Antarctica (34 page)

The other part of the Vostok story also holds true in the EPICA core. All the way back to the ancient ice beneath my feet, to the snow that fell nearly a million years ago, the story was still the same. Carbon dioxide has risen and fallen with the seasons, with the ice ages, with the different climate patterns. But in all that time it has never been within striking distance of the amount we have today. Through the entire EPICA record, the highest value of CO
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was about 290 parts for every million parts of air. Now we are at nearly 400 and rising.
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The EPICA investigations are still going on and more cores are being drilled elsewhere on the continent. In 2009 the Chinese built a summer-only station called Kunlun at Dome A, where the ice is still higher, and older, than at Dome C, and they are planning both to drill ice cores and to set up astronomical research there.
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Other researchers are looking at Antarctic sites with higher resolution, closer to the sea, farther from the sea, investigating all the subtleties of the story that Antarctica's ancient air can tell us.

But the most striking finding remains. In nearly a million years of repeated climate ups and downs, carbon dioxide is always highest when temperature is highest, and it has never been so high as it is today, thanks to our burning of fossil fuels.
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The deepest voids of Dome C hold a warning that we would do very well to heed.

 

Antarctica doesn't just hold warnings of past change; it's also an agent for change. The evening after the Twin Otter arrived to take the drillers home there was an impromptu barbeque in the drilling workshop. Now that Laurent was no longer there, the construction workers moved in. It was late at night; we had been playing cards. People were smoking, and they were about to commit further sacrilege. Someone arrived with a steel brush and a bucket of snow and started vigorously scrubbing the top of the stove. Someone else brought strips of bacon, boxes of eggs and bread rolls filched from Jean-Louis's larder. Crack, splat, and the eggs were already starting to fry on the stove's sloping top. Now the bacon went on, and soon we were all tucking into an illicit midnight feast.

But then a few of the guys started to get giddy. Someone picked up my camera to try to take a picture of someone else. He in turn tried to grab the camera and it was now being passed over people's heads, and thrown from one person to the next. It was an expensive piece of equipment; I was using it to document my time here. I didn't have a back-up. ‘Hey, give it back!' I said. And now I was the one they were keeping it from, a stupid game of piggy in the middle as if we were still ten years old.

At first I tried to reason with them, and then it was too late. I was enraged. The strength of my fury shocked me. I had never felt this angry before. I wanted to scream at these people who I'd been cheerfully playing cards with a few moments earlier. ‘I need it for my work!' I said. ‘Give me the fucking camera.' I stormed out of the tent, with no idea where I was going. When I returned, the camera was beside my empty chair. I picked it up without a word, and left.

The next morning at breakfast, Jean-Paul Fave beckoned me over. He was the designer of the new station, stick-thin, in his sixties, with a snow-white beard and known to everyone on the station as ‘Papy' (‘Granddad'). He patted the empty chair beside him and I slid into it. ‘I hear that you were very angry last night,' he said. I nodded, shamefaced. ‘They are just boys and they don't understand the work you are doing down here. I understand, but I am old. When I was their age I was just as foolish.' And then he smiled his gap-toothed smile. ‘But you should also know that being down here affects people. You should not come here and expect to find people behaving normally. And that includes you!'

That shocking rider took me completely by surprise. Even me? But I was just an observer! And yet, what I'd experienced in all the bases I had visited, and especially here in Dome C, was the gratifying, enticing closeness that comes when—in a place that was famous for its hostility—you found such like-minded people who invited you in so readily. Everyone here was in the same situation. Nobody had their family with them, or their children, or their real lives.

And perhaps that was also one of the reasons why the ice exaggerated your emotions. You didn't just have a good day here; you had the best day of your life. You weren't just mildly irritated when someone was being an idiot; you were furious. The environment edged even the relatively well-balanced towards mania. I remembered how Jake Speed had told me at the Pole that the most successful winterers were the ones who let things slide, who were naturally the most laid back and tolerant people in the real world. This would not be a good place for someone who was highly strung, or at least not for any length of time.

The effect tended to wear off after a while, when you were back in civilisation. But I kept hearing warnings about the dangers of coming here too much and staying here too long. The Americans have a joke about the reasons that contract workers came down here: ‘First, they come for the adventure. Then they come for the money. Then they come because they no longer fit in anywhere else.'

And, now that I thought of it, Laurent had issued the same warning before he left, when I asked him if he'd miss the place.

‘No,' he said. ‘I've spent enough time on the ice caps that I could stop now and I wouldn't miss it. I like it. I love it. I do it with enthusiasm, but I'm not attached. I see people here who are attached, hired, kind of lost, because they don't realise what's happened.'

‘What has happened?'

‘They get enough money to leave for six months, then they come back. They're out of the system somehow, and they don't realise it. Nobody warns them really. It takes time to find out for yourself. Even companions are given to you. Here you have instant parties and you don't have to worry whether people will come, because they're already here. I understand how people get lost when they have nothing back home.'

I remembered hearing something similar from a French doctor who had just spent his second winter at DDU. ‘People I know who've done many winters, four, five and even one who spent eight, they start a new life every time. I don't want to be like them, to exist for only twenty people and at the end of the year, at the end of the adventure, that's all finished, and then you start again with another set. It's not sane.'

Perhaps over-winterers were like Persephone in Greek mythology, who became too involved on her first, forced, trip to the underworld
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, and was therefore doomed to return every year. Antarctica changes the things it touches. And if you enter this world of ice too completely you might be trapped into returning year after year, constantly seeking out the same blank slate, the same do-over, while life in the real world slides by.

 

Richard Brandt was an American snow researcher from the University of Washington in Seattle, though he usually worked from his smallholding in the Adirondacks. We came in on the same plane from McMurdo and Richard had been an ally here from the beginning, the only other native English speaker on the base. He was the one who saved me a place on the ‘international table' at the various holiday feasts, as far as possible from the big Italian group. He warned me they would get rowdy and that food might fly. It did.

Later he taught me to do trick riding on a skidoo, jumping over a specially constructed hillock that was strategically out of view of the station. His skidoo had a toy penguin called Waddles on the front. Richard carried it everywhere with him, taking photographs of the little bird's latest adventures and posting them online for eager schoolchildren.
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He was a thoroughly nice man. And now, he had offered to show me his own research, at a snow pit and tower about a half-mile beyond the new station.

It was another beautiful blue Dome C day, and Richard found me a pair of skis. It was, he said, the only way to travel. But I soon realised that he was probably born on skis. He was politely gliding along, keeping pace, not bothering to use his poles, while I was puffing and panting beside him.

To save breath I used an old runner's trick: if you want to be less winded than the person you're exercising with, ask them a short question that requires a long answer.

‘What do you love about snow?' I said.

It worked, in a way. Richard didn't get any more breathless, but he did tell me about what happens when water freezes. He talked about how water is a tangled mess of molecules that romp around, catching each other's hands and releasing them again, squeezing together and recoiling. And then, when it freezes, all the dignity returns. The molecules line up formally, obeying careful rules for where to stand.

They also hold each other at arm's length, which is why ice is less dense than water, and why ice cubes float. Though we're so used to that we scarcely notice, it's actually incredibly rare; if you put a lump of most solid things in a pool of their own liquid they would sink. It's just as well for us that ice floats instead; if it didn't, rivers and oceans would freeze from the bottom up, and our planet's episodic ice ages might have wiped out all life on Earth.

And then he talked of how just a few simple rules about where the molecules had to fit when they froze could lead to such a glorious variety of crystal shapes.

‘Is that why you love it, because snow is beautiful?'

‘Yes, but it also transforms things. Where I live, on our smallholding, everywhere you look there are jobs to do. But when it snows the jobs all disappear. Snow turns the whole world into a playground.'

We arrived at the snow pit, which was two square holes side by side, each ten feet deep, separated by a thin wall of snow. We shed our skis and climbed in, and Richard reached up and dragged a cardboard ‘lid' over the pit we were standing in. At first I didn't understand why, but when he pointed over to the thin wall of snow I gasped. Its snow layers were now backlit by the sunlight pouring through from the pit on the other side. You could clearly see the annual layers, where jutting crusty ledges marked the summers and soft snow underneath, the winters.

And the colours. There was a spectacular gradation in the light from an aqua white close to the top to pale blue, deep sky blue then violet. Richard took what looked like a broom handle lying on one side of the pit and pushed a hole into the wall, though not entirely through it. Now the bottom-most hole was an intense violet tunnel with lilac walls.

‘Look at that,' Richard said. ‘It's the purest colour you'll ever see in nature.'

He told me that snow appeared to be white because most of the sunlight hitting the surface was scattered by ice crystals, with no favouritism for any particular colour of the rainbow. But some rays made it past this first hurdle and succeeded in penetrating into the snow's interior. Now the frozen water molecules were ready to dance to the rainbow's tune. And here in the snow pit we were cleverly positioned to witness what happened next.

Water molecules are choosy. They like to vibrate, but will do so only in response to certain specific colours of light. Here, close to the top of the pit, they were picking out the red light, soaking it up and resonating like tuning forks. As the light travelled a little farther down, they were taking out the oranges, and purples. Blue was the survivor. Water simply doesn't resonate at this blue frequency, so it was the one colour ice couldn't stop. Look one metre, two metres, three metres down the wall, and blue was still going strong, evading any attempts to absorb it.

This is why the oceans are blue. As light penetrates below the surface all other colours are stripped away by the jangling water molecules. It's also why blue light gleams from crevasses and cracks in a glacier, and why even quite small blocks of ice still have that bluish tinge.

Richard and his team had been sampling the snow all around here, prodding it with probes to different depths, and they had measured the exact frequency of this lovely blue. It was the end of the rainbow, the last colour that human eyes could see before the light tipped over into ultraviolet and everything went dark. It was as pure a colour as they come, one single wavelength of precisely 390 nanometres (about four ten-thousandths of a millimetre).
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I was enchanted both by the colour and by Richard's explanation. Just as the ice filters away all the other colours, so life here removed all your distractions—same food, same clothes, no children, no pets, no bills, no bank accounts. It felt good to relish that absence of minutiae and to focus on what seemed essential. And yet if this pure blue were the only colour on Earth it wouldn't be enough. Come here, the message seemed to be, stay here and learn what you can, but if you are wise you will take what you find home with you, and work out how to understand it in the messy, complicated but ultimately colourful world outside.

But that wasn't the whole story. We left the snow pit and walked to a hundred-foot tower that Rich built a couple of years ago with a French collaborator from the Glaciology Lab in Grenoble. It looked rudimentary, with simple aluminium struts, but there was a metal staircase running all the way to the top. We climbed carefully, not letting any exposed skin touch the metal. You could be fooled here. With so little wind, in the midday sunshine you could forget that it was -13°F and that skin would stick to frozen metal, and then rip.

At the top there was enough of a breeze to burn and I buried my face in parka and scarf. The view was magnificent. We could see the entire base, the new station, summer camp, rows of tents and heavy machines. And we could also see the flat white plateau, a frozen ocean stretching out to infinity. The top of the tower was bestrewn with instruments—anemometers whose tiny cups were spinning in the breeze to measure the wind speed, and cameras trained in all directions. But the ones that Richard had come to tend were looking both high and low at the sunlight. They were measuring how much energy was arriving from the Sun, how much was being soaked up by the snow surface and how much was bouncing back.