Freezing Temperatures, Glacial Winds, Volcanic Dust: All in a Day’s Work for Times Team in Antarctica
We arrived in New York with 10 terabytes of footage
and produced The Antarctica Series of four virtual-reality films shot on, above and below the ice: "A Shifting Continent," "McMurdo Station," "Three Six Juliet" and "Under a Cracked Sky."
Four of us made the trip: Graham Roberts oversees virtual-reality projects at The Times; Evan Grothjan has filmed Times
VR projects on five continents; Justin Gillis is a climate reporter; and I am the graphics editor for the Science desk.
By JONATHAN CORUMMAY 19, 2017
In this Times Insider piece, Jonathan Corum explains how a team of four reporters
and videographers were able to shoot a series of virtual-reality films in Antarctica, without seeing any of the footage.
Those cameras share a power source — a 25-pound block of lithium batteries
that makes airplane security cringe and is awkward to lug across ice — but they don’t share memory, so Evan had to keep track of multiple sets of 16 tiny memory cards, swapping them out barehanded in the freezing temperatures whenever problems arose.
After training, we were allowed to leave the relative safety of the station
and film ice in all its forms: the seasonal sea ice covering McMurdo Sound, the pressure ridges dotted with Weddell seals and their weaning pups, the Texas-size floating pancake of the Ross Ice Shelf, a cascading edge of the East Antarctic ice sheet, and more glaciers than we could count or name.
We packed at least two of everything, including prototype cameras we used to take the first virtual-reality stereo footage ever shot in Antarctica.
