ST. PETERSBURG: From the deck of his ship captured by ice floes off Antarctica, Yuri Medunitsin stared into the distance and didn’t like what he saw. The sky was dark, as always at this time of year, he recalled, but there was no mistaking the colossal shape drawing close: a towering iceberg capable of crumpling the vessel with 107 men aboard.

As the current carried the Magdalena Oldendorff ever closer toward the giant frozen mass, Medunitsin and some of his companions feared the worst. Then, suddenly, the ship veered, carried by the water flow, and passed the iceberg unscathed.

For essentially the entire month of June, a team of Russian scientists trying to get home, along with the crew of the Magdalena sent to fetch them, remained trapped at the bottom of the world, struggling to avoid a disaster-film fate.

Surrounded by walls of ice that its engines were not powerful enough to cut through, the Magdalena was left to the mercy of the elements. Food was running out, electricity rationed. Not until the end of June did rescue arrive, in the form of helicopters that sliced through torturous winds to reach the ship.

Finally arriving home just days ago, the Russian researchers now can thaw out and reflect on their ordeal. To hear them tell it, their hypothermic travails simply go with the territory.

Voyagers have been trying to make the Antarctic work for their purposes for nearly two centuries. Russian expedition leader Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen, Englishman Edward Bransfield and American Capt. Nathaniel Palmer all claimed first sightings of Antarctica in 1820. Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen was the first to reach the South Pole, in 1911, and since 1959 an international treaty has designated Antarctica neutral territory open to scientific exploration by many countries.

After recent financial cutbacks, Russia staffs just four of its eight stations on the continent, housing about 90 year-round residents. A similar number joins them during summer months.

At the inland Vostok station, where the coldest temperature on Earth was recorded at 129 degrees below zero, researchers have discovered a huge lake about 2 1/2 miles beneath the ice. It contains million-year-old water never exposed to the atmosphere and possibly containing previously unknown microbes and bacteria.

The tradeoffs for such breakthroughs become clear from time to time when researchers become trapped. Jerri Nielsen, an American doctor, discovered she had breast cancer while stationed at the US base at the South Pole in 1999 and had to be evacuated under arduous conditions. Another American doctor, Ronald Shemenski, had to be retrieved from the pole last year when he developed gallstones and pancreatitis.

The Magdalena was not the first ship to become trapped by ice, but this was the first time in years that such a massive rescue operation was undertaken.

With the Southern Hemisphere winter fast approaching, the window for leaving was closing when the 74 Russians boarded the ship, with a crew of 33 sailors and pilots, and headed out on May 30. Within hours of their departure from Novolazarevskaya, a coastal station that Russia maintains in Antarctica, the German- owned supply ship Magdalena became trapped.

On one side was the continental ice barrier rising 130 feet into the air. On the other, a frozen ocean and more than a hundred icebergs, some emerging from the water as high as 60 feet and one an estimated 29 miles long. The winds howled and visibility sometimes dropped to zero.—Dawn/The Washington Post News Service.