Ice Diaries

by Jean McNeil

  Just as Scott’s did, our pyramid tents weighed over one hundred kilograms each, as we discovered during winter training. Lashing them to the sledges was an art. The manfood boxes easily weighed in at fifteen kilograms a piece. The Antarctic world is one of physical toil and heft, but this is not the reason women were barred from it for so long. In training Suzanne and I were left to erect the pyramid tents on our own — we might have no help in the field. We lifted and broke camp unaided.

  Time had also stopped in social relations, for lack of a better term. We had reverted to an age before mobile phones and Wi-Fi. Our entertainments were Victorian. On base we played board games and did group crosswords and pub quizzes, before going skiing as a group, like children.

  “I kind of like it,” Suzanne said, as we drank tea in the dining room that night. “It reminds me of when I was a child, before any of this stuff was invented. We used to play charades once a week at home. Now we watch Downton Abbey.”

  Suzanne had taken quickly to life on base. She was an outdoorswoman at heart, reared against the lean winds of Cornwall, a hill walker and rock climber. Crucially she was comfortable in groups and with the rollicking banter that fuels pub talk.

  Very quickly groups were established. Suzanne made friends with a couple of the Andys (there were four Marks and six Andys on base) and the younger scientists. I was only a couple of years older than Suzanne, but in the Antarctic bubble the difference was significant. I found myself gravitating to the forty- and fifty-year-olds, the senior scientists and pilots.

  Suzanne and I didn’t have much time to think, let alone write or make art. Days were occupied by briefings — “sit reps” — fire drills, obligatory group activities such cleaning out the food store, trips into the bay in the RIBs to collect water column samples, talks, and lectures. I took to running on the runway every day, accompanied by a walkie-talkie in case one of the planes was about to land. Several times my walkie-talkie would squawk to life, and I would hear the communications manager’s urgency: “Plane, incoming. Bravo Zulu Zulu. Leave runway immediately. Repeat, leave runway …” I would look up mid-runway to see a red speck in the sky. By the time I had reached its edge the speck would be on the deck.

  The days I lived after stepping into what people on base called the Antarctic bubble would be some of the most vivid of my life. We forget so many days of our lives, days blurred by routine and unawareness. We have to believe there will be more of them; it would be exhausting to live every day as if it were the last one of our lives. Yet in the Antarctic, I was beginning to understand, such intensity was expected, even necessary: most of us had only one shot at the continent. “Time is different here,” Mark the field assistant, who had stopped with me on the ski slope on my first night in the Antarctic, told me.

  There was no stately progression to time in those months. Time froze or lunged forward, like the outlet glaciers that coursed down the rims of the continent. It could be because we lived in two time zones on base: local time, three hours behind the UK, the same as Stanley or Buenos Aires, and “Zulu Time” (equivalent to Greenwich Mean Time, GMT), which all aircraft operations and communications were conducted in. Perhaps it was down to strange regimes of day and night — stalled sunsets, three-month-long days, three-month-long nights.

  I realized I been programmed by a life in the temperate latitudes of the northern hemisphere to expect that the sun would rise in the east and set in the west, and that night would follow day. To be released from these mechanics, which I was unaware of having internalized, was to be freed from a machine I suppose I had tired of. Part of my euphoria was explained by the fact that there was just so much light. It was chemical, but also psychological.

  Language was also different in the Antarctic. Those first nights in the bar I learned the truncated idiom of base. There is a British linguistic habit of trying to diminish the power of exotica by shortening names. Even the shortest words are ruthlessly guillotined: leopard seals, the only carnivorous seal in the southern hemisphere and one to be avoided as they can easily kill a person, are leps; scientists are beakers, named after the Muppet Show character; mechanics are mechs. Then there are the equally amputated place names — Monty for Montevideo, Punta for Punta Arenas. The expressions of everyday interaction permitted on base meanwhile were all hyperactive, welded to exclamation marks: “Magic!” or “Super-duper!”

  The pilots spoke in a Morse code of their own: “BZZ will depart Site 8 at oh eight hundred Zulu” was a typical phrase. My all-time favourite word was uplifted. This was the term used when the Twin Otter finally came to get you in the field, to bring you home to base.

  That night the bar filled with more people just arrived on the Dash, wearing the familiar expression of the base newcomer, even if they had been here before: a composite of exhilaration, fatigue and disbelief. Only forty-eight hours ago they’d stood in the departure lounge at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire with its ropey vending machines and tweed-jacketed newspaper kiosk owner, and here they were in the Antarctic, squaring themselves up to nearly eight weeks’ work in an underground ice cavern and the punishing winds of Berkner Island.

  Everyone talked about the ice coring team long before their arrival. They were the scientific superstars of the season, these forensic archaeologists of the Antarctic. That night there were three: the chief scientist, Xavier, who at fifty was already a legend in ice core drilling; Jonah, a tall engineer; and Gemma, a young glaciologist. I’d seen pictures of Xavier in the halls of Cambridge HQ; in them he looked like an auto-body-shop Santa, with his orange boiler suit, his knit cap, and his ice beard, the skin on his cheeks bloodless and pinched.

  “It’s always fun to watch their beards grow,” Gemma told me, when I asked her how she managed for so long in the field with men — young women are not common in ice core drilling. “We have competitions. Or, they have a competition, hopefully. My role is to measure their beards every day. Anything to keep yourself from going mad in the refrigerator.”

  The ice coring was done from an underground chamber where the drill and the computerized equpiment are housed. Here, Gemma told me, the temperature was between minus ten and minus twenty-five, colder, often, than at the surface. The team would surface to cook and sleep in pyramid tents on the blasted plain of Berkner Island.

  Xavier was a popular figure; everyone seemed to want to talk to him. I chose my moment to catch him on his own. He turned his brown eyes on me and there was a note, very faint, of wariness. But he was a generous conversationalist, and for nearly half an hour he explained the background to the Berkner project.

  “In ice, depth equals time,” Xavier began. “It’s all about time, really. Another thing about time and ice cores — in coring, time goes backward, not forward. The further down you get, the further back in time you go.”

  Antarctic ice cores show that there are eight cycles of warm and cold roughly every 100,000 years. “One cause is a change of external input, such as a variance in the earth’s rotation of the sun,” he said. “The other is a release of carbon dioxide: in the pre-human world this would have been caused by the retreat of ice sheets and subsequent warming of boreal landscapes, perhaps leading to methane release. Or a failure of the carbon dioxide sinks in the oceans, for whatever reason.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Earth warmed for five thousand years.”

  “Why did it then stop warming?”

  “We don’t know.” He put his drink down. “Wait a second and I’ll get something.”

  He returned with a sheet of graph paper. How happy scientists are — really they look beatific — when asked to explain something.

  “Look at this.” Xavier talked me through the red spindly graph lines on the paper. “What the ice cores also show is that major changes have taken place in the earth’s climate within timescales we thought were too short to accommodate such revolutions.”

  I looked again. The core
graph looked like a cardiogram; the tops of the red-spike heartbeats were temperature rises, some of them drastic, followed by a fall into cold.

  “Some of these represent a rise of as much as ten degrees in about fifteen years.” He pointed to the top of the spike. “It must have been very uncomfortable to be alive, just then.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Within the last 100,000 years. Humans would have been around to experience the final spikes, albeit in hunter-gatherer communities.”

  I stared at the spikes, flummoxed by the rapid change they signalled, in contrast to the slow time we associate with “normal” climate change, the slow time of the earth’s rhythms, those grandiose processes of glaciation and melt that Max and I spoke about on the ship.

  “And in the last four hundred or so years in particular the climate has been remarkably unchanging,” he continued. “This is what has allowed us to depend upon planting seasons and yields, to extract the planet’s energies, and to grow our population.”

  His conclusion was obvious. Now we are living on the rising vertical of one of Xavier’s spikes and no one knows where the apex will lie, at which degree the temperature will peak, or if it will ever fall.

  After talking with Xavier, I retreated to Lab 7, clambering once again over silver boxes of drilling kit and instruments, to sit at my desk and stare out the window at the glacier.

  Many times in the coming months in the Antarctic I would feel a subdued chastening which was not so much despondency as a sobering longing on behalf of the planet. For the first time in my life I was beginning to think of the planet as an organism whose well-being I could effect. I had considered this before, of course, but in the abstract. In the Antarctic I felt closer to the planet than ever before. It was almost as though I could hear its pulse. Was this just a fanciful projection of mere human guilt?

  I was learning more in a matter of weeks than I had in entire years. I was relieved to have been released from the narrow concerns of the day-to-day. I was no longer an observer in a global drama but a participant. I considered the paradox of our geographical position. In the Antarctic we were beyond the human, temporarily protected from it. The Antarctic is changing, and will change, but it is out of the equation for experiencing the human effects of climate change, because it has never sustained human life. The disruptions and mass suicides foreseen by climate apocalypticians will never take place there. We were at the epicentre of the crisis, yet simultaneously safe.

  Before I’d left the bar, Xavier had passed me on to a physicist to speak to that night. The physicist was a tall, genial man from Durham University. He was studying neutrinos. These sounded vaguely familiar, in the family of quirks and quarks and other subatomic matter I knew little about.

  The physicist told me how a star collapses: for tens of millions of years it has fed on the fusion of hydrogen to make helium. But when all the fuel is gone the star collapses in a sliver of a second. It sends neutrinos into space, soaked in clouds of star-rubble. “Remember, this is happening when man is gnawing the bones of tigers and competing with strange breakaway groups of hominids,” he had said. By the time the neutrinos reach earth we are staffing international space stations. They pass through our bodies undetected and come to rest deep underground, in defunct coal mines, in the frozen subterranean lakes of Antarctica. Stars, the physicist said, or their descendants, are moving through us, always.

  By December it is too cold to flee his rages and hide in the bat-infested cabin in the woods. Deep snow pockets the spaces between the trees; it will be more difficult to outrun him, panting behind us, rifle in hand. He is fit, still, but the drink and the prescription medicine take their toll. He sits down in a heap and puts his head in his hands, the rifle leaning against a tree beside him.

  One night, close to the end, he comes home and hits her. He threatens to get the chainsaw, which he keeps in the bathtub. “I’ll tear the place down,” he yells.

  I go to the kitchen drawer, take out a knife, jump on his back and shove it in his shoulder, hard. Blood spurts over my nightgown.

  He doesn’t know what has hit him. Then my grandmother is peeling me off him, even though I cling to his back. I almost have the knife lined up with his throat.

  “Get! Off!” My grandmother’s hand. She pulls me away by the scruff of my neck, like an animal.

  Why is she trying to stop me from killing the madman? “The chainsaw,” I say. “He’ll kill us all.”

  He collapses that night, more from drink than blood loss. But my grandmother is a practised backwoods medic, and soon she has made a poultice. She puts my nightgown in the sink and burns it. “He won’t remember anything tomorrow.”

  The ice locks in a cordon around our island. For much of our island’s history the lake and sea ice spelled death — falling through the winter ice, crossing lakes or the inland sea on foot or by sleigh. They drowned, or were saved, pulled out from the disintegrating ice, only to later die of hypothermia. Sometimes everything would go through: horses, a sleigh, in later years a skidoo. If you could get the person or animal out quickly enough and into warmth, they might survive. Men used to travel roped together, like horizontal mountaineers, so that they could pull each other out walking across the ice that covered the two-kilometre-wide gut of water that separated our island from the bulk of the main island.

  Years later, after I had left and was living with my mother in the timber baron town, I returned in winter. The inland sea was open, barren and blue. A film of ice scalloped its edges. “It hasn’t frozen this year, or the last,” my relatives told me. They shook their heads at the memory of the years when they’d walked on water.

  It is minus twenty. We limp through another Christmas. For two weeks I can’t get a straight answer out of any of them.

  “I’m hungry!”

  “Well then make yourself something to eat. There’s a good girl.”

  “Will you help me put on my snowsuit?”

  These appeals are met with a drugged silence. They are all sitting, him, her, her sisters, at the kitchen table, playing cards. A quart of rum sits in the middle of the table, half-full. The smoke from their combined cigarettes is not elegant, it does not curl as in films where card sharks play poker games in wheezy dens. I can’t breathe in this lung cancer sauna. I struggle into my snowsuit and go outside. One step outside, the cold bites at my cheeks.

  I take the dog for company. We walk across lakes, through boggy taiga traced by thin veins of mining roads, flatlands corrugated by drumlins. I am eleven years old. My schooling at the local primary is rudimentary; I do not yet know that the polar regions, the plates of ice that top and tail our planet, exist. Another thing I do not know: soon this chapter of my life is about to come to an abrupt and dramatic end.

  I look for my dog, Lindy, in the black cage of trees. She is nowhere to be seen. I fear she will meet the fate of our other dogs, caught in bear traps and frozen to death overnight, dragged off into the woods by an unidentified creature — a lynx, perhaps, or a wolf. The anxiety of potential loss is in direct proportion to the intensity of the thing loved. Even then I had an inkling that life was about this: about testing the limits of loss, how much of it we could take. That this was part of the intentions of an external intelligence. Through loss it would determine who was fit to live and who was weak enough to die.

  I call and call for her, but she does not return. The dog is possibly the most intelligent of all of us, the first one to defect from our republic of cold sorrow. But she shows up a day later, the glint of hunger in her eye.

  3.

  EASY LIFE!

  shuga

  An accumulation of spongy white ice lumps, a few centimetres across, formed from grease ice or slush and sometimes from ice rising to the surface.

  December 31st

  New Year’s Eve. A low mantle of cloud hovers above the horizon. The cloud and land p
ress the sky until a thin blue line sandwiched between two grey-white smudges is all we can see of it.

  Niall the met man from Northern Ireland explains that this is a typical Antarctic effect caused by the temperature differential between the cold fission of sea ice and the moisture from summer melt ponds formed within the ice itself. This is the reason cloud hangs much lower in the Antarctic than anywhere else on earth, he says.

  Base is busy with preparations for the New Year’s Eve party. There will be a formal sit-down dinner, followed by a set by the base band. Its musicians have taught themselves to play their instruments over the previous winter. Melissa the doctor has learned to play drums, which she does very convincingly with the stone-faced concentration of Charlie Watts.

  The party is held in the sledge store, where the skis, mountaineering equipment, and clothing are kept. After a while I go outside to see the colours of early morning. Standing next to a rubbish skip is a figure in a parka. We stand in easy silence for a few minutes, listening to the thump of music coming from the sledge store, whose windows had been taped up with bin liners to simulate night.

  Our eyes are fixed on the icebergs in North Cove, stunned by the sea ice and the colours of the sky layered with sherbet shades — cold pink, mandarin, lemon. It is three thirty a.m.

  “Nice scene, isn’t it? Myself, I never tire of the skies down here.”

  His voice is level, certain. On closer inspection his face rings a bell. I have seen his mug shot next to the tagging board. In the photo he is dressed in a floaty jacket of a material I learn is called Ventile, a favourite among pilots, and made from parachute material, lightweight yet very warm.

  The photo on the tagging board is sepia-toned. In his jacket he looks antique also, a hero from another, more legitimate, era.