Antarctica

by Gabrielle Walker

  That far from the station, SPRESSO might as well have been on the Moon. There was no way anyone was going to let me go out there on my own, and little chance that anyone could spare the time and the vehicle to take me there. But then I hit lucky. It just so happened that two SPRESSO researchers, Kent Anderson and Steve Roberts, were coming through town. I grabbed them in the galley the day they arrived. Yes, they were planning an expedition out to SPRESSO. And, yes, I could come, too.

  Kent was a stocky man, square of body and round of face with a tidy beard and jovial appearance. Steve was quieter and taller, sandy-haired and clean-shaven. Our expedition would be in the Sloth, a rumbling, grumbling yellow lump that ran on tank-like caterpillar tracks and had ‘US Navy, For Official Use Only’ stencilled on the side. As its name implied it was known more for solidity than speed.

  We were equipped, Steve told me, with full survival gear: orange bags packed with spare clothing, survival bags, emergency food and stove, two radios and an iridium satellite phone. In the outside world, packing all that for an eight-kilometre trip would seem absurd. Here, where the weather could turn on a sixpence, he assured me that it was essential.

  As we jarred and jolted our way over the snow, Kent told me about SPRESSO. It was, he said, part of a global network, jointly funded by the United States Geological Survey and the NSF, through a university consortium called IRIS (Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology).25 Appropriately for a station at the end of the world, and just like ARO, this was the extreme end-member of the network, by far the quietest seismic station on Earth.

  The quietness mattered because, with no outside distractions, you could pick up the subtlest possible signals from the other side of the world. An earthquake doesn’t just shake the nearby ground. It sends seismic waves down into the bowels of the Earth where they pass through the hot rocks of the planet’s interior, squeezing and compressing them or nudging them from side to side. And when these waves, much diminished in strength and stature, make it out the other side, they bear traces of the rocks they have passed through. By measuring the relative speeds of waves that have come from different places and passed through different parts of the planet, SPRESSO could act as a sort of inward telescope, constructing an image of the Earth’s mantle of rock, its liquid outer core made of almost pure iron, and the hot hard solid sphere of iron that lies at the centre of the Earth.

  The South Pole was especially good for this not just because it was so quiet. Its unique positioning on the Earth’s axis of rotation also meant it could hear events with a clarity that other stations couldn’t reach. That’s because in most places the Earth’s own rotation can get in the way. ‘If you think of the Earth as a bell and you hit it with a big earthquake, it’ll vibrate and the way it vibrates tells you something about the structure of the interior of the earth,’ Kent said. ‘Anywhere where the Earth is spinning, the vibration of the ringing bell also changes. Here at the axis of rotation is the only place where you can hear the true ringing of the bell.’

  SPRESSO was also uniquely placed to find out about the very centre of the Earth. Most stations pick up only the waves that have taken glancing paths through the Earth’s interior. Here, you could detect ones that had passed through its heart. And SPRESSO was on hand to make sure nobody was cheating on the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Nuclear bombs also set off seismic waves. If they are far enough away, they will be faint. But sensitive SPRESSO would pick them up in a heartbeat. ‘If someone tried something in the middle of nowhere, in the southern seas, we would probably hear it.’

  When we finally reached the SPRESSO site, the only surface sign of its presence was a set of brightly coloured flags, red, yellow, orange and green, fluttering on an apparently empty plateau. Some, Kent told me, marked the corners of the buried building, some the three boreholes where the seismic instruments lay and some, well, ‘just don’t walk there,’ he said.

  As we came closer I realised there was a vent pipe, comically poking up out of the snow like a periscope from a submarine. There were also two hatches covered first with snow and then, when we had brushed that aside, with wood. One led to a few near-surface instruments, the other to a yellow stepladder that took us down to the surprisingly warm and cosy hut that serviced the seismic instruments.

  Inside, as he stripped off his parka and gloves, Kent told me that they’d have preferred to put the site farther from the main station—twelve miles or more. But that was going to be too complicated, and expensive, to service. So the compromise was to put the instruments closer in but deeper down in the snow. It took three seasons to set up the hut and drill the holes and now the seismic instruments were irrevocably buried under a thousand feet of ice.

  ‘The chamber round the instruments is at about -51°F,’ Kent said, ‘but the instruments themselves are wrapped in heat tape, so they’re more like +25°. And if one tape fails, they’re already wound with a back-up.’

  ‘What happens if both heat tapes fail?’

  ‘Then we’ve lost the instrument, so let’s not think about that.’ Eight thousand miles from here, on the other side of the world, a piece of the Earth’s crust might be straining. The Earth’s tectonic plates that hold our continents and oceans are constantly shifting, pushing and grinding against each other, striving for dominance. Sometimes, something has to give. Perhaps up in the Aleutian Islands off the coast of Alaska a section of crust might suddenly rise or fall. Tsunami warnings will chatter out from instruments around the Pacific. Sirens will sound, and sensible coast dwellers will head for high ground if they can. But the heaving crust won’t just set off a mighty wave of water. It will also send other waves, seismic waves, downwards into the inner Earth.

  Seismic waves travel by squeezing and stretching whatever material they are going through, just as sound waves squeeze and stretch the air on their way to your ears. They will pass easily through rock. Though some will stay close to the surface, others will skim the liquid outer core of the Earth or sweep through its solid centre before emerging here, to be picked up by SPRESSO’s listening ear. These waves will be full of fascinating information about the rocks they have passed through. They can tell us about the subtleties of the parts of our planet that drillers will never, ever reach. They can help us understand how the iron core of the Earth feeds our planet’s magnetic field and why sometimes in the ancient past it suddenly switched, making north become south, and south become north. Or what sets off vast plumes of hot rock that start at the boundary between core and overlying mantle and slowly make their way to the surface. (These events are mercifully rare in Earth’s history—when these gigantic mantle plumes reach the surface, they can cause the kind of epic volcanism that can flood half a continent with molten rock.)

  The seismic waves from our Aleutian quake would be rich with such information, just waiting to be read. The detectors waiting 900 feet below ground would feel the first stirrings. And they would send their message up to the instruments here, which would wink and beep to register the shock, providing us with a unique window into the world far beneath our feet.

  We watched, but for now nothing happened. All was quiet on this quietest of southern fronts. Kent and Steve decided to climb out and test out a new communications system, burying an antenna in the snow and going out on to the plateau. I waited around for them, taking in the view.

  Out here, with nothing but wasteland in all directions, I felt for the first time as if I were truly on the Moon. On the horizon there was a single soft white wedge of cloud; the rest of the sky was a clear cerulean blue. The sastrugi stretched out in that familiar pattern of frozen white wave tops. Some looked like porpoising dolphins, caught in mid-leap; some were stippled as if a giant hand had blotted paint; some looked like writhing coils and some just smooth drifts of sugary snow. For all of them the side shaded from the sun had a dull bloom, the colour of pewter, and the hollows were in deep blue shadow. Cutting through it all was the stark white scar of the Sloth’s tracks. It was a beautiful, guileless scene. M
y eyelashes and hair had quickly frosted, and inside my gloves my fingers were already numb. But I still found it hard to believe that this place could ever be cruel.

  When Kent re-emerged from the sub-glacial chamber, I asked him what he thought of the place. Was he just in it for the science, or did he find something special about the landscape? Definitely, he said, the landscape was a big part of it.

  ‘People find beauty in different things. I live in the desert in New Mexico. Coming out here, which is the world’s largest desert, there is absolutely no life, nothing green to look at. Maybe I’m a strange person for cherishing it, but it puts into perspective what’s important to me.’ He was earnest, struggling to explain something that clearly mattered to him.

  ‘I study seismology, I look at the power of the Earth; when an earthquake goes off, just a little tremble on the surface can wipe out whole swathes of civilisation. And Antarctica is so big, it kind of scales everything. I mean this is a fairly big operation at the South Pole but compared to the vast nothingness around us, we’re hardly anything here. We’re so insignificant compared to what the Earth can do.’

  I heard this sort of thing a lot on the ice. ‘It makes you feel small,’ people kept saying to me. And they didn’t mean small in a bad way. It wasn’t about feeling humiliated. They seemed to find something reassuring about being in the presence of something that was unquestionably bigger and stronger than they could ever be. It didn’t matter how much money you had, how big a superpower you were, what technology you had devised. Sometimes it might look beautiful, sometimes guileless, but down here, if Antarctica said no, then that was final.

  ‘Believing you are important as a human being brings with it a certain responsibility,’ a French doctor told me at Dumont d’Urville. ‘You’re important so you have things to prove. Here you have nothing to prove because you can only submit. It’s almost a relief. You are relieved of your image of being important.

  ‘It’s different from choosing not to prove things—that implies you can’t get better, it’s pretentious. The value here is that the choice itself is taken away. And if you take away false choices you can ask yourself the true questions: what’s important for me? What direction should I take? Who are the people I miss and why? Who misses me?’

  South Pole winter, September-October

  Ever since midwinter the sun has been creeping up on the dark side of the horizon. And now, with September, comes the return of twilight. The stars fade and so—largely—do the auroras. By the end of the first week, you can take down the blackout sheets that keep the artificial lights inside the station from leaking out. The solstice, around the third week, brings the first signs of sunlight and the beginning of the long slow polar sunrise.

  Perhaps you’ll be one of the people who’s excited by this, who plays ‘Here Comes the Sun’ incessantly over every available loudspeaker. Perhaps, like the rest, you’ll be feeling sadness at this loss of the comfort blanket of darkness and the beginning of the end. But as the sun slowly rises and the time of the long shadows returns, don’t be fooled into thinking that the light has also brought warmth. The temperature will still be south of -75°F and those first feeble rays do little more than stir up the winds. ‘That fucks you up,’ says Jake. ‘You associate dark with cold and light with warm. It’s light out but it ain’t warm. Everyone’s tired, you want it over with. The ones who haven’t cracked yet, that’s when they crack.’

  And there will now be stacks of work for everyone, making the station ready for opening. There’s heating the summer housing for the people coming in, taking down the flags that helped you feel your way in the darkness, marking and grooming the skiways for planes to land, and preparing the fuel lines ready to recharge the station for another year.

  Still, just as with the coming of the sun, the station will probably be split between those who can’t wait to get out of here and those who dread the coming invasion. For with the station opening comes the promise, and the threat, of the world beyond the ice. ‘Travel plans. “I can’t wait to see my girlfriend” plans. I can’t even listen to those conversations,’ says Jake. ‘Everyone is checking out. It’s not over yet but they’re already done. I think they’re missing out on a major part of the winter. I’m in a different place. I’m putting all my energy back in. Storing it. All the patience is paying off at that moment. It’s blossoming. It’s the first spring flower starting to stretch itself towards the sunlight.’

  If you’re lucky, and you’re also one of the people dreading the invasion, the weather might conspire to hold it off for a few more precious days, as happened in 1997. ‘That year, it was a very late opening,’ says Robert. ‘The weather at the beginning of November was awful. The first plane was trying to come in for twelve days. Every day we were in comms, getting reports, “the weather is still too bad”. We were celebrating. One day they flew over, three passes, but still they couldn’t land. We were getting emails from McMurdo saying, “It must be terrible for you”. Not at all, we had a big party, twenty-eight people and food for a hundred!’

  But in the end they will come. You will be kicked out of your room, bewildered by the new people running down the corridors. Someone will hang a parka on your peg. Someone else will sit on your chair. They will be fresh from the world outside, amused by your pale faces and toasty stares. As well as running AST/RO, Nick Tothill was last year’s winter science leader. He began his final report leading up to the Opening with a quote from The Epic of Gilgamesh:

  I shall break the doors of hell and smash the bolts,

  And the dead shall eat with the living . . .

  But at least the living bring treats along with them—magazines and newspapers, physical mail, and freshies. The hydroponic greenhouse will have been supplying you with some green stuff over the winter, the odd bit of lettuce and the very occasional tomato. But now there will be fruit and veg by the planeload. ‘When the first strawberries arrived, Cookie slipped me one while I was waiting in the queue,’ says Nick. ‘I took a bite. I can’t describe the sensation. I stood stock still for five seconds. Perhaps in three weeks I’ll be back to being as spoiled as everyone else, but right now every bite of fruit is so very good.’

  You may feel more exposed that you ever have, but perhaps also more balanced. ‘So many of your crutches get knocked out from under you,’ says Nick. ‘Down here, you have to learn to trust yourself. Stuff that you may have been struggling with for years just kind of goes. An Antarctic winter scours your personality down to the bedrock.’

  And whatever happens when you return to civilisation, don’t expect the experience to fade quickly. ‘I don’t think this place ever leaves your body,’ says Larry. ‘You can’t ever fully get away from it. Five years later you can look at a calendar in February and think “station’s closing”. Ten years later, on 21 June, you’ll think “it’s midwinter”. It never leaves you. Why? I don’t know. Coming down here isn’t hard, it’s going back that’s hard. You’ve got to pay for things. Try walking into a supermarket after winter. It’s probably one of the most daunting experiences you have. You’re used to “this is what’s for dinner” and then suddenly you’re faced with that kind of choice.

  ‘You get back and the world is different. Things have changed, of course they have. Watching the sun rise and set in a twenty-four-hour period. Not treating everybody like your best friend, as you would here. Getting used to the idea that you’re not living on top of everyone any more. Sitting in your room, listening to your clock tick and thinking: what do I do now?’

  So, however toasty you might now be going, however eager to click your ruby slippers and get yourself back to Kansas, there’s another piece of Antarctic slang that you should probably now be made aware of. According to Polies, the phrase ‘I’m never coming back here again’ translates into Antarctican as ‘See you next year’.

  It was Jake Speed’s penultimate day at the Pole and he had offered to drive me round in a skidoo, showing me some of his favourite places. We visited a
n igloo that the winterers built, swooped around the berms where much of the station’s supplies were stored and where Jake had spent a large part of the past five years. And then we ended up just outside the station, on the empty plateau, to watch a sastruga grow.

  In the winters, great windstorms sculpt these sastrugi into magnificent forms that can be ten feet high. Today we had to make do with a stiff, trickling breeze that sent the snow curling and writhing over the surface like parallel threads of smoke. Jake pulled out a lighter and stuck it upright into the snow to make a suitable obstruction. He lay down with his face close to it and I followed suit. And, sure enough, grain by grain, the snow began to build into a miniature hill on the windward side of the lighter, leaving a growing trail in the lee.

  We both lay there for a while in silence. Then I asked Jake the question that had been bothering me for days. I’d noticed that Robert and Steffen, the two telescope nannies—and, now I thought about it, other people who had spent winters at the Pole—were all happy enough to talk to me about mechanical details, but guarded when I tried to dig deeper. So why did Jake agree to speak to me?

  He smiled. ‘It’s hard to break in,’ he said. ‘You caught me in a strange place. Normally I wouldn’t have talked to you. I’m pretty protective of all this. But I’ve just done what no one else has done and I felt like it was important for me to share.’

  So why are the others so much more guarded? ‘Obviously the weather and the climate are intense, but the most intense thing about this place is the people, the interactions that you have with them. I know that Robert gets up every morning, then takes his right eye with his left index finger, rubs it three times and then brushes his teeth. I know that guy like a wife.’