in the ice cap, and finally melted out of the ice shelf or an ice berg somewhere in the Weddell Sea – after hundreds of thousands or millions of years without any harm to life.  Instead we spent some litres of fuel to melt the contaminated snow. The exhaust escaped into the atmosphere to add yet another measure of greenhouse gas, and thus became an immediate contribution to one of our planet’s most urgent problems.

Svein with two canisters of collected spill oil.  Photo: Stein Tronstad/NPI