Ocean Notorious

by Matt Vance

  Many years later, in 1871, a Professor William Lyon published The Hollow Globe and claimed Symmes’ theory as his own. Incensed, Symmes’ son Americus republished The Symmes’s Theory of Concentric Spheres from his father’s writings.

  Symmes’ half-baked theory appealed to the sense of the sublime that would become fashionable in the eighteenth century. Previously, only that which was manicured and controlled could be considered beautiful; the wilderness was the hideout of the devil himself.

  The concept of the sublime as applied to nature owed much to the writings of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, and John Dennis, a man with a humbler lineage. Both men crossed the Swiss Alps and recorded their thoughts but Dennis was the first to publish his views. In Miscellanies he said he had set out on his traverse of the alps thinking that beauty in nature was ‘a delight that is consistent with reason’. He had quickly realised it was in fact ‘mingled with horrors and sometimes almost with despair’.

  Hollow earth declaration by John Symmes, 1818.

  Symmes’ theory fitted the bill nicely and artists and writers pounced on it. Edgar Allen Poe’s 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, an epic tale of escape and discovery, is probably the most direct expression of the hollow earth fantasy. A warm paradise is protected by a wall of ice and a dark-skinned race of people. In the climax Antarctica appears as a dazzling white, mist-cloaked, nightmarish figure clutching a scythe – an icy immensity both beautiful beyond comprehension and vicious in intent. In a style that foreshadowed modern horror films, the story stopped short of the final death blow.

  Since its first sightings, Antarctica has had the steely eye of science cast over it. No trace of a hole has been found, just a thick mantle of ice. Beneath the floating Ross Ice Shelf reside some of the best kept records of Earth’s climate, stretching back past the advent of mammals and the evolution of humans to the extinction of the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago. And far from being mere recorders of climate, Antarctica and the ocean that surrounds it are critical participants. It is now known that their cycles of cooling and warming have far-reaching effects on the global weather system. So does the three-quarters of the world’s fresh water that is stored in Antarctic ice. Transferred slowly into the Southern Ocean, it kickstarts ocean circulation and the distribution of heat and nutrients to the world’s oceans.

  In the early 1960s John Mercer, a glaciologist at Ohio State University’s Institute of Polar Studies, was part of a team compiling a definitive atlas of Antarctica’s numerous glaciers. This could have been a mind-numbing exercise but Mercer went off on a tangent. New data on the behaviour of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet suggested it was grounded 200 metres below sea level. At the same time, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels recorded at the South Pole were rising. Putting two and two together, Mercer became one of the first scientists to warn of the impact that continually increasing the consumption of fossil fuels would have on Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. In 1978 he published a paper in science journal Nature predicting increased carbon dioxide levels and resulting changes in ocean circulation would lead to the collapse of massive ice shelves on either side of the Antarctic Peninsula and the destablisation of the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet. This, he said, would have a significant effect on sea levels, ocean currents and world climate.

  While Mercer’s theory was greeted with considerable scepticism it sparked a desire among scientists to uncover the climate records of the past that were locked up in sediment layers buried under the Ross Ice Shelf. From the 1980s there was a succession of geological drilling projects in the Ross Sea. Drilling geological cores anywhere requires a large investment of money. This is exacerbated in Antarctica, where the great distances involved, the conditions and the temperatures mitigate against any form of industrial-scale investigation. Most of the early projects were, therefore, small-scale ventures and unlocked equally small sections of geological time.

  By 2006 the idea had grown into something bigger and hairier: a multinational project with the robotic name ANDRILL, loosely standing for Antarctic Geological Drilling. No one will volunteer how much the project cost, but its physical manifestation was a forty-tonne drill rig that looked from a distance like an elongated circus tent, set on the featureless plain of the Ross Ice Shelf not far from McMurdo Station.

  The location of the rig had been chosen to align with a deep basin on the ocean floor created by rock debris from the Mount Erebus volcano. Sediments trapped in the basin would contain information about the advance and retreat of the ice shelf over millions of years of geological time. The site was also close to the junction between the two large catchments of East and West Antarctica and so would give a good indication of changes in climate that had affected the whole continent.

  To get to the sediments the drill team had first to punch through eighty metres of ice and then lower the drill a further 800 metres through the black waters of McMurdo Sound. Once they began drilling into the sea floor, they had to contend with the tidal rise and fall of their ice platform and the fact that, like all glacial ice, it was slowly on the move towards open water. Anyone who has bored into a piece of wood knows that any movement of the drill can lead to a broken bit and lots of swear words. It was a miracle that the ANDRILL team managed to drill without wrecking any of its expensive gear.

  I arrived at the drill site near the end of an Antarctic summer, escorting a small huddle of artists. I noticed the drill crew looked exhausted. They had been grinding through twelve-hour shifts in twenty-four-hour daylight for three months non-stop and were now close to achieving the maximum depth of 1,285 metres. They were in a race against time to get the job done before the rig had to be disassembled in the face of the onset of the merciless winter.

  Geological drilling site, Ross Ice Shelf, 2007.

  As cores came up the drill hole they were carefully cut into one-metre lengths and transported over the ice to the Crary Lab at McMurdo Station. Immediately a group of physicists scrutinised the small fractures and faults to discover any obvious tectonic information. Once they had completed their inspection, the core was cut in half along its length. One half was shipped to the drill archive at Florida State University; the other was free to be dissected for sampling at the lab.

  This sampling looked like a feeding frenzy. There were a number of different teams. Some were interested in the make-up of the rocks, others in the minute fossils they contained, still others in the layers of volcanic ash that represented past eruptions of Erebus and its neighbour Mount Terror. Each team stuck colour-coded flags into the core at points they deemed interesting and began hacking out bits. Somehow they kept track of the position in the core that their sample had come from by a coding system so the various results could be distilled into an accurate and comprehensive record of geological history.

  The artists and I hovered out of the way at the back. We noticed that whenever anything soft, green or muddy-looking showed up in the core there was palpable excitement. The soft bits might hold fossilised remains. The creatures whose fossils these were would have needed certain conditions to be present for their existence. Their presence could therefore reveal a lot about climate fluctuations. As the palaeontologists bellowed out taxonomic names the room began to resemble a share-trading floor.

  We gathered that most of the creatures came from a group of marine algae called diatoms. When the diatoms died, they had rained down on the ocean floor in such profusion that their tiny silicate shells had left a distinct line in the sediment. For the creatures to exist in the first place, Antarctica had to have been more temperate and ice-free than it is today. According to the scientists, these particular diatoms had existed somewhere in the Pliocene Epoch, about three to five million years ago, and coincided with the advent of hominins, the earliest stirrings of the human form. The world was warmer by up to three degrees, the sea level was at least twenty metres higher, and the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were similar to those that all of us o
n Earth will soon be facing.

  Enthralled with our newfound knowledge, the artists and I headed for the nearest bar at McMurdo. We were in complete agreement that information about geological time could be best digested with the aid of good whisky.

  Later, full analysis of the ANDRILL core would reveal that the Ross Ice Shelf had shrunk and expanded at least forty times in the last five million years. In the warmer times, indicated by the presence of diatoms in the core, not only had this ice shelf retreated but so too had most of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. In cooler periods, the Ross Ice Shelf seems to have stretched further north than it does today.

  Part of the explanation for these climatic oscillations comes from the work of a Serbian mathematician. Milutin Milanković was unlucky enough to be honeymooning in Austro-Hungary when the First World War broke out. Interned at first in a prison, he was subsequently released to spend the rest of war at the Hungarian Academy of Science in Budapest. He put his time to good use trying to figure out how the climate of a number of planets varied according to their orbit around the sun. It would be the start of a lifelong project.

  In the 1930s Milanković presented a theory as to why Earth’s climate had changed dramatically over the ages. The answer, he said, lay in three regular changes to the way Earth moved around the sun. Every 100,000 years Earth’s orbit around the sun varied from circular to elliptical. Every 41,000 years Earth tilted so that either the northern or southern hemisphere was further away from the sun. And every 22,000 years it wobbled on its axis like a spinning top. These events, he said, changed the distribution of solar energy striking the Earth and so set the rhythm of the world’s ice ages – including the advance and retreat of the Ross Ice Shelf.

  As sometimes occurs in the world of science, Milanković’s work was initially dismissed after doubt was cast on some of the data he had used to prove his theory. It was not until the 1970s that technology came to his rescue with the advent of high-resolution studies of deep-sea cores. These showed a link between glaciation as it was expressed in sea temperature and Milanković’s climate predictions.

  From the cores studied by the ANDRILL scientists it became apparent that catastrophic events such as occasional asteroid hits or gigantic volcanic eruptions also threw the whole system out of kilter, and pushed Earth’s climate into extended warmer or colder periods. One of these extended warm periods had occurred in the Miocene epoch, beginning around twenty-one million years ago and lasting about seven million years. During this time much of the ice of the Ross Ice Shelf and West Antarctic Ice Sheet melted. The period ended with a major cooling event: temperatures plummeted and the Antarctic ice cap as we know it was formed.

  This epoch was the focus of ANDRILL’s second season. When I returned there was a new drill site further out on the Ross Ice Shelf. A year on, the rig looked the same. It kept up its steady hum, floating on the moving ice shelf while drilling back through time and producing cores like a sausage machine. The crew still had the tired look of people who spent a lot of time looking down holes.

  I visited the Crary Lab and its excitable scientists to absorb some of the stock market atmosphere. The fossils and sediments coming up in this new set of cores suggested a slightly warmer world in which Antarctica had a climate similar to today’s southernmost regions of South America or the west coast of the South Island of New Zealand – more temperate than polar. By the end of the season, the drilling operation had brought up 1,107 metres of core samples.

  One Tuesday morning word got out about some action over at the lab. Any plans I had for the day were shelved as I staggered to McMurdo in a blizzard. What I saw among the hubbub was a two-metre section of core that looked like squishy green mud. You could almost touch the thrill in the room.

  I collared one of the palaeontologists and begged to hear the news. The mud, he explained, contained an abundance of marine and terrestrial microfossils, including five times as many freshwater algae and almost eighty times as much plant pollen as had been seen before. This was the most striking evidence yet that there had once been terrestrial life in abundance in Antarctica. I asked him what kind of world the creatures had lived in. ‘A very warm one,’ he said. ‘Antarctica was almost tropical.’

  Polar explorer Roald Amundsen, June 1899.

  Message from the living world

  84°26′S

  Nearly halfway back from the South Pole to their base at the Bay of Whales, Roald Amundsen and his four companions witnessed a curious thing. Two skua gulls appeared from the north, circled the group, and alighted on top of the cairn the men had made from snow and topped with a flag as a beacon for their return journey. The birds eyed them for a while before taking to the air again and heading south.

  The group fell silent. The birds were the first sign of life for eighty-two days. Much later, Amundsen would describe the incident as ‘a message from the living world to this realm of death’.

  Over a century on, the moment has disappeared into the greater glory of the heroic era of polar exploration. I came upon it in one of the two heady volumes of Amundsen’s book The South Pole, in which the Norwegian explorer chronicled the first – and for the next century the only – overland return journey to the geographic south pole from the Ross Sea.

  At 841 pages the book is too long and too obscure for all but the most dedicated polar history buff. There is no longer a copy in my local library but I have managed to find one in a second-hand bookstore and brought it to read at our field camp on the Ross Ice Shelf. With me is a small assortment of politicians and executives, whom I am to educate in the wonders of Antarctica with an eye to keeping the funding for science flowing. Also in the camp is a man who manages the logistics of shipping goods to Antarctica. Rob has come along to fill a spare seat in the Hagglunds, our all-terrain vehicles, and appears to be the only completely sane person in the assembled company.

  As we set up camp it’s immediately obvious that listening is a skill that’s been discarded by the VIPs on their way to the top. While Rob and I erect the tents they try to work out who is the alpha dog, with puffed chest gestures and much hand-waving and yelling. When they do attempt to do something they don’t bother with careful preparation: two executives put up their tent without pegging it down first and it skitters away in the breeze. Their peers laugh derisively: the incident must be a sign these guys are unsuitable as leaders.

  Amundsen would not have tolerated such amateurism. The entire first volume of his book is dedicated to his preparations. He spent several years in the Arctic, learning from the Inuit how to live and move on the ice. He was fastidious about every detail of his southern expedition, especially the selection of his team, who had to be well-proven, level-headed and strong of heart.

  Alongside these practicalities he waged political and financial trickery to get the project off the ground. It’s a sign of his political skills that based merely on his initial promise of taking an expedition to the North Pole he secured the backing of the Norwegian government and the use of Fridtjof Nansen’s ship Fram.

  By the time the ructions about his change of plan had died down, Amundsen was in the Ross Sea looking for a suitable base from which to strike out to the South Pole. He took a calculated risk and opted not for land but for a section of the Ross Ice Shelf called the Bay of Whales. The bay gave easy access to the ice and lay over a hundred kilometres closer to the pole than the alternative, Ross Island. The icescape of the bay was, and still is, in a constant state of flux, and like most of the shelf large chunks occasionally calve off and become icebergs. Basing a camp there was a typical Amundsen punt, intensely pragmatic and eschewing the chance of the expedition having a permanent shrine.

  Amundsen’s base Framheim, Bay of Whales, 1911.

  He named the base Framheim and built a small prefabricated hut with a network of under-ice caves to serve as workshops and storage areas during the polar winter. His accounts of this time are of the meticulous work of his men and a hut full of glowing good cheer.

 
; This warmth was a fleeting apparition in Amundsen’s life, which was rendered ice-cold by his desire for fame. He and his three brothers had been raised largely by their mother, Gustava, and their nanny, Betty. Their father, Jens, was a ship owner and captain and, like many who followed this profession, rarely home. Gustava was determined that Roald not go into the same awful business as his father. She badgered him to train as a doctor but on her death he at once quit medical school to indulge his fervour for the sea and exploring wild places. This set in train a pattern of quickly changing passions, an obsession with the North Pole, and self-defeating treachery that would mark the rest of his days.

  Amundsen’s personal relationships suffered. He never married and instead pursued the wife of a wealthy American timber merchant. Like his passion for the North Pole and then the South, his love for Kristine Bennett was full of subterfuge. After twenty-three years, when Kristine finally began to unshackle herself from the ties of marriage and family, Amundsen, rather than securing the love of his life, quickly retreated into the illusive rewards of fame.

  Amundsen adopted two girls and treated them much the same way. While iced in on the Maud during his second expedition to the Arctic when he was attempting to drift over the North Pole, he had befriended some local Siberian Inuit, who would visit the ship on their hunting trips out across the frozen Arctic Ocean. In 1920 a hunter named Kakot, whom Amundsen had employed to help on the ship, brought along his malnourished four-year-old daughter, Kakonita. Amundsen nursed the girl back to health and developed a parental affection for her.

  Kakot had no desire to take her back: her mother had died and having a daughter around interfered with his passion for fighting and womanising. Another girl, Camilla, the daughter of a local trader, was found as a companion for Kakonita, and at the conclusion of his unsuccessful expedition Amundsen took both girls home to Norway to be educated. For a few years he showered them with gifts and affection, before tiring of their presence and sending them back to Camilla’s parents in Siberia in 1924 on the excuse that he was bankrupt and could no longer support them. The girls had been just a brief flicker of humanity in Amundsen’s intensely solitary existence.