Antarctica

by Gabrielle Walker

  That was it, the end of the drilling season and the end of an extraordinary project. Nobody was going to risk another run. Emails went out and congratulations started flooding in from around the world.

  ‘We have finished with the drilling after having trapped and freed the drill at a depth of 3270.2m,’ Laurent wrote in his diary. ‘There is still 6m of ice left, which we will not touch for political and ecological reasons. We prefer to leave the impression that we have not polluted the base below the ice where water is present. Even if that could seem a very minimal impact, the image is too strong for us not to pay attention. The ego of the driller has taken a blow, but intellectually it’s very satisfying.’

  That evening there was a party, European-style, in the EPICA workshop. Using the biggest knife from the kitchen, one that looked more like a machete, Laurent briskly lopped the top off a magnum of champagne. The cork, wire retainer, bottle top and all flew into the air, leaving a surprisingly neat diagonal slice in the green glass neck. There was a general roar of approval from the assembled crowd of Concordians who then started passing round plastic cups that were frothing over with bubbles. When I received mine, I understood why they were still frothing. As well as champagne, each cup also contained chippings of 8oo,ooo-year-old ice. I detected a definite whiff of drilling fluid in the mix, but said nothing. Instead I wandered over to where Laurent was standing.

  ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘Like someone has cut the strings to my shoulders.’

  Now the drilling was done, everyone was more relaxed, and this first celebration heralded the beginning of party season at Dome C. Christmas was upon us. Here, as in most parts of the continent, intensely hard work was the norm. Scientists, who were often here for only part of the season, could end up working round the clock to get everything done; the people who were here on contract for the entire season to maintain or build the station still worked ten-hour days six days a week, and on Sundays they were often out in snow dozers, levelling ground or preparing for new projects. But now there would be dancing and feasts and the entire crew would get a day and a half off.

  The food would be spectacular. Frenchman Jean-Louis Duraffourg was the head chef, sharing his duties with a Swiss-Italian, who was responsible for the pasta. All the French called Jean-Louis the Reine-Mere (the Queen Mother), for his fussy, slightly camp persona. He was round of figure, with white hair and moustache and a bustling manner. Appreciate his food and he was your friend for life. He would beckon you into the kitchen to give you privileged access to first tastings of the delicacies that he was considering serving for the next feast. He was an Antarctic artiste. He had even devised a special recipe for making baguettes rise properly in the thin, high-altitude air. He wouldn’t, however, divulge this no matter how much you begged. Jean-Louis had been coming here a long time, and his Christmas and New Year feasts were legendary.

  Before the seven-course spectacular, there was to be a reception across the way in the free-time tent. I was wearing what passed for party chic in Antarctica: jeans, hiking boots, a black thermal top, but I also had an ice-blue furry gilet that my friends had bought me before I left, and I had dared to apply a little lipstick.

  Now, though, I was feeling unexpectedly shy. This was my first taste on the ice of the wide gender imbalance that has been true of Antarctica for most of its human history. Though the American bases that I’d already visited were more or less 60:40 men to women, here we were six women and forty-four men.

  Rita had already chatted to me cheerfully about this. When she first came here four seasons ago there were only two women, and the following year she was here on her own. ‘You become everybody’s sister,’ she says. ‘Or like a doll. People are very careful with you. And they’re also proprietorial. You’re not allowed to have one or two friends. If you speak with just one person, it only takes a few minutes before other men start to surround you. Some women deal with it by becoming surrogate men. Others make themselves invisible.’ That year, she didn’t touch her makeup. ‘If you’re alone, you don’t want to be noticed so much—you don’t want to draw attention.’

  I write about science; it wasn’t as if I was unused to being in groups of men with very few women. But there were still aspects of the environment that I found intimidating. I think I was supposed to. In the wooden room—the designated hangout of the Italian contract workers, which was also the first sight of the station for most visitors—there hung a girly calendar. And not a misty ‘tasteful’ one either. In this calendar the girls weren’t just naked, they were tied up. There was a daily ceremony in which the boys chose which image to turn to, with general roars of appreciation. Apparently there used to be three calendars, but one year a (male) American scientist cleverly brought some maps of Italy and suggested they could talk about home instead. That was enough to displace two of the calendars, but about the last they were adamant.

  Thanks to the concerted efforts of Patrice Godon, the head of logistics at the French polar institute, IPEV2, whom I met in DDU, the French side was more enlightened. At his command the traditional ‘wall of knickers’ had just been removed from the macho outpost, Cap Prud’homme, which was on the mainland just across from DDU. (Before Patrice’s intervention, every woman passing through Cap Prud’homme was supposed to leave a pair of knickers to be displayed, with their name, on the wall. Men working there brought in knickers from their wives. To put on the wall. I wasn’t offended by this, so much as baffled.)

  There were also a few more women in the French programme. Patrice had made it his business to hire women engineers and technicians. Two were here at the station—Marianne Dufour, a contractor who was spending the summer working on the construction, and diminutive Claire le Calvez, who was a fulltime employee at IPEV. Claire would not just be the only woman in the first wintering crew here, but would also be head technician. She was candid about her relative lack of experience, which was perhaps one reason that she was universally respected. She was also the first woman to drive the gruelling two-week tractor train that brings heavy goods up here from the coast, more than 600 miles away. I couldn’t imagine her ever complaining about anything. She was good-humoured, tolerant and self-possessed and I sensed that she would have a good winter.

  But even so, on my tour of the new, French-designed station I noticed that the brand new women’s bathrooms were half the size of the men’s. When I asked why, I was told that there would obviously never be as many women as men here. When I said that the American bases used to have a similar imbalance but they are now more than a third women, I received the unanswerable reply: ‘Women are more powerful in America.’ At least the new women’s bathrooms had the same facilities as the men’s. When Rita first came, she had to clean her teeth, and pee, in the shower.

  It might have been for all these reasons, or for some other reason entirely, but in spite of my enthusiasm for visiting strangers throughout the continent, I was suddenly reluctant to join the party. One of the ice-core scientists, a young woman named Inger Seierstad from the University of Copenhagen, found me lurking in a corridor, hooked her arm in mine and said: ‘We’ll go together.’ And we walked into the tent to a great cry of ‘the blondes!’ in three different languages.

  But then all was suddenly well. Although most of the men were in their thirties or forties, here on the ice they were like schoolboys. They were harmless. We were packed in, shoulder to shoulder, as every person on the station was called up to the front, to receive a wrapped gift from Camillo Calvaresi, the station leader, and a kiss on the cheek from Rita. The gifts were all the same—a mug with the Italian Antarctic logo. I was touched that, although I had only been there for a few days, there was also one for me. The mood was exuberant. And then there was Jean-Louis’s magnificent seven-course feast, followed by dancing back in the free-time tent until what would be dawn in any part of the world where the sun was more reasonable about setting.

  What a turnaround. This hadn’t just been a fun evening in spite of my anxietie
s; it was a Christmas entirely without tension. There were no past, painful histories with these people that you had to tiptoe around, because you had no history with them at all. And yet, there was no awkwardness or sense that you were an outsider because everybody was in the same situation. I love my family and I love my friends. But at Dome C, among strangers, most of whom didn’t speak my language, there was no pressure to enjoy myself or to prove myself (or to prove that I was enjoying myself). Just an instant network of like-minded people full of acceptance and warmth.

  And the party had now broken the ice. In the days that followed, I watched movies with the Italians and played cards till late with the French. On Sunday we spent two hours outside, wrapped up like mummies in -30°F, playing pétanque with coloured balls on the white snow. Many of the men were reluctant to speak about their own experiences on the ice, but unlike at the Pole it didn’t feel like being shut out. ‘Page blanche’, one Frenchman said to me, every time we met, ‘blank page’, which was all he wanted me to write about him. An Italian talked about life here as being like plugging in an electric cord when you arrived, and unplugging it when you left. And another Frenchman spoke romantically about how to be here was to experience ‘life between parentheses’. I especially liked this way of putting it. Like a phrase in parentheses, life down here didn’t change the meaning of life on the outside, but perhaps it somehow changed the flavour.

  And then, Antarctica delivered a wonderful Christmas present, something I’d been wanting for years and never experienced. A bunch of us had been playing cards in the free-time tent, and as we emerged, blinking, into the late-night daylight the scene took us by surprise. Instead of the usual midnight sun, bright blue sky and long shadows, the world had turned a numinous shade of pale. Somebody whispered: ‘It’s a whiteout.’

  I ran to the main building, where I’d hung my cold-weather gear. Though the temperature was -40°F, there was so little wind here that jeans and a jacket were usually enough for the quick jaunt between the camp’s buildings. But to go out on to the plateau I would need wind pants, parka, gloves, hat, the whole Antarctic works. Inside I hastily told the guys in the comms room that I was going out for a walk. At first I thought they might forbid me to leave, but then one of them handed me a radio. ‘If you have any trouble, call.’ God bless Concordia. I’d been smothered and banned and protected everywhere I’d gone in Antarctica, in many cases probably for my own good, but here they understood that sometimes you just wanted to be out there, alone.

  I’d heard all about whiteouts from old Antarctic hands. There were two kinds. One was the sort you’d imagine, the raging blizzard where fat flakes of snow swirled around you. Blizzards were often unexpectedly warm compared to what went before. They were also suffocating, and disorientating.

  When we were doing our initial field training back at McMurdo, the mountaineers there tried to prepare us rookies for what might come by putting white buckets on our heads. (We later discovered that these were painted on the outside with grotesque faces for the amusement of the many onlookers.) Our task was to line up along a rope, sweep outwards and try to find a colleague who had fallen in the ‘blizzard’ and was in danger of freezing to death. The buckets were to block our eyes, distort our voices and confuse our ears. It worked. When I watched the next batch of recruits try the same task, they stumbled and floundered, the apparently straight rope twisting into knots, as their colleague lay inches away, but undiscovered.

  But I had been longing for the other kind of whiteout, the one that had apparently descended now without warning. In this variant, you could see anything in front of you quite clearly, but without any definition. Thick cloud somewhere high above us was scattering sunlight so completely that all shadows were gone. The white snow underfoot and the white sky above were indistinguishable, empty of any kind of texture or shade. Dome C had become a void.

  I tested this as I walked away from the camp and into the emptiness. I could hear my feet crunching into the snow, but there were no apparent footprints. I knelt and put my face close up against the snow. Still nothing. I touched the surface. My gloved fingers could trace the hollows that my feet had left. But all I could see was white.

  I hurried now, wanting to get as far as I could from the camp before the spell broke. Ten minutes of walking, twenty minutes, and when I turned there was no more sign of the bright orange tents and buildings. There was nothing.

  I nudged the bulge of the radio for reassurance; I’d been careful to put it inside my many layers of fleece, wind-bib and parka, to keep the battery alive. And then I knelt on the snow.

  It wasn’t like sensory deprivation, or like being inside a cloud where your view was physically blocked. All my senses were functioning. I felt cold. I knew that I could see for hundreds of metres in front of me. The fur of my parka hood was clearly framing my view. Yet when I looked up, down and all around me, the real outside that I was seeing was . . . a blank. Nothing had ever been so empty. A white sheet of paper has the weft and weave dimly in view. A white-walled room has corners and shades. There are always shadows. Except here.

  I had wondered about this experience ever since I first heard of it. What would it be like to sit still and alone in a living, breathing void? Would I feel frightened? Lonely? Bored? The answer was none of the above. The jabbering voice in my head was momentarily stilled. I felt a deep delicious peace. I wanted to bathe in it.

  Or maybe it’s not really about peace. There was nothing passive about this feeling. The world had shrunk, as if Antarctica had allowed itself to go from being intimidating to being intimate. And it had given me a deep sense of comfort that was almost overwhelming. This was the opposite of loneliness. It was also the opposite of being smothered. I felt utterly relaxed.

  But then, as I was trying to cling on to this feeling, I caught sight of a tiny black shape on the horizon behind me. It was one of the drums that marked the edge of the runway. The cloud above must be lifting. The big, open, impersonal emptiness of Antarctica was back.

  As I trudged back to the camp, now following my footsteps easily in the snow, I tried to understand why this touched me so completely. I had loved the welcome that I’d experienced in all Antarctic camps, and especially here. But I was more used to thinking of this as ‘us against it’; the harsher the environment outside, the more we humans stuck together. I’d seen photos of Scott tents framed against a bleak white landscape, with a warm glowing light inside to lead you home. Or heard about Vostok Station, which was officially the coldest place on Earth. One winter they recorded temperatures there that were cold enough for steel to shatter; cold enough that you could cut diesel fuel with a chain saw.3 But many people told me that it was one of the warmest, most human of all the bases on the ice.

  And yet, the warmth of my human welcome here felt pale beside the depth of comfort that I had experienced just now, out on my own, on the ‘hostile’ plateau, in temperatures that should have frozen my bones. The emptiness had descended on me, and I didn’t feel abandoned. I felt cradled.

  Work was winding down now in the drill tent. The cleaning runs were all but done, and the drillers were packing up their equipment ready for the journey home. But I found Dorthe and Inger in the core-processing trench, working on the few remaining ice cores that had to be logged and bagged, and sent out into the world. Although the ‘trench’ was buried in snow, it was more like a large underground workshop, kept permanently at -22°F to protect the cores inside.

  The fragility of the ice was evident in more than the temperature. When I closed the great freezer door through which I had just entered, I noticed a warning on the back, written in wobbly black marker pen. ‘SLOWLY!’ it said. ‘DO NOT SLAM!’ and there was a cartoon drawing of an ice core shattering.

  The room didn’t quite echo—but it seemed empty with its white, refrigerator-like walls and just two muffled figures inside. At the height of the project there were fifteen scientists, working in a bustling production line, measuring the lengths of the cores, s
awing pieces off them, making the first quick measurements of the climate records they held. The walls were marked, here and there, with graffiti. Much was of the ‘I was here’ variety, in various languages, but since they were written by ice-core scientists many also said something like ‘measuring the oldest ice on the planet’. Some showed evidence of impressive graphic skills. In one corner I found a manacle, ball and chain, drawn so convincingly I thought from a distance that it was real. Next to it, someone had marked out the number of days in lines, prison-style, that they were working there. And near the floor in the corner opposite was a skull and bones that seemed to be disappearing into the ground.

  But there were also cheery reminders of home, a hand-made subway sign for the Bronx, a poster marking how ‘Emiliano, Fabrice, Gianni, Mart, Matthias and Mirko’ together held the WORLD RECORD for ice-core processing, at thirty-five cores a day. The place seemed full of ghosts.

  Dorthe showed me where the cores came in to be logged, where—in past seasons when ice cores were flooding in from the drill tent—the researchers would measure the lengths of the different segments, fitting broken pieces together like puzzles. I saw a piece of ice lying there, presumably from the past week or so. It was a beautiful pure cylinder, maybe half a metre long.

  ‘Wow, what a great core!’

  ‘You say that, but when I saw it I wanted to weep,’ Dorthe said. She showed me the streaks near the surface. They were subtle but clear when you knew what to look for, all aligned in the same direction like animal hairs.

  ‘That happened when it went into the oil bath,’ she said. ‘It started to melt. And now we can’t use this to extract air—it’s too dangerous.’

  ‘Dangerous?’

  ‘Some air could have escaped. We can’t trust the answer we’d get.’

  It was not enough, then, to battle the conditions, risk the drill, go through brittle ice layers that were always ready to shatter, and get all the way down to the soft stuff with your cognac bombs and your instincts for how far to go. When the cores came up above ground they were always in danger of melting.