Everyone in Antarctica knows Ivan. Even those that haven’t had the pleasure of riding inside of him—in comfortable seats, surrounded by wood paneling and the pleasant sounds of jazz warbling from his internal speakers as he rumbles slowly along the ice—have heard of him and probably walked right past him, sitting pretty near McMurdo Station’s cafeteria in his iconic orange-and-white livery.
Recently, rumors grew that Ivan’s time on the ice was coming to an end, and it was time for the old bus to be retired. This caused an outcry among his longtime fans, who feared that he would end up unceremoniously scrapped for parts—a potentially sad end for such an iconic vehicle.
Ivan the Terra Bus arrived in McMurdo Sound in 1994, a shiny new supplement to the existing Delta passenger transport vehicles that had been brought over in the 1970s by the U.S. Navy. This fleet was responsible for bringing people from the runways out on the ice, where passenger planes would land after taking off from New Zealand, to the two national bases on Ross Island—America’s McMurdo and New Zealand’s smaller Scott Base. The hefty vehicle was about 46 feet long and 12 and a half feet wide, with a turning radius of 160 feet—the equivalent of the width of a football field. It had enormous tires with nearly six-foot diameters, and a ladder was required to climb up into its interior, which could accommodate up to 56 passengers. “It was warm and big and impressive,” remembers scientist David Theil, who rode in Ivan in 1995 when he was still almost brand new.
Antarctic veterans remember the contest that was held among McMurdo residents to name the bus when it arrived. Roy Harrison, a mechanic, remembers being disappointed that his own suggestion, “Magic Bus” (in honor of the song by The Who) wasn’t chosen. The winning name “Ivan the Terra Bus,” was, of course, a reference to Ivan the Terrible, legendary medieval tsar of Russia; there’s also the happy coincidence that “Terra Bus,” the name that the Canadian manufacturer Foremost gave the model in 1981, sounds very much like a pun on the two Ross Island mountains that rise above McMurdo Station—Mount Erebus and Mount Terror. Those mountains were named after the two ships that first explored the regions, HMS Terror and Erebus (more famous, perhaps, for later being lost in the Arctic with John Franklin’s doomed expedition).
“Ivan the Terra Bus” was suggested by the engineer John Wright, whose main accomplishment was masterminding the thousand-mile snow road between McMurdo Station, on the edge of the continent, and Amundsen-Scott South Pole station at its center. That wasn’t a route Ivan ever took, though. His job was solely to rumble along between the airfields and the stations, and pretty soon after arriving he became a staple of life at McMurdo, the subject of songs, jokes, and fond memories. Bill Jirsa and Allison “Sandwich” Barden wrote this ditty during the 2006-7 summer season to celebrate Ivan:
He’s Ivan the Terra Bus / He’s bringing our friends to us / He took some friends away / Took them down to the Ice Runway / Someday he’ll come for us …/ He’s Ivan the Terra Bus!
There were certain quirks about Ivan that his drivers and passengers grew to love. He was rather slow compared to the smaller Deltas, taking over an hour to reach McMurdo from the airfields, but the ride was always memorable. The day the vehicle was unloaded from the cargo ship at the ice pier, an overenthusiastic driver backed Ivan into a bollard, resulting in a large dent on his rear bumper. This dent, which went unfixed, was forever known as “Charlie’s Folly” after the driver, and was marked thusly with permanent marker. Stickers were plastered all over Ivan’s charming wood-paneled interior, mementoes of Antarctic projects, excursions, and memes—such as a picture of a penguin holding a knife with the slogan “BECOME UNGOVERNABLE.”
Bex Henderson first arrived on the ice in 2018, long after Ivan had become part of everyday life at the station, but she was still honored to get to drive him every day. It wasn’t an easy job. “He had a whole set of instructions just to even get him turned on,” she remembers, involving a 30-to-60 minute engine warm-up period, and easily fogged windows that often meant having to drive with poor visibility for the beginning of a ride. But, she says, “Ivan could just make it through anything. I mean, he just floated across when the roads went bad,” as opposed to the Deltas and the 65-passenger Kress trailer, which often got bogged down in slushy snow and transitional terrain, and led to passengers being stranded out on the ice.
Some of the newer vans that arrived after Ivan were preferred for their speed and comfort, when it came to getting to and from the base quickly, but Ivan was always the slow but steady old reliable of the airfield fleet. “Have you really been to Antarctica if you didn’t get picked up in Ivan?” Henderson says.
Ivan’s impending retirement was a cause for alarm among his passengers and fans. As replacement parts stopped being manufactured, repairs became difficult and fixes required increasingly expensive manufacturing and engineering. That’s a lot of money and effort for a 30-year-old bus, no matter how beloved, especially at a time when the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic efforts are facing increasing budget cuts and threats from political upheaval.
Eric Chevreuil, a longtime USAP worker in various departments including supply and IT, was distressed to find out during the 2024–25 summer season that Ivan’s fate had been sealed. The beloved Terra Bus had apparently been slated for auction at Port Hueneme, California, due to be inevitably scrapped for metal value or, Chevreuil imagined, bought cheaply to decorate someone’s roadside farm equipment store and then left to rust. Chevreuil was determined to prevent that from happening.
“Ivan was a safe haven, a whole experience by itself, especially on our first deployment, [our] first trip from the icefield to the station,” he remembers. “Warm, wooden panels, some jazz music in the background, muffled sounds of various conversations (56 seats), record breaking 15 to 20 mph at 2200 rpm max, the ice outside, sometimes fog or blizzard…”
Chevreuil contacted museums across America and various NSF personnel, making the case that Ivan was an important artifact of Antarctic history that deserved to live on. Soon he was relieved to hear the news that Ivan had been given an eleventh-hour pardon, and would be shipped not to the scrapyard but instead to Christchurch, New Zealand.
It seems that the groundswell of protective nostalgia for Ivan and his legacy at McMurdo helped save him from the scrapper. Especially for people like Chevreuil and Henderson, who caught the tail end of Ivan’s legendary lifespan, Ivan represents an earlier era of Antarctic living, one which is rapidly fading into memory.
“[Ivan] was a mark of an older time, which I think a lot of people—especially people who had been there for years—had that special connection to, as things at McMurdo changed so much,” Henderson says.
When Ivan first arrived, McMurdo had a bowling alley, a greenhouse, multiple bars, and an old-school boy’s club culture still very much influenced by the Navy, which only turned over McMurdo operations fully to the NSF in 1993, shortly before Ivan’s arrival.
The base has evolved over the years, with new facilities replacing beloved old ones, and certain more casual aspects of life on the ice (such as drunken partying) restricted, due at least in part to the rising awareness, on the ice and off, of McMurdo’s persistent culture of sexual harassment. That kind of change is very much welcome, but material remnants of an older McMurdo are still mourned as they are deprecated, demolished, or consigned to the scrapyard.
With Ivan arriving safely in New Zealand last week, at the close of the Antarctic summer season, his devoted riders and drivers from over the years can breathe a sigh of relief. According to a statement by an NSF spokesperson, “Ivan is currently parked in Christchurch while NSF works with partners to determine its long-term home. USAP will continue to use other all-terrain vehicles on the continent to transport personnel.”
The rumor among Antarctic workers is that Ivan will likely be displayed at the International Antarctic Centre in Christchurch, but it’s possible he might end up at a museum somewhere else in the world. Either way, Ivan will live on as a beloved part of Antarctic history.