Antarctica Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Map of Antarctica

  Introduction

  Prologue

  EAST ANTARCTIC COAST

  Welcome to Mactown

  The March of the Penguins

  Mars on Earth

  THE HIGH PLATEAU

  The South Pole

  Concordia

  WEST ANTARCTICA

  A Human Touch

  Into the West

  Timeline

  Glossary

  Notes

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2013 by Gabrielle Walker

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  First published in Great Britain by Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-0-15-101520-7

  eISBN 978-0-547-53697-2

  v2.0314

  For Fred and David,

  my bookends

  All lose, whole find

  —e. e. cummings

  Introduction

  Antarctica is like nowhere else on Earth. While there are other wild places or ones that seem extreme, this is the only continent in the world where people have never permanently lived. In the interior of the continent there is nothing to make a living from—no food, no shelter, no clothing, no fuel, no liquid water. Nothing but ice.

  People have long suspected there may be some kind of land at the bottom of the world. The Greeks believed in Antarctica saying, with the peculiar logic of philosophy, that there must be a far southern continent to balance out the land in the north. Poets and novelists dreamed up new races of humans inhabiting tropical southern lands, or a hole at the South Pole that gave access to a hollow Earth beneath.

  They were free to dream. The great sailing expeditions of discovery, which showed European powers the new worlds of the west and the ancient ones of the east, were always forced to turn back if they travelled too far south; they were blocked by the great ring of impenetrable pack ice that circles the southern seas.

  The first sighting of the continent’s outermost islands in 1819 did little to stop the speculation of what might lie beyond, and the first serious attempts to penetrate its interior took place barely a hundred years ago, in the heroic age of exploration by Scott, Amundsen, Shackleton and the rest.

  Even now, although this land is bigger than Europe or the continental US, it has only forty-nine temporary bases, most of them on the relatively accessible coast.1 In summers there are perhaps three thousand scientists on the ice, plus another 30,000 tourists who come in on short visits, usually by ship to the western Peninsula. In winters, there can be just a thousand people on the entire continent.

  The scale of the place is hard to grasp. You see a mountain or an island that seems a few hours’ walk away and decide to wander over and explore; five days later you’re still walking. The early explorers did this a lot. The problem is not just the size of the features—glaciers that make Alaska look small, mountains that dwarf the Alps—but also the absence of anything against which to judge them. There are no trees, or indeed plants of any kind; no land animals; nothing but glaciers, snowfields and sepia-toned rocks.

  In spite of its size, Antarctica officially belongs to nobody. An international treaty, signed now by the forty-nine countries with a declared interest, forbids commercial exploitation and dedicates the entire place to ‘peace and science’. Thus, the continent is a science playground. Dozens of countries have gained themselves a placeholder for any future exploitation by building bases whose presence is justified by the noble pursuit of science. But whatever the true reasons that governments pump money into Antarctic science, the results extend far beyond the continent itself. Discoveries made there have dramatically changed the way we see our world.

  For these reasons and many more I have been fascinated by Antarctica for more than two decades. I have visited five times, mainly as a guest of the huge American programme, run by the US Government’s National Science Foundation, through whom I spent several stints at the South Pole, stayed for four months at McMurdo—the main American base on the coast and the unofficial capital of Antarctica—and visited many of the US field camps scattered around the continent. I’ve also been a guest of the Italian, French, British and New Zealand governments. I’ve sailed to Antarctica at various times on a tourist ship, a British Royal Navy icebreaker and a science research vessel. I’ve driven on the ice in tractors, snow dozers, skidoos and strange tracked vehicles with triangular wheels, and flown over it in helicopters, Hercules transport planes and small ski-equipped Twin Otters.

  And in all these experiences I have encountered some astonishing stories. Antarctica has much, much more than just ice and penguins. It is like walking on Mars; it is a unique window into space; it has valleys that time has forgotten; mysterious hidden lakes; under-ice waterfalls that flow uphill; and archives of our planet’s history that are unrivalled anywhere else on Earth. It is also a place of romance, adventure, humour and terrible cost. Since there is no prior culture or indigenous population, modern humans can write themselves afresh. For the people who go there, Antarctica is a carte blanche.

  Even its apparent barrenness is a large part of its power. People are drawn to Antarctica precisely because so much has been stripped away. The support staff I met there told me that they had come not to find themselves so much as to lose the outside world. The continent lacks most of the normal ways that we interact in human societies. There is no need for money; everyone wears the same clothes and has the same kind of lodging—whether a tent, a hut, a dorm room or, in the bigger bases, an ensuite room that wouldn’t be out of place in a Travelodge; you eat the same food as everyone else; you forget about the existence of mobile phones, bank accounts, driving licences, keys, even children. (Almost none of the bases will allow anyone under the age of eighteen.) And with this simplicity of life comes a clarity that’s intoxicating.

  That doesn’t just apply to your time on the ice. A sojourn in Antarctica brings with it a new way of seeing back in the real world. Christchurch, in New Zealand, is the main point of return for the American mega-base, McMurdo. The locals are used to the oddities of Antarcticans arriving after long months on the ice. Nobody is surprised if, while checking into your hotel, you ask for a glass of fresh milk along with your room key (there are no cows on the continent), or if you wander out of a restaurant forgetting to pay. And in the botanical gardens at the end of the season you can often find people sitting for hours, staring in wonder, as if they were seeing flowers for the first time.

  With this book I have attempted to weave together all the different aspects of Antarctica in a way that has never been done before: what it feels like to be there; why people of all kinds are drawn to it; Antarctica as place of science, political football, holder of secrets about the Earth’s past, and ice crystal ball that will ultimately predict all of our futures. It is only when you see all those different aspects and how they interconnect that you can begin to understand this extraordinary place.

  I have tried, in short, to write a natural history of the only continent on Earth that has virtually no human history.

  Antarctica is made up of two giant ice sheets. Part One of the book is based around coastal stations on the East Antarctic ice sheet, the larger of the two. This is home to a bleak
ly beautiful frozen lake district, which is so like the Red Planet that it has been dubbed ‘Mars on Earth’. It’s also here that you can meet the ‘aliens’ of Antarctica, creatures that live on the coast there year round and have been forced into bizarre adaptations to cope with the extremes. There are fish with antifreeze in their blood, seals that live out the winter swimming non-stop beneath the sea ice, snow petrels that look angelic on the wing but are spitting maniacs close up, and penguins that put themselves through extremes of starvation and privation to rear each new generation.

  For Part Two we move to the high plateau in the interior of the eastern ice sheet. This is where the astronomy happens, giant telescopes high on the summit of the ice sheet that see through windows in the cold, dry sky to parts of the Universe that other telescopes can’t reach. This is also where we see how humans pass winters trapped on their bases, as isolated as if they were on a space station.

  The fulcrum of the book comes as I describe another treasure found in the east: the extraordinary archive of the Earth’s climate history, buried as bubbles of ancient air under three kilometres of ice. While scientists working on the rest of the world were quibbling, Antarctica told us beyond any doubt that our burning of oil, coal and gas has significantly changed our atmosphere, taking it into unnatural and potentially very dangerous territory.

  Part Three then focuses on the west of the continent: the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and the peninsula tail pointing to South America. The Peninsula is warming up more rapidly than almost anywhere else on Earth. And the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is the vulnerable one, based on slippery wet rocks that could send it sliding into the sea. Though it is the smaller of the two ice sheets it still contains enough ice to raise sea levels around the world by three and a half metres.2 If the West Antarctic Ice Sheet melted completely, or even in part, Antarctica would no longer be a remote curiosity. Its ice would fill the oceans, rearing up to flood London, Florida, Shanghai and the hundreds of millions of people who make their livings in places that now seem perilously close to the sea.

  The underlying theme of the book is the classic ‘hero’ story, in which the narrator travels to the end of the Earth, to the strangest, most distant lands, only to find a mirror, the girl next door, the key to life back home. But there is also a deeper message, for which Antarctica is the living metaphor. The most experienced Antarcticans talk not about conquering the continent but about surrendering to it. No matter how powerful you believe yourself to be—how good your technology, how rich your invention—Antarctica is always bigger. And if we humans look honestly into this ice mirror, and see how small we are, we may learn a humility that is the first step towards wisdom.

  Prologue

  The walls of the crevasse looked grey in the streaky light of Steve Dunbar’s headlamp. It was dark and cold and the ice was sheer. The world above him had become cone-shaped, the tapering sides leading down from a distant hole, the size of a manhole, through which daylight was feebly filtering.

  Before climbing into a crevasse like this Steve would normally have broken open more of the snow bridge that had masked it, to widen the hole and let in a little more light. But this time he couldn’t afford to send a cascade of snow downwards. Somewhere below him in this infernal crack was a human being, who had been down there for thirty hours or more, in temperatures of -31°F. Steve knew what he was likely to find. But still, he had to try.

  Word had come yesterday evening, and as soon as Steve’s pager had gone off, he’d known it meant trouble. He was head of the Search and Rescue (SAR) team at McMurdo Station. According to his contract, his job was to keep the scientists and support workers on the American research programme safe from harm. According to the unwritten rules of this continent, if anyone anywhere came to grief, the chances were his pager would buzz.

  This time it was a Norwegian team. Four of them had been riding skidoos to the South Pole, hoping to retrieve a tent left there back in 1911 by the great Norwegian hero Roald Amundsen. Amundsen was one of the most famous people ever to set foot on Antarctica, the conqueror of the Pole, the winner of the race to the bottom of the world. This was now 1993 and the tent had been buried by decades of snow, as well as shifted by the moving ice. But the men were confident they could find it, dig it up and take it home in triumph to be displayed next year at the Lillehammer Winter Olympics.

  Now, however, they had run into difficulties. A thousand kilometres from their goal, someone had fallen into a crevasse. They had set off a distress beacon, which had rung bells with the Norwegian government, who had called the American government, who had called the US National Science Foundation, who had called the base commander at McMurdo, who had called Steve.

  For a nearby emergency, the SAR team could be on the road in about twenty minutes, but the region where the Norwegians were now trapped was about as remote as it was possible to be. While Steve organised a team of seven people and packed up 1,000 lb of gear, the aeroplane coordinators diverted a ski-equipped Hercules from its mission to service a remote science station.

  Hercs are heavy planes, far too heavy to take out to a crevassed accident site. This one took the team on the three-and-a-half-hour flight to the Pole, where Steve chose three trusted members—a Navy medic, an American mountaineer and another mountaineer from the New Zealand base near McMurdo—to join him on a smaller Twin Otter plane. They would take some gear, scout out the situation and call in reinforcements as necessary.

  By the time they reached the site of the accident, in the Shackleton Mountains, more than a day had passed since the beacon had flared. The pilot spotted a tent and buzzed down low, a hundred feet above the surface, but nobody emerged from the tent. That was a bad sign. There had been radio contact with the Norwegians from the Pole but that had stopped a few hours ago. Through the Twin Otter’s window Steve could see countless holes where their skidoos had broken through snow bridges; he could see the tracks where they had hit dunes in the snow and then flown through the air. They must have been going at top speed, vaulting over crevasses, surrounded by danger, holes opening up all around them, scared to death. There were three skidoos parked next to the tent. And about two hundred feet away, one hole had ropes dangling forlornly down into it.

  The closest landing site they could find was nearly three miles from the tent. As the Otter taxied after landing, a snow bridge opened up on the left-hand side, leaving a hole that the plane’s ski could easily have tumbled into. There were crevasses everywhere. Any hopes of bringing in reinforcements now vanished. This was going to be a one-stop mission, to find the casualty, bring him back to the plane and get back out of there.

  The team was roped up and ready before they even climbed down on to the ice. Steve took the lead, probing every step with a thin pole almost as tall as he was. His arm quickly grew tired from the repeated lifting and thrusting. The snow was like sugar, so full of air that he could hardly tell where snow finished and hazardous crevasse began. In spite of their care the four of them plunged repeatedly through the snow, their ropes holding firm, their legs dangling over invisible chasms.

  And the crevasses were unbelievably chaotic. Instead of the usual parallel lines like stretch marks in the snow, these were a crazy paving of zigzags running every which way. That’s really dangerous. Normally you can approach crevasses from the side and then step over them, knowing for certain that even if you fall in, the person behind you won’t. But if you can’t predict their directions, all four of you could be on the same snow bridge over the same crevasse at the same time. And if you all break through into the same crevasse at once, everybody falls. Steve’s sense of responsibility grew heavier with every dogged step. At what point did his obligation to protect the people behind him on the rope begin to override his obligation to help the people he’d come to save?

  He kept going; they all did. Four hours of slog just to travel three miles. When they were just a few yards away from the tent, two of the Norwegians finally climbed out to greet them. Steve could tell straight awa
y that they were shot to pieces emotionally. Inside the tent, one of their companions had cracked ribs and concussion. He’d been the first to fall. His skidoo had broken a hole big enough to plunge into and he had gone with it. Luckily for him he had smashed into a ledge in the crevasse and stuck there, unconscious, while his skidoo crashed on down into the abyss. When he came to, he had managed to climb out using a chest harness and ropes that his companions had thrown to him. A chest harness with broken ribs? That must have been agony.

  It was after this that the others had set up the tent. But then the real disaster hit. The team’s second in command, an army officer named Jostein Helgestad, had decided to try to find a safe passage through the crevasses on foot. His companions had seen him disappear into the ice just a stone’s throw from the tent. And they had heard nothing from him since.

  Somebody had to look, so Steve secured a rope to one of the skidoos and went in. Sixty feet down, the crevasse was so narrow that he couldn’t turn his head for fear of knocking off his headlamp; the danger was now not falling so much as getting wedged in. His legs were splayed, his crampons snagging on the ice walls. He couldn’t control his own rope any more; his companions up on the surface were going to have to start lowering him. He yelled up instructions then pivoted vertically so that he was descending head first into the darkness. His headlamp picked out a sleeping bag that had been thrown down by the Norwegian team and had evidently been left untouched. Then he saw his man.

  The crack was now barely a foot wide. Jostein was wedged in sideways where he had fallen and where his body heat must have melted him further into the ice. Steve strained to touch him but couldn’t quite reach. Instead he probed down with his ice axe, snagged Jostein’s arm and gingerly raised it. The arm was frozen solid.