Antarctica

by Gabrielle Walker

  But then a few of the guys started to get giddy. Someone picked up my camera to try to take a picture of someone else. He in turn tried to grab the camera and it was now being passed over people’s heads, and thrown from one person to the next. It was an expensive piece of equipment; I was using it to document my time here. I didn’t have a back-up. ‘Hey, give it back!’ I said. And now I was the one they were keeping it from, a stupid game of piggy in the middle as if we were still ten years old.

  At first I tried to reason with them, and then it was too late. I was enraged. The strength of my fury shocked me. I had never felt this angry before. I wanted to scream at these people who I’d been cheerfully playing cards with a few moments earlier. ‘I need it for my work!’ I said. ‘Give me the fucking camera.’ I stormed out of the tent, with no idea where I was going. When I returned, the camera was beside my empty chair. I picked it up without a word, and left.

  The next morning at breakfast, Jean-Paul Fave beckoned me over. He was the designer of the new station, stick-thin, in his sixties, with a snow-white beard and known to everyone on the station as ‘Papy’ (‘Granddad’). He patted the empty chair beside him and I slid into it. ‘I hear that you were very angry last night,’ he said. I nodded, shamefaced. ‘They are just boys and they don’t understand the work you are doing down here. I understand, but I am old. When I was their age I was just as foolish.’ And then he smiled his gap-toothed smile. ‘But you should also know that being down here affects people. You should not come here and expect to find people behaving normally. And that includes you!’

  That shocking rider took me completely by surprise. Even me? But I was just an observer! And yet, what I’d experienced in all the bases I had visited, and especially here in Dome C, was the gratifying, enticing closeness that comes when—in a place that was famous for its hostility—you found such like-minded people who invited you in so readily. Everyone here was in the same situation. Nobody had their family with them, or their children, or their real lives.

  And perhaps that was also one of the reasons why the ice exaggerated your emotions. You didn’t just have a good day here; you had the best day of your life. You weren’t just mildly irritated when someone was being an idiot; you were furious. The environment edged even the relatively well-balanced towards mania. I remembered how Jake Speed had told me at the Pole that the most successful winterers were the ones who let things slide, who were naturally the most laid back and tolerant people in the real world. This would not be a good place for someone who was highly strung, or at least not for any length of time.

  The effect tended to wear off after a while, when you were back in civilisation. But I kept hearing warnings about the dangers of coming here too much and staying here too long. The Americans have a joke about the reasons that contract workers came down here: ‘First, they come for the adventure. Then they come for the money. Then they come because they no longer fit in anywhere else.’

  And, now that I thought of it, Laurent had issued the same warning before he left, when I asked him if he’d miss the place.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve spent enough time on the ice caps that I could stop now and I wouldn’t miss it. I like it. I love it. I do it with enthusiasm, but I’m not attached. I see people here who are attached, hired, kind of lost, because they don’t realise what’s happened.’

  ‘What has happened?’

  ‘They get enough money to leave for six months, then they come back. They’re out of the system somehow, and they don’t realise it. Nobody warns them really. It takes time to find out for yourself. Even companions are given to you. Here you have instant parties and you don’t have to worry whether people will come, because they’re already here. I understand how people get lost when they have nothing back home.’

  I remembered hearing something similar from a French doctor who had just spent his second winter at DDU. ‘People I know who’ve done many winters, four, five and even one who spent eight, they start a new life every time. I don’t want to be like them, to exist for only twenty people and at the end of the year, at the end of the adventure, that’s all finished, and then you start again with another set. It’s not sane.’

  Perhaps over-winterers were like Persephone in Greek mythology, who became too involved on her first, forced, trip to the underworld14, and was therefore doomed to return every year. Antarctica changes the things it touches. And if you enter this world of ice too completely you might be trapped into returning year after year, constantly seeking out the same blank slate, the same do-over, while life in the real world slides by.

  Richard Brandt was an American snow researcher from the University of Washington in Seattle, though he usually worked from his smallholding in the Adirondacks. We came in on the same plane from McMurdo and Richard had been an ally here from the beginning, the only other native English speaker on the base. He was the one who saved me a place on the ‘international table’ at the various holiday feasts, as far as possible from the big Italian group. He warned me they would get rowdy and that food might fly. It did.

  Later he taught me to do trick riding on a skidoo, jumping over a specially constructed hillock that was strategically out of view of the station. His skidoo had a toy penguin called Waddles on the front. Richard carried it everywhere with him, taking photographs of the little bird’s latest adventures and posting them online for eager schoolchildren.15 He was a thoroughly nice man. And now, he had offered to show me his own research, at a snow pit and tower about a half-mile beyond the new station.

  It was another beautiful blue Dome C day, and Richard found me a pair of skis. It was, he said, the only way to travel. But I soon realised that he was probably born on skis. He was politely gliding along, keeping pace, not bothering to use his poles, while I was puffing and panting beside him.

  To save breath I used an old runner’s trick: if you want to be less winded than the person you’re exercising with, ask them a short question that requires a long answer.

  ‘What do you love about snow?’ I said.

  It worked, in a way. Richard didn’t get any more breathless, but he did tell me about what happens when water freezes. He talked about how water is a tangled mess of molecules that romp around, catching each other’s hands and releasing them again, squeezing together and recoiling. And then, when it freezes, all the dignity returns. The molecules line up formally, obeying careful rules for where to stand.

  They also hold each other at arm’s length, which is why ice is less dense than water, and why ice cubes float. Though we’re so used to that we scarcely notice, it’s actually incredibly rare; if you put a lump of most solid things in a pool of their own liquid they would sink. It’s just as well for us that ice floats instead; if it didn’t, rivers and oceans would freeze from the bottom up, and our planet’s episodic ice ages might have wiped out all life on Earth.

  And then he talked of how just a few simple rules about where the molecules had to fit when they froze could lead to such a glorious variety of crystal shapes.

  ‘Is that why you love it, because snow is beautiful?’

  ‘Yes, but it also transforms things. Where I live, on our smallholding, everywhere you look there are jobs to do. But when it snows the jobs all disappear. Snow turns the whole world into a playground.’

  We arrived at the snow pit, which was two square holes side by side, each ten feet deep, separated by a thin wall of snow. We shed our skis and climbed in, and Richard reached up and dragged a cardboard ‘lid’ over the pit we were standing in. At first I didn’t understand why, but when he pointed over to the thin wall of snow I gasped. Its snow layers were now backlit by the sunlight pouring through from the pit on the other side. You could clearly see the annual layers, where jutting crusty ledges marked the summers and soft snow underneath, the winters.

  And the colours. There was a spectacular gradation in the light from an aqua white close to the top to pale blue, deep sky blue then violet. Richard took what looked like a broom handle lying on
one side of the pit and pushed a hole into the wall, though not entirely through it. Now the bottom-most hole was an intense violet tunnel with lilac walls.

  ‘Look at that,’ Richard said. ‘It’s the purest colour you’ll ever see in nature.’

  He told me that snow appeared to be white because most of the sunlight hitting the surface was scattered by ice crystals, with no favouritism for any particular colour of the rainbow. But some rays made it past this first hurdle and succeeded in penetrating into the snow’s interior. Now the frozen water molecules were ready to dance to the rainbow’s tune. And here in the snow pit we were cleverly positioned to witness what happened next.

  Water molecules are choosy. They like to vibrate, but will do so only in response to certain specific colours of light. Here, close to the top of the pit, they were picking out the red light, soaking it up and resonating like tuning forks. As the light travelled a little farther down, they were taking out the oranges, and purples. Blue was the survivor. Water simply doesn’t resonate at this blue frequency, so it was the one colour ice couldn’t stop. Look one metre, two metres, three metres down the wall, and blue was still going strong, evading any attempts to absorb it.

  This is why the oceans are blue. As light penetrates below the surface all other colours are stripped away by the jangling water molecules. It’s also why blue light gleams from crevasses and cracks in a glacier, and why even quite small blocks of ice still have that bluish tinge.

  Richard and his team had been sampling the snow all around here, prodding it with probes to different depths, and they had measured the exact frequency of this lovely blue. It was the end of the rainbow, the last colour that human eyes could see before the light tipped over into ultraviolet and everything went dark. It was as pure a colour as they come, one single wavelength of precisely 390 nanometres (about four ten-thousandths of a millimetre).16

  I was enchanted both by the colour and by Richard’s explanation. Just as the ice filters away all the other colours, so life here removed all your distractions—same food, same clothes, no children, no pets, no bills, no bank accounts. It felt good to relish that absence of minutiae and to focus on what seemed essential. And yet if this pure blue were the only colour on Earth it wouldn’t be enough. Come here, the message seemed to be, stay here and learn what you can, but if you are wise you will take what you find home with you, and work out how to understand it in the messy, complicated but ultimately colourful world outside.

  But that wasn’t the whole story. We left the snow pit and walked to a hundred-foot tower that Rich built a couple of years ago with a French collaborator from the Glaciology Lab in Grenoble. It looked rudimentary, with simple aluminium struts, but there was a metal staircase running all the way to the top. We climbed carefully, not letting any exposed skin touch the metal. You could be fooled here. With so little wind, in the midday sunshine you could forget that it was -13°F and that skin would stick to frozen metal, and then rip.

  At the top there was enough of a breeze to burn and I buried my face in parka and scarf. The view was magnificent. We could see the entire base, the new station, summer camp, rows of tents and heavy machines. And we could also see the flat white plateau, a frozen ocean stretching out to infinity. The top of the tower was bestrewn with instruments—anemometers whose tiny cups were spinning in the breeze to measure the wind speed, and cameras trained in all directions. But the ones that Richard had come to tend were looking both high and low at the sunlight. They were measuring how much energy was arriving from the Sun, how much was being soaked up by the snow surface and how much was bouncing back.

  The reason was to get a background check, a ground truth. Satellites were spinning overhead measuring the radiation coming in from space, and the equivalent radiation being poured back out from the surface. Finding the balance between these two helps establish what our climate is actually doing. But after a while, the satellites can lose their focus; their measurements drift and they take their instrumental eyes off the ball. So researchers find certain special places, like this one, where they can measure the numbers on the ground and use them to drag the satellite readings back into line.

  Dome C is particularly good for this because it’s so flat. There is very little wind, which means the surface is smooth and the reading is similar regardless of the angle at which you look.17 Perfect for Richard’s purposes. He wasn’t here to look for signs of change; he just wanted to be sure the satellites were telling the truth.

  Here in the continent’s interior, on the old, cold, dry and above all thick East Antarctic Ice Sheet, nothing much is changing or likely to change for a very long time. Whatever we do to the Earth, chances are that there will be ice on this part of the continent for thousands or tens of thousands of years.

  But although this part of Antarctica is set in its ways, others are starting to stir. Over in the west the ice sheet is thinner and more nimble on its feet. Gigantic glaciers speed over the ground at what is for ice a dizzying pace. The ocean is already beginning to lap at certain parts of the coast, eating away at floating ice shelves, undermining them. And the satellites that Richard helped to calibrate are showing that the Antarctic Peninsula, that great finger of land that is embedded in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and points accusingly up towards South America, is currently warming faster than anywhere else on Earth.

  PART 3:

  WEST ANTARCTICA

  Home Truths

  6

  A Human Touch

  The Antarctic Peninsula is the northernmost part of the continent. It’s also the most conventionally beautiful place in Antarctica. Take the Alps, and cross them with the Grand Canyon. Stretch them both so that the mountains are higher, the cliffs sheerer, the glaciers wider and longer and bluer. Now put this glorious mix beside the sea, next to icebergs and penguins and seals and whales, and all within just two days’ sail of civilisation.

  There you will find bright blue days or silent grey ones, when the water is eerily still. You can sail down narrow channels, only passable for a few weeks of the year, where mountains and ice plunge steeply down to the sea on either side, and researchers in field camps on the banks call up the ship’s radio for the sake of a little contact with the outside world, or signal their greetings with waves or cartwheels.

  It’s not surprising, then, that this is also the most visited part of Antarctica—the human face of an otherwise inhuman continent. More than 20,000 people come here every year, most of them by sea.1 And the voyage may be gentle or riotous, depending on nature’s whim.

  If you make this journey south, you will probably start off at one of three ports: Punta Arenas in Chile, Ushuaia in Argentina, or Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands, just off the Argentinian coast. These are small, remote southerly towns, whose hotels have names like ‘The End of the Earth’. But they aren’t, or at least not quite. It’s the ice-reinforced ships that sail south from here that will take you to the real end.

  At first, as you enter the Atlantic and head south, the seas will probably be calm; you’ll be shielded from excessive weather by the coast of South America on the starboard side. But after perhaps half a day’s sailing you will emerge beyond its protective tip, and out into the wide-open seas of Drake Passage.

  This is the gap that first opened around thirty-five million years ago, when South America released its geological handhold and drifted away, and the oceans were finally free to swirl unchecked around the entire continent of Antarctica. From west to east, with no land left to stop them, they built up a vortex of currents that isolated Antarctica from the warmth of the north and allowed it to fall into a deep freeze.

  That same unbroken geography also renders this stretch of ocean the stormiest in the world. Winds and waves circle the globe here with no land to break their momentum, and the Pacific and Atlantic oceans can clash with such devastating fury that Drake Passage is notorious in shipping lore. Before the Panama Canal was built, rounding Cape Horn at the bottom of South America and braving these so
uthern seas was the fastest way to get from the Atlantic to the Pacific and also the most dangerous; in the past four centuries of sailing more than a thousand ships have been wrecked here. It is rich with mysticism and romance. On the tip of Cape Horn, beside the tiny military base, is a monument bearing the silhouette of a wandering albatross and a poem by Chilean poet Sara Vial:

  I am the albatross that waits for you

  At the end of the Earth.

  I am the forgotten soul of dead sailors

  Who crossed Cape Horn from all the seas of the world.

  But they did not die in the furious waves.

  Today they fly in my wings to eternity

  In the last trough of the Antarctic winds.2

  Before you cross this boundary and sail out into the passage, you’ll need to tie down or pack away everything that can move. You’ll also learn what to do if the ship’s alarm sounds: how to find and drag on the unwieldy, suffocating rubber immersion suits; where to gather beside the sealed melon-shaped lifeboats that will be your last resort; how not to think about what it would be like to be squashed inside one of these with twenty other humans, while the ocean tossed you about like a football.

  If the winds are bad, you will understand why so much of the ship’s furniture is screwed to the floor, and why the tables have wooden rims. If it’s not fastened down, the chair you are sitting on can fly through the air. Waves have been known to crash so high that they smack against the windows of the bridge, sixty feet up. The only way to move around the lurching ship is to cling with both hands on to doors and railings. You will not be going outside. You will probably not be going anywhere much, just lying weakly on your bunk, holding on to the wooden sides and wishing for it to be over.