by Barry Lopez
All around us is the silence of deep space.
Nancy calls out, “John, what do you call this place?”
“Heaven.”
“No, no. That’s what you call it. What do people call it?”
He doesn’t answer.
The cirque has no name, nor do the peaks above or the spurs radiating from the main ridge, the arêtes. Descriptive, eponymous, fanciful, memorializing, and valorizing nomenclature has not made it this far. The place seems so indifferent to our presence that for one of the few times in my life I find myself gazing into an enormous space with no sense of the time in which it exists. Most of the interior of Antarctica actually seems like this to me, not just uninspected or unnamed but unknown. It has not yet been snared in a catalog of designations and coordinates, of metes and bounds. The state of relief I feel, resting on my back in a slot in this boulder field, out of the wind and staring up at the surrounding ramparts of the cirque, causes me to hear John’s response—heaven—not as a synonym for conventional feelings of ecstasy but as a word characterizing the absence of disintegration.
We rested there for an hour before climbing up out of the cirque and entering the other world.
* * *
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AT THE FOOT of the Wilson Piedmont Glacier in northern Victoria Land, on the west coast of McMurdo Sound, some eighty-five miles by air north-northwest of McMurdo Station, is an indentation called the Bay of Sails—more of a bight, actually, than a bay. It is commonly assumed that the name derives from a recurrent natural phenomenon, the grounding here of large icebergs. Seen from a distance on a bright summer day, the bay appears to be crowded with sailboats racing before the wind. In fact, it was named after a technique members of a sledge party used, in the austral spring of 1911, to assist them in crossing the sea ice. They rigged masts and sails to help propel their man-hauled sledges.
Eight years before I made the trip to Graves Nunataks, I joined a team of benthic ecologists working under the sea ice in McMurdo Sound. Our field season eventually took us to the Bay of Sails and to a series of dives we made around the bases of grounded icebergs there. (Benthic ecologists study communities of organisms living on the bottom, or benthos, of bodies of water.) The National Science Foundation was funding the project in order to determine, in part, how polluted Winter Quarters Bay was, McMurdo Station’s small natural harbor, which is ice-free for only a few weeks in late summer. (The harbor basin, about the size, shape, and depth of a large European soccer stadium, was named by members of a 1901–1904 British expedition, the first serious effort to reach the South Pole, who overwintered on that shore.) Early in the history of McMurdo Station, when it was being operated by the U.S. Navy, the military dumped construction debris, raw garbage, and barrels of toxic waste on the sea ice of Winter Quarters Bay. When the ice melted during the short summer each year, all this waste sank to the bottom of the bay. Eventually the bay gained the distinction of being the most contaminated harbor in the world, its bottom covered with decommissioned shipping containers, transformers leaking PCBs, rusting barrels of corrosive fluids, broken machinery, and discarded furniture and mattresses.
We spent the early days of our field season collecting samples of organic life from the bottom of the harbor, which we then compared in the lab at McMurdo with bottom samples taken from unpolluted waters in close proximity to Winter Quarters Bay. During the latter days of the project we began studying places in McMurdo Sound where the benthos had also been radically disturbed but by natural or nonanthropogenic events, such as iceberg groundings.
On the day I’m remembering, we crossed McMurdo Sound by helicopter and landed alongside a massive iceberg in the Bay of Sails. Its sheer, brilliantly lit walls, abutting the frozen sea at a 90-degree angle, were impossible to take in without sunglasses. We drilled a four-inch-wide hole through about seven feet of sea ice next to the berg, then placed explosives there to create an opening large enough for us to use as a dive hole. Underwater here, we discovered the same extraordinary clarity we’d seen everywhere else in McMurdo Sound, except in the self-contained basin of Winter Quarters Bay. This early in the austral summer, before the annual plankton bloom, we were able to measure an astonishing 900 feet of lateral visibility. This meant that if the letters were large enough, we could read a billboard at this distance, or looking right and left underwater here, we could take in 1,800 feet of the side of the iceberg we were working alongside.
Above the surface of the sea ice, the regal presence of the icebergs, like austere blocks of alabaster, had an altogether different look than they did underwater. Below the surface they seemed malign, vaguely threatening, the nuptial whites of the carapace above being a deceptive guise. No one was comfortable swimming close to them, especially in the shadows where they had plowed into the bottom, like ships run aground.
We surveyed the communities of mostly motile sea life here—starfish, scallops, urchins, nemertean worms—at the depth we routinely worked at (65 feet), and then began photographing a series of small scientific platforms. These square metal tiles, mounted on the tips of steel posts embedded in the bottom, supported communities of sponges and other small sedentary life-forms. Most of the platforms, erected twenty years before, had been destroyed by icebergs; those that remained gave some hint of what type of sessile, or sedentary, communities come and go in this periodically disturbed environment.
The water is extremely cold, 28.6° F (3.4° F below the freezing point of freshwater and about 0.2° F above the freezing point of seawater). After an hour down here, most of us are ready to surface and warm up. On this day, however, with the day’s work done, I wanted to linger. Stretched out horizontally on my back in the currentless water, forty feet below the dive hole, I started to roll over slowly, like an idling dolphin. My eyes traveled first across the underside of the sea ice cover above me, with its dark communities of epontic (ice-associated) algae, until they reached the distant edge of the ice cover, meeting the dark water there and then the field of black cobbles below me. The cobble plain sloped away beyond into the depths of an unlit ocean. My eyes roved the potholes and undulations of the cobble plain, where massive red starfish, pale green urchins, and a kind of large, long-legged sea spider called a pycnogonid moved with nearly imperceptible slowness. Winding their way among these creatures were white nemertean worms, three and four feet long and as thick as my forearms. Between me and these benthic creatures, pods of slow-swimming scallops pass by, like flocks of birds in slow motion. At the end of this rolling, I see the walls of the iceberg rising, and then I am looking straight up through the roughly round, six-foot-wide lens of still water in the dive hole. Through it I can see a cobalt blue sky and the dark-clad bodies of the other divers in their dry suits, their faces glowing in sunlight reflecting off the sea ice.
They’re milling about, basking in that torrent of sunshine. No one is in a hurry. I begin the slow roll of 360 degrees again. Tomorrow we’ll go somewhere else in the Bay of Sails and examine a similar situation. That night I’ll go over in my mind what I saw, and a desire to study it again more closely will overcome me.
Traveling and working in Antarctica, I’m residing in the only place on Earth without an aboriginal history, a place with only the very fewest threads of modern human history. An old piece of Gondwana. Inspiring, not empty. Almost everything one sees here is new. The familiar but very misleading separation between human history and natural history has no footing here.
* * *
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WORK UNDER THE SEA ice brings all of us into a richer world than any of the early explorers suspected was here. They didn’t have the technologies to enter this space. Despite a cover of solid ice two meters thick, the bottom, down to about twenty meters, is surprisingly well lit because the ice is translucent and the water column is largely devoid of life before plankton blooms in the austral spring. In areas undisturbed by icebergs, the organic life is astonishingly rich�
�we estimated that each square meter contained between 100,000 and 150,000 organisms, a density of life that compares with the floor of a temperate-zone rain forest.
One day, at the tip of an island in McMurdo Sound called Big Razorback, I slid into a tidal crack with two companions to see what the benthic community looked like in an area scoured regularly by sea ice as the tide ebbs and flows. In an environment like this one, divers check on each other three or four times a minute, more often than usual. The tidal nature of these waters means large slabs of sea ice might suddenly collapse or shift. Or a piece of equipment, already working near its limits in these frigid temperatures, might malfunction. We’re miles from the edge of the sea ice, where the ice cover of the sound meets the pack ice of the Ross Sea, and where orcas and predatory leopard seals prowl for penguins and seals; but it’s not good to forget that these sea mammals, who need to surface regularly to breathe, could somehow also turn up here, deep in the semipermanent ice cover.
A more subtle danger divers face in Antarctica is that because the water is so transparent, it’s easy to misjudge distances, and therefore easy to swim off too far from the dive hole. Based on your experience with clear tropical water (not very helpful), you could easily swim over to a place you believe is about 100 feet away. It turns out to be 300 feet away, and suddenly you’re much lower on air than you planned and faced with a 300-foot swim back to the dive hole, the only access you have to the surface.
When divers are swimming together in areas less dangerous than those around tidal cracks, they tend to check on each other less frequently. To get the others’ attention, a diver might tap on her tanks with a dive tool, alerting companions to something she’s found. On the dive that day at Big Razorback, three of us were swimming nearly shoulder to shoulder when we all heard that familiar sound. Who had made it? Not me, we signaled each other. Strangely indifferent to the sound—we had to be more than a thousand miles from any other diver—we swam on! Then we heard the sound again. This time we all turned around and found ourselves face-to-face with an adult Weddell seal, all ten feet and 600 pounds of him or her. The sound was coming from the seal—we could see its throat muscles moving in synchrony with the clanks. We knew Weddell seals were around, but we didn’t expect them to approach us this closely, to be this curious. (We had discovered a few caverns on the underside of the sea ice that day where seals had surfaced to breathe. When we located these domed cavities we made a surmise and surfaced in them ourselves. Removing our regulators, we inhaled the stagnant, vaguely fishy air of multiple seal exhalations.)
When I look back, what I most often recall about those weeks of diving is the contrast between the apprehension I brought to this sort of technically challenging work and the euphoria that so quickly replaced it once I saw the density, the bright colors, and the variety of organisms in the enormous carpet of life spread out below me. To be suspended above it was trance-inducing, what I imagine it must be like to drift over the Serengeti in a hot air balloon, several hundred feet above herds of unalarmed wildebeest and impala, the lions, giraffes, and stalking hyenas.
It’s in the nature of places like Antarctica, regions of Earth where relatively few people are to be found, to present themselves in unexpected and unique ways, even to casual observers, to slightly contradict conventional wisdom. On all of our dives, for example, I saw small patches of bottom life flattened against the underside of the sea ice. How did they get up there? Could they survive there? It was later explained to me that in some spots a weak bottom current might eddy around a cluster of benthic creatures, rocks, and bottom sediments and come to a complete halt in some crevice or notch. Here, a few molecules of seawater might freeze. Over time this initially small platelet of frozen freshwater might expand (as seawater crystallizes into platelets, it squeezes out the sea salts that keep seawater from freezing at 32° F), creating a growing matrix of freshwater ice crystals. (The specific gravity of freshwater allows crystals of it to float in seawater.) At some point the expanding mass of freshwater ice becomes large enough to exert an upward force sufficient to uproot a section of the bottom. This scrap of the benthic community continues to float upward until it lodges on the underside of the sea ice cover.
One day I almost swam straight into a dark basalt cobble floating in the water column in front of me. I assumed it was encased in freshwater ice, but I could find no angle of observation that made this apparent. Had I not learned what can happen in these very cold waters, I would have had to conclude that here in Antarctica, dense rocks float.
* * *
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WANDERING THROUGH THE LABS at McMurdo Station one night, talking to people at random about their work, I came upon a desiccated jumble of benthic life sitting on an examination table. When I asked the researcher tugging at it with a large pair of tweezers what it was, she explained that parts of the benthos not only occasionally rise up to press against the sea ice but can actually migrate through it. (The process is somewhat comparable to what happens during a meteorite’s journey from its fall on a snowfield to its emergence on a stranding surface.) In the water, as new ice forms on the bottom of the sheet of sea ice, parts of the benthos that have risen to its underside are entombed. Surface winds, meanwhile, are exposing the uppermost layer of sea ice to sublimation. Whatever is embedded in the sea ice, therefore, moves slowly closer to the surface. This researcher had collected the mat of sea life she was examining weeks before on the surface of the Ross Ice Shelf. In some places the ice shelf is over 2,000 feet thick. It could have taken centuries for these desiccated communities to emerge.
She hopes to learn what the benthic community looked like down there when, all those years ago, these organisms were alive on the bottom.
When benthic life emerges on the surface of the Ross Ice Shelf, it is fragmented and scattered by the wind, so how these creatures and plants once fit together is hard to determine. This is also, of course, the case with attempting to determine the shape of certain Paleoeskimo dwellings in the High Arctic. If a group of Thule people arrives at the site of an old Dorset camp and uses those stones to build dwellings of their own, how can one be sure what the parent Dorset dwelling looked like? When someone comes upon a couple of bones from the rear leg of a mala, searches for and is able to find most of the rest of its bones, and then studies the imprint of tracks in the soil nearby, along with tooth marks on the bones and other clues, it’s possible to figure out what killed the mala and what happened afterward, as other animals became involved in the event. To put back together what nature or man has taken apart, to make something whole and integrated again out of its remnant parts and puzzle out how it came to be dismantled, constitutes the area of science called taphonomic research.
One can argue, I think, that such a formal inquiry into disintegration and the attempt to achieve reintegration is an emerging force in the arts today, just as it is in archeology and field biology. It’s part of a much larger determination, far and wide across human cultures today, I believe, to understand a familiar type of menacing levigation, the fission of integrated communities.
* * *
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McMURDO STATION IS LOCATED on one side of Ross Island’s Hut Point Peninsula. A New Zealand station, Scott Base, is situated on the other side, at a place where the McMurdo Ice Shelf, a small spur of the Ross Ice Shelf, meets the enormous expanse of sea ice covering McMurdo Sound. Our group hoped to dive in this spot where the ice shelf, nearly one hundred feet thick at this point, abuts the sea ice, only six or seven feet thick. The relatively thin sea ice offered us light; the ice shelf, on the other hand, presented us with unusual under-ice structures. We hoped to pick out subtle shifts in the composition of the benthic communities here as we ventured farther into the side-lit darkness underneath the ice shelf.
We entered the water through a tidal crack in front of Scott Base and soon were swimming through massive convolutions in the ice shelf’s seaward wall. It was like sw
imming through the interior of a drowned cathedral, gliding above the aisles and the nave, peering into the grottoes of side chapels, floating past the choir stalls, and rising into the domes of the ceiling bays. Looking up eighty feet or so into the irregular geometry of the ice shelf front, bathed as it was in late evening sunlight from the northwest, I felt like I was standing in the apse at Chartres, gazing up into groined vaults between the capitals of the columns, complexly curved surfaces lit by the cathedral’s clerestory windows.
Ross Island
In Antarctica there was no end to the wonder.
* * *
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SOME EVENINGS, after finishing up work at the benthic lab in McMurdo, identifying and counting organisms, I’d look up John Schutt. I’d usually find him around the Berg Field Center, staging gear for that year’s ANSMET expedition and awaiting the arrival of other members of the team. One responsibility he had was testing the snow machines people were going to use, so some evenings he and I went out together, running them at full throttle across the Ross Ice Shelf (more testing, perhaps, than they might have really needed). Often this was after midnight. The sun would by then have come around to the northeast, front-lighting the peaks of the Royal Society Range on the far side of the sound. The textures of these mountains would sometimes come out so forcefully in the crystalline air that we’d stop the machines, lay back on the seats as though they were couches, and just watch. The rays of the sun brought out more strongly a third dimension in the peaks and intensified their colors. I remember on one of those nights talking to John about the dives, about how easily one might come to think of Antarctica as geographically desolate, not knowing of this vivid underworld of color and movement. Emperor and Adélie penguins rocketing past as you worked. Levitating rocks. He told me about a meteorite crater he’d been working at on Devon Island in the Canadian High Arctic, during the boreal summer preceding the austral summer we were now in. The meteoroid had hit with such force it melted the ground around it, making it look like foundry slag. The heat turned quartz intrusions in the bedrock into chunks of colored glass.