by Barry Lopez
I’m convinced now that what I’ve found buried in the ice in front of me is a meteorite, a small dark rock, an object not of this Earth.
* * *
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WE’VE JUST RETURNED from seven hours of searching at Graves Nunataks, two miles distant. (Nunatak is an Inuit word for an isolated mountain peak standing proud of a large ice sheet.) It is mostly the wind that determines the length and shape of our days here. When it quietens, dropping below about ten knots, no longer thickening the atmosphere with loose snowflakes and creating an obscuring ground fog, it’s safe for us to leave camp and navigate with confidence between our camp and ice fields around the nunataks, where we’re looking for meteorites. We’re not concerned about suddenly losing sight of camp behind the contours of the surrounding hillocks of snow and ice; what we’re watchdog alert for is any sustained change in the intensity of the wind.
If it should pick up and hold, our workday is done.
With twenty-four hours of sunshine available almost every day during the height of the austral summer, from late November until mid-January, it’s not the advent of “night” and “day” that tells us when it’s time to take up again the search for meteorites. And it’s not just the wind that can hamper us. It’s the temperature as well. The colder it gets, generally, the shorter our workday will be.
We’ve all set our watches to the same minute, an additional precaution in a situation like this, where coordinating with one another is critical. We keep to New Zealand Daylight Time (NZDT), the time at Christchurch, 2,900 miles to the north, the city most of us rendezvoused in more than a month ago, and from which we flew to McMurdo Station. McMurdo, 719 miles north of our camp, the major American scientific base in Antarctica, also runs on “Kiwi time.” At 08:30 NZDT every morning we establish radio contact with McMurdo, conveying information about our weather and assuring them that all is well. If we’re not up on the radio at that time, someone in McMurdo will be opening a manual of emergency procedures to determine what the next step will be.
Three years before we arrived, four scientists, the first people to visit this part of Antarctica, landed nearby in a Twin Otter. They off-loaded two snow machines and together searched several square miles of bare-ice fields at the foot of the nunataks. They wanted to determine whether there were enough meteorites sitting on these stranding surfaces to warrant putting in a full team to collect them and to conduct a more thorough reconnaissance. An expensive and major operation, that. The four men flew back to McMurdo and later decided the area was rich enough in extraterrestrial material to warrant putting in a camp for a full forty-day field season.
We are that projected field party.
We spend our days at this moderately high altitude, in the coldest and most remote of Earth’s deserts, looking for bits of debris from a great shower of stones that daily peppers the planet. It’s the allure of this simple empirical task together with the ur-remoteness of the region that have brought me here. Also my friendship with the man in the turquoise windbreaker, John Schutt. For years we’ve been hoping to hatch a plan that would put us together in the field in Antarctica for a few weeks.
John, a geologist and alpine guide, is the director of our field party.
I get to my feet—at this point in my life the cold saps my strength a little more quickly than I’m comfortable admitting—and return to the westernmost of the three tents. I’m certain I’ve located the expedition’s 156th meteorite just a short ways from my and John’s tent during my evening stroll. I’ll describe it to John. After supper we’ll chip it free of the ice and collect it, observing all the necessary formalities.
I wait by the tent’s entrance—a collapsible canvas tunnel—until John finally looks my way. I mime putting food in my mouth and point sharply with my mitt to my chest. “I’ll get supper going,” I mean. John signals with a wave and a salute, and goes back to work on the snow machine.
In the middle tent at this same moment, the one at the apex of the triangle, the two women in our group, Nancy and Diane, have finished their supper and are preparing for bed. In the easternmost tent, Paul and Scott are playing pinochle. A little more than eight hours from now the four of them will drift over to our tent to hear the weather reports from twenty-two American field parties, all but three of them living in semipermanent heated camps set up across many thousands of square miles of ice, mostly on the western side of the continent. We will be especially attentive to the weather reports from camps within a thousand miles of us but we will identify most closely with the reports coming from the only other deep-remote cold camps. Like us, these two small field parties are living closer to the weather than those in the other camps.
Using our limited ability to predict the weather, based on changes in local barometric pressure, together with reports from the other camps and information McMurdo relays to us from their weather station, we’ve been reasonably successful in anticipating the sort of storms that will make a day of work impossible for us. In the morning, if the wind is up and a ground blizzard is blowing, the others will still make their way to our tent for “weather ops,” using numerous red, blue, and green cloth flags tied to bamboo poles anchored in patches of wind-hardened snow to guide them. (Nancy, Diane, and Paul have never camped in conditions like this and are especially anxious about having to use the latrine in a storm. It’s sheltered on three sides by snow walls and its perimeter is demarcated by flagged poles. During heavy weather, though, all you might be able to see is the next flag on your route.)
* * *
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SOME DAYS I wonder where the rest of us would be without John. He’s been out there for more than half an hour fixing one of the snow machines, going at it bare-fisted in the tight places that won’t admit a hand wearing a glove. At every turn—four-cycle engines, electronics, crevasse rescue—his knowledge far outstrips my own. Ever since we first met, eleven years ago at McMurdo Station, we’ve enjoyed our experience together “on the ice.” Whenever I’ve arrived here to accompany scientific field parties he’s always been staging gear for one of the meteorite teams.
An appetite for physical engagement with the world of snow, ice, and rock beyond our tent, and having an opportunity to work together, almost always in silence, are desires John and I share. We’re comfortable being confined in the limited space of a Scott tent, we split the cooking chores easily, and we observe the same unwritten rules that ensure each person a bit of privacy. I like the rhythm of our daily problem solving and the hours of stories and reminiscence we share in the tent on storm-bound days, the physical and technical challenge of the work the six of us all do, and the deep sleep that comes with exhaustion. Humans, I think, were built for this. We can do it superbly.
* * *
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WE’VE HAD A ROUGH TIME with weather. Five of us flew into McMurdo from Christchurch on December 4 to meet John. Since then, local weather, either at McMurdo or at our put-in site on upper Klein Glacier in the Queen Maud Mountains, has been too stormy for us to fly. Or the logistics to get clear of McMurdo have been too challenging, with four or five other scientific parties all trying to get out into the field at the same time.
We spent nineteen days in McMurdo before we were able to fly south, most of it working to stay busy. We didn’t need nineteen days to stage the expedition. Six or seven would have done it. We had to tune up and test-drive the snow machines. We had to get three of our party through two days of safety-and-rescue training. And we needed to prepare a dozen pallets for the cargo planes, strapping down our food boxes, personal gear, collection equipment, camp gear, and the snow machines and sleds. Two ski-equipped LC-130 Hercules aircraft would get us up to Klein Glacier. Once there, we’d off-load the pallets, set up a temporary camp, then start loading supplies onto our Nansen sleds, which we’d then tow behind the snow machines on a thirty-five-mile traverse to Graves Nunataks.
While those new to Antar
ctic camping learned how to refuel cookstoves, set up Scott tents, use portable radios, and navigate crevasse fields, John and I requisitioned food and inspected every piece of equipment we were taking into the field with us, looking for excessive wear or any flaws.
It frequently goes like this for scientific parties seeking to deploy from McMurdo. Waiting. All flight plans are tenuous because of the continent’s notoriously undependable weather. Some field parties, having secured the financial and logistical support of the National Science Foundation (NSF), and having worked out, painstakingly, a research plan and flown in to McMurdo, find their field season finally canceled. In the end, they were never able to get out of McMurdo—except for the return flight to Christchurch.
I used our long delay as conscientiously as I could. I continued my reading about chondrites and achondrites. I studied inorganic chemistry texts to better understand what my five companions were talking about. Ralph Harvey, the team’s principal investigator, offered me several blackboard sessions, which took me to the margins of my ability to comprehend the sometimes esoteric chemistry involved. (Because of the long delay in McMurdo, Ralph would not make it to Graves Nunataks with us. Scott, scheduled to replace Ralph midway through the expedition, did make it, but this arrangement limited Ralph to only three days in the field before he had to depart.)
Most every morning during the delay John and I walked over to the weather center at McMurdo to learn where we stood. With the elevated view the weather operations tower afforded us, we could quickly see whether our pallets had been loaded that morning or were still sitting in the same spot out there on the ice runway, so we had the beginnings of an answer to our question before we asked. (About a dozen anemometers that were torn apart by winds in excess of a hundred knots are mounted around the room on wooden plaques near the ceiling, like a frieze.) Are we still scheduled to go today? we ask. No, canceled. Maybe tomorrow? The answer to that is usually just “We’ll see” or “Maybe.” The meteorologists and flight planners don’t commiserate with people in a delayed field party. They don’t offer explanations or encourage hope. There are rumors enough around town, of course, without this. John and I leave Mac weather ops (McMurdo Station Weather Operations), nodding politely to members of other field parties in the room, all hoping for better news than we’ve just gotten.
One morning at the weather center a flight planner I’d worked with on earlier trips to Antarctica said she could offer me a seat on a helicopter ferrying supplies to a field camp at Cape Crozier, forty-five miles away on the east end of Ross Island. We weren’t going south that day, I knew, so I was immediately interested.
During the winter of 1911 three members of Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated 1910–1913 polar expedition had made the round trip from Scott’s winter quarters at Cape Evans, on the west end of Ross Island, just down the coast from McMurdo, to Cape Crozier. They would endure weeks of very cold temperatures—as low as −77° F—and the scientific research they went there to conduct at an emperor penguin colony at Cape Crozier would, regrettably, never be put to use.
I’d long hoped to be able to visit the ruins of a rock shelter that this small party had built at the cape to shield themselves during a storm, and had in fact made an unsuccessful attempt several years before this to locate it. As it happened, the flight planner who spoke to me that morning remembered this disappointment of mine and offered me a second opportunity, which I took.
Sometimes serendipity cancels out bad luck at McMurdo.
* * *
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ON THE MORNING of December 23, our bad luck ran out and we were airborne. The Hercs landed us and our gear at the upper (southern) end of Klein Glacier. We set up a temporary camp and prepared for the traverse to Graves. The next morning a fresh storm blew in shortly after we left. We were each towing two or three fully loaded sleds behind our snow machines as we climbed moderate slopes in thirty-knot winds, which became more and more challenging as the day went on. At one point a gusting wind punched through at the edge of my snow goggles. The sudden rush of violent, cold air caused my eyes to water. Tears splashed across the inside of the plastic lenses in my goggles and froze there, completely obscuring my view. I had to stop on a steep incline I was traversing to clear the lenses. While I did, the wind, blowing broadside to my sleds, began pushing the two of them down the slope, swinging them below me. In the swirling snow I could barely make out the others ahead. No one was following behind me, I knew, and the heavily loaded sleds were beginning to pull me down the incline.
Moments of mounting tension like this tend to stand out in retrospect, but in fact such moments are little more than predictable interruptions in a plan you can never assume will work smoothly anyway, especially in situations like this. To keep from panicking, you focus on what you have to address first, then move on to the next thing. I cleared my goggles, anchored them firmly against my face, inched ahead on the slope to get out in front of the sleds hanging below me, and followed the tracks of the sled ahead of me. Soon I had everyone in sight again.
They’d pulled up and were waiting.
We traveled sixteen miles that day, southeast from the head of Klein Glacier, gaining 1,600 feet in altitude before setting up a second temporary camp, hoping for better weather the following day. We positioned our tents near a small rock outcrop in the icecap called Inuksuq and remained there all the next day, pinned down by high winds. When the wind dropped, a hard, depthless blue sky replaced the layer of overcast above. From the height of Inuksuq, John picked out a route that would circumvent a crevasse field and take us to Graves Nunataks, which we could now see clearly, about fourteen crow-fly miles away (nineteen actual miles by snow machine, in order to bypass the crevasse field). We arrived there late that afternoon.
The clear weather and dintless skies held for another day and a half, during which we located and collected several dozen meteorites. Then a new storm confined us to our tents again, this time for six days. Our original plan had been to have our camp set up at Graves by December 12. By this point, then, we had lost nearly three weeks of time in the field. As it turned out, we would get in only eight more full days of searching for meteorites before our scheduled pullout date. There was nothing for it but to let the frustration turn to bemusement and to utilize any time we had, whenever the wind dropped, to pursue our search.
* * *
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OUR CAMP AT GRAVES is isolated geographically, but we’re also cut off electronically from the outer world. We have no satellite phone and no means of tuning in to an international news program, like the BBC’s. Our solar-powered radio communications with McMurdo are rudimentary, and McMurdo’s policy with deep-remote camps is not to pass on any personal news except of a death in the family.
I enjoy the sort of mental space this kind of isolation affords. There are no intrusions here, no unexpected inquiries or announcements. One can unfurl a thought without fear of interruption, unfurl it until one decides he’s finished with it. No phone rings. No doorbell, pager, or intercom sounds. No one knocks.
The isolation encourages you to think in a different way about what it means to be human, and to consider the long stretch of humanity’s epoch. And the strangeness of this place. Nearly everything on Earth can be referenced by using chemistry, physics, and biology. But that’s not the shape of reality here. The interior of Antarctica is about chemistry and physics, not biology: the rock exposed above the ice has a chemical composition; gravity, in the province of physics, causes the ice to flow downhill to the ocean. And it’s the pressure of accumulating snowfall that turns snow to ice in the firn zone below us. More physics. This is Earth without life. No birds fly across the sky. No plants grow. The spoor and tracks of animals do not appear. The wind scours. There’s no gurgle of flowing water. The polar night, like the polar day, is months long.
We, the six of us, and the scientists and workers at the South Pole, are all there is of biol
ogy here, for tens of thousands of square miles.
We’re camped in an abiotic ocean of seemingly stayed time and nearly undifferentiated space, beneath a fall of Archean light. Our presence seems as inconsequential as the death of a mayfly. Yet I am as comfortable in this place as one hand would be resting in the cradle of the other.
It feels so oddly safe here.
* * *
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METEORITES LAND IN a random pattern across the entire surface of Earth, falling day after day no more in one place than another. Most are lost to view immediately in the world’s oceans, lakes, and rivers. Many don’t stand out sufficiently amid Earth’s ordinary rocky debris to draw any notice. And of these, most weather and erode into fragments more or less quickly. In Antarctica, however, the unusual dynamics of the ice environment not only preserve an inordinate number of meteorites but actually concentrate many of them in clusters on top of the ice, in areas called stranding surfaces. (The blazing object we commonly see in the night sky, the “shooting” or “falling” star, is a meteor. A meteorite is what someone picks up on Earth, the metallic or stony remains of a meteoroid, which is any random bit of solar system debris with the potential to enter Earth’s atmosphere.) It’s in Earth’s atmosphere that the meteoroid becomes a meteor, because of its friction with the air. Hundreds of millions of meteoroids, many of them the size of sand grains, enter the Earth’s atmosphere every day. Most burn up entirely during their descent.
The majority of the meteorites that reach Antarctica make a comparatively soft landing on a cover of snow. Over time, as more snow falls on them (and the bottom of the moving ice sheet below them slowly melts, because of its friction with Antarctica’s bedrock and the ice sheet’s encounters with geothermal hot spots), these meteorites move down deeper in the layer of snow they landed on, until that layer reaches a transition zone. Pressure from the burden of snow above becomes sufficient at this point to reconfigure the snow crystals, turning them into crystals of ice. The meteorites thereafter lie embedded in a mass of moving ice, like raisins in a cake. As the mammoth ice sheets flow downhill toward the sea, they encounter bedrock obstructions, the most formidable and prominent of which is the continent’s spine, the Transantarctic Mountains. To get around these obstructions and continue on to the sea, the ice sheets flow slowly toward areas of least resistance—mountain passes. Where Antarctic bedrock stands proud of the flowing ice sheet—the case at numerous places in the Transantarctic Mountains, such as Graves Nunataks—the deep horizontal layers of the ice sheet are forced to bend upward and flow vertically. Eventually these layers reach the surface of the ice cap with their loads of meteorites, and the wind bares them to the sky.