Martin's Antarctic Visit  
January 2004  

The building at the centre of the picture is the Crary Science and Engineering Center, the scientific heart of McMurdo Station. Simply known as the Crary Lab' it was opened in 1992 and replaced some dilapidated and inadeqaute science facilities that have since been demolished. The Crary Lab' contains offices, laboratories and freezers that are the temporary home of hundreds of scientists each year. It is a little oasis in the sense that only scientists and science support staff are allowed there, able to escape from the noise, dirt and general ugliness of McMurdo Station.

The lab' is named after Albert P.Crary, a leading American polar geophysicist and science administrator of the 1950s-1980s. I wish I had had the opportunity to meet him because he was one of the first people to pursue scientific studies in the early 1950s of the Ellesmere ice shelves and ice islands of the Canadian Arctic, where I did my doctoral research and began my polar science career.

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