Southern Exposure

Logistics manager for NSF’s Office of Polar Programs lays groundwork for Antarctic research projects

By Jim Raper

David Bresnahan ’70 was a business major at Old Dominion, but it was a wet suit, not a business suit, that got him his first job in Antarctica.

He parlayed a summer internship on the frozen continent into a career with the U.S. Antarctic Program, which is administered by the National Science Foundation. During his 35 years with the NSF, Bresnahan has helped to plan thousands of research projects and rubbed shoulders with some well-known people, including Bill Clinton and the explorer Sir Edmund Hillary. Also, earlier this year, he organized a historic traverse that accomplished the first ever transport of supplies over land – or over ice – from the coast of the continent nearly 1,000 miles to a station at the South Pole.

His job as a logistics manager in the NSF Office of Polar Programs would never have come about had he not been a scuba diver when he was a student at Old Dominion. His chances for a job in Antarctica were helped along, too, by his camping experiences as a Boy Scout in Northern Virginia, where he grew up.

In 1967, during his sophomore year, Bresnahan worked part time as a diver for the school’s Institute of Oceanography and was active in the campus Dive Club. Lenny Nero ’71 (M.S. ’76) and Steve Webb ’69 were his dive buddies. “The director of the Oceanographic Institute, Dr. Jacques Zaneveld, had a grant for research in Antarctica and he had selected Lenny and Steve to go south June-to-September in 1967,” Bresnahan remembers. “But Steve decided not to go and Dr. Z needed a replacement on short notice. I was working with Lenny already as a diver, which was crucial, but I was not a biology student and didn’t want to be.”

He says he was uncertain of his chances during most of the job interview. But Zaneveld finally touched on just the right subject. “He asked me if I had any cold weather camping experience, and I launched into a detailed discussion of my Boy Scout background. It included lots of winter camping. At the time, I didn’t know that Dr. Z had a long history with Boy Scouts in Norfolk.”

That first trip was during winter on Antarctica, when temperatures range from frigid to downright deadly – the record low at the South Pole is minus 117 degrees Fahrenheit. Still, Bresnahan says, he and Nero did dives to collect samples off the sea floor near McMurdo Station, which is on McMurdo Sound about 2,000 miles south of New Zealand. “We were one of the first groups to conduct regular science diving during the Antarctic winter,” he says.
Also during that first trip, Bresnahan experienced the kind of Antarctic incident that could make one think twice about ever going back.

He and Zaneveld were traveling during the austral winter, when it is almost always dark, in a vehicle with treads like a tank. “We were crossing a crack in the sea ice when, suddenly, the back of the vehicle slipped in. Dr. Z and I jumped out. He broke his heel in the jump. So we’re there on the ice and we realize that the radio is in the vehicle, which has its back end down in the water. I had no desire whatsoever to crawl in to get to the radio. So I set out running the 2H miles back to the station in the dark and in the minus-30-degree cold. Lenny says that when I burst through the door at the station, all I could do was croak.”

Bresnahan returned with the rescue team and was helping to carry Zaneveld to another vehicle when a mechanic who was assisting him fell through a crack in the ice. “Like most mechanics, he had his pockets full of tools. He was weighted down to sink really fast. But I reached around and just by chance I caught his hood with my hand and was able to yank him out of the water.”

Anytime a person is pulled out of the water, or emerges from a dive in a wet suit, “you become glazed in ice like a donut in a matter of seconds,” Bresnahan said.

The cold is hard to imagine, he adds. “Perhaps the most startling thing I ever experienced in Antarctica was that first time I went into the water in a wet suit. The water is a few degrees below freezing because of the salinity. The air temperature is much, much colder. I was holding onto a line waiting for my wet suit to warm up and the effect was shocking.”

Bresnahan says he has never been afraid to dive under ice. “In the old days we’d just find a crack in the ice and maybe expand it a bit with a chain saw. Today we have a large drill” to create dive holes 4 feet in diameter.

And as for finding your way back? Not a problem, he says. “Water clarity in Antarctic waters, particularly during the winter and early spring, is so pure. You have visibility of maybe 1,000 feet. You don’t find this anywhere else in the world. Around Norfolk a diver is lucky to see his fins.” Only in the late austral summer do plankton blooms lower visibility.

Bresnahan stopped doing research diving years ago, and he is quick to point out that he is not a scientist. Nevertheless, he has fond memories of his diving experiences in Antarctica, and he enjoys explaining why researchers are so eager to jump into the cold, cold water.

“The unique thing with these waters is that scuba divers can reach benthic (sea bottom) communities that are more common in much deeper water elsewhere. The giant sea spiders and certain sponges are examples. Metabolism in this water is slow, as it is at great depths.” The depth limit for most scuba diving is about 200 feet.

Most of Bresnahan’s work with the NSF happens now at the organization’s offices in Arlington, Va. He travels to Antarctica only for the austral summer. During his last trip, one of his duties was to oversee a pilot expedition of large, tracked ice vehicles from McMurdo Station to the South Pole Station. All previous deliveries to the South Pole Station had been by aircraft, which were not able to transport some items that are especially large or heavy. Occasionally, structures and instruments had to be disassembled before flight and reassembled under difficult conditions at the South Pole Station. “Reaching the Pole safely and returning to McMurdo (the two-way trip took two months and covered more than 2,000 miles) over the same track represents an outstanding accomplishment,” Bresnahan says.

Former President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore are two of numerous politicians who have been briefed by Bresnahan about Antarctica and NSF operations there. Sir Edmund Hillary, the famed conqueror of Mt. Everest who also established New Zealand’s first year-round research station on Antarctica in 1957, visited McMurdo last year and got a VIP tour from Bresnahan and other NSF staffers.

NSF funds between 150-200 research projects involving Antarctica each year, and Bresnahan is the logistics manager responsible for all of them. He helps with air travel to the continent, living arrangements, instrumentation needs, helicopter flights on the continent, land and sea transportation to work sites, diving equipment, laboratory facilities, and numerous other mundane or emergency needs. “We put together a complex plan for each project,” he says, “but sometimes weather can make you change priorities.”

Bresnahan has worked with several ODU researchers over the years, including Eileen Hofmann, professor of ocean, earth and atmospheric sciences. Her work, much of which has involved the shrimp-like krill eaten by seals and penguins, has taken her to Antarctica a half dozen times since the late 1980s. “I’ve worked with David quite a bit,” she said. “In the Antarctic, logistics drives projects as much as the science does. He makes the ships work and the supplies show up. People like him make it happen.”

Twenty-six nations, all signatory to a 45-year-old treaty under which the continent is administered, have Antarctic research stations – the United States has three, including McMurdo. Scientists from at least 40 different countries line up looking for research slots, and the reasons are many, Bresnahan says. Antarctica is a prime spot for research into ozone depletion and climate change. It has been a gentle landing area (50 percent larger than the United States) for meteorites, which tend to be better preserved than elsewhere. The South Pole Station, which would be below sea level without its ice, is actually 9,000 feet above sea level and a good place to put a telescope. Astronomers also like looking skyward from 90 degrees south, where the earth’s rotation does not interrupt the viewing.

Antarctica also has four species of penguins and a 5 million-square-mile ice sheet that is 15,000 feet in some places and contains 70 percent of the world’s fresh water. The ice buildup, however, has been slow because precipitation rarely falls. “It actually qualifies as a desert climate,” Bresnahan explains. “Not much snow falls, but it doesn’t go away. And it blows around a lot.” It is the coldest and windiest of the earth’s seven continents.

The research advantages definitely outweigh the hardships, however, and the NSF strives to make the research experience rewarding, he says. “I love to hear a researcher say, ‘I can get more done in Antarctica than at my home institution.’ Of course, one reason people get so much done, and I’m talking about during the busy austral summer, is that there is nearly 100 percent daylight. But it is also possible because of the excellent support that NSF provides.”