Antarctica (3 page)

About two hundred miles to the east, Roald Amundsen set up his rival camp, not on solid ground like Ross Island, but on the surface of the Barrier itself. Though most of the cliffs are impenetrable, Amundsen had found one inlet, called the Bay of Whales, which gave him a way in.

Scott didn't know he was in a race to the Pole until his men spotted Amundsen's ship, the
Fram,
while Scott and others were laying supply depots elsewhere on the Barrier. The two crews politely shared meals and plans, but the British were soon hurrying back to base with the news that they now had a rival. Scott was deeply shocked. He had thought he had a clean run at glory and although he made as light of it as he could, his men privately recorded in their diaries that he seemed to be sleeping badly, and that the news had obviously hit him hard.

Throughout the winter, each in their own camp, the two teams stocked and tallied and prepared. Amundsen had brought a small, crack team. Everyone knew their role and they spent the dark, cold months refining their equipment. Scott had brought three times as many men, including two who were paying for the privilege, and their activities were more muddled. Practising or trying too hard seemed almost ungentlemanly. Even before they started out for the Pole, the seeds of the coming tragedy were already being sown right here, on Ross Island.

But although Amundsen made the right choices, and ultimately won the race, it is the spirit of Scott's hut that survives in Mactown today in the overwhelming focus on science. Scott's men spent much of their winter giving each other scientific lectures and he himself wrote that, because of the science his men planned to do during their expedition, ‘If the Southern journey comes off, nothing, not even priority at the Pole, can prevent the Expedition ranking as one of the most important that ever entered the Polar regions.'
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Today, science lies at the heart of the programme. In summer there can be 1,200 people in McMurdo, in winter perhaps 250; and they are all here with one overriding purpose: to support the US National Science Foundation (NSF)
³
and the scientists that it selects to bring down here.

The Antarctic Treaty, signed by twelve nations in 1959 (and later ratified by a further thirty-seven), bans military or commercial activity, including prospecting. The wildlife is protected, and everything brought in must eventually be taken out. To be allowed to have any significant presence here on the continent, a government must sign the treaty and set up scientific research.

There are some who mutter that the science is just a placeholder, an excuse to plant a flag and maintain a presence just in case Antarctica proves strategically valuable for some other reason. But the selection process for science grantees is intensely competitive in every participating nation. Nobody can come here unless they have proved themselves in many rounds of testing.

And if you ask the support workers why they are prepared to abandon their home life and come here to this ugly town to work six long days a week for months at a time, one person after another will tell you they love the sense that they are doing something that matters, and the chance they have to learn. Science is the lifeblood of the base. It pervades everything. And the talks given by scientists in the galley after dinner tend to be standing room only.

In spite of—or perhaps because of—its isolation, Antarctica turns out to be a fantastic place to do science; over the years it has yielded extraordinary insights into our world. Working in field camps and bases throughout the continent, researchers from many different countries have explored the hostile and the alien, and have found new ways of seeing everything from the Moon and Mars to the heart of the Galaxy and the origins of the Universe. But the farther in you go, the more that home tugs at you; the continent's icy mantle has messages not just about outer space, but about the history of our own human world, and perhaps also its future.

In the process, the ice has revealed to us many of its most extraordinary characteristics. Science is only one of Antarctica's faces, though it's the main one that the world currently sees. But there is also history, politics, natural history, romance and adventure. You might ask which of these represents the true face of the continent. The answer, of course, is all of them.

As well as the scientists and contractors, Mactown also has a steady trickle of VIPs, artists, musicians and writers whom the NSF has invited to provide a new view of the continent. My office mate for the first few days was Yann Arthus-Bertrand, the French photographer who has made his name taking extraordinary photographs of Earth from the air.

When I arrived he had already spent a month photographing the area around McMurdo from helicopters. But, he told me, he also had a side project, a video exploration of what makes people tick. He had taken his standard set of questions around the world, and planned to distil the answers and display them in some sort of installation. On my first day in the office, Yann sat me down, pointed a video camera at me and then reeled off the questions:

‘What is your greatest fear? Do you feel you give enough love to the people around you? What could you never forgive? When is the last time you cried and why? Do you have enemies? What is the meaning of life? Are you happy? What does money mean to you? Why is there poverty and why do we tolerate it? What do you think there is after death? Who do you hate and why?'

Afterwards I asked him what he had found so far, and he told me that the residents of McMurdo had thrown up two answers that took him by surprise. First of all, in spite of the many grumbles, an astonishingly high proportion of people here said they were happy. But the money question really surprised him. Elsewhere in the world people usually said that money means power, or security, or status. But to the people of McMurdo, money—apparently—meant freedom.

McMurdo is paid for by the US government and is host mainly to American scientists with their occasional international collaborators. For them it is a staging post, a gateway out into the field. Most stay here for just a few days to pick up their gear and do the obligatory training. There's a two-day snow school to teach you how to pitch tents, light primus stoves and work the bulky high-frequency radios that might be your only way to signal for help if a helicopter or plane crashes or you get trapped outside in a storm; then there are compulsory briefings on the various forms of Antarctic travel. (The helicopter briefing shows the position to adopt if you're heading for a crash. ‘It's the classic “kiss your ass goodbye”,' the instructor said when I took my course. ‘Don't come out of this position until everything stops, or until you hear the pilot say “whew, that was a close one” . . . And even then you might want to give it a few minutes.')

Researchers collect their field equipment from a vast warehouse of tents, sleeping bags, primus stoves and ultra-cold-weather gear, and choose menus from a similarly vast frozen food store. And then they climb aboard the helicopters or ski-equipped planes that will take them to whatever outpost they have chosen to study.

But some science happens right here, on the edge of town. Beneath the sea ice, for instance, where alien creatures, the weird and the wonderful, are willing to go to extreme lengths to make this most hostile of continents their home.

 

They have spiders the size of dinner plates! Giant slimy worms twice as long as I am tall! Creatures with flailing legs and crushing mandibles that are bigger than my hand! If I'd known Sam Bowser's fondness for science fiction B movies when I first met him, I'd have suspected him of spinning me yarns. But the evidence is there. I've seen the home movies he has made while diving under the sea ice off the coast here, and I have stuck my hands in the freezing waters of the Crary Lab aquarium to pull out some of the bizarre animals he describes.

Sam is a biologist from New York State's Wadsworth Center in Albany, and he has been diving in Antarctica for years.
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Each season his team sets up camp across the sound from McMurdo, in a place called Explorers Cove. This is not regular ice diving—you can't just saw out a hole, because the sea ice here can be three, four, even five metres thick. Instead they drill a thin column down through the ice, adding extensions to the drill like the brush from an old-fashioned chimney sweep. Then they insert a sausage string of bright red explosives and Boom! There's your dive hole.

The water here is around 28°F, as cold as it's possible for the sea to get; the salt allows it to dip below the normal freezing point of water, and the ice floating above it keeps it from warming. It's physically painful to keep your hands in for the count of ten. And Sam's team dives in these temperatures for up to an hour at a time.

He says the trick is to wear layer upon layer of thermals under a crushed neoprene dry suit. The hands are the hardest to keep warm. Hand-warmers help, and several pairs of gloves, though if you wear the really warm ones—the orange three-fingered monstrosities that turn your hands into lobster claws—it can be hard to handle any equipment you take down there with you.

Your mouth is the only part of your body exposed directly to the water. At first it hurts a bit and then it goes numb and the problem disappears. But when you re-emerge from the dive hole, your lips will be rubbery and useless and if you try to speak in the first few minutes, your words will be comically garbled.

But this discomfort is worth it, Sam says, for the sights you see as you emerge from the tunnel of the dive hole. ‘It's incredible. There's this giant ocean below you. It's like walking through a spaceship door and seeing the universe. If you're not going to be a space man, you'd better be an Antarctic diver, because it's the next best thing.'

The water is so clear that you can see for 250, maybe 300 yards in the green half-light. Your head tells you that this is impossible, that distant divers cannot be so far away and still so clearly visible, that they must instead be much closer, hanging nearby in the water like tiny Tinker Bells. Nobody is tethered. You float freely to maximise your flexibility, always deeply mindful of the shaft of light, what Sam calls the Jesus beam', that shoots down from the dive hole and shows the way home.

The underside of the ice is sometimes flat, sometimes cathedral-like, with columns of stalactites and feathered frosting. Your air bubbles rise up and collect beneath it to form silver puddles like mercury, surrounded by water.

And below you, the grey sea floor is carpeted with alien creatures. Run your flashlight over them and their colours leap out. There are brittle stars, golden discs that raise themselves up on their five long legs as you approach, and then march away on tiptoe like the Martians from
The War of the Worlds;
feather stars, 40 cm across, that look like a bundle of bottle brushes and swim by waving their protuberances wildly as if they were drunken octopuses; and sun stars, a sort of bright orange starfish with up to forty arms, which in the waters of McMurdo Sound can grow to a metre or more.

For this is the land of the giants. The sea spiders here are more than a thousand times bigger than the ones elsewhere in the world. They stride over the seabed like colossi, a full foot from tip to toe. They are supposed to have eight legs, like their relatives on the land. But some have ten or even twelve. (When the first naturalists came back from Antarctica in the 1820s with drawings of these beasts, their colleagues thought they had accidentally drawn too many appendages.) They look like tall, spiny tarantulas and they are unexpectedly beautiful.

And then there are the less picturesque creatures. The ribbon worms, which are as thick as your thumb and can grow to ten feet long, a writhing, revolting mass of toxic slime, like naked intestines squirming around the sea floor. Ribbon worms occur in most parts of the world's oceans but the ones here are the heftiest of all. They chase limpets. They've even been known to catch fish.
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Or there's
Glyptonotus antarcticus,
which look like woodlice, or perhaps cockroaches, except that they are bigger than your hand, with a crunchy hard shell and creepily crawling feathered legs that wave wildly when you turn them upside down. Their mandibles reach menacingly from under their leathery segmented shells, and they are said to have inspired the creatures in the
Alien
movies.

Why should these creatures be so much bigger than anywhere else? Although it seems paradoxical, the answer lies in the extreme cold temperatures. Life here is necessarily very slow. Chemical reactions take place at an absurdly sluggish rate, and animals can live very much longer than their warmer cousins. On top of that, colder water can dissolve more oxygen, which is essential for growing big. It's as if the cost of living is cheaper here, in the cold outpost, away from the fast-paced cities, so everyone can afford to have a bigger house.

Still, living in water that lies below the normal freezing point has its own dangers. The spiders and other invertebrates don't mind too much. Their bodily fluids tend to be quite thick, and well protected from infiltration by ice crystals in the water. But fish are another matter. They have to take freezing seawater into their stomachs to get the salt they need, and their thin blood is no barrier to the infusion of cold from the outside. So they have had to develop another, decidedly weirder adaptation than simply growing large: they fill their bodies with antifreeze.

This discovery was made by another McMurdo researcher, Art Devries, back in the 1960s in several fish, including one called
Dissostichus mawsoni
.
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You can see these on any dive near McMurdo. They have large blockish heads, jutting jaws and thick lips; they can grow to more than a metre long and they're often called Antarctic cod (although they are actually no relation). Art found that their thin blood is swimming with home-made antifreeze, not unlike the stuff you would put in your car. It shows up in their stomachs, gut walls, liver, brain, the whole body. This clever strategy only protects them down to about 28°F, though, and if you catch one on a really cold day and accidentally touch it to the ice on your way back up, it will freeze solid immediately—and become a fish popsicle.