Antarctica

by Gabrielle Walker

  That night, I wondered why so many men and women in Antarctica felt the need for whimsy like this. In some cases it might be like whistling in the dark: you had to show bravado in the face of a hostile environment. But Dave and Jim and the team didn’t seem remotely afraid of this place. They clearly loved it. In the end I decided that it was partly because they worked so incredibly hard here, from early morning till late at night; the laughter was for release. But I also sensed that it came out of exuberance at doing their science in a place that clearly made them feel alive.

  The next morning brought clear weather and a good working day. As we hiked over to a new site, Dave explained what he was investigating this season. It was all about ice. Beacon Valley was ringed around with smaller valleys like catchers’ mitts, which trapped the snow blowing down from the plateau and turned it into ice until it formed glaciers.

  Rocks tumbling down from the steep sides of the valley coated the glaciers with a thick dark surface, and this protected the ice at least for a while. But as the glaciers moved sluggishly towards Beacon Valley the prurient fingers of the wind succeeded in poking through gaps in the rocks, sand and silt and whipping away whiffs of ice vapour. By the time it reached the centre of Beacon Valley, far away from the sources, the ice should all have vanished.

  But it hadn’t. One day, when he was digging around in the rocks, Dave’s shovel clanged against something that was unmistakably ice, where no ice had the right to be. Yesterday’s experiment with the sledgehammer was intended to send seismic waves down through the ice to the rock beneath, to measure how thick it was. Today, he meant to drill into the ice and pull up some samples.

  As we hiked, I started to think about the heroic explorers of old. Like most of the people that I’d met down here, the team had read about those early Antarctic exploits. But very few from the heroic age made it this far into the uplands. Beacon Valley was barely touched till the helicopters could make it in—and even now very few people had stood here. I wondered if that made these scientists feel like explorers themselves. Dave considered the question. ‘For me it’s the science,’ he said finally. ‘It’s not about standing where no one else has stood. It’s about finding things. Thinking where no one else has thought.’ He stopped suddenly, his face alight. ‘Oh, wow! Let me show you something really interesting! I didn’t know we had already crossed over into the yellow brick road.’

  He started scrabbling at the pale golden rock that had appeared beneath our feet, half hidden by chocolate-coloured boulders. ‘Look at him, he’s like a leprechaun,’ Jim said, adding with a heavy Irish brogue: ‘Pot o’ gold.’

  ‘Precioussss . . .’ hissed Dave, piling slabs of the yellow rock into his arms. ‘Master says I can have it.’ He was leaping and bounding from side to side, making us all laugh, before he stood up and started placing the samples into a bag. And then he looked at me with a wide grin. ‘You know how we were talking about discoveries. Well, you just walked on one.’

  This pale yellow rock was once volcanic ash; though it didn’t look like any ash that I’d seen before, that was because it had been around for a while. But the important thing was that if you had ash you could get a geological age. When a volcano erupts, the cloud of debris that it throws into the air contains minerals that act as tiny cages trapping radioactive elements inside. The cage is so small that nothing can get in or out. All the radioactive elements can do is gradually decay, tick, tick, tick, at a precise rate just like a clock. If you find these tiny cages and measure the ratio of what is left inside, you know how long ago the eruption happened.

  That mattered because this particular layer of ash lay on top of Dave’s buried ice, meaning the ice must have formed before. And when he measured those ticking clocks, they told him that his buried ice was at least eight million years old.18

  Ice! The most vulnerable solid on Earth. The material that melts as soon as you look at it. It’s almost inconceivable that such stuff could survive intact on Earth for so fantastically long. At first nobody would believe it, and Dave has had to make his case again and again, with multiple ashes and detailed models, to win over his scientist peers. But now, most were convinced that the ice buried in Beacon Valley was by far the oldest on Earth. And by drilling into it, Dave hoped to get samples, actual bubbles, of the ancient air trapped inside.

  So far, Dave hadn’t managed to get a clean clear signal of ancient air from his ice cores. There was evidence that cracks in the ice had mixed up the bubbles from different times and muddied the picture. But he was convinced that if he succeeded he would find the clearest window yet into the Earth’s distant climate history.

  Jim was just as excited about the prospects for ice on Mars. ‘I think it’s very likely that there’s still ice on Mars, buried under the same kind of rocks that we have here and it could be tens or even hundreds of millions of years old. Imagine that! We could go there, and drill into it, and get a pristine climate record of the whole history of Mars!’

  And so I stayed and watched for the next few days, as the team hefted their drilling apparatus to site after site, faces falling as the cores cracked or the rocks shattered, and shining with delight when a clean ice core went into its bag ready to be analysed. And I sang along with them to Tom Jones and Meatloaf. And I did my best to listen to the silence of the valley, when everyone else was asleep.

  On my last day there, as we were walking back to camp, the wind had dropped. Though the temperature was 21°F it felt surprisingly pleasant—the sun was warm on our backs and there were no clouds.

  Dave looked at me quizzically. ‘What do you think?’ he said. ‘Are we crazy to spend six weeks out here? Can you imagine doing it?’ Yes, I could. I could imagine staying here much, much longer than that. I found myself envying him the serenity of this valley that time forgot. ‘I’m tired of rushing around,’ I said. ‘I’d like to stay here long enough to get bored, and then go beyond the boredom and see what’s really there.’ He seemed to understand. ‘It’s when you’ve been here for a while, when you really get in the zone, like a runner with a second wind, when the weather’s good and you’ve had a good day doing good science, you can just stop and listen and ask “what are you telling me?”’

  Ask who? The landscape? I wondered if he was being whimsical again but I could see from his face that he was in earnest. ‘It does talk to you,’ he said. ‘Antarctica has this way of clearing your mind. Part of it is that there’s no distractions. They keep saying to me “why not just do day trips” but I say, “no, you have to be here, to be immersed in it. You have to feel the landscape—to start to feel like Antarctica. That’s when you can hear what it’s telling you.”’

  As we arrived back in camp we all heard the distant ‘whup whup’ of a helo breaking the silence of the valley. My ride would soon be here. I raced to my tent to pick up my gear. Soon I was back in the air, flying over the scaly polygons and out over the glacier. Behind and below me, the oldest landscape in the world was still telling its story to anyone who stayed around long enough to hear.

  PART 2:

  THE HIGH PLATEAU

  Turning Point

  4

  The South Pole

  You can describe the South Pole in many different ways. It is an imaginary dot in a vast field of white; the farthest south anyone can go; one of only two places on Earth where all the lines of longitude meet, where if you make one full turn your feet pass through every time zone, but where the Earth itself does not spin, and the ground beneath you is still. Unlike the North Pole, it is also the site of a surprising amount of human activity: dormitories, offices, trucks, pool tables, shower blocks, saunas and science.

  There are two physical markers to tell you that you’re standing at the South Pole. One is ceremonial, a red and white striped barber’s pole topped with a mirrored globe and surrounded by the flags of the first twelve countries to sign the Antarctic Treaty. This is where the dignitaries go to have their picture taken, and where you can lean in and see your face, weirdly d
istorted in the globe’s mirror, with ice and sky and buildings stretched out behind.

  Not far away is the ‘real’ Pole, marked by an understated steel rod and topped with a small brass cap. A new cap is lovingly designed and machined each year by a resident technician whiling away the long dark winter, and the marker is relocated in an official ceremony every New Year’s Day. The geographic pole itself doesn’t move but the ice slides over it, about thirty feet per year, and, without this annual shift, the marker would drift inexorably away from the true pole.

  Alongside this, an American flag flutters over a white panel declaring that this is the ‘GEOGRAPHIC SOUTH POLE’, with a red cross at the centre of a map of Antarctica in case you were in any doubt. The panel also bears quotes that reveal the very different fates of the two teams that first reached the Pole. On the left, dated 14 December 1911, is Roald Amundsen’s laconic: ‘So we arrived and were able to plant our flag at the Geographic South Pole’. On the right, dated 17 January 1912, is Captain Robert F. Scott’s testament to the misery of coming second in a race in which there were only two entrants: ‘The Pole. Yes, but under very different circumstances from those expected.’

  The Anglo-Saxon literature traditionally describes Amundsen’s crew as efficient in a way that implies dull. They did, however, have their own trials along the way. Amundsen was acutely aware of the danger that he could be forestalled by Scott, and decided to start out on his journey very early in the spring. Too early, as it turned out. The weather was too cold, the dogs suffered terribly, and in the end the teams had to dash for home. One of Amundsen’s crew complained so loudly, bitterly and publicly after this episode that Amundsen gave him formal written orders relieving him and two of his colleagues from the polar party and sending them instead on a make-work exploration to the east. This was harsh, but probably smart. A polar journey is hard enough without dissent in the ranks.

  However, in the end, the dogs worked beautifully, the weather cooperated, the snow held firm, and Amundsen and his men made it to the Pole with food and time to spare. His diffident description of his achievement has probably helped it to be dismissed as almost unsportingly easy. But one of his companions, Olav Bjaaland, wrote of the fears that had beset them. ‘We reached the South Pole at 2:30 today, tired and hungry, thank God we have enough food for the return journey.’ And then, charmingly, he addressed his mother and entire family: ‘Yes, if you only knew Mother and Saamund and Torne and Svein and Helga and Hans, that now I’m sitting here at the South Pole and writing, you’d celebrate for me.’1

  The journey was certainly not easy for the British team. Thirty-four days after Amundsen had reached his goal, on the eve of their arrival at the Pole, Scott and his four companions spotted a black Norwegian marker flag next to the unmistakable traces of skis and sledge runners and dog prints. ‘The Norwegians have forestalled us and are first at the Pole,’ Scott wrote in his diary. ‘It is a terrible disappointment, and I am very sorry for my loyal companions . . . Tomorrow we must march on to the Pole and then hasten home with all the speed we can compass. All the day-dreams must go; it will be a wearisome return.’2

  They continued to make their own measurements of the height of the sun at noon, calculating for themselves where the Pole should be. But Amundsen’s tracks led to the same place, to the pyramid tent that he had left, with a Norwegian flag and a letter to King Haakon of Norway, enclosed in a note to Scott himself:

  Dear Captain Scott,

  As you probably are the first to reach this area after us, I will ask you to kindly forward this letter to King Haakon VII. If you can use any of the articles left in the tent please do not hesitate to do so. The sledge left outside may be of use to you.

  With kind regards I wish you a safe return.

  Yours truly,

  Roald Amundsen.

  The temperature at the Pole was -20°F, a hard wind was blowing and the sun obscured by a gloomy fug of ice smog. ‘Great God! This is an awful place,’ Scott famously declared, ‘and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.’ Of course, for him and his companions the worst was still to come.

  My first visit to the Pole was in 1999. Unless you are an adventurer determined to retrace heroic steps on skis, the journey in the modern age is by Hercules aircraft. The flight is noisy and uncomfortable, window-free, squeezed into webbing seats, wedged up against crates of cargo. But it only lasts three and a half hours, and if you are lucky and the crew knows it’s your first time, you might be invited up on the flight deck to see the view, drink hot chocolate and bandy words over a headset with the pilots from the American Air National Guard.

  The beginning of the flight takes you over the Ross Ice Shelf, the great floating Ice Barrier of the heroic age. Then, as you reach the Transantarctic Mountains that mark the edge of the plateau, you see the first stirrings of the mighty glaciers that spill down from the ice sheet into the shelf below. These were the gigantic staircases used by early explorers to climb up from the low-lying ice shelf on to the plateau. You follow the path of the one chosen by Shackleton and then Scott, the Beardmore Glacier, which is one of the largest in the world. (Amundsen found his own farther east, which he named the Axel Heiberg Glacier after a Norwegian patron of polar expeditions.)

  The scale of the Beardmore is unimaginable. From above it looks like a thousand-lane superhighway, stippled and folded with crevasses and great sweeping flow lines. And guiding it on either side, like gargantuan kerbstones, the brown tops of the Queen Alexandra and Commonwealth Mountains are just visible above the flowing ice.

  And then—when the tips of the mountains are finally swamped and the ice sheet takes over—there is . . . nothing. Not a thing. Now you’re flying over the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, which is by far the largest body of ice in the world. In places it is four kilometres thick, and it extends over more than ten million square kilometres. It contains so much ice that, if it completely melted, it would raise global sea level by more than 200 feet. Picture the entire Pacific Ocean, stretching round a third of the globe from China to California; then add in the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, the Southern Seas and the Arctic. And then imagine every square centimetre of our watery world rising by more than the height of the Statue of Liberty. That’s how much ice lies beneath you as you fly.

  And yet, it just looks flat, greyish, and, frankly, rather dull. On my visit in 1999, with first-timer flight-deck privileges, I craned my neck to peer out of a small side window, trying to imagine trudging over the plateau for day after day, week after week, leaning against your harness, gasping for breath in the thin air, squinting into the sun, bracing yourself against wind and cold. But instead, there on the jump seat, drowsy with warmth and hot chocolate, my imagination failed me and I fell asleep.

  I woke to a nudge from the navigator. ‘South Pole’s in sight,’ she said. Hastily I sat up and saw a bright white smear against the flint. Gradually tiny buildings came into view and then our descent became noticeable, the co-pilot counting the height in feet as the instruments wound their way downward. ‘Rainbow at two o’clock,’ he said suddenly over the headsets and everybody turned to the starboard window where a blotchy smudge of rainbow hung in the sky. ‘Rainbow at ten o’clock,’ the pilot replied and we turned to see its twin, staring at us through the port window.

  Then the skis hit the runway and I had to unlock my harness and scramble back down the rickety ladder to grab my parka and gloves and kitbags and prepare to climb on to the ice. Out of the aircraft, dazzling sunlight combined with the roar from the propellers just a few metres away. I was vaguely aware that someone was standing between me and the props. Her job, it later turned out, was to stop befuddled newbies like me from blundering into their blades. Dryness and coldness joined forces, as the mucus inside my nostrils abruptly froze and the first gasp of air rasped my throat.

  And then I looked up. The ‘rainbows’ we had seen in the cockpit were two bright round splodges of light called sun dogs, one either side of the
sun, joined together by a golden ring of light. The cause of this atmospheric phenomenon was dancing all around me: the air was full of tiny shards of ice crystals, diamond dust, which were refracting the sunlight, and glimmering and sparkling with the effort.

  I remembered then that this was Scott Day, 17 January, exactly eighty-seven years after he had reached the Pole in misery and dismay. The contrast was shaming. I was warmly clothed, rested and fed, and as if to labour the point the continent had put on this glorious light show. It was as if I had fallen down a strange white rabbit hole into wonderland.3

  That first trip was short—just two days. But the second visit, five years later, looked set to be more measured. The US National Science Foundation, which runs Amundsen—Scott South Pole Station, had granted me two boons: this time I had been permitted to come in early November, right at the start of the summer season, when the station had only just reopened; and I would be allowed to stay for nearly four weeks. I could afford to slow my pace, soak up the atmosphere and try to catch the echoes of the winter just gone.

  Antarctica is a continent of extremes and winter is the most extreme way to experience it. In the heroic age there was no choice; in order to be there in the summer when the sun was briefly present and you could sledge and race and seek out new territories, you had to spend at least one and more often two winters dug in against the black night, squeezed in uncomfortable proximity with a band of increasingly irritating comrades in a small smoky hut, while the elements outside rattled your teeth and froze your heart.