Heat (35 page)

I expected the Chariot camp to be vacant, empty but for the two of us. In fact there are three Inupiat men working at the camp. “You’re lost,” one jokes, pointing northwest. “Point Hope is that way.” They came in on four-wheelers and have been here for the past week, sent by their village to clean out one of the Chariot shacks, to convert it to a search-and-rescue camp, stocked with food and propane and a radio. They are living on cots in the hut.

The three men have trained the resident ground squirrels to jump up and snatch cookies from their hands. One man lets a squirrel take a cookie held loosely in his mouth. The squirrels are obese, rounded. They look like jumping balls of fur. The men named one of the squirrels Cookie and another Scarface. Cookie and Scarface squabble with loud squeaks and surprisingly vicious mouth-to-mouth combat before running to their respective home turfs.

One of the men asks if I work for the government. Another says that his grandfather’s sod house was on this beach, and the family had tried, unsuccessfully, to claim the site as their own. “Are you sure you don’t work for the government?” the first man asks again. “You look like a guy from Fish and Wildlife.”

The second hut is open on one side where a garage door has been removed, but the walls provide a windbreak. We sweep out musk ox droppings and broken glass before setting up our tent inside. We explore the broken machinery next to our hut. On the ground we find rusted tools, along with scrap metal and wood and tarpaper, all overgrown by tundra grasses. Between the huts and the Cape Thompson bluffs, we discover an old radio shack, its walls collapsed and lying on the ground, its antenna mast sprawled across the tundra, but with the radio itself still standing, as big as a refrigerator, bolted to the building’s foundation. The radio’s long-failed vacuum tube technology stands exposed to Arctic weather. The size of radios like this one was driven in part by the heat of their components—miniaturized and packed too closely together, they overheated. In the days since Chariot, radio tubes have been replaced by transistors, and transistors have been replaced by silicon chips, but the challenge of dissipating heat remains. Some of today’s desktop computers incorporate tiny water-cooling systems to control heat, and engineers are working on methanol-based cooling systems that might soon be used in laptops. For supercomputing centers, with rack after rack of silicon chips working in tandem, air-conditioning failure can spell disaster.

Did Teller use the radio that now lies in the tundra? Did he ride in one of the abandoned Weasels? Did he bathe in Ogotoruk Creek just here where it runs behind the abandoned buildings and out to the Chukchi Sea?

I bathe briskly in Ogotoruk Creek, washing away three days of dirt and sweat and shivering as the wind dries my body.

In August 1959, the Chariot camp had ten dormitories, a mess hall, a shower and laundry with hot water, three generators, a mechanic’s shelter, latrines, and two warehouses. It supported sixty-six men, who referred to it as Camp Icy Meadows. The men carried out experiments, including the one in which soil imported from the Sedan shot was buried in the tundra. Sedan soil containing cesium-137, strontium-90, and plutonium-239 was buried in twelve plots within a mile of the Chariot camp to better understand how radioactive remains from the Chariot blast would be likely to move into the creek and through the food chain.

During the half century since Chariot’s abandonment, the camp has been used by various cleanup crews. One of the crews sought out the buried radioactive material that had been brought here from the Sedan shot. The government has claimed that the material was removed, that no Sedan radiation remains at the Chariot site. The three Inupiat workers do not believe it. They seem, in general, disgusted by the federal government. They joke that, having worked here all week, they now glow at night. The man who had asked twice before asks again, “Are you sure you don’t work for the government?”

I snap a picture of a metal tray lying on the tundra near our shack. It is the sort of cafeteria tray with an indentation for silverware, another for a main course, two more for sides, one for dessert, and one for a carton of milk or a glass of water. Did Teller’s men eat from this tray? Or was the tray left by cleanup crews? Through my viewfinder, the tray appears in the foreground surrounded by tundra grass and low-growing dwarf willows, with the main camp in the background. Behind the camp, the sky and the Chukchi Sea stretch out toward Russia. Waves slap against the gravel beach, their noise drowned by the howling wind.

That evening, at twilight, the moon sits low over the Chukchi Sea. It is a full moon, deep red behind the silhouette of what is left of the Chariot camp. It is the deep red moon that one would expect when the atmosphere is full of the sort of fine particles thrown into the air by distant desert sandstorms or forest fires or volcanic eruptions or nuclear explosions.

In 1959 the government received a letter from the Alaskan Arctic. “We the undersigned,” the letter said, “the Point Hope Village Council do not want to see the explosion at the near area of our village Point Hope for any reason at any time.”

The government also heard from a resident named Kitty Kinneeveauk: “I’m pretty sure you don’t like to see your home blasted by some other people who don’t live in your place like we live in Point Hope.”

From another Point Hope resident, Joseph Frankson: “You know, anybody that’s born anyplace always likes his home. I don’t care where people are from. I know I like this place, Point Hope. So I like to keep living here.”

After four years of bickering, on August 24, 1962, an Atomic Energy Commission media release announced that Project Chariot would be “held in abeyance.” On the same day, the
Anchorage Daily Times
and the
Fairbanks Daily News-Miner
ran an Associated Press article. “Alaskan Eskimos won a victory over atomic science today,” the article reported. “Their great white father isn’t going to order anytime soon, if ever, a big nuclear boom on their happy hunting grounds.” The people of Point Hope would be able to stay in Point Hope. They would not be chased away by radioactivity.

Three years later, in 1965, far out at the end of Alaska’s Aleutian Island chain, more than a thousand miles from Point Hope, the government set up a belowground bomb-testing facility. They detonated an eighty-kiloton hydrogen bomb named Long Shot. It was followed by two more, the one-megaton Milrow shot in 1969 and the five-megaton Cannikin shot in 1971.

Temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun itself momentarily flared up deep under the surface of the windswept Alaskan island known as Amchitka. The little island of Amchitka, once the home of Aleuts, then a military base that survived Japanese bombing during World War II, catalyzed a growing movement to halt the proliferation of nuclear weapons. The Milrow shot inspired the founding of Greenpeace, and in 1971 Greenpeace activists set sail in an old halibut seiner, the
Phyllis Cormack,
to witness and protest the Cannikin shot. Nuclear testing on Amchitka ended that year, and the island was declared a bird sanctuary. Greenpeace went on to advocate against whaling and later launched a climate change campaign.

Back in Anchorage, I telephone the Firewalking Institute of Research and Education, ready now to schedule a walk. But our calendars fail to mesh. I scramble for another opportunity. I find, by luck, a woman in California who plans to lead a walk in the spring. Her fire walks focus on spiritual growth, both hers and her initiates’. Her next fire walk will take place under a full moon.

She considers the quarter cord of firewood typically used on fire walks inadequate. She will burn a full cord of dried and seasoned cedar under a full moon, rain or shine.

“Sign me up,” I tell her. But spring is some months away, and I need warmth now. I need some sun.

Chapter 8

The Top of the Thermometer

M
y companion and I fly to Bonaire, near Venezuela, just seven hundred miles from the equator, leaving in our wake several tons of carbon emissions. In three days, Bonaire will become a Dutch municipality. Taxes will go up. Roads might improve.

I sit on a cracked concrete seawall staring out over the reef. A million million thermonuclear explosions warm my face. The explosions occur in the core of the sun, 320,000 miles below its surface, a place where immense pressure and heat push hydrogen atoms together to become helium, a place with a density fourteen times that of lead, a place of Teller’s dreams, a fiery furnace broiling at an unimaginable twenty-four million degrees.

Energy emitted in the core moves outward, making its way through a soup of hydrogen, bouncing from atom to atom, transiting toward the surface. The journey might be as quick as fifteen thousand years or as long as a million years. No one knows. What is known is this: the deadly gamma rays and x-rays generated in the core emerge from this soup, by and large, in the form of light and heat. And this: from the sun’s surface to my face, the journey requires only eight minutes and sixteen seconds. I sit eight minutes and sixteen seconds from the surface of the sun, but tens of thousands of years from its core.

The sun is a common type of star, its singular claim to importance residing in its proximity to earth. William Herschel, discoverer of infrared light, discoverer of Uranus, wrote of the sun in his 1833 textbook on astronomy: “The sun’s rays are the ultimate source of almost every motion which takes place on the surface of the earth. By its heat are produced all winds, and those disturbances in the electric equilibrium of the atmosphere which give rise to the phenomena of terrestrial magnetism. By their vivifying action vegetables are elaborated from inorganic matter, and become, in their turn, the support of animals and of man, and the sources of those great deposits of dynamical efficiency which are laid up for human use in our coal strata. By them the waters of the sea are made to circulate in vapour through the air, and irrigate the land, producing springs and rivers.”

Herschel was a brilliant man, but he was not always right. The sun, for example, does not support earthly magnetism. And he occasionally saw heavenly bodies that did not exist. And he believed the sun to be populated. “But now I think myself authorized, upon astronomical principles, to propose the sun as an inhabitable world,” he wrote. “It is most probably inhabited, like the rest of the planets, by beings whose organs are adapted to the peculiar circumstances of that vast globe.”

A century and a half after Herschel, we know so much more. The sun is not inhabited. Its past and future are well understood.

Thirteen and a half billion years ago—a scant few hundred thousand years after the birth of the universe, after the Big Bang—the hydrogen that would become the sun drifted in a thin cloud. This cloud drifted through space for nine billion years before it was hit by the shock wave of an exploding star. That shock compressed parts of the cloud, triggering a star-forming contraction. The shock wave also carried with it certain foreign elements—elements like oxygen and carbon and neon, elements that formed in the exploding star, elements that are present in the sun and on the earth. These elements came in proportions suggesting that the exploding star itself had formed from the debris of yet another exploding star. The hydrogen cloud was old, first-generation stuff, stuff from the early universe, but the shock wave that hit it was stuff twice cycled through, entering a new life. Our sun, Herschel’s sun, is a third-generation star.

The sun is a star of average size, yet it is difficult to imagine its immensity. In the four and half billion years that have passed since the sun’s birth, hydrogen has become helium at a rate of something like four million tons a second.

During these four and a half billion years, the sun has changed. Every billion years, it grows 10 percent brighter. It grows 10 percent hotter.

A billion years from now, the sun’s brightness, its warmth, will evaporate the oceans of earth. The oceans, as water vapor, will trap heat. The earth’s surface temperature will increase to seven hundred degrees.

Five billion years from now, the sun will exhaust its hydrogen supply. Fusion will slow. With this slowing, the outward explosive forces will be overcome by inward gravitational forces, and the sun’s core will contract on itself. With contraction, temperatures will increase. At 180 million degrees—six times hotter than today—the heat will trigger a new round of fusion reactions. These reactions will convert helium to carbon. Slowly, energy from the fusion of helium to carbon will reverse the sun’s contraction. The energy will push the sun outward. The expanding sun will swallow Mercury and Venus. The expanding sun will destroy what is left of the earth.

A few more billion years will pass, the sun pulsating, shrinking and expanding. It will throw off its outer skin, forming a sphere of glowing green and red gas. Inside that sphere the remnants of today’s sun will collapse on itself, becoming earth sized but more dense. It will become a white dwarf, a crushed ball of carbon and oxygen and heavier elements. Its surface will be pulled smooth by gravity. There will be no hills, no valleys, no craters. It will be a hundred thousand times more dense than steel. A hydrogen bomb, detonated on its surface, would not make a dent.

As a white dwarf, the sun will not be alone. Ninety-seven out of every hundred stars in our galaxy will become white dwarfs, too small to fully explode, too small to become supernovas. Fusion will end. The sun will become a degenerate star, its life defined by trapped heat and by the heat of slow contraction, of gravitational collapse. An inch of contraction provides a hundred thousand years of heat for the white dwarf future sun. But over time it cools. It fades to yellow and then orange and then red and then brown and then, finally, fifteen billion years from now, black.

From the seawall, I launch myself into the water. I swim above coral and fish and eels with the sun on my back. I gawk. The coral here has seen better days. The coral throughout the Caribbean has seen better days. Warmer water and pollution and too many gawkers and maybe hurricanes change the reef. In life, the reef-building corals depend on a partnership with a photosynthetic protozoan, their zooxanthellae. With warmer waters, with less-than-ideal conditions, they expel their
zooxanthellae
. The coral, without zooxanthellae, becomes white. It dies. Algae grow over its carbonate skeleton. The reef grows patchy.

Thickets of branching elkhorn and staghorn coral that once stood in the shallows are gone, dead and broken up, transmogrified to beach sand. I find a brain coral, boulder sized, its lower half alive and bluish green, its shoulders bleached as white as salt, its cap fuzzy with algae.

Floating facedown, my back and legs and arms expose a combined area of maybe six square feet to the sun. From the sun at this latitude, an area of six square feet receives the energy of ten sixty-watt lightbulbs. I feel the power of ten sixty-watt lightbulbs burning into my skin, warming this water, heating this planet.

The water temperature here is eighty-eight degrees.

Back home, I call my firewalking instructor in California to confirm a time and date. While I have her attention, I ask if she knows anything about William Herschel. Does she know that he believed the sun to be populated? She does not. Does she know anything about extreme heat, about the heat generated by fusion reactions in the sun, by experiments with supercolliders? She does not.

Her interest is in the power of the mind. “It’s not enough to hope,” she says, “you have to believe.” She tells me that her fire walks have led to healings, to the power of the mind overcoming disease. She thinks that attempts to explain firewalking scientifically detract from the experience. Firewalkers are not helped by the knowledge that the coals have little total heat capacity and therefore little heat to release, nor are they helped by the knowledge that the ash layer surrounding hot coals offers protective insulation. They are helped by the power of the mind. They are helped by belief in their own abilities.

I ask her to recommend a book about firewalking. She discourages me from reading ahead of time. She does not want me to develop preconceived notions.

I hang up the phone and read Loring Danforth’s
Firewalking and Religious Healing
, mainly about the Anastenaria of Greece, where the healing effects of firewalking are well known, but also about the American firewalking movement. Danforth quotes one firewalking instructor, an American: “I’ve led over three thousand people through fire, and I’ve had two people in bed for a week with third-degree burns.” A seventy-year-old woman walked through fire and was hospitalized with second-degree burns. The president of a major corporation walked through fire and was burned. “I got burned,” he later said. “And so what? It became a positive experience.”

The book includes a copied advertisement for one of Tolly Burkan’s fire walks, with a parenthetical notice: “Professional fire fighters admitted free with I.D.!” It also includes a quote from a man who had just walked through fire: “I am convinced that if you had your shit together and really put your mind to it, you could survive a direct nuclear blast.”

I fly to Rome on business. It is raining, the streets full of Romans with umbrellas fully deployed. They talk of a new record low temperature for Italy, a temperature achieved on the day of my arrival, three hundred miles north of Rome in the Italian Alps, the Dolomite Range, in a low spot, in a frost hollow. The temperature there touched fifty-four degrees below zero.

In passing, I talk to a physicist at the Sapienza University of Rome, founded in 1303 by Pope Boniface VII.
Sapienza:
knowledge or wisdom, so it is the University of Knowledge, just as
Homo sapiens
is the wise man.

Enrico Fermi was among those who found knowledge here. With this knowledge he fled fascism, accepting a Nobel Prize in Stockholm en route to Columbia University, where he joined Leo Szilard. Szilard was the man who, with Edward Teller, would convince Einstein to warn President Roosevelt of the possibility of nuclear weapons, triggering the sequence of events that would lead to the Manhattan Project and the nuclear bomb.

At Columbia, well before the bomb became a reality, Fermi and Szilard proved the possibility of nuclear chain reactions. They proved that a neutron bombarding a uranium nucleus could split the uranium atom, sending out more neutrons, which could in turn split more uranium atoms. They moved to the University of Chicago, where they built the world’s first nuclear reactor in the racquetball courts beneath the football stadium. It was a model for the secret reactor that would be built in Hanford, Washington, the reactor that would manufacture the plutonium used in the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki. With Robert Oppenheimer, Fermi is sometimes referred to as the father of the atomic bomb, just as Teller is referred to as the father of the hydrogen bomb.