The Second Kind of Impossible

by Paul Steinhardt

  None of the characters ever stepped back to consider the big picture. But the movie audience could plainly see that they were all repeatedly crisscrossing the same small hill in a central area, let’s call it the spire near the Primary, with four palm trees bent at different angles. It was easy for the audience to realize what the characters could not, which was that the trees formed the shape of a giant “W.” The treasure they sought was hiding in plain sight the entire time.

  Our expedition had always used the elevated spire as a reference point. But until that final afternoon, we had never taken the time to scramble across the stream to get a sample from the spire itself. Who knows? I thought.

  As the morning wore on and the rain picked up, the temperatures began dropping into the low 40s and then continued to sink into the 30s, just above freezing. Everyone had returned to camp by then except Chris and Mike. They had left for their final hike right after breakfast and were now still unaccounted for. Before they left, I had insisted that they take the assault rifle along for protection.

  Were they prepared for the low temperatures? Were there any bears in their path? I became increasingly worried as the hours continued to pass without any sign of them.

  Chris and Mike finally marched back into camp sometime around mid-afternoon. They were both soaking wet but otherwise unscathed and well satisfied with their efforts. With their return, I felt an enormous burden suddenly lifted off my shoulders. The final day of fieldwork was now complete and, most importantly, everyone had made it through in one piece. In fact, everyone seemed very happy.

  For the first time in two weeks, I could finally allow myself to relax. I am not sure anyone, not even Will, could have ever fully appreciated the sense of fear I had been grappling with. Before leaving on the trip I had heard alarming stories from colleagues about terrible incidents in the field, including fatal accidents, all of which I had kept to myself.

  If anything had gone wrong during our expedition and anyone had been seriously injured, it would have been my fault for having organized the trip in the first place. I was the one who was responsible for putting this highly trained team of dedicated experts in harm’s way, even though, truth be told, I knew in advance that there was an infinitesimally small chance of success. I do not know how I would have coped with the guilt if someone had suffered a life-threatening injury. Thankfully, I could finally put all of those concerns behind me.

  That evening, our Russian hosts prepared an especially memorable feast for our final night in the field. We enjoyed our dinner outside, eating together around a large campfire. It was only August third, but the brief summer season had already taken a hard turn toward fall. We were all wearing several layers of clothing underneath our warmest coats.

  Everyone was in a jubilant mood that evening, and each of us offered a toast to commemorate the adventure. Vodka had been in plentiful supply throughout the trip, and our Russian colleagues decided to hand out awards for “the non-Russians who drank the most like Russians.” Glenn and Chris took top honors and were both awarded a piece of Soviet-era memorabilia—drinking flasks emblazoned with a hammer and sickle. It was strange to see that the former socialist symbol was now being used as a capitalistic souvenir. How times had changed!

  Viktor ended the evening in spectacular fashion by setting off emergency flares in a dazzling display of fireworks. He handed me one of the brightly burning flares and I held the torch high for a group photo to celebrate our victory in the field. (That image is reproduced in the color insert, no. 24.) After a spate of individual photos, everyone gathered back at the campfire for what promised to be a long, boisterous evening of vodka and song.

  I returned to the tent to record my thoughts in my logbook:

  It has been a very successful trip by any standard. Everyone has been made comfortable and happy, even the most irascible. As a result, everyone has worked incredibly hard. I am so impressed by all of them. Unlike most geology trips that Lincoln had described for me, where some work hard, some not, and one person ends up being the camp pariah, here everyone has worked very hard. By Olya, Viktor, and Bogdan making extraordinary efforts to ensure the camp food was great and camp life was as comfortable as possible, no one, except perhaps me, has been highly stressed. Everyone has had space to express himself or herself, even Bucks. Even if we find nothing, we will all know that we gave our absolute maximum effort.

  AUGUST 4, 2011: After a late night of revelry, some may have felt the worse for wear the next morning. But everyone was up by 6 a.m. to get a jump on the return trip to Anadyr. We gathered all of our belongings and loaded up the two behemoths for what we knew would be a long, slow ride back to civilization. We would be trying to outrun the rapidly worsening weather at the breakneck speed of nine miles an hour.

  Within our first half hour on the road we began spotting Kamchatka brown bears, which normally avoid human contact (see color image 11). We kept a close watch on three of the gigantic animals and looked out for others. We had been warned that if we saw a small group of bears it probably meant there were many more lurking nearby.

  The occasional bear sightings continued throughout our first few hours on the road, and at one point an especially curious bear came within several hundred feet of our lumbering vehicles before moving on. We were safely inside the vehicles and never in danger. But the bear was close enough for me to fully appreciate its potential power and to be grateful that we had never tangled with one of them.

  Until now, we thought we had foolishly overpacked by bringing gloves and multiple layers of clothing. But with the temperature continuing to drop as we left the Koryak Mountains, all of our cold weather gear was now being put to good use. No one complained about the increasing chill, especially not me, because it brought a sudden end to the aggravating mosquitoes that had been making my life miserable for the last twelve days. Finally, I could remove the hat draped with protective netting. Finally, I could stop the application and reapplication of DEET. Finally, finally this part of the expedition was over. I was celebrating all day inside my head.

  As we continued our trek, I watched as a new weather system began to descend on the mountains. A chain of clouds floated from peak to peak dusting each mountaintop with a white layer of snow. I have always been an avid cloud watcher and the unpredictable cloud formations in the Koryaks had been unexpectedly fascinating. If I had ever seen the Koryak clouds depicted in a painting before making this trip, I would have just assumed they were figments of an artistic imagination. In person, the clouds and the gorgeous rainbows that often accompanied them were an inspiring natural wonder. It was like watching an ongoing, ever-changing performance, with the clouds forming and re-forming magnificent shapes the likes of which I have never seen. Wistfully, I knew I would miss being in the audience for their daily dance across the sky.

  By the second day of driving, we had left the Koryak mountain range and reentered the tundra. I was once again absorbed by the natural beauty and noted with some sadness that the laughing flowers that had seemed to be mocking us when we arrived were no longer laughing. Many of the fragile white tufts were blown away by the stiff, wintry wind and only their bare flower stems were left standing. I watched the vast field of stems shiver and shake in the wind and imagined they were waving goodbye to us with every fiber of their being.

  The already slow drive turned into a slog later that afternoon when the sky suddenly opened up and unleashed a hard rain. At one point, the road became so muddy that the orange behemoth got stuck in a deep depression and Viktor had to circle back to give Bogdan a tow. During the last two days of driving, the two of them had been taking turns helping each other out of the mud. Now that the rain was growing increasingly intense I began to wonder if we should continue as planned. Driving through muddy ruts in the tundra with poor visibility could be dangerous and we might easily get stuck all night in a wet, soaking mud hole.

  The situation was becoming desperate when we spotted a natural gas station in the distance. It was the sa
me station we had unsuccessfully tried to stop at during the first leg of our journey. Viktor and Bogdan slowly inched the behemoths toward the station through the mud and rain, stopping for another emergency tread repair along the way. As we got closer, Will saw the number “zero” on one of the buildings so he dubbed the site “Station Zero,” although it is officially known as the Western Lakes Gas Field.

  I feared the worst as we approached the station. We had not been able to call in advance about our arrival, as they had asked us to do, because our satellite phone had been knocked out of commission by the rainstorm. Previously, they had turned us away. Now, we were in the middle of a deluge and urgently needed some help.

  Once we finally plodded our way up to the main building, I gritted my teeth, wondering what their reaction would be to our second unexpected arrival. Olya decided that we should try to negotiate. She took Vadim and me into the station, probably thinking that we both looked so bedraggled that the manager would have to take sympathy on us. She led us to the front desk and asked if the station could provide food and shelter for the night. At first, the manager said he was agreeable but then warned us he did not have ultimate authority to decide if the station could help us or not. The supervisor of the kitchen and rooms was the real decision maker, he told us, with what appeared to be a certain amount of trepidation.

  When the much-feared supervisor finally appeared, she turned out to be a short, sweet, round-faced woman who was thrilled to welcome us, almost as thrilled as we were to be welcomed. She introduced herself as Lenechke and immediately called on her assistants to show us where we would be spending the night. I had expected she might find some empty space in the complex where we could sleep on the floor. Instead, we were shown to a set of comfortable rooms for two with heat, individual showers, hot and cold running water, and most important of all, mosquito-free indoor toilets.

  The team could not believe their good fortune as they piled into the rooms. By the time we had all finished showering, Lenechke’s kitchen had prepared a wonderful hot meal for us to enjoy. We were still 120 kilometers from Anadyr. But as of that evening, everyone felt like we had returned to civilization.

  When we awoke the next morning, Kamchatka’s changeable weather had changed yet again. The heavy rain had stopped. But when we stepped outside we could see that the entire range of Koryak mountains was covered with snow from top to bottom. Winter had arrived with full force on August fifth, which meant we had barely made it out in time.

  I reminded everyone about a discussion several months earlier when Valery had made his original recommendations for our trip to Chukotka. He had told us that there was no point in going any sooner than the third week of July because the ground and river would be too cold and too hard for digging. Sure enough, even though we followed his advice and made our trip in late July, we had still struggled with the freezing soil and water at the Listvenitovyi.

  Valery had also warned us that we needed to leave the Koryaks after the first week of August, or it could become too cold. Once again, his advice was spot-on. And once again, I was grateful for our extraordinary Russian colleagues.

  I was hoping we could finish the rest of our trip back to Anadyr at top speed, but the overnight rain made that impossible. The tundra had become a muddy swamp and it was going to be difficult, if not impossible, for Viktor and Bogdan to make rapid progress. I remembered how intimidated I had felt when I initially climbed aboard one of their immense vehicles. My first impression was that the behemoths were invincible. Now I knew how truly vulnerable they were in the middle of the hostile terrain. It would be another twelve grueling hours of slow, careful driving before Anadyr finally came into view.

  Once we saw the town in the distance, a glorious rainbow appeared over the mountains which gave the last few miles of our difficult drive a bit of a magical ending. I took a deep breath as I gazed at the beautiful setting from my usual spot in the front seat of the blue behemoth. I felt a deep sense of relief as we drove into town and safely ended the field portion of our trip.

  * * *

  ANADYR, AUGUST 7, 2011: After breakfast the next morning, we got right back to work and gathered for an intense scientific meeting to review everything we had learned. Chris Andronicos began by presenting many of the details he and Mike had discovered about the different types of rocks and formations in the valley and mountains surrounding the Listvenitovyi. I was enormously impressed by how much they had been able to accomplish.

  Chris finished the presentation by stating his principal conclusions.

  First, he could confirm with certainty that the blue-green clay in which the Florence sample was found was till from the glacier that had occupied the region eight thousand years ago near the end of the last ice age. Furthermore, there was no sign of unusual geological activity consistent with material being drawn up in a superplume or vent from deep below the surface. In conclusion, based on the observations in the field, all of the possible alternatives to the meteorite theory were now dead.

  Chris had been skeptical of the meteorite theory from the start and was inherently cautious before reaching any firm conclusion. So the fact that he could now find no plausible alternative to our hypothesis was deeply meaningful to me. As I looked around the room, I could see everyone was nodding in agreement. It was a meteorite.

  I had not known Chris personally before inviting him to join the expedition, and had mainly relied upon the recommendation of his former Princeton advisor, Lincoln Hollister. Having now spent two weeks with him in the field, I had come to regard Chris as a superb scientist who was remarkably talented in imagining plausible geological scenarios for a multitude of phenomena. The decision to add him to our team had paid off exponentially.

  Once Chris had finished his presentation, it was up to Glenn and Luca to report the results of our digging, panning, and laboratory efforts. We had downloaded all the images they had taken of the most “interesting” grains onto an iPad, which was passed around the room so that everyone had a chance to closely scrutinize the images. The grains, numbered from #1 to #120, ranged from less than a millimeter to a few millimeters in size.

  Glenn spent the next two hours reviewing the grains one by one, discussing the potential significance of each. In contrast to the optimistic enthusiasm that had followed Chris’s presentation, spending two hours with Glenn going through the images of 120 samples in excruciating detail made everyone more realistic.

  In conclusion, Glenn reported that in his opinion, none of the grains identified in the field appeared to resemble the original Florence sample.

  Everyone in the room fell silent. I knew that Glenn tended to be pessimistic, or at least conservative, when making pronouncements. His bedside manner, so to speak, was terribly blunt. No one on the team could have been surprised at his report, because none of us ever believed that we were likely recover more meteorite grains. Even so, it was difficult to hear the bad news stated so directly. The mood in the room plummeted.

  I called for everyone to place a bet: What were the odds? What was the chance that, in all of the material we were bringing back home with us from the Listvenitovyi, there was even a single grain of natural quasicrystal?

  I walked the group through my own analysis. Figuring that we had already identified 120 of the most promising grains of interest, allowing for the fact that none of them seemed to be what we were looking for, and considering that there was a total of sixty-two bags of panned grains altogether, I estimated that there was a 0.01 percent chance of success. Less than one chance in ten thousand. Others quickly chimed in with numbers that were even more pessimistic.

  Except for Luca. When he left Florence to join our expedition, Luca said, he estimated our chance of success was 0.1 percent, or one in a thousand. But now, he had decided to up the ante. He was willing to wager that we had as much as a one percent chance of success, or one in a hundred. Luca’s confidence had grown tenfold for one very specific reason. He was pinning his hopes on Grain #5, the sample he singl
ed out on our very first day in the field.

  I appreciated Luca’s optimism, but we both knew it was impossible to positively identify a sample based on what could be seen with either the naked eye or the images obtained through Valery’s low-power microscope. We also both knew that two of our experts, Chris and Glenn, had expressed doubts about Grain #5. They were pretty sure it was not even a fragment of a meteorite, much less a grain that contained a natural quasicrystal.

  After hearing all the bets, I realized that even if we adopted Luca’s rosy interpretation of a one percent chance of success, everyone had just agreed that there was at least a ninety-nine percent chance that we had come up empty. That was a sobering thought.

  The next morning was spent packing in preparation for the flight home. Our greatest concern was whether we would be able to get all the samples out of Russia. Chris and other American geologists had told me horror stories about samples being confiscated at the airport by aggressive Russian customs officials. Even if we managed to clear that hurdle, U.S. customs would be yet another challenge. It was illegal to bring soil into the United States. Technically, our material was “separates” and not soil. The bags of grains were perfectly legal to import because they had been panned and boiled. But we could not count on U.S. customs agents to recognize the distinction. They might decide to seize our material, anyway.

  We devised a plan to give us the maximum chance of getting our samples through customs. Our team members would be taking five different routes home. So we split the sixty-two bags from our excavation sites into five sets. There would be one set for each customs route. And we would make sure there was at least one bag from each of the twelve dig sites in each set. That way, even if four of the five sets were lost to customs agents, the sole surviving fifth set would still be a representative collection of the material. Will and I would be traveling together, so we shared one of the sets. Chris, Glenn, Mike, and Luca would carry the other four. All of us planned to put the sample bags in our checked luggage.