Freezing Temperatures, Glacial Winds, Volcanic Dust: All in a Day’s Work for Times Team in Antarctica<br />We arrived in New York with 10 terabytes of footage<br />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."<br />Four of us made the trip: Graham Roberts oversees virtual-reality projects at The Times; Evan Grothjan has filmed Times<br />VR projects on five continents; Justin Gillis is a climate reporter; and I am the graphics editor for the Science desk.<br />By JONATHAN CORUMMAY 19, 2017<br />In this Times Insider piece, Jonathan Corum explains how a team of four reporters<br />and videographers were able to shoot a series of virtual-reality films in Antarctica, without seeing any of the footage.<br />Those cameras share a power source — a 25-pound block of lithium batteries<br />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.<br />After training, we were allowed to leave the relative safety of the station<br />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.<br />We packed at least two of everything, including prototype cameras we used to take the first virtual-reality stereo footage ever shot in Antarctica.
