The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
A breathtaking view of Antarctica
Teacher a National Geographic explorer, returns to herald wonders of continent
PORTLAND — For more than an hour Monday, the Portland Public Library became a window into a place like no other, as middle school teacher Sarah Harris took some two dozen residents on a multimedia visit to Antarctica.
Through videos, photos and virtual reality viewers, Harris summarized a trip she made to the continent last December as part of a National Geographic-sponsored program.
What her audience saw was an area not as snowy as people might have imagined, and certainly not as quiet as they might have hoped, what with steady winds and the calls and cries of huge colonies of penguins.
A 2008 graduate of Portland High School, Harris has a contagious enthusiasm for knowledge and learning best summed up in the address of her blog: educatorexplorer.com.
Two years ago, Harris applied to become a National Geographic Society explorer — a civilian recruited by the society to partake in a visit to a remote area and then return to share the experience.
“We fund and support groundbreaking scientists, conservationists, educators and storytellers,” according to the NGS website. “Every one of them is a National Geographic Explorer — infinitely curious about our planet, committed to understanding it, and passionate about helping make it better.”
In February 2017, Harris was notified she had been chosen as one of 35 explorers. They came from 26 states and also included three teachers from Canada. The explorers divided up into smaller groups and were assigned to visit Iceland, Greenland, Alaska, the Arctic or Antarctica.
After learning of her selection, Harris approached Superintendent of Schools Philip B. O’Reilly and explained the program in detail.
O’Reilly was “incredibly supportive” — even though it meant Harris would be away from teaching for a three-week period.
Harris was paired with two teachers: a chemistry teacher from Southern California interested in analyzing the waters around Antarctica, and a technology educator from Chicago who focused on sonic research.
The three women immediately bonded. They were tasked with measuring the impact of having tourists visit fragile ecosystems. In 2013-14, 37,000 people visited Antarctica. Last year, the total was 51,707.
In December, the explorers met in New York and flew 10 hours to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where they intended to stage for the next leg of their trip. But a looming general strike compelled Harris and her colleagues to leave sooner than they had intended.
However, the strike gave Harris, a social studies
teacher, a quick introduction to “the current political climate in Argentina” before she and her party set off for Ushuaia, 1,476 miles to the south.
There, in what is recognized as the southernmost city in the world, the explorers boarded a Lindblad cruise ship and set off for Antarctica.
In addition to the explorers, there were 150 tourists, NGS photographers and scientists on the ship. Among the “fascinating people” Harris’ team got to meet on the ship was a naturalist who has spent 20 winters in Antarctica.
As the manager of the base station at McMurdo Sound, the naturalist said his most taxing job was “conflict resolution — getting people to get along with one another,” Harris said.
Antarctica itself is unlike anywhere else, she said. By treaty, it is recognized as an area for “peaceful purposes” — study and research — that belongs to everyone and no one. No country “owns” Antarctica, she explained.
Every discovery must be shared with naturalists and scientists from the 53 countries that signed the Antarctic Treaty.
People who have spent one of the punishing winters there describe it “as akin to being on a different planet,” Harris said. The explorers did not go far into the continent itself, but instead made various stops on the Antarctic Peninsula, Harris said.
Because of the changeable weather and presence of icebergs and/or pods of whales, decisions about where the ship would stop “were made on the spot,” she said.
And while Portland endured fierce cold, the weather in summertime Antarctica was 30 degrees to 40 degrees — T-shirt weather for the Chicago teacher, Harris said.
That meant many of the photos Harris took were of rocky, treeless vistas devoid of snow, causing some of her middle school students to question whether she really was in Antarctica.
“Some of the kids thought I was working on
Long Island Sound off Old Saybrook,” she said.
Before they could land on shore, everything the visitors brought or wore had to be disinfected, to keep the land clear of leaves and bugs, Harris said.
One of the ports of call was host to a colony of 150,000 penguins, Harris said. The rule is tourists cannot come closer than 15 feet from a penguin.
However, “no one told the penguins,” who boldly waddled up to inspect the visitors.
As cute as penguins can be, Harris said they spend most of their time eating krill (small crustaceans) and squid, and expelling the waste — which results in acres of “dirty snow.”
The mix of krill and penguin guano smells “like the bird house at the Bronx Zoo,” Harris said.
Penguins travel in trenches they carve out of the snow.
Harris showed a photo of penguins trudging down a hill in their trenches while the tourists, clad in orange/red parkas, hiked up the hill in their own trenches.
The explorers did take to sea on Zodiacs and, at one point, were surrounded by a pod of 40 to 50 killer whales, and later by humpback whales, she said.
Harris showed one photo that captured “the circle of life” — a skeleton that had been picked clean of even the tiniest morsels. She then asked her audience to visit four tables set up around the interior of the Mary Flood Room to focus on details of the visit before posing questions to Harris about her journey.
Harris closed with a vignette: She had set a small video camera on a tripod and left it unattended as she explored one of the island stops.
It wasn’t long before a penguin clomped into view to inspect the camera, sniff it to see if it was worth eating, and then, having concluded it wasn’t, ambled off screen.
In the audience were Harris’ parents, Rick and Alison Harris.
At 3, Alison Harris said, having discarded the idea of becoming a rubbish-woman, her daughter announced “she was going to be a teacher.”
In succeeding years, “she never wavered” from that goal, her mother said. “She just had some sense she was going to be good at that.”