by Barry Lopez
I’ve never stood atop Observation Hill without taking off my hat. They were so intensely and unmistakably human, these furiously determined men.
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MY COLLEAGUES Paul Mayewski and Cameron Wake were working at the bottom of a snow pit, about twelve miles from Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station one December morning. I was perched eight feet above them on a snow ledge. The fourth man in our party, Mike Morrison, was looking down from the edge of the pit, eight feet above me. Our tents were pitched about three hundred yards downwind (where the fumes from our cookstoves wouldn’t contaminate the snow samples we were gathering). It was the start of an overcast day, light winds, −31° F. It was colder at the bottom of the pit, near −40° probably. (The average temperature at South Pole in those years was −57° F, which was also the temperature year-round of the surrounding snow cover at a depth of about fifty feet.) In my experience it becomes noticeably harder for people to work efficiently at temperatures below about −30° F, a point I was about to prove.
Paul, the principal investigator in the field party, was extracting a series of snow samples from the wall of the pit we’d dug, working his way down ten millimeters at a time. The sterile samples, reaching back many years in the history of Earth’s atmosphere, would give him a chemical record he could compare with other data he was compiling from other sites in Antarctica and Greenland, much of it ice-core data. I’d spent the previous month with Paul, Cameron, and four others on upper Newall Glacier in Victoria Land’s Asgard Range, at about 5,000 feet. That work had culminated with the successful extraction of a 177-meter (581-foot) ice core, now packed for shipment and sitting in a refrigeration unit at McMurdo.
Having finished that work at Newall Glacier, we were now here, on the fourth and final day of Paul’s attempt to secure a painstakingly assembled string of uncontaminated snow samples. Paul and Cameron were both wearing sterile suits, gloves, and masks over their cold-weather gear. They deposited each sample in a sterile numbered bottle. The sample in bottle 481 was taken .39 inches (ten millimeters) below sample 480 and .39 inches above sample 482, and so on. Mike lowered a crate of fifty numbered sample bottles to me and I lowered them to Cameron. At some point it entered my mind that I could shorten Cameron’s time in the extreme cold at the bottom of the pit by lowering the bottles to him in the plastic bags in which they were triple sealed. I’d just get rid of the crate.
The problem with this idea was that if I removed the bags from the rigid crate, the sequential arrangement of the numbered bottles would be destroyed. Reaching in, Cameron was as likely to pull out bottle 451 as bottle 473. Before this realization hit me, unfortunately, I was leaning down from the ledge, handing Cameron the bag. He and Paul stared at me silently from the frigid depths in which they would now have to stand idle, waiting for me to correct my mistake.
I climbed out of the pit, donned sterile garments, placed one of the three sterile bags in the crate and began arranging the bottles inside it in numerical order. Fifteen very long minutes later I handed the crate down to Cameron.
The day following this fiasco with the bottles, two Sno-Cats came out from Pole (as it’s called by most here) to pick us up, along with our gear and the 505 samples. Back at Pole we learned we had a choice of accommodations. We could return to McMurdo that evening and spend three or four days there before catching a flight to Christchurch, or we could stay at Pole and fly to McMurdo later. (At the time, ski-equipped LC-130s flew into Pole almost as often as weather permitted, mostly ferrying fuel for the generators that keep the station running year-round, but also transporting basic supplies, construction materials, machinery, spare parts, scientists, and visitors. The window for them to do this is usually no more than ten weeks.)
We opted to stay at Pole. At that time the station supported only a small resident community during the austral summer, and the opportunity to live without noise and disruption was far greater here. McMurdo was loud, sprawling, crowded, awash in regulations, and entirely too social for all of us. In addition, for me, Pole was a center for research in areas I knew little about—geodesy, solar plasmas, dark matter. The extreme isolation of this circumscribed station, its relatively small human community, and the nature of much of the scientific inquiry being carried out here gave Pole the feel of a research platform traveling onward in deep space.
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I OFTEN BROODED, wherever I happened to sleep in Antarctica, about things that always seemed to be on my mind. Global climate disruption; refugee camps in the Horn of Africa, with their listless, crumpled lives and bewildered, wandering children; the avarice behind corporate exploitation of what some describe as the world’s “commons,” places like the open ocean that belong to all people; the mendacity and selfishness of national governments, including my own; the plague of underreported femicides in Juárez tied to drug cartel activity, which ends for hundreds of them at the cartel’s crude mass graves, narcofosas; the acre of crudely caged animals and the baskets of their body parts I’d encountered once in an all-night market in Yueyang. The depression this brought on sometimes left me with feelings of guilt, however unwarranted that might have been, and feelings of anger, which occasionally polluted the memories of what I had been doing that day.
It did not escape me that I returned as often as I did to Antarctica because it offered a kind of relief I could find nowhere else. In Jaipur, my hotel sat isolated behind a distant wall that separated me, I knew, from the lives of the truly destitute. In untenanted reaches of the Mojave in Arizona, I rarely passed a vehicle on the road without wondering whether it carried beleaguered “illegals,” or whether la Migra would knock on my motel door one evening and ask for identity papers because of my surname. Even living in a rural part of the Cascade Mountains in Oregon, I knew I had to come this far to drink water from a stream without a second thought about giardia.
I can say that nearly every day in Antarctica I was astonished by something—picking up part of an asteroid from the ice cap; being escorted through the blue-light tunnels at Pole that housed part of the AMANDA project; the huge penguin colony at Cape Crozier; placing my hand on the forehead of a mummified seal. Against the horrors I’d seen elsewhere or knew about, these things were a balm. I wanted to respect and absorb the experience, and I wanted to give it away to whoever might need it.
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ON MY FIRST VISIT to Pole, the one I’d made with the two journalists, I brought a tubular map case with me. I told our NSF escort, who was inquiring more and more pointedly about the contents of the tube, that it contained a fly rod. I told him some of my friends were fly-fishermen and I was going to assemble my fly rod at Pole and make a few casts, just to have a good story. I knew he didn’t believe me and sensed he’d lost patience with my trying to humor him. As we disembarked our plane at Pole, he confronted me. What was in the case? I told him it was a kite. I wanted to fly a kite at the South Pole. He said kite flying was not permitted at the South Pole, that flying a kite here might interfere with aircraft operations. I said the only aircraft within hundreds of miles of us was the one we flew in on, and which was now sitting on the ground here. I assured him, however, that I would walk off a good ways before sending the kite aloft. He said that if I attempted to do this he would contact his superior in McMurdo by radio and I would be reprimanded. I said that was okay. He left for the radio room inside the station’s geodesic dome and I walked off a couple of hundred feet from the plane and flew the kite. No one, then or later, ever reprimanded me.
I wanted to fly the kite at Pole because, for me, one of the most impressive aspects of the Antarctic Treaty, a document meant to guide all human activity in Antarctica, is its insistence on equality. Sign the treaty and you may share in the bounty of what people here are learning—about the ice, the planet, our solar system, the Milky Way galaxy, and the universe beyond. Flying a kite over the semicircle of natio
nal flags in front of the station (representing the treaty’s twelve original signatories) was a whimsical and private gesture of disagreement. If Antarctica belongs to no one, then no national flags should fly here. And if the continent is to be held in common, then the flag of the United States should not be flying by itself, as it did then, next to a brass-capped rod in the snow that marks, precisely, the location of Earth’s south geographic pole.
It would have been disrespectful of me to have asked our escort to listen while I explained my reasons for bringing a kite to Pole. Not the place, not the time. As it was, most thought flying the kite was a stunt, a wry comment on the NSF’s humorless emphasis on safety issues. During lunch at Pole that day my host, by way of apology, said he was concerned only about everyone’s safety—and that flying the kite, even at −26° F that day, actually seemed like fun.
After I finished my interviews with the staff and a few of the scientists at Pole that afternoon, I realized I still had a few minutes before the other two journalists and I were scheduled to leave. I went in search of a staircase that led to an observatory I had heard about called the Skylab. At the top of these stairs was a small square room with a couple of battered club chairs in it, and triple-paned windows looking out over the polar plateau in three directions. The windowsills were set low, so as not to cut off the view for someone sitting in one of the chairs, and tinted shades hung in front of the windows to cut the sun’s glare and reduce the intensity of its radiation, softening the ambient light in the room.
I stood transfixed in the doorway, seeing that the view of the polar plateau ran unimpeded to the horizon. From this height, as if from a ship’s bridge, the prospect was of another Pacific, though there was no indication that life had ever been here, nor was there any suggestion that it might come. The view was of a void so utter it seemed empty even of space. The geography for an anchorite. As far as you could look, it was unstoried, free of history on a human scale. A land not yet saturated with laws.
There were two chairs in the small room. My escort, Jack, was sitting in one. After he gave me a nod, I took the other chair. Here sat a man staring at what he loved. I looked out at the sky with him for a while, out across the crusted plain of wind-wrinkled snow. Where the waist of the sky met the white plain, the air was lit by a belt the color of lapis lazuli. High above it, past succeeding shades of light blue, over the shoulders of the sky, hung a few wisps of mare’s tail cirrus, parallel to one another.
“I’m so sorry about the kite,” I said.
“And I’m sorry about the confrontation,” Jack said.
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THERE IS NO LONGITUDE at the South Pole. Its lone coordinate is 90° South. From here, every direction is north. East and west come into play, technically, as soon as one steps away from the actual geographic pole, but such coordinates are without meaning here, they’re too difficult to imagine. People orient each other outside by referring to the wind, as in “upwind of that research hut,” or to the movement of the polar ice, as in “just downstream of that front loader.” The ice on which Pole station sits is moving seaward at the rate of about 33 feet per year. Annually, on January 1, a representative of the U.S. Geological Survey locates the precise point in Earth’s bedrock, 9,300 feet below, that marks the southern end of Earth’s axis of rotation, and then he or she drives a metal rod into the snow above. For the next 365 days the rod is assumed to mark the South Geographic Pole.
A few hundred feet from the actual pole (where all of Earth’s twenty-four time zones converge) is a ceremonial pole, a short barber pole of red, white, and blue stripes supporting a chrome sphere the size of a basketball (it’s flanked by the half circle of twelve flagpoles), a setting often used for group photographs. Off in another direction a sort of folk version of the South Pole has been established, with yard ornaments like pink flamingos, FOR SALE signs, a placard warning that NO LIFEGUARD IS ON DUTY, bouquets of plastic flowers, a municipal bus stop sign from suburban Boston, and a tall post bearing a plywood cutout of a salmon on which the number 9,512 is printed, the distance in miles to Salmon, Idaho.
On the first day the temperature at Pole drops below −100° F, which it does regularly in winter, any one of the winter-over staff can elect to join the most exclusive of Antarctica’s social clubs, the 300 Club. Candidates enter the station’s sauna, which has been heated to “200 degrees” (more like 130 degrees), then sprint for the marker at the true pole wearing only their boots. One turn around the pole marker and then back inside the station. Most candidates develop frost nip in a few spots—the first stage of frostbite—typically in gender-specific areas. The 300 Club initiation and gag T-shirts (South Pole: One Inch of Powder, Two Miles of Base) take some of the edge off winter life at the station, a place that does not fit easily into any one of the geography boxes one is handed as a child.
It does not actually snow, for example, at South Pole. What lies on the polar ice cap around Pole is “diamond dust,” ice crystals drifting down on perennially light winds. And a visitor is able to see farther over the surface of the planet here than he or she can anywhere in the middle latitudes, almost twice as far, because Earth flattens out at the poles, making the planet an oblate spheroid. The atmosphere above the pole also flattens out, making the atmospheric layer thinner and creating an effective pressure altitude at Pole of around 11,500 feet, not 9,300 feet. Some visitors arriving by plane from sea level at McMurdo suffer from altitude sickness for a few days before they adjust. (Others never adjust and must return to McMurdo.) The stars, moon, and sun do not rise and set here each day but rise and set instead on a 365-day schedule, a primary reason why so much celestial research is supported here at a place that is difficult to reach and very expensive to maintain. Telescopes of several sorts trained on celestial objects overhead can track them for months without ever losing sight of them; and the relative dryness and thinness of the flattened atmosphere makes the optical images they record clearer than images made at lower latitudes.
Arrayed around Pole, rather like satellites, are a dozen or more data-gathering stations with long-running programs. Situated anywhere else on the planet, they would be far less useful—or of no use at all. For example, because Antarctica is seismically the quietest of Earth’s continents, seismographs located in snow pits at Pole are able to pinpoint earthquakes all around the world that are too faint to register at other seismic research sites. And the enormous reservoir of snow and ice beneath Pole has proven ideal, as I’ve said, for trapping neutrinos, near-massless particles that are a key component in competing theories of dark matter. Finally, the transparency and electromagnetic stillness of the atmosphere at Pole—it has the lowest water vapor content and the least “sky noise” of any place on Earth—makes it an ideal place for locating the 13.8-billion-year-old edge of the expanding universe, and for researching the chemical composition and behavior of Earth’s upper and lower atmosphere.
The deployment of instruments here—helioseismographs, optical and gamma-ray telescopes, ozone depletion recorders—represents some of the more technically complex work being carried out by Edward Wilson’s progeny. If he were to visit here today, however, Wilson might initially feel at a loss. He’d find himself far from the questions in biology that were dear to him; but I think he’d quickly gain a sense of the relevance of research on the internal structure of the sun, and the importance today of studying atmospheric chemistry. And sitting around the mess-hall tables with other scientists, he might even understand why some of their research, like that into global climate disruption, irritates the members of certain religions and an international class of profiteers who’ve supplanted, in some ways, the oligarchs of his own era as social tyrants.
And he would be puzzled by the tension between science and popular culture.
Wilson, a person in the mold of Darwin, might not fully appreciate the versatility of computer software or be surprised by the ability of a ch
romatograph to determine the chemical nature of objects in the asteroid belt, but a difference in tools is not the striking difference between the science of his time and ours. It’s not the scientific topics—how Niels Bohr used quantum theory to reorganize the interior of the atom, for example—that would baffle him. Wilson was intensely curious about the material world. He would understand the drive and the urgency—though he himself was not an urgent man—behind all of this. What he would have trouble absorbing is the aggressiveness with which modern governments and for-profit businesses selectively promote debate about scientific research, and how avidly they pursue the development of technologies that this research makes possible. He would have been appalled by the lack of an ethical framework for the development of the atomic bomb, or by the dissemination of genetically engineered food, or by the dumping of chemical waste in urban water supplies. He would have been made anxious about the emergence of identity theft and the eclipse of personal privacy that these new technologies had made possible.
The differences between his world and ours that would have most kept Wilson awake, I tend to think, were not the advances in science that would have required him to reeducate himself, but changes in human behavior and human aspiration, primarily the development and promotion—and enthusiastic acceptance—of problematic technologies without regard to their long-term consequences. He would have had difficulty matching his sense of what was moral—one reason every member of his 1910–13 British Antarctic Expedition, including Scott, regularly sought his counsel—with the rapaciousness that generally characterizes twenty-first-century quests for material gain.