Antarctica

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “You’d think that would be enough of a threat to get everyone’s attention.”

  “Yes, but it’s so inconvenient. If we have to take global warming seriously, then everything changes. CO2 levels have to drop, industrial society can’t keep burning fossil fuels—we would have to live differently. It’s so much easier to find some scientist somewhere who would be ever so happy to appear before a Congressional committee and declare that there is no such thing as global warming, or if there is that it isn’t really a problem, or that burning fossil fuels has nothing to do with it. Then the problem can be declared nonexistent by law and everyone can go back to business as usual.”

  “You mean Professor Warren?”

  “Yes,” Michelson said, nodding in approval at Wade’s recognition.

  In fact Professor Warren’s appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had caused quite a stir, as Wade well knew, having been put in charge of substantiating Phil Chase’s rebuttal to the professor. It was slightly possible Michelson was aware of Chase’s opposition to the renegade professor, rather than knowing only that the committee as a whole had endorsed Warren’s views enthusiastically, and used them to justify the blockage of the CO2 joint implementation treaty with China. But it was hard to tell; between beard, sunglasses, and black leather nose protector attached to the sunglasses, Michelson’s was a hard face to read. A face from a Breughel painting, really. Best to make no assumptions.

  “Is this where we’re going?” Wade asked, pointing up a side valley where Graham Forbes was just in view.

  “Yes. Follow Graham. Up into the Apocalypse Peaks,” he announced with some satisfaction.

  Hiking uphill on the brown pebbly snow-crusted rubble was hard work, and Wade started to heat up. He unzipped his parka and let the cold air cool him a bit. Unfortunately no matter how hot his torso became, his ears and nose continued to freeze.

  As they climbed higher they could see farther up the hanging valley. A glacier ran down its middle, reaching almost to the frozen lakes on the floor of Barwick Valley. Higher still and they could see the source of the glacier, a big tongue of ice pouring through the gap between two black rock ridges. Above and beyond that tongue the whole world was white. The edge of the polar cap, as Michelson confirmed; enough ice to cover the United States and Mexico. “These Dry Valleys are very unusual, you must remember that. It will be a shame if they get overrun by the ice.” Michelson ascended at a steady relaxed pace, and appeared neither too hot nor too cold. “That’s Shapeless Mountain. Beyond it is Mistake Peak. Over there, Mount Bastion and the Gibson Spur. These are all peaks of the Willett Range, and the ice cap is running up against their southern flanks, and through the passes between them, as here.”

  “You like the names.”

  “Yes,” surprised, “I do.”

  He led Wade under the side of the glacier, right up to its faceted cliff of a sidewall, which gleamed pale blue in the bright sun. Spills of broken ice splayed out from the wall here and there, as if ice machines had churned out a vast oversupply of ice cubes. “See how rounded all the chunks are,” Michelson pointed out. “They’re subliming away in the arid winds, and they’ll be gone before there’s another calving in the same spot. That’s why there’s no build-up of ice, and the glacier’s sides are sheer like this. They break off as a result of slow pressure from behind, and then the wind cleans up the mess at the bottom.”

  Eventually they climbed onto a section of rubble bordering the glacier that ramped up until it was level with the broad surface of the glacier, then just above it, so that they could see beyond the glacier, and a long way up the ice plain of the polar cap, rising gently to the south. It was not perfectly smooth, but had broad undulations that formed very low hills and valleys, Wade saw; subtle contours of up and down, all very smooth except in certain zones, where it was completely shattered. A kind of white frozen ocean, pouring through a break in the shore and down to a lower world. Also curving down in places to stand right over the shore, like waves that would never break. Puffing, sweat stinging one eye, Wade was nevertheless fascinated by the sight, glaring even through his polarized sunglasses; it was surreal, a kind of Dalí landscape, with all its features made impossible and subtly ominous, as the ocean bulked higher than the land, and one surge of the immense white wave would sweep them all away.

  But of course it stayed put. Michelson had hiked ahead, and joined Graham Forbes between the glacier and a broken cliff of reddish stone facing it. There at the foot of the red stone was a band of lighter sandstone, freckled with pebbles embedded in it. Graham Forbes was already kneeling before this sandstone, tapping away with a geologist’s hammer.

  “Now this is a very nice example of the Sirius group,” Michelson said as Wade approached them. “Almost a textbook example of it, in that it would make a good photo in a textbook. See how it’s laminated against the dolerite? Like the dirty ring of a bathtub. It’s a sedimentary rock, called tillite or diamictite, depending. Glacial till, from an ancient glacier.”

  “Not from this one?” Wade said, gesturing at the ice mass looming behind them.

  “No, from a predecessor. It’s been here a while.”

  “How long?”

  A snort from Forbes.

  Michelson’s moustache lifted at the corners. “That’s the question, isn’t it. We maintain that some Sirius group sandstones date from around three million years ago.”

  “Other people don’t agree?”

  “That’s right. There are those who say that the eastern ice cap has been very stable, and has been here for fourteen million years at least. So—” He shrugged. “We look at Sirius sandstone wherever we can find it, and see what we can see.”

  “How have you established the three-million-year date?”

  “There are microfossils buried in the rock, the fossil remnants of marine diatoms and foraminifera. These creatures have evolved over time, so that different kinds have lived in different eras, and the diatom record on the ocean floor is very well stratified and preserved. So when you find certain kinds of diatom fossils, you can match them with the record and say with fair confidence that the rock they are in is of a certain age.”

  “And this is a real method—I mean, an accepted method?”

  The little smile. “Oh yes, very real. It’s called biostratification, and it’s very well established.”

  “I see.”

  “We’ve also found evidence of a fuller biological community than just marine diatoms—members of a beech tree forest biome. Which suggests it was so warm that the ice cap would have been substantially gone, with western Antarctica an archipelago, and even eastern Antarctica covered in parts by shallow seas.”

  “You carbon-14 dated the beech trees?”

  “No no, carbon-14 dating only works for a short distance back in time. These are much older. And beech trees have remained stable evolutionarily for many millions of years, so we can’t date them by their type. There are some beetle fragments among the beech remains, however, and some other plants, lichens and mosses, and some of these can be dated using various methods, uranium-lead, argon-argon, amino acid … every little bit of biological material in Sirius tends to add its part to the puzzle.”

  “Look,” Forbes said to Michelson, pointing with the geologist’s hammer to the rock of the slope at about his knee level. “A dropstone of diamictite, within the massive diamicton here.”

  Wade saw that a round boulder of sandstone, the same color as the rest but with more pebbles in it, was embedded in the rest of the sandstone.

  “Interesting!” Michelson said, going to one knee to have a closer look. “So this boulder must be very much older than the matrix.”

  “Older, anyway,” Forbes allowed.

  They continued to discuss the band of sandstone, pointing out features invisible to Wade. “Do you think this could be our D-7 disconformity again, cropping up here?”

  “It looks like that could be some crude stratification below it, see that.”<
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  “And above, massive clast-rich diamictite, with dolerite boulders, and more water-lain gravels.”

  Back and forth they went, in a flurry of terms, as they wandered up and down the slope: deformed laminites, clast-poor muddy diamictite, rudimentary paleosols, lonestones, metasediments; “And then at the bottom the Dominion erosion surface again, perhaps. See how scoured this dolerite is, with north-south striations.”

  “Very nice,” Michelson said.

  They were seeing much more in this rock than Wade had ever realized could be there, much as he might hear more than them if confronted with an unfamiliar piece by Poulenc. They were reading the landscape like a text, even like a work of art in some senses.

  “See here!” Michelson exclaimed to Forbes, pointing at a patch of whitish rock at one end of the sandstone band, laminated very finely. “Silt layers, calcite crystals perhaps, and deposited here certainly—these couldn’t have been moved here, they’re much too delicate, see? You can break the layers with a finger.” He demonstrated. “Beautiful.”

  “I’ll take some samples,” Forbes said, getting a flat rectangular white canvas bag out of his daypack.

  “Is this the first time you’ve found this kind of thing?” Wade asked, feeling pleased: a scientific discovery!

  “The first time here, anyway.”

  “And what does this indicate?”

  “Well, these silt or clay layers suggest the bottom of a lake, and as you can see, boulders have dropped onto the layers while they were still wet and could be bowed down under the weight, see that? One explanation of that could be that this was a lake in a glacier’s margin, and icebergs calving would melt, and drop the boulders in them onto the silt on the bottom of the lake. We certainly see results just like these around living glaciers. So we may be looking at the bottom or shore of a lake.”

  Michelson and Forbes got on their knees and began dismantling some of the precious layered deposit, putting chunks of it into sample bags, discussing more invisible features in their highly technical language. “Here,” Michelson said to Wade. “If you care to help, you can count the number of vertical layers this deposit has.”

  Wade got on his knees and went at it, getting colder by the minute. The other two continued inspecting the sandstone inch by inch, apparently oblivious to the biting chill air, even though they were wearing less than Wade was.

  Michelson looked back at Wade. “Try counting how many fit against your fingernail, then measuring how many fingernails high the stack is, and multiply,” he suggested.

  Wade, shocked at the idea of that sort of approximation entering the pure realm of science, continued to count the layers one by one.

  Eventually they all stood up. Wade was cold, and very stiff from the previous day’s hike, and his hands were numb inside their mittens. “Six hundred and six,” he reported. “So there was liquid water down here for six hundred years!”

  “Or six hundred tidal cycles,” Forbes said. “Which would be about one year.”

  Wade saw the little smile reappear under Michelson’s moustache. “Liquid water, in any case,” Michelson said. “And very possibly this disconformity in the succession represents the transition from a marine environment to a subaerial one. What we called D-7 over on the Cloudmaker.” At the end of his black noseguard an icicle curved down almost to his chin, turning his face from a Breughel into something out of Bosch. “Let’s get back to camp,” he said, glancing up at the sun as if consulting a clock. “I’m famished, and we mustn’t be late for dinner. It’s Misha’s turn to cook, and he’s planning something special, I can tell.”

  Indeed he was. After a long walk back weighted down by many sample bags filled with rocks, they crawled into the Scott tent and the sharp smell of cooking garlic butter raked down their nostrils directly to their empty stomachs. They oohed and aahed and knocked around against the sloping canvas of the tent until they were properly arranged, Wade back in his corner, which was very hard on his back—harder work physically than the whole rest of the day. But on this night Val was seated next to him, in fact jammed against him leg to leg, so that the entire evening he had the more-than-just-somatic warmth of that contact pouring into him. “Just in time,” Misha told them, handing out hors d’oeuvres: mugs of cold Scotch and melted brie on camp crackers, followed quickly by the main course: lobster tails sautéed in the garlic butter, with a side of corned-beef hash, followed eventually by a dessert of chocolate bars and Drambuie.

  It was heavenly. Wade sawed away at the flesh of his lobster tails with a big Swiss Army knife, marveling that food could taste so good. “Four star,” someone muttered, and there were various hums and purrs and clattering as they all gulped down their meals. Near the end of the main course Michelson leaned on one elbow next to the radio and stretched out like a Roman emperor, the little V of a smile lifting his moustache. “Remember,” he said to Wade, “you must tell them what hell it was down here.”

  “Ninth circle,” Wade agreed, wiping melted butter off his chin and licking it from his fingers.

  “You liked the lobster?” Misha asked him.

  “Kind of salty,” Wade said, which caused Val to choke.

  “Don’t worry,” she said to the frowning Misha when she had recovered, “things are going to taste salty to Wade here for the rest of his life.” She explained what he had done at Don Juan Pond and the scientists laughed at him.

  Then as they slowly downed dessert, and Misha heated water on the Coleman stove to wash dishes, the talk turned to the day’s work. Wade asked them to tell him more about the Sirius group controversy, and Val seconded the request, and the scientists were happy to oblige. All four of them contributed to the telling, even Misha, who to Wade’s surprise took the lead; he had had training in geology, that was clear. “The old view,” he explained, “was that the East Antarctic ice cap is an old and stable feature. The west sheet comes and goes, but the east sheet was established after Antarctica detached from South America, forty or fifty million years ago. Then it was here in place, and growing ever after, except for some warming periods, maybe, but those all long ago; most recently fourteen million years, at the latest.

  “Then in the 1980s Webb and Harwood and their group found diatoms in the Sirius sandstone, and dated the diatoms at three million years old. When they published that data and their conclusion, that the eastern ice sheet hadn’t been there three million years ago, the battle was on.”

  “Battle,” Wade said around a final salty mouthful of lobster.

  “Well, you know. Scientific controversy.”

  “Battle,” Harry Stanton confirmed.

  “The two sides wouldn’t shoot each other on sight,” Michelson objected.

  “No no,” Misha said, “it’s not like people after a divorce or something, you know, totally personal and vindictive. But still, they were both convinced that the other side weren’t being …”

  “Scientific,” Michelson supplied with his little smile.

  “They both thought the other side was being a blockhead,” Harry said. “Scientifically speaking of course.”

  “Yes,” Misha said. “They didn’t like each other, after a while.”

  “Suggesting lab contamination didn’t help,” Michelson said.

  “Lab contamination?” Wade asked Misha.

  “Well, when Harwood and Webb first said they had found these diatoms in the Sirius sandstone, some of the stabilists suggested the diatoms had come from other studies in the same lab. That went over very poorly in Ohio, as you can imagine.”

  “Indeed. Stabilists?”

  “The old ice group. This is the battle of the stabilists and the dynamicists.”

  “So we won the name battle at least,” Michelson murmured.

  “Then next, when it was established that the diatoms were actually inside Sirius rocks, the stabilists suggested there were so few diatoms that they had probably just blown in on the wind from the coast.”

  “That infamous coast-to-plateau wind,” H
arry noted.

  “Which blows so hard that it shoves the diatoms right under the ice cap that the stabilists claim has always been there,” Michelson said.

  “Yes, of course,” Misha said. “Blown over from Australia, perhaps. But they did find some diatoms in the ice at the South Pole, so the stabilists had some support for this idea.”

  “And how did the Ohio group deal with that?”

  Misha grinned. “With quantity. Sometimes you have quality results, and sometimes you need quantity results. They blew up tons and tons of the Transantarctic Mountains. They went to every Sirius site they could find with a great big dynamite license from NSF, and they blew up great masses of Sirius and took them back home and dumped them on the stabilists’ desks, metaphorically speaking of course. Diatoms by the ton.”

  “Not tons,” Michelson objected. “Nothing in excess.”

  “Tons. Whole nunataks you see on the map, now entirely gone and removed to labs at Ohio State.”

  “No no—”

  “Yes yes,” laughing, “I was the mountaineer for one of those expeditions, I set the charges myself! It was awesome. There should be an Ohio State Glacier named up there, we tore a brand new pass in the Transantarctics.”

  Much laughter in the tent at Michelson’s expense, who clearly had been involved with this project. Wade saw that the younger scientists were fond of him. “And they found good evidence?” Wade said.

  “Quite good,” Misha judged. “No doubt there were beech forests here when the Sirius group was laid down.”

  “Parts of the Sirius group,” Michelson qualified. “It could easily be that the Sirius group is fossil till from several different glacial periods.”

  “And so the stabilists were convinced, and they recanted,” Wade said, to more hoots of laughter.

  “Of course not,” Misha said, grinning and refilling their mugs with Drambuie. “That isn’t how it works, of course. No one is ever convinced of anything.”

  “So how do new ideas take hold?”