Antarctica (32 page)

But even so, on my tour of the new, French-designed station I noticed that the brand new women's bathrooms were half the size of the men's. When I asked why, I was told that there would obviously never be as many women as men here. When I said that the American bases used to have a similar imbalance but they are now more than a third women, I received the unanswerable reply: ‘Women are more powerful in America.' At least the new women's bathrooms had the same facilities as the men's. When Rita first came, she had to clean her teeth, and pee, in the shower.

It might have been for all these reasons, or for some other reason entirely, but in spite of my enthusiasm for visiting strangers throughout the continent, I was suddenly reluctant to join the party. One of the ice-core scientists, a young woman named Inger Seierstad from the University of Copenhagen, found me lurking in a corridor, hooked her arm in mine and said: ‘We'll go together.' And we walked into the tent to a great cry of ‘the blondes!' in three different languages.

But then all was suddenly well. Although most of the men were in their thirties or forties, here on the ice they were like schoolboys. They were harmless. We were packed in, shoulder to shoulder, as every person on the station was called up to the front, to receive a wrapped gift from Camillo Calvaresi, the station leader, and a kiss on the cheek from Rita. The gifts were all the same—a mug with the Italian Antarctic logo. I was touched that, although I had only been there for a few days, there was also one for me. The mood was exuberant. And then there was Jean-Louis's magnificent seven-course feast, followed by dancing back in the free-time tent until what would be dawn in any part of the world where the sun was more reasonable about setting.

What a turnaround. This hadn't just been a fun evening in spite of my anxieties; it was a Christmas entirely without tension. There were no past, painful histories with these people that you had to tiptoe around, because you had no history with them at all. And yet, there was no awkwardness or sense that you were an outsider because everybody was in the same situation. I love my family and I love my friends. But at Dome C, among strangers, most of whom didn't speak my language, there was no pressure to enjoy myself or to prove myself (or to prove that I was enjoying myself). Just an instant network of like-minded people full of acceptance and warmth.

And the party had now broken the ice. In the days that followed, I watched movies with the Italians and played cards till late with the French. On Sunday we spent two hours outside, wrapped up like mummies in -30°F, playing pétanque with coloured balls on the white snow. Many of the men were reluctant to speak about their own experiences on the ice, but unlike at the Pole it didn't feel like being shut out.
‘Page blanche',
one Frenchman said to me, every time we met, ‘blank page', which was all he wanted me to write about him. An Italian talked about life here as being like plugging in an electric cord when you arrived, and unplugging it when you left. And another Frenchman spoke romantically about how to be here was to experience ‘life between parentheses'. I especially liked this way of putting it. Like a phrase in parentheses, life down here didn't change the meaning of life on the outside, but perhaps it somehow changed the flavour.

And then, Antarctica delivered a wonderful Christmas present, something I'd been wanting for years and never experienced. A bunch of us had been playing cards in the free-time tent, and as we emerged, blinking, into the late-night daylight the scene took us by surprise. Instead of the usual midnight sun, bright blue sky and long shadows, the world had turned a numinous shade of pale. Somebody whispered: ‘It's a whiteout.'

 

I ran to the main building, where I'd hung my cold-weather gear. Though the temperature was -40°F, there was so little wind here that jeans and a jacket were usually enough for the quick jaunt between the camp's buildings. But to go out on to the plateau I would need wind pants, parka, gloves, hat, the whole Antarctic works. Inside I hastily told the guys in the comms room that I was going out for a walk. At first I thought they might forbid me to leave, but then one of them handed me a radio. ‘If you have any trouble, call.' God bless Concordia. I'd been smothered and banned and protected everywhere I'd gone in Antarctica, in many cases probably for my own good, but here they understood that sometimes you just wanted to be out there, alone.

I'd heard all about whiteouts from old Antarctic hands. There were two kinds. One was the sort you'd imagine, the raging blizzard where fat flakes of snow swirled around you. Blizzards were often unexpectedly warm compared to what went before. They were also suffocating, and disorientating.

When we were doing our initial field training back at McMurdo, the mountaineers there tried to prepare us rookies for what might come by putting white buckets on our heads. (We later discovered that these were painted on the outside with grotesque faces for the amusement of the many onlookers.) Our task was to line up along a rope, sweep outwards and try to find a colleague who had fallen in the ‘blizzard' and was in danger of freezing to death. The buckets were to block our eyes, distort our voices and confuse our ears. It worked. When I watched the next batch of recruits try the same task, they stumbled and floundered, the apparently straight rope twisting into knots, as their colleague lay inches away, but undiscovered.

But I had been longing for the other kind of whiteout, the one that had apparently descended now without warning. In this variant, you could see anything in front of you quite clearly, but without any definition. Thick cloud somewhere high above us was scattering sunlight so completely that all shadows were gone. The white snow underfoot and the white sky above were indistinguishable, empty of any kind of texture or shade. Dome C had become a void.

I tested this as I walked away from the camp and into the emptiness. I could hear my feet crunching into the snow, but there were no apparent footprints. I knelt and put my face close up against the snow. Still nothing. I touched the surface. My gloved fingers could trace the hollows that my feet had left. But all I could see was white.

I hurried now, wanting to get as far as I could from the camp before the spell broke. Ten minutes of walking, twenty minutes, and when I turned there was no more sign of the bright orange tents and buildings. There was nothing.

I nudged the bulge of the radio for reassurance; I'd been careful to put it inside my many layers of fleece, wind-bib and parka, to keep the battery alive. And then I knelt on the snow.

It wasn't like sensory deprivation, or like being inside a cloud where your view was physically blocked. All my senses were functioning. I felt cold. I knew that I could see for hundreds of metres in front of me. The fur of my parka hood was clearly framing my view. Yet when I looked up, down and all around me, the real outside that I was seeing was . . . a blank. Nothing had ever been so empty. A white sheet of paper has the weft and weave dimly in view. A white-walled room has corners and shades. There are always shadows. Except here.

I had wondered about this experience ever since I first heard of it. What would it be like to sit still and alone in a living, breathing void? Would I feel frightened? Lonely? Bored? The answer was none of the above. The jabbering voice in my head was momentarily stilled. I felt a deep delicious peace. I wanted to bathe in it.

Or maybe it's not really about peace. There was nothing passive about this feeling. The world had shrunk, as if Antarctica had allowed itself to go from being intimidating to being intimate. And it had given me a deep sense of comfort that was almost overwhelming. This was the opposite of loneliness. It was also the opposite of being smothered. I felt utterly relaxed.

But then, as I was trying to cling on to this feeling, I caught sight of a tiny black shape on the horizon behind me. It was one of the drums that marked the edge of the runway. The cloud above must be lifting. The big, open, impersonal emptiness of Antarctica was back.

As I trudged back to the camp, now following my footsteps easily in the snow, I tried to understand why this touched me so completely. I had loved the welcome that I'd experienced in all Antarctic camps, and especially here. But I was more used to thinking of this as ‘us against it'; the harsher the environment outside, the more we humans stuck together. I'd seen photos of Scott tents framed against a bleak white landscape, with a warm glowing light inside to lead you home. Or heard about Vostok Station, which was officially the coldest place on Earth. One winter they recorded temperatures there that were cold enough for steel to shatter; cold enough that you could cut diesel fuel with a chain saw.
³
But many people told me that it was one of the warmest, most human of all the bases on the ice.

And yet, the warmth of my human welcome here felt pale beside the depth of comfort that I had experienced just now, out on my own, on the ‘hostile' plateau, in temperatures that should have frozen my bones. The emptiness had descended on me, and I didn't feel abandoned. I felt cradled.

 

Work was winding down now in the drill tent. The cleaning runs were all but done, and the drillers were packing up their equipment ready for the journey home. But I found Dorthe and Inger in the core-processing trench, working on the few remaining ice cores that had to be logged and bagged, and sent out into the world. Although the ‘trench' was buried in snow, it was more like a large underground workshop, kept permanently at -22°F to protect the cores inside.

The fragility of the ice was evident in more than the temperature. When I closed the great freezer door through which I had just entered, I noticed a warning on the back, written in wobbly black marker pen. ‘SLOWLY!' it said. ‘DO NOT SLAM!' and there was a cartoon drawing of an ice core shattering.

The room didn't quite echo—but it seemed empty with its white, refrigerator-like walls and just two muffled figures inside. At the height of the project there were fifteen scientists, working in a bustling production line, measuring the lengths of the cores, sawing pieces off them, making the first quick measurements of the climate records they held. The walls were marked, here and there, with graffiti. Much was of the ‘I was here' variety, in various languages, but since they were written by ice-core scientists many also said something like ‘measuring the oldest ice on the planet'. Some showed evidence of impressive graphic skills. In one corner I found a manacle, ball and chain, drawn so convincingly I thought from a distance that it was real. Next to it, someone had marked out the number of days in lines, prison-style, that they were working there. And near the floor in the corner opposite was a skull and bones that seemed to be disappearing into the ground.

But there were also cheery reminders of home, a hand-made subway sign for the Bronx, a poster marking how ‘Emiliano, Fabrice, Gianni, Mart, Matthias and Mirko' together held the WORLD RECORD for ice-core processing, at thirty-five cores a day. The place seemed full of ghosts.

Dorthe showed me where the cores came in to be logged, where—in past seasons when ice cores were flooding in from the drill tent—the researchers would measure the lengths of the different segments, fitting broken pieces together like puzzles. I saw a piece of ice lying there, presumably from the past week or so. It was a beautiful pure cylinder, maybe half a metre long.

‘Wow, what a great core!'

‘You say that, but when I saw it I wanted to weep,' Dorthe said. She showed me the streaks near the surface. They were subtle but clear when you knew what to look for, all aligned in the same direction like animal hairs.

‘That happened when it went into the oil bath,' she said. ‘It started to melt. And now we can't use this to extract air—it's too dangerous.'

‘Dangerous?'

‘Some air could have escaped. We can't trust the answer we'd get.'

It was not enough, then, to battle the conditions, risk the drill, go through brittle ice layers that were always ready to shatter, and get all the way down to the soft stuff with your cognac bombs and your instincts for how far to go. When the cores came up above ground they were always in danger of melting.

And although the scientists on site would do a little bit of analysis, the complicated stuff- and that meant in particular the precious air trapped inside these cores—could only be analysed in far-off Europe. Cores or pieces of cores had to be transported safely to the UK, Switzerland, France, Denmark and all the other countries participating in this European mega-project. Any one loss was everyone's loss. There was only one piece of core for each slice of time so if one piece melted, the whole record suffered.

Scientists call it ‘not breaking the cold chain'. The cores went out from here in a Twin Otter to be taken to the coast and put on ships with special freezers (and back-up generators). These would transport the cores to European ports where they would be loaded on to freezer lorries for the last stage of their journey. The story went that French lorry drivers picking up the cores at Marseilles were not allowed to stop for lunch on their five-hour drive to Laurent's lab in Grenoble in case there was a melting accident. In some places the cores were then stored in massive commercial food freezers. There was one near Grenoble, called
Le Fontanil,
where the ground floor held sides of meat, cheeses and frozen raspberries, and the upstairs, fanned intermittently to increase the wind chill, was a treasure house of ice cores from the world's coldest places. You could impress on contractors as much as you liked how precious these odd scientific samples were, but if they also had several million euros' worth of food on the same site they would make sure the electricity supply was properly backed up.

And there was an extra safety system. Inger showed me how every core that arrived in the trench had a piece cut off its entire length to be left here in the Antarctic snow as insurance against loss in the outside world. She took a cylinder of ice and pushed it carefully up against a horizontal saw. As blade hit ice the noise was suddenly deafening and there was a spray of white ice dust. Inger carefully lifted off the top segment which was placed in a clear plastic bag marked with a thick black arrow pointing to the TOP. The ice all looked more or less the same. It was crucial to mark which way up each segment should be, and to write on each sample the depth that it came from, and there was a system of numbers for this, indecipherable to the uninitiated.