Blazing Ice

by John H. Wright

  We jostled over the snow at three miles per hour, staggering our tracks with the tractor in front of us. “Then you’ve got James McCabe and Stretch Vaitonis. Both of those guys are superb equipment operators. Both are gentlemen of the highest caliber. If you think redneck, rough, and crude when you think heavy equipment operator, then you think wrong when it comes to those two.”

  “What about you? What should I think when I think you?”

  “You’re finding that out right now.” I caught his eye across the cab, again.

  We weren’t a military operation, and I didn’t expect blind allegiance. We were an egalitarian group. Individually we were an introspective lot, relishing time alone in our cabs, left to our own thoughts. But we enjoyed fellowship and banter at the end of the day. With all the experience we’d amassed, and the unknowns we faced, everybody’s input was equally valuable. I happened to be the headman, and I made the decisions when a decision was necessary. If I made a dumb decision, every one of these guys would say “Fuck you!” I would, too.

  “Have you made a decision yet?” Scooter asked, still sounding smart with me.

  “I have.”

  “Well … ?”

  “We’re going to keep going south until half our time or half our fuel runs out. We’re going to find out what it takes to cross this damn Shelf. And then we’re going to turn around and go back. That is my decision.”

  A long silence followed as the Elephant Man lunged forward over the virgin snows. Soon enough, Scooter would see a tractor sink or a sled break. Then he’d stand off to the side and watch us fall into our routines.

  We already speculated on the roots of our disappointments. Popular culprits ranged from soft snow and high ambient temperatures to tractor tread and sled designs. Meanwhile, we were stuck with it for the year. Virgin snow lay in front of us, and behind us lay no road but that which we’d built. Putting a fully loaded, even overloaded, traverse fleet into the trail-breaking business had been a mistake. NSF expected we’d make it to the top of the Leverett this second year. We’d be lucky to get to the base of it.

  “What would you like me to do besides run with the flagging crew, John?” Scooter asked.

  “One component of our difficulties is this soft snow. You mountaineers have your own take on snow, and I need some of that. I want you to do your mountaineering thing and teach me what you learn about it.”

  “Like dig snow pits? I can dig snow pits for you!” Scooter sounded enthusiastic now. We’d dug a few pits back when Delaney was with us, but we hadn’t kept it up.

  “Excellent, Scooter. Meter-deep pits ought to do it. Our troubles are in the top two or three feet. We’ve got to work hard to sink farther than that. I’ll ask Norbert to help you.”

  From that day on, we had snow pits at every campsite. Scooter and Norbert measured snow densities and temperatures down the walls of their pits. They correlated that data to the snow layers they exposed.

  We didn’t have a rammsonde, the standard snow science penetrometer for measuring the unconfined, compressive strength of snow. Instead, Scooter used a mountaineer’s trick for empirically deriving the same information. He measured resistance to penetration along the pit walls by jamming things into it. A knife measured the hardest, most resistant end of his scale. A pencil, then a finger, then two fingers, four fingers, and, finally, a fist graded down to the soft end. Scooter and Norbert went the extra mile by including measurements of our rut depths near each pit.

  One flat-light day, I looked around the module sleds and spotted Scooter’s head floating in the whiteness two hundred feet away. Just his head. Floating nearby, at Scooter’s chin level, Norbert’s crouching form took notes. Towering above all, Stretch patiently leaned against a floating shovel and stared down at Scooter. The colorful phantasms drew me over.

  “What do you see in this one?” I asked from the pit’s edge. Scooter’s incorporeal form had now materialized into his entire body down in a hole.

  “This is the stuff that’s giving you troubles.” He scooped out a handful of grainy snow near the bottom of the pit wall, and held it out on his black gloves. The grains were the size of small BBs. “This is TG snow. Uniformsized, facetted.”

  “TG?”

  “Temperature gradient. It’s weak stuff.”

  “That’s like what Delaney showed us from his little core tubes. It doesn’t stick together,” I recalled.

  “Yeah. Well, most of this pit wall is TG snow. But see this thin layer here?” Scooter pointed to a layer three inches thick, a foot below the surface. Its finer grains stuck together, laminated. “This is WF snow. It’s stronger. You want more of this stuff,” he declared.

  “What’s WF?”

  “Wind fucked … It’s my own term. Some call it wind slab. Stand over here on this edge of the pit.”

  I stepped where he indicated and the ground gave way under my weight. The WF slab cracked. The TG material supporting it collapsed, spilling a pile of icy BBs onto the pit floor.

  “See?” he asked.

  “QED,” I answered.

  “Right. Whatever that means. Anyway, all the pit walls show mostly TG snow below the surface crust. Just a few thin WF layers. Altogether, that don’t support squat.”

  “Copy that, Scooter. Then the best we can hope for as long as we’re in this stuff is to smash it down, and hope it sinters into some sort of pavement by the time we turn around and go back.”

  “Road building is your thing. Snow pits are mine.”

  Back in the living module I pulled out a couple of references from our traveling library and opened them for Scooter and Norbert on our galley table. One was a thick copy of Albert Crary’s glaciological studies from his late-1950s science traverse, when he’d circumnavigated the Ross Ice Shelf. I turned to the contour map on which he’d plotted snow strengths.

  “Crary distinguishes between hard and soft snow on this map. The contour lines have numerical values. He doesn’t give their units, but I think they derive from rammsonde measurements.”

  Norbert and Scooter studied the map. Crary’s track ran around the edge of the Ice Shelf. All his snow strength measurements came from along that track. We were cutting across the middle of the Shelf, where Crary didn’t go. We had crossed his track back near the Shear Zone. We’d cross it again somewhere up ahead.

  “You see these closed contour loops he’s mapped around the middle? Where we are right now?”

  Scooter and Norbert nodded. Those contours indicated what Crary believed would be the softest, weakest snow. He had to extrapolate those values over a hundred miles because he wasn’t here.

  “Scooter, do you think your TG snow is the same soft, weak stuff Crary was talking about?”

  “I want to look over this report more closely,” Scooter said. “But I think so.”

  “If it is so,” I speculated, “then there’s hope that we’ll come out of this swamp. Up here closer to the mountains, where Crary went, the contours show a harder surface. Now let me show you this other one.”

  The other report was only a half-inch thick. It collected contributions to a traverse conference held in Washington, D.C., in 1994. NSF sponsored it and CRREL hosted it. The list of attendees named French and Russian traverse experts, Caterpillar tractor dealers, and other snow vehicle manufacturers. Names like Dave Bresnahan and George Blaisdell rang familiar.

  “Check this name,” I turned the page. “Russell Magsig.”

  Their eyebrows rose. I added, “Our Russell has been in on this for a long time. Respect that. But here’s what I want to show you now …”

  The next section represented glaciologist’s contributions. I’d never met Robert Bindschadler or Gordon Hamilton, but I had heard their names around the program a lot. Their notes described criteria for selecting the Leverett route across the Transantarctics. We were not there to debate that. We were going to test it. But their list of criteria included features they thought should be avoided: abundance of crevasses, steep slopes, blue ice, and
“depth hoar.”

  “Scooter, the alpine mountaineers in my home town are always talking about weak depth hoar layers at the base of the snow pack. They predict avalanches on account of it. As I understand, that stuff is pretty much the same as what you’ve been digging here?”

  Scooter nodded, his eyes wide open and attentive. “Right. The old timers used to call it depth hoar. These days we call it TG, and the process that makes it is kinetic metamorphism. It ain’t going to avalanche on this Shelf, of course, but it’s the same stuff that collapses under your tractors as you squirm through it.”

  “Thank you. I thought so. Those glaciologists thought depth hoar should be avoided. And I reckon we know why, now. You put those guys together with Crary’s projections and you have this big swamp. Had I understood that ahead of time, I might’ve made a strong argument for building a road across it first, before we brought out heavy loads to break trail.”

  Scooter cocked his head. “Hey, nobody can blame you, John.”

  “Blame’s beside the point. That’s dinosaur bones. I’m looking at that three-year schedule to complete, and wondering how big this swamp is.”

  We got our first indication on December 27 that second year, still headed south. Quite suddenly in the afternoon, all our tractors started riding up on top of the snow. The overcast that obscured our skies for weeks rolled back. Golden glints of sunlight reflected off the distant mountains now rising for the first time on our southern horizon. Scooter invited me over to his snow pit that evening. I dropped down beside him.

  “Look at this, John.” He pointed out the various layers exposed in his pit wall.

  “No BBs. Is this all WF snow?”

  “A lot of it is. But look at these layers with the finer grains. This is equi-temperature stuff.”

  “What? ET, now?”

  “Just another name. But check this … it’s bonded. It doesn’t spill.”

  I stood up in the pit, studying the new mountains. “You suppose they have anything to do with this snow being here? I’m talking about weather and wind up close to them. Not like those foggy doldrums behind us.”

  “Could be. There’s a lot more to learn.”

  “If we’ve just come out of three hundred miles of swamp, then that would be wonderful.”

  But we would wait a year to find out. The next day was December 28. There was a red mark on the calendar. We turned around to run back on the road we’d built behind us.

  Snow accumulates in Antarctica to such an extent that, over time and depth, it compacts itself under its own weight. It squeezes the air out of its mass until it becomes dense ice. When that ice cracks, you get a crevasse. If you’re building a road across Antarctica, crevasses are a terrain problem that will slow you down, or kill you. We understood this, and sometimes our knowledge flowed back to the mountaineers.

  Matthew Szundy had rotated in for Scooter as we retreated from our farthest south. His boyishly handsome, clean-shaven, and smiling face loudly proclaimed: I am ALERT!

  During our retreat, we stopped at a place we called the George Trend to explore for crevasses that might be lurking there. Blaisdell had called my attention to a satellite image where he noticed a staggered array of linear features cutting across our path. If the features themselves weren’t crevasses, they might be telltales of crevasse country. Our outbound trip proved that a hundred-foot-wide, twenty-mile-long path through the George Trend was free of crevasses. That was good enough for us then. But on our return, I wanted to see if we could actually find a crevasse there.

  Matthew and I went exploring in the PistenBully. He ran the radar, and I drove. Over two days we ran one-mile squares on both sides of our trail. Cloudy skies gave us no surface definition. I navigated by GPS. But even had there been clear skies, we had no landmarks. At 120 miles from the Shear Zone, the peaks of the Transantarctic Range hid below all our horizons.

  While we mapped out one of our western squares, the clouds broke a tiny bit. A shaft of bright sunlight struck the snowfield in front of us, and cast an oddly curved shadow on the snow. I broke Matthew’s concentration. “I don’t believe my eyes. Do you see what I see? Is that a hill in front of us?”

  Matthew looked up from the radar screen and out the windshield: “You don’t believe your eyes? That looks like a hill to me.”

  “What’s a hill doing out here?” Matthew was new to the Ross Ice Shelf. Did he get how weird that was?

  “Maybe we’re in a trough?” he suggested.

  That would mean we were in a bottom, looking up, with another hill behind us. And we hadn’t felt any slope-change by the seat of our pants. We’d never have seen this hill if it hadn’t been for that shaft of sunlight.

  We went ahead to find out what the radar saw. Matthew reported the stratigraphy beneath us rose as we started climbing. It flattened out as we crested the hill. That meant some sort of fold lay below us, an anticline of sorts.

  We continued into a broad, sunlit stretch of flat ground.

  “STOP!” Matthew cried.

  I let go of everything. The PistenBully automatically stopped.

  “I got a crevasse,” Matthew turned the computer screen toward me.

  He was on it. The clear black needle-form in the radar image was probably ten feet in front of us now. It looked narrow, like a crack we could drive over. But it was too small to account for what we’d seen on the satellite images. I looked right into Matthew’s bright blue eyes.

  “Good job. You know, I teased those CRREL guys all the way from the Shear Zone out to RIS-1. They never found a single crevasse on the open Shelf. But here, on your first day out, you found one! You are good, man! You are much better than those CRREL guys!”

  “But I thought finding no crevasses was good?” Matthew puzzled over my praise.

  “Finding no crevasses is good, but it didn’t stop me from teasing them. Now I’m teasing you.”

  Matthew laughed uneasily. He was brand new to our haggard mob and needed to fit in right away. He knew his routine job would be running the radar and looking for crevasses. He’d dealt with alpine crevasses as a guide, but these were Shelf crevasses. And our job was to get tractor trains through, not paying clients on foot.

  That evening in our galley, long after the crew retired to their bunks, I slouched wide awake on the galley bench. All the scenes of our ignominious defeat in the snow swamp replayed for me on the ceiling. I plotted solutions, but I wondered if NSF would receive our horror stories as whining complaints or as lessons learned. Matthew surprised me as he stepped in from outside.

  “Hi, John. You’re not asleep?”

  “No, I am cogitating.”

  “Me, too. Cogitating. Been thinking about crevasses,” Matthew confessed.

  “Have a seat?”

  He dragged the caster chair out of the comms booth and sat across the floor from me. My legs stretched across to a stool on the other side of the galley table.

  “I’m concerned about these crevasses. I’m not sure we’re paying enough attention to them,” Matthew said. I saw where this conversation was headed.

  “Well, that’s actually an old joke,” I replied.

  Matthew’s neck straightened. “What?”

  “A very old joke,” I repeated. “You know the story of the blind men and the elephant?”

  “Yeah, I know that story,” Matthew said, probably wondering if he was getting through to me at all.

  “Okay. One blind man says an elephant is like a tree. Another one says it’s like a wall. And another one says it’s like a snake … You with me?”

  Matthew smiled at the twist his earnest conversation had taken. I was going to enjoy this.

  “Well, I’m talking to my hometown Rabbi,” I continued. “Marvin Paioff, the smartest man I ever met, and our conversation turns to Jews’ preoccupation with anti-Semitism. ‘Marvin,’ I said, ‘I had a college buddy named Jeff Schwartz. We shared an English literature class together. Every time we had to write a paper, I’d explore my favorite them
e of medieval knighthood. Jeff would explore anti-Semitism. So it’d be ‘The Value System of the Red Cross Knight in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene,’ for me. For Jeff, it’d be ‘Anti-Semitism in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale.’ Now, Marvin, that’s what Jeff was interested in. Exploring anti-Semitism. He did it every chance he got. And I explored chivalry, every chance I got … until I understood it to be licensed hypocrisy. But I’ve noticed over the years that many of my Jewish friends have Jeff’s same infatuation with anti-Semitism. Why is that?’ Do you know what he told me?”

  Matthew, thoroughly lost, was nevertheless intrigued. “I have no idea what Rabbi Paioff told you.”

  “He told me the same thing I just told you.”

  “What?”

  “That it’s a very old joke. And he asked me if I knew the story of the blind men and the elephant?”

  “But what’s the joke?”

  “Oh … you want to know that?”

  “Yes!” Matthew demanded.

  “Okay. I was wondering. A U.N. delegation studies the elephant. When they’re done, they write up their reports. The United States representative turns in his: The Use of Elephant Manure as an Agricultural Crop Enhancement. The German’s report is titled The Elephant as a War Machine. And the Frenchman writes about The Love Life of the Elephant. You know what the Israeli’s paper is?”

  “No,” cried Matthew, now grinning from ear to ear.

  “Anti-Semitism and the Elephant.”

  “Aw jeez,” he laughed. “I thought we were talking about crevasses!”

  “We are talking about crevasses. Haven’t you been paying attention?”

  Matthew gestured with open palms and open mouth, as if to say, “What? What?”

  I took a more serious tone. “You’re a mountaineer. You’ve seen a jillion crevasses. You’re a crevasse expert. If you’re like other mountaineers, you figure you’ve got a lock on crevasses. Am I right?”

  “Yes,” Matthew said forthrightly, now more engaged with the subject. There was no backing down in him. No false modesty. He was going to work great for us.