Antarctica (22 page)

Your first reaction is probably relief that the rush is finally over. The last few days of the summer season are always the most frantic. People are scrambling to finish their summer tasks. The ones who are leaving are talking vacation plans; the galley is full of ideas about how to spend your summer salary in tropical travel spots. You have to close your ears to this kind of thing. You can't let it get to you. But it's hard when the energy levels rise, as the last plane gets closer. When they finally leave, it's like the quiet that hangs in the air after a family reunion, when everyone has gone home and you can digest it all in peace.

But if this is your first time, you'll probably also be feeling jittery. In the twenty-first century there are few places left on Earth where you can be genuinely stranded. And yet here you are, in the middle of a thick mantle of ice sliding over a bare continent of rock. And whatever happens they're not coming to get you. They're just not.

When this jolt of panic subsides (as it usually does) you'll be left, if you're lucky, with another kind of relief, the sense that you have little to worry about beyond your own work, and that of the people immediately around you. In Larry's memorable phrase it's not about giving up, but about giving in. (This is also the time when you can guarantee that you can't be packed off home. If you had a twinge of backache or a slight toothache in the past week or two, you'll probably have stayed well away from the doctor just in case. Now that it's too late to be repatriated, chances are there's a queue already forming outside Club Med.)

By long-standing tradition, the first act of the new winter crew is to gather around the TV for an official screening of the two versions of
The Thing.
Both are horror stories set in remote polar stations. The older one, set in the Arctic, looks foolish to modern eyes. Its monster is a unimpressively wooden kind of Frankenstein, and a woman wearing a powder-blue parka with a fetching furry trim keeps popping up to smile and offer all the men coffee. John Carpenter's later version is much more frightening. This one is set in an Antarctic station in the winter. For those who don't know it, I won't spoil the story but an alien presence becomes increasingly disturbing, and the claustrophobia is extreme. Perfect viewing, in sum, for a team of people who are about to be isolated in a remote Antarctic station for nine long months.

The next few days will be for taking stock. Now that the population has gone down from two hundred to just a few dozen, there's space to breathe. Nobody's working nights any more—everybody is on the same daytime shift. You might be nailing down everything that could be blown away by the winter storms, or taking down the flags that marked the runway and putting up new flag lines, one marker every three metres, between the main station and all the outer buildings. These might look redundant while the sun is still shining, but when the darkness comes, and the raging blizzards, these flags and the ropes looped between them might just save your life.

And each day, the circling sun dips almost imperceptibly closer to the horizon. The two Poles are the only places on Earth that experience a single day per year. Both places have exactly six months of daylight and six months of darkness, the transitions marked by a single sunrise and a long drawn-out sunset lasting three weeks or more. The first sign of the coming sunset is the lengthening shadows. Each day those thrown by buildings, storage piles, skidoos will stretch a little, until they seem to reach almost to the horizon. Your own shadow will seem impossibly long and as you walk two vast legs will mimic every step you take with a gigantic stride.

Now while there is still some daylight and the weather isn't yet too cold, you might grab the chance to sneak into Old Pole, the Station That Nobody Mentions. This was built back in 1956 under the supervision of former Boy Scout Paul Siple, and marked the first human presence at the Pole since Scott and his men had trudged disconsolately away nearly half a century earlier. (Paul Siple was wholesome enough in his appetites to make Baden-Powell cringe. At the end of an earlier Antarctic expedition, when finally back in New Zealand, he wrote how ‘I hurried to a field where I flung myself on the ground and lay daydreaming in the soft warm breezes until my body cried out for a glass of milk and some fruit.'
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)

Originally Old Pole was on the surface, but the ice has since taken it, as it will one day take everything else. Most people know that it lies roughly over there, buried somewhere under that large patch of ice; but in the summer few people dare risk going in—I certainly didn't—for fear of being summarily sent home. Entering it is strictly forbidden, officially for safety reasons though there are some who mutter that officialdom would prefer everyone to forget it exists. But in the winter, what can they do? Sack you? Visits certainly take place and photos are later passed round the station like contraband, showing images that are misted with frosted breath hanging in the air. Though some of the rooms are still intact, others are dramatically contorted, their steel joists twisted and buckled by the awesome power of the ice.

By now the sun will be touching the horizon, and the first colours will appear in the sky. Don't expect deep spectacular reds; there is no dust in the air to scatter the setting sunlight, only crystals of ice that give colours that are paler and more subtle—pinks and mauves rather than crimson. On the side of the horizon opposite the Sun, you'll see a purple haze like a visor, as the Earth casts its own shadow on to the air. And as the Sun dips deeper, you will have a better chance than most to see the famous green flash. In principle this can happen anywhere in the world at the end of a sunset. Light travels more quickly in the thin upper air than in the low dense air, so it tends to bend a little round the curved Earth. And since green light curves more than red, a flash of green is often still visible when the sun has disappeared over the horizon. In the tropics this might last a second. In the stretched-out saga of a polar sunset, a green stripe comes and goes over the course of a day or even two.

Next come long days of a ghostly grey twilight. Half the sky darkens to deep blue, royal blue and then black, specked with stars, while the other half is still infused with leftover light from a sun that is only just over the horizon. As the sky turns, or rather you turn beneath it, the dark half moves, too, picking out different constellations like an inverse searchlight. And then you notice that the rest of the sky has also grown darker, and then there's no light at all. This is the true winter, the crown jewel of an Antarctic stay. And it is now that the Dark Sector, home of the station's telescopes, comes into its own.

 

Tony Stark and I didn't get off to the best of starts. Someone had already pointed him out to me so I knew he was a veteran astronomer from Harvard University, there at the Pole to work on one of the telescopes. One evening in the galley I went over to speak to him, but before I could introduce myself he made it obvious that he already knew what I was there for, and didn't particularly approve. ‘I hope you're going to do a good job,' was his opening line, ‘because you're taking the space of someone who could be critical to the scientific enterprise.' (‘Charming to meet you, too,' I thought, but luckily didn't say.)

Tony's attitude wasn't that uncommon among the scientists on the US Antarctic Program. Though many see the poetic and mysterious side of the continent where they work, others are at best irritated by the drama and the difficulties. Yes, yes, it's an extreme place and all that, but we're doing science, and that's all that matters. If you're here to help us do our science, that's fine. If you're not, then get out of the way.

This seems particularly disingenuous at the Pole. There are some excellent scientific reasons for being here, especially to do astronomy. The cold, dry air and steady winter darkness provide a stability and clarity that make this one of the cleanest windows on Earth for peering out through the atmosphere into space. But it's not perfect. Though the Pole lies at the geographic centre of the continent, it's also on a slight slope. The winds on the continent are born on local high points and then spill down the sides till they reach the coasts with a furious flourish. And on the way, they pass by here, stirring up the air and muddying the view.

But if you recall that the science in Antarctica also serves as a political placeholder, the reason for this location makes more sense. Before the Antarctic Treaty came into effect back in 1961, eleven nations had staked claims on various parts of the continent. Though these claims are now officially on hold, they have never been wiped from the record. And, significantly, they are all great wedges of land that meet at . . . the South Pole. The US has never staked a claim of its own, but it has built this station right at the touching point of all the other claims, an unofficial geopolitical finger poking into everyone else's pies.

Still, science was something that the South Pole was very good at, and Tony was one of its ablest practitioners. When he relented enough to take me back to his lab, in the Dark Sector, the stories he told me of their discoveries make me very happy that I bit my tongue when we first met.

The Dark Sector, where the telescopes lived, was about a kilometre and a half away from the main station, but it seemed farther. Temperatures had still barely lifted above -58°F and the wind drew tears that instantly froze into globs of ice, gumming my eyelashes together, rendering me all but blind. As I rubbed at my eyes, I noticed belatedly that everyone else was wearing goggles. I thought they were only necessary if you were riding on a skidoo. I knew better now.

The Dark Sector was separated from the main station to avoid any light and radio wave pollution when the darkness finally fell. There was one main building called the Martin A. Pomerantz Observatory (MAPO)
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and various smaller ones, some with towers and visible telescopes like classic radar dishes pointing up into the sky. Inside were offices, computers and banks and banks of electronics with spaghetti tangles of wires. And a gigantic poster of a mad-looking Jack Nicholson in
The Shining.
‘Heeeeeeere's Johnny!'
The Shining
used to be one of the movies that the winterers watched on the day the last planes left, but lately they had been saving it for midwinter.

Tony's telescope was called AST/RO. The letters stood for ‘Antarctic Submillimetre Telescope and Remote Observatory'; the slash was to distinguish it from all the other telescopes whose owners have devised acronyms to be able to call them ASTRO. And as we sat in the main astronomical building in the Dark Sector, warming our hands with mugs of hot tea, he explained what AST/RO was looking for.

The Galaxy in which we live, the Milky Way, is fairly typical, large and flat, shaped like a child's drawing of a flying saucer with a bulge in the middle surrounded by a disk of spiral arms. Our home planet and the others in our Solar System inhabit a provincial spot in the outer part of one of these arms, some 30,000 light years from the bulge at the Galactic Centre. Though it sounds like a measure of time, a light year is actually the distance light can travel in a year, which is a shade less than ten trillion kilometres. Light moves so quickly it took humans until relatively recently to discover that it moves at all. Our own Sun is about eight light minutes away, the next nearest star about 4.2 light years. Thirty thousand light years seems almost unimaginably distant, but by the scale of the Universe, which was the scale Tony Stark lives and breathes, it's still not that far. ‘I feel very at home in the Galaxy,' he told me when casually tossing out these figures. ‘I think of it as if it were some kind of nearby real estate. I'm not overawed by it any more.'

The problem when it comes to studying the centre of our Galaxy is not the distance, but the many intervening clouds blocking our view. The stars in the night sky are all relatively close by. It seems as if there are many of them, but there are a million times more packed into the Galactic Centre. We can't see these because clouds of molecules like hydrogen, carbon monoxide, nitrogen and methane soak up all the light they emit, and cloak them from our view. ‘There are twenty-some magnitudes of visual extinction in the Galactic Centre,' Tony said. ‘Not only can you not see it, but you can't see it twenty times over.'

So if we stuck with visible light, the sort of light that our weak human eyes can detect, the main activity of the Galaxy would be for ever out of view. But AST/RO's eyes went beyond this. It could detect light coming in with longer wavelengths than the typical colours of the rainbow. In its preferred range of so-called ‘submillimetre' (or far infrared) wavelengths, molecular clouds shone brightly, and the Galactic Centre was an open book.

The trick for seeing with radio eyes is to have as little water vapour as possible between you and outer space. That's why the South Pole is so very good at it. For every 10°F below freezing, the amount of water vapour in the air drops by half. When the temperatures here got cold enough, in the deep midwinter, AST/ RO could pick out the many molecular clouds that dot the night sky. But more than that, looking through this pristine Antarctic window it could see right into the heart of our Galaxy, to the bulging centre of commerce, activity and drama.

And when it looked, AST/RO saw something that impressed even the phlegmatic Tony Stark. Spinning around the centre of our Galaxy was a molecular cloud to dwarf all others. It was nearly a thousand light years across, and contained two million times as much material as our Sun. Like a storage ring it was soaking up dust and molecules dragged in from the rest of the Galaxy. And it was getting denser all the time. AST/RO showed that this massive ring was right on the edge of stability. It was so dense that after just one more tweak, in another few hundred thousand years at most (which in galactic terms was the merest twitch), it could tip over the edge. Then, as if you had dropped a mighty slug of vinegar into a giant galactic sauce, it would curdle and coagulate into blobs of gas that would fall in on themselves in a spectacular celestial light show. It would become a massive centre of star formation. At present there were only a handful of new stars created in the Galaxy each year. When this kicked off there could be thousands. They would be every colour and size, supermassive blue ones that blaze brightly but burn out quickly; more measured, smaller orange and red ones. As some were still barely switching on, others would be reaching the ends of their short lives and exploding dramatically, before new ones eventually reformed again from the material that was flung out.
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