Blazing Ice (30 page)

“Boy, were they surprised to see us!” Judy laughed. “They all thought something horrible had gone wrong!”

With a sense of piracy this morning, I'd reminded Judy they would arrive in McMurdo in time for Sunday brunch. This evening we enjoyed her loot: fresh fruit and cheese and pastries for dessert.

We awoke to a beautiful, clear day. The Ross Ice Shelf before us stretched south to infinity. To the east, its vast reaches led to places we would not go. The stony ground of White Island, Black Island, and Minna Bluff formed our western horizon. In a few days they'd fall away as we lost all sight of land. Behind us steamed Mount Erebus, the mighty volcano that made Ross Island. Erebus would be the last to disappear. Perhaps in a week we'd catch our first glimpse of the rising Transantarctics.

In
Fritzy
's cab, sunlight streamed through the window glass and warmed my mechanical environment. Our tractors and sled trains were so big that I couldn't see around any of them. Nor could I see any single person, either in their own cab or outside of it. The mere thought of running over someone walking around a sled train when its tractor started moving brought shudders. At 0730 I started the radio check.

“
Wrong Way
, you got three aboard?”

“Two aboard, one on a snowmobile,” Greg called back.
That's three
.

“Brad, are you ready?”

“
Red Rider
's ready.”

Four
.

“
Elephant
… Judy. You ready?” Judy and Brad would run in front of me today.

“
Elephant
's ready.”

“Stretch?” Stretch was behind me.

“R-ready.”

“Russ? How's the caboose?” Russ ran behind Stretch.

“
Quadzilla
's ready.”
Six and seven, and I make eight.

“Okay, Greg. Take off.”

The clang of drawbars clapping steel hitches rippled through the fleet as we pulled into formation, one tractor at a time. The PistenBully swung in front, towing two snowmobiles. John V., bundled up, rode one of them with fifty flags at the ready. Brad rolled out next. Behind him one, two, three, and finally four sleds started sliding forward. Then Judy and the
Elephant Man
: one, two sleds. Then me in
Fritzy
. I felt my train lurch: one, two, three sleds.

A few seconds passed. Stretch radioed, “I'm rolling.”

Finally Russ: “
Quadzilla
's rolling.”

The Ross Ice Shelf is for crossing, and this morning our sails unfurled. Our best daily distance made good for the loaded, outbound traverse last year logged 50½ miles. This year, once we passed the dorniks and sailed past SOUTH, we made fifty-five. The next day we made sixty. And the day after that we made seventy. The paper traverse to Pole worked if we averaged only fifty miles a day.

Our sixty-mile day might have been better, but for an unusual interruption. I told the crew that morning, “Expect a Twin Otter sometime today. If
we're moving, close up ranks and stop in line on the trail. He'll land beside us. We won't make camp.”

New digital data had come into McMurdo a couple days before. Our Iridium link didn't have the capacity to receive it in the field. Dave copied it to disc and tried to chopper it out to us, but McMurdo weather had grounded him. We'd since passed out of helicopter range. Today Dave was going to try it with a Twin Otter.

“What is it?” Brad asked.

“I expect it will be a map of some sort.”

A map of the breach through The Shoals of Intractable Funding, I hoped. The measurements at our monument posts last year predicted the ice moved fast in that region. Our flag line could've drifted toward some shoal we didn't know about. The breach might not be open this year, and I didn't want to spend another month looking for a new one.

“It comes from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.” That sounded impressive. “They call themselves NGA, and they're wrapped up some way with the National Reconnaissance Office. They were looking at the Shoals last month. It's spook stuff, and I don't understand all I know about it.”

Eyebrows raised around the galley. We had an event coming.

My desire for a reliable map of hidden crevasses found expression before I'd ever seen the Shear Zone. And though we'd tried airborne infrared and airborne radar in the field that first year, we had little success making that map.

After the year of our miserable slog across the Ross Ice Shelf, I attended a USAP Planning Conference in Syracuse. This was near the New York Air National Guard's base at Schenectady. As always, the Guard was well represented. And they were friends of the traverse. They saw the traverse not replacing air missions to Pole but offering them mission options to different locations around the continent.

Colonel Dunbar was one of those friends. He caught me at the snack table, in the hotel hallway between conference sessions. He was probably a little bit older than me, but like all the clean-shaven guardsmen, he had a boyish face. Wherever I ran into him, whether on the Ice, at the contractor's office, or at these conferences, he was upbeat about the Guard's mission.

“There're some people here I want to introduce you to. They're with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and I think they've got something you can use. They want to meet you.”

“The National what?”

“The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. They run the satellites that look down on you and read what brand of cigarettes you're smoking.”

“Well, I don't smoke. Can they read that?” I laughed. Colonel Dunbar laughed, too. I licked the pastry remains off my fingertips, grabbed a napkin to finish the job, and wondered how reading cigarette labels in Antarctica from an orbiting satellite was going to help the traverse.

Colonel Dunbar led me to an unused room off the hallway. Turning through the door, he beckoned to a couple other men standing among others mingling in the hall.

“John, this is Colonel Bright,” he said, indicating the one who wore an air force uniform, another boyish looking man. Then, gesturing to the other gentleman dressed in business-like civilian clothes, he said, “And this is Pete Ofstedal with the NGA.”

Pete wore glasses and was balding. He was a fit man who displayed perfect posture.

“Howdy, fellas,” I greeted them, shaking hands.

“Colonel Bright and Pete Ofstedal are working on analyzing deep field landing sites in Antarctica. You might be facing some of the same problems they're looking at.”

I could imagine their concerns with deep field landings. A picture at my desk showed one of their LC-130s with its ski slumped in a crevasse. That happened two years ago. I picked it up from there: “You want to know where the hidden crevasses are? And something about the surface roughness of a prospective landing site?”

Pete nodded, “Precisely.”

“And you're using satellites to look down and see what you can see?”

“They are among our ‘National Assets,'” Pete confirmed, using an oblique reference to “secret satellites.”

“Colonel Dunbar here says you can read the label off a cigarette pack at one hundred miles. Can you see through snow and find a hidden crevasse?”

“That's what we'd like to know. We have a multispectral capability.”

Meaning not just the visible spectrum that reads cigarette labels, I thought. “Are you talking infrared?”

“That's classified,” Pete said.

Nobody had ever said that to me seriously before. Always it came in the form of a joke, followed by “If I told you, I'd have to kill you.”

“Could you could produce a flat map that showed hidden crevasses?”

“That's
exactly
what we'd like to do,” he said.

“Me, too. How can we help each other?”

Other folks peeked into the room, and, seeing the four of us quietly talking, they ducked back out. Movements in the hallway suggested another conference session was getting started. The four of us, however, were content to stay where we were.

“I understand you know where some hidden crevasses are?” Pete asked. He'd seen my presentation earlier. It included pictures of the Shear Zone.

“And you want to do some ground-truthing?” I asked. My eyes narrowed, looking sideways at Pete.

“That would be ideal.”

“How close can you get? If you can read a cigarette label, you are talking pretty close?”

“How close we can get, as you say, is also classified. But we can produce geo-referenced imagery, and each pixel has a tag.”

Geo-referenced meant latitude and longitude fixes. The question was: how big were their pixels? I already had access to twenty-five-meter pixel imagery on RADARSAT. They were too large to show all but the biggest crevasses.

“I'd like to know something about your wavelengths
and
your resolutions.”

“You need a security clearance for that. Do you have one?”

“No, but I'll get one. I don't know how to do that yet, but I will,” I told him. “But how about an image itself?”

I told them about a fellow at NSF who once sent me a “derived” image of ground we crossed on the way to the Shear Zone. Colonels Dunbar and Bright were both familiar with that ground. It was the White Out Landing Area downwind from Williams Field. The derived image showed lines and color-shaded areas, but the fellow who gave it to me couldn't, or wouldn't, identify its classified sources. The image was of no use since I didn't know what the symbols meant.

“We could probably work around that,” Pete encouraged me.

“Great. So, I need to give you something
you
can use.”

Our road across the Shear Zone crossed a lot of crevasses. We blew up their bridges and filled them. All our work was now covered under new snow, but I'd marked every crevasse with signposts and flags. Because the markers, and in fact the whole road, moved, Jeff Scanniello surveyed the markers annually. He used highly accurate, differential GPS.

“The crossing is three miles long. Suppose I gave you the coordinates of the endpoints of that line, and simply told you ‘between these two endpoints are many crevasses,' but I didn't tell you where they were. Could you then take that information and have a look at the ground along the road?”

“Yes,” Pete said. “That is exactly the kind of information we can work with. And you would be able to tell us afterwards how our work compares to what you know?”

“Certainly. But I'd want to see your product, not just send you the answer sheet.”

“With a
secret
level clearance you can do that,” Pete explained.

I was quite satisfied with the way our conversation was going. Pete and the two colonels were, too.

“What does all this stuff cost, by the way? I don't manage a huge budget.”

Pete answered, full of gravity, “We do not charge for the use of our National Assets. The National Science Foundation has no cost exposure in what we are discussing today. I'm due to make a presentation about it tomorrow. I hope you'll attend?” Looking squarely into each other's eyes, we shook hands in agreement. The four of us then ambled down the hallway to rejoin the conference underway in the big room.

Back in Denver, I began the entangled process to win my clearance. Meanwhile, I provided NGA with the information it required to run its test on the Shear Zone crossing. NGA conducted that test near the start of our third year in the field.

My clearance came through after that field season. In June 2005 I visited the NGA office at Scott Air Force Base. It was full summer in Illinois, and the middle of the long winter's dark on the Ross Ice Shelf

Pete, along with NGA analyst Steve Wheat, escorted me to the second floor of a windowless, brick building. Steve stopped me just short of their own
sea of cubicles while he went ahead. His voice sounded over the cubicle walls: “There's a
secret level clearance
on the floor.”

I swelled at having my presence heralded with such formality for I was proud of my clearance, proud to be participating in the high-level government world of classified knowledge. Steve came back to get me and led me past those same cubicles. Every computer screen I passed had been blanked out or turned off completely. Steve had been warning folks that I had
only
a secret level clearance, not nearly as high grade as the top-secret field around me.

Laughing, I followed Steve into a secure conference room in the center of that office floor. Inside was a long table, surrounded by plush, comfortable swivel chairs. An assortment of air force officers, Colonel Bright among them, and National Reconnaissance Office personnel joined us. In that room, we viewed the classified imagery.

I was astonished. The numbers of crevasses they saw, their locations and orientations in the field, all agreed precisely with my ground truth.

When the meeting broke up, Pete and Steve drove me across the green, tree-lined campus in Pete's compact sedan.

“Pete,” I said, “I'll have to submit a trip report describing what I've found, so I want to know what I
can
say. I don't want to spoil our collaboration by saying or doing something clumsy.”

Pete discussed his guidance with me at length. Then he asked, “Having seen what you have today, and confirming the accuracy of our work, wouldn't you say there is a high potential here for science in Antarctica?”

“You mean because National Science Foundation runs the show? Of course. But I could care less about science, Pete. What I'm talking here is mission safety assurance. I'm talking about saving the lives of my crew.”

Pete smiled, nodding deeply, signaling our convergence. “The assurance of public safety is the prime component of our mission.”

“Well, Pete, I don't know how many people constitute ‘public.' But I've shown you pictures of
Linda
. Two people went down with her, and by rights they should both be dead. I don't want any Lindas. Those two people, and the ones that may follow me … is that public enough?”