Antarctica
Page 30
I joined him on a trial voyage aboard one of the US National Science Foundation’s two research vessels, the Nathaniel B. Palmer.20 Following our crossing of Drake Passage, we had steamed straight on down the Peninsula, not stopping at any of the islands or bases, not even the Peninsula’s American base, also called Palmer, which was apparently one of the loveliest on the continent, though sniffed at by the rest of the people on the programme as being too cushy. We were heading for an inlet called Lallemand Fjord, about a third of the way down the Peninsula, which bore an ice shelf that Gene had his eye on.
Gene was a man in a hurry. The operations on the Palmer were on an industrial scale, with massive winches and cables, and it was forbidden to go out on to the back deck without a float jacket and hard hat. If he felt he had to be out there now, Eugene would rush up with his clipboard and pen, grab a hard hat out of someone’s hand (or, once, off somebody else’s head), and cram himself into the nearest float jacket even if it announced its size as SMALL in large letters on the back.
But at least he was still prepared to go along with one of the oldest Navy traditions. The previous night, the ship had sailed past the invisible line in the sea that marks the Antarctic Circle, and those of us who were first-timers had had to undergo an initiation ceremony. Originally this only applied to crossings of the equator, during which naval ‘pollywogs’ (neophytes) were transformed into ‘shellbacks’ (veterans) by means of the sort of humiliations that would make members of a fraternity turn pale. Scientific cruises take this at least as seriously as naval vessels, and I know otherwise rational researchers who, when departing on an equator-crossing expedition, would rather forget their passports than their certificate saying they have already paid suitable obeisance to King Neptune, and don’t need to do so again.
Luckily for those of us on board who were Antarctic Circle pollywogs, our local King Neptune, biologist Rob Dunbar from Stanford University, had decided to let us off lightly. Instead of the compulsory haircuts and random shavings, or ceremonial dumping into vats of rubbish, he demanded that we each write a poem demonstrating suitable deference to the king.
That evening, after handing in my ten verses of doggerel, I received a certificate stating in elegant copperplate that, at two bells of the first watch of the day, I
Did, Boldly and Without Trepidation, Cross the Antarctic Circle at 66° 33’ South Latitude, 67° 36’West Longitude, aboard the Vessel Nathaniel Brown Palmer, entering the Treacherous and Unforgiving Reaches of the Antarctic Ocean. By so Doing and having Subsequently displayed proper Obeisance to King Neptune and his Faithful Lieges prior to Departing the Southern Reaches, She now Commands due Honor and Respect from all Persons, Whales, Seals, Penguins, Fishes, Crustaceans, Sponges, Insignificant Microscopic Creatures and other Denizens of the Polar Domains.
(Rob studies insignificant microscopic creatures, which is probably why they made it on to the list.)
Below all this, just above the signature of King Neptune, it added:
She bears this Distinction with Pride for it is neither Lightly Undertaken nor Easily Attained.
Certificate in hand, I watched for a while up on the bridge, but there was little to see but monotonous grey water with the occasional flash of a distant iceberg on the radar screen. Eventually I stumbled off to bed, to be woken next morning by my cabin mate, Mary, urgently shaking my shoulder. ‘Get up!’ she said. ‘You’ve got to see this!’ She was right. While we’d been sleeping the ship had turned into the mouth of the Lallemand Fjord and we were now about halfway along.
The scene was spectacular. All around us there was ice: the great squared-off tabular bergs that had only recently broken off; medium-sized ones with rounded edges and longer histories; and small chunks, with odder shapes. You could see what you wanted in these natural sculptures: a mermaid, a horse’s head, swans with their necks entwined, dragons.
But their shapes also told real stories if you knew how to read them. With a practised eye you could see where, as they had melted from below, they had become repeatedly unstable and flipped over and then flipped again. There were shelves of ice jutting out in mid-air, where old water lines had once been, or sides rippled with lines created by bubbles of air that had once escaped from the melting ice below the water, and bobbled their way to the surface.
All of this ice had come from the land, from snow, turning to ice, turning to glaciers, spilling into the sea, floating, flexing and finally breaking off. But the water, too, was freezing. Here it was slushy with grease ice, or frazil, which slithered against the ship’s hull; there it was so still that it had already begun to form pancakes, like frozen water lilies, decorated with streaks of snow. As we continued, the sea ice became more abundant, and thicker. The Palmer’s bow now smacked with pistol cracks as she performed a stately slalom through the pack. And overhead snow petrels wheeled, silhouetted against a slate grey sky, graceful as swallows.
At last, the ship heaved to. Ahead a cliff of ice blocked the way, standing perhaps sixty feet above the water and much more below. This was the Müller Ice Shelf, the parent of all these icebergs, the end point of the waste-disposal chute that was perpetually carrying snow from the mountains of the interior back down to the sea.
The Müller Ice Shelf was to be Gene’s test case. He already knew that it had retreated and re-advanced perfectly naturally in the past, and he believed that the signature of this was there to be read, in the mud of the Lallemand Fjord’s sea floor.
This mud had accumulated week by week, year by year, from a steady rain of debris through the seawater. Just as with the ice cores, looking down through the layers of this mud was like looking back in time. It contained dirt and ground-up rock carried from land by the glacier, and dead bodies and excretions of tiny sea creatures living in the water, and the relative proportions of land dirt and water creatures could show the times when the ice shelf was hanging overhead, and the times when it was gone.
But first, we had to collect the mud. The crew and science team heaved a square metal tube over the side. It was three metres long and had a heavy weight on the top and when it finally reached the sea floor it sank gently into the soft sediment, collecting a long plug, before being heaved back up and winched on to the ship.
Down below decks in the labs, the core lay out on a bench ready for its autopsy. Amy Leventer, from Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, pored over it, meticulously comparing each layer against a rock colour chart. ‘5Y 4/4 moderate olive brown,’ she said, and a graduate student noted it down. (All of the researchers were so familiar with this chart and its arcane nomenclature that they couldn’t resist practising on other objects, too. Rob Dunbar had already identified the precise shade of my coat. I’d have called it beige, but he assured me it was ‘light olive grey, 5Y 5/2’.)
To my less expert eye, the top of the core was just a nondescript sludgy grey, but deeper down, where the sediments were older, it changed to a fetching olive green. There it was, the very moment that the ice had appeared, written into the core. The green colour came from microscopic sea creatures; the sludgy grey, from where the glacier had advanced out on to the water and dropped its load on the sea floor, swamping the biology with hard grey grit.
In other words, the model was working. A few thousand years ago, there was no ice shelf here. But then, in the seventeenth century, the world was hit with a global climate cooling called the Little Ice Age. Londoners built bonfires and held markets and fairs on the frozen River Thames. And in Antarctica, out of human sight, the Müller Ice Shelf began to jut out into Lallemand Fjord and make its mark in the mud.
There was one last thing to check. To be sure that the mud on the sea floor really was an accurate record of the sediment falling through the water, Gene and his team had left a mooring in the fjord the previous year. A string of four bright yellow cones was now floating somewhere in the water, anchored to the sea floor with heavy weights, their heads turned upwards to catch the falling rain of dust, sand and debris. Now all we had
to do was find the mooring and retrieve the traps.
The finding part was easy enough—the mooring’s long string quickly showed up on the high-frequency sonar—but retrieving it was going to be tricky. Since it had been deployed, a large iceberg had drifted up close to the mooring site, and the captain was worried. Those of us who were non-essential were banned from the back deck and had to take turns watching through the open door. It was snowing now, thick fat flakes. The crew were out there in full immersion suits, attached to safety ropes to stop them falling into the frigid fjord. As the ship trawled past the site again and again, they toiled to snag the rope with a grappling hook over the side, like a heavy engineering version of the gift-grabbing games at seaside resorts.
Once, twice, they felt the snag and hauled the hook up only to find a few bare chunks of ice. Back over the edge, try again, and then . . . finally . . . gotcha! And the winch kicked in to haul the mooring up. I still can’t believe how much effort it took to dot the i’s of this model, to do the careful additional due diligence that would gather just a few more points on the graph.
But it was all a vital part of the story. The only way to be sure—really sure—of what was happening in Antarctica now was to interpret the clues from the past, and Gene was determined to get it right. And all his care was paying off. The results from Lallemand Fjord looked good; the model was making perfect sense. Now he needed to go to the other side of the Peninsula, to see if the other, bigger ice shelves were also just coming and going perfectly naturally, or if their recent retreats were something more sinister. That, however, meant sailing into the Weddell Sea, the iciest of Antarctica’s waters, and also perhaps the most perilous. Even today, few ships manage to penetrate the pack ice that builds there; and one of the first that tried—the Endurance’s namesake—met a horrible fate, in one of the most spectacular stories of the heroic age.
It was 1914 and Ernest Shackleton had a new plan. After turning back from his attempt to reach the South Pole five years earlier, he had decided to try a new adventure. He intended to make the first ever crossing of the continent, from sea to shining sea.
An expedition of this scale would need two ships. One, the Aurora, would go to the familiar Ross Sea side of the continent, while Shackleton himself would lead an expedition on a second ship, the Endurance. This would brave the infamous ice of the Weddell Sea, and land somewhere on the floating Ronne Ice Shelf, the mirror image of the great Barrier. Shackleton and his men would then make their way across the continent, using depots laid by the Ross Sea party. Never one to understate his case, he had named the expedition in the grandest of terms: the Imperial Transantarctic Expedition.
Of the two ships, the Endurance had the harder sailing task. For some reason the Weddell Sea was always far more choked with pack ice than the Ross Sea, and an earlier expedition had already lost a ship there. But at first all was well. Though it encountered ice early, the little ship made its way gamely along leads of open water, and steamed and smashed through the frozen sea ice between. On they crept through the pack, getting closer and closer to their goal. By January 1915 they were within eighty miles of the coast. They could see it. They could almost touch it. The men, heartily tired of the voyage, began to talk eagerly of how they would set up their base on land, and prepare for the expedition to come.
But then, agonisingly, the pack closed in. There were no more leads of open water, no more thin sections of ice that the ship could smash her way through. She was stuck. On 20 January 1915, Endurance found herself pinioned, a helpless prisoner forced to drift back north as the coast moved tantalisingly back out of sight. Shackleton had had to turn back within one hundred miles of the Pole. Now, once again, his goal was slipping away.
February passed, and March. The pack around the ship was like solid ground, enough for the men to practise sledging, exercise their dogs, play games and climb the pressure ridges that the ice threw up as it shifted and squeezed. Many were still hoping that the ship would eventually go free, but Shackleton knew better. In the privacy of his cabin he confided to Frank Worsley, captain of the Endurance: ‘You had better make up your mind that it is only a matter of time . . . What the ice gets, the ice keeps.’21
And the ice kept up its pressure, in visible waves that squeezed ever tighter around the ship. She listed this way and that. Her timbers creaked and groaned, and then finally cracked. On 27 October, the crew were forced to abandon ship. Shackleton gathered the men around him in front of Endurance’s shattered remains. ‘Ship and stores have gone,’ he said, ‘so now we’ll go home.’22
‘I think it would be difficult to convey just what those words meant to us,’ wrote one of the men, ‘situated as we were, surrounded by jostling ice floes as far as the eye could reach, tired out with our efforts to save the ship, and with no idea as to what was likely to happen to us—“We’ll go home”.’23
Each man was allowed no more than two pounds of personal gear. (One of the few exceptions was a banjo belonging to one of the crew members, which Shackleton insisted on taking, saying it was ‘vital mental medicine’.24) In such a pass, the values of the outside world were meaningless. Forced to confront what mattered most to them, men threw away money and kept photographs. Shackleton himself cast a handful of sovereigns onto the snow, and tore a page from the ship’s Bible, with this memorable verse from the Book of Job:
Out of whose womb came the ice?
And the hoary frost of Heaven, who hath gendered it?
The waters are hid as with a stone,
And the face of the deep is frozen.25
At first the men marched, attempting to drag their two lifeboats with them over the towering pressure ridges of ice. But the hills were too high and too hard. ‘The floes grind stupendously, throw up great ridges, and shatter one another mercilessly,’ Shackleton wrote in his diary. ‘Human effort is not futile, but man fights against the giant forces of nature in a spirit of humility.’26
And so they waited, and drifted, at a camp they called ‘Patience’ until in April 1916 they met enough open water to launch their lifeboats and sail for the nearest land. This was Elephant Island, a tiny, uninhabited and unsung patch of volcanic rock at the very tip of the Peninsula. The men set up camp on an inhospitable spit of land and contemplated their future. Nobody would come to rescue them there, for nobody knew where to look. Shackleton decided the only recourse was to equip one of the open lifeboats, the James Caird—which was less than twenty-five feet long—and sail it across the stormy Southern Atlantic, seeking help.
Cape Horn was the closest occupied land, about 600 miles away, but it lay in the wrong direction. The prevailing westerly winds that tore around the continent made reaching it impossible. Instead, Shackleton and the five men he chose to accompany him would have to forge out into the wide ocean, and try to reach the whaling station at South Georgia, a tiny pinprick of land more than 700 miles to the north-east, a needle in the great grey haystack of the Atlantic Ocean. If they missed it, all would be lost. The next nearest land was thousands of miles away.
To the twenty-two men left behind, and perhaps also to the six in the tiny boat, the mission must have seemed suicidal. But nobody dared say so. For Shackleton, pessimism was the only unforgivable sin, and he described optimism as ‘true moral courage’. He was convinced that believing in an endeavour took you more than halfway to achieving it. And as his story shows, he may well have been right.
‘We fought the seas and the winds,’ Shackleton wrote. ‘At times we were in dire peril . . . flung to and fro by Nature in the pride of her strength . . . So small was our boat and so great were the seas that often our sail flapped idly in the calm between the crests of two waves. Then we would climb on the next slope and catch the full fury of the gale where the wool-like whiteness of the breaking water surged around us.’27
The men not on watch, or bailing out the leaky craft, crawled into soaking sleeping bags in the tiny covered space that the carpenter had contrived and tried to get some rest. But the
hasty construction had not been designed for comfort. ‘The bags and cases seemed to be alive in the unfailing knack of presenting their most uncomfortable angles to our restseeking bodies,’ Shackleton wrote. ‘A man might imagine for a moment that he had found a position of ease, but always discovered quickly that some unyielding point was impinging on muscle and bone.’28 And the makeshift cabin was also suffocating. One of the crew wrote that more than once on waking, he had the ghastly fear that he had been buried alive.29
But Shackleton had chosen his five companions well. Worsley wrote in his navigating book that Irish seaman McCarthy ‘is the most irrepressible optimist I’ve ever met. When I relieve him at the helm, boat iced & seas pourg down yr neck, he informs me with a happy grin “It’s a grand day, sir”.’30
And Shackleton also had Worsley himself, the captain of Endurance, the master navigator whose task was to find South Georgia in this wide and stormy sea. The normal procedure by which seamen calculate courses and distances had become, Worsley wrote, ‘a merry jest of guesswork’. Instead, on the rare occasions where the sun could be seen, Worsley knelt on the thwart, two men holding him on either side, and tried to snap the altitude of the sun with his sextant while the James Caird bucked and heaved and rolled beneath him.
It ought to have been impossible. It was impossible. But fourteen days after they left Elephant Island, the men saw the cliffs of South Georgia rearing in front of them. Worsley’s handful of sextant sightings had done the trick. They had achieved one of the greatest boat journeys ever made.