The Rock From Mars
Read The Rock From Mars Online
Authors: Kathy Sawyer
CONTENTS
F
OR
J
OHN,
MY ROCK
The author gratefully acknowledges
the support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
—A
LBERT
C
AMUS
,
The Myth of Sisyphus
Physicists have paid little attention to rock, mainly because we are discouraged by its apparent complexity. . . . We also may question whether it is even possible to find interesting physics in such a “dirty” and uncontrolled system.
—P
O
-
ZEN
W
ONG
, “The Statistical Physics of Sedimentary Rock,”
Physics Today
41, no. 12 (1988): p. 24.
The role of the infinitely small in nature is infinitely large.
—L
OUIS
P
ASTEUR
PROLOGUE
S
OME
16
MILLION
years ago, a comet or asteroid slammed into Mars with the energy of a million hydrogen bombs. The impact gouged out a crater and blasted a massive cloud of soil and rock into the planet’s thin atmosphere. Most of it fell back, but some fragments were ejected at velocities as high as 11,000 miles per hour—enough to fling them out of their native gravity and off on their own orbits around the sun.
After millions of years, at least one fell into Earth’s gravitational embrace. It plunged through the atmosphere trailing fire, melted a little from the heat of friction, and resolidified with a new look—a glassy black fusion crust. The rock plowed into the south polar ice cap.
Elsewhere on the rock’s adopted world, mastodons, long-horned bison, and saber-toothed cats roamed. Birds of prey with twenty-five-foot wingspans drifted overhead. Beluga whales plied the seas. Horses and camels loped across plains. Vast continental glaciers covered much of what is now northern North America and Eurasia, pushing their towers of ice up to 13,000 feet high. And an inquisitive, uppity species of upright walkers crossed the Bering land bridge from Eurasia into North America.
As the rock lay icebound for thirteen millennia, the humans evolved precociously, rose beyond the day-to-day struggle for existence, and pondered concepts of justice, beauty, and their place in the cosmic scheme. They developed powerful machines that extended their reach across time and space, to the edges of all known creation. They wondered if they were alone in this daunting expanse, and at times seemed to edge tantalizingly close to the answer. All this time, a natural conveyor belt in the Antarctic was nudging the rock toward its destiny.
One polar summer day, a young woman plucked it off the ice. The rock had emerged at last into the province of human curiosity.
Twelve years later, on a muggy August afternoon in Washington, D.C., CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, and other media outlets carried images of the rock, nested in velvet, live around the globe. Reporters and VIPs jammed an auditorium to glimpse this object and to hear the report of nine exhausted, exhilarated people who had looked into its heart and found tantalizing clues to the history of worlds.
Across town, in the Rose Garden of the White House, President Bill Clinton stepped to the microphones and said this about the alien rock: “Today, rock eight four oh oh one speaks to us across all those billions of years and millions of miles. It speaks of the possibility of life. If this discovery is confirmed, it will surely be one of the most stunning insights into our universe that science has ever uncovered. Its implications are as far-reaching and awe inspiring as can be imagined. Even as it promises answers to some of our oldest questions, it poses still others even more fundamental.
“We will continue to listen closely to what it has to say as we continue the search for answers and for knowledge that is as old as humanity itself but essential to our people’s future.”
What follows is an account of how a fist-sized lump fallen in wilderness came to such a pass and of the people who made it possible and of what happened next. In the end, the mysterious stranger changed their lives and much else besides.
CHAPTER ONE
SCORE
R
OBBIE
S
CORE HAD
no idea what she had found, and yet it was exactly what she was looking for. She noticed the object first as a dark green blemish on the clean expanse of ancient blue that shimmered around her.
In this stretch of Antarctica, December 27, 1984, was a balmy summer day, the temperature around zero Fahrenheit, the winds abating. The sunlight shone thermonuclear white. It could play tricks on your eyes. Score was on her first trip to “the ice,” cruising downslope on a snowmobile in loose formation with five others who had come here for the hunt. Inside a sarcophagus of expedition-weight clothes, she felt the painful bite of the breeze intensified by her own motion over the ground. She wore dark Polaroid glasses and three layers of gloves—glove liners, insulated gloves, and “bear paw” mittens that fit over the top of the cuff of her red polar anorak with the fur-lined hood. That and her black wind pants were standard government issue. She wore her own hat, a jaunty red, white, and black knit, which (when not covered by the hood) distinguished her from the others.
They were working in a region of soul-searing desolation known as the Far Western Icefield, whose nearest landmark was a forked ridge of rock called Allan Hills. They were a good 150 miles from the nearest outpost of anything resembling civilization. Ordinarily, the hunters would spread out in a line, about a hundred feet separating each from the next, and sweep in tandem one way and then the other across a designated grid as large as three or even five miles in one direction. Back and forth, back and forth. The downwind legs weren’t bad; but heading into the wind could be brutal, the chill searing right into your face.
In places, the ice turned washboard rough, jarring the riders with ranks of long, concrete-hard dunes called sastrugi. Built of windblown ice crystals, they could stretch to hundreds of yards in length and grow to the height of a person.
To an observer looking down from a godlike vantage, the behavior might have seemed puzzling—these bright-colored motes of life sweeping out their puny patterns in terrible isolation against a continent. But they had come here with a purpose. Their begoggled eyes were scouring the bright ground for bits of dark rubble. They were hunting the fallen husks of shooting stars. Meteorites.
The exercise itself was a little like plowing a Kansas wheat field. But you had to concentrate. Done right, the job meant hour after hour of relentless, brain-numbing eyeball concentration. If you blinked, you might miss a trophy.
During these sweeps, you were alone in your own world, in your own head. You moved through a deep, oppressive silence except for the wind and the vibrating hum and scrape of the Ski-Doo as it schussed over the hard ice. No birds sang. No trees rustled. Score would think about what was going on in her life and sing the latest rock-and-roll songs to herself, using just a smidgen of her consciousness to keep a proper distance from the hunters on either side. Maintaining focus was easier when there were lots of meteorites turning up. But some days, it seemed that the people on the other side of the grid had all the luck. It was like being in the wrong line at the bank. On days of really slim pickings, she mused about what she and her roommate would fix for dinner, wondered about events back in the real world, and sang something like maybe that Hall and Oates hit about broken ice melting in the sun.
Today, things had been going so well and the weather was so fair that, toward noon, on the spur of the moment, group leader John Schutt decided to give everybody a break from the routine. He led them on an excursion to the summit of a four-hundred-foot-high escarpment lapped by giant waves of ice, like a storm surge frozen in the instant it hit the shore. They were some forty miles out from the edge of the Transantarctic Mountains. Where the hunters were now, the peaks were still buried; they had not yet pierced the miles-thick ice sheet, but the surface ice echoed their topography.
After days of feeling as if she were plying some vast and featureless sea, Score was excited about reaching this area, known as “the pinnacles.” Here, fierce winds and the resistance of the obstructions beneath the glacier had sculpted the ice into strange shapes that loomed as high as twenty feet above the ice floor. In the dazzling sun that day, the effect was magical, and a welcome relief from the sameness of “the farm.” Score got a little extra adrenaline kick from knowing there were treacherously deep crevasses to watch out for on this artful summit. The chasms were visible and easily avoided, but the roughness of the terrain forced the team to abandon their usual formation and pick their individual paths as best they could.
After a five-mile run along the top, Schutt turned them back toward the smooth designated search area below. Score felt the cold go right through her as she sat on the Ski-Doo, her gloved thumb taking the brunt of it out there on the chest-high control. She rumbled downhill toward the flat plain of blue ice, where she and the others formed up to resume their systematic search. Though the terrain was less rumpled now, the blue ice was still patchy, interrupted by drifts of hard snow sculpted in little bumps and ridges a foot or so high. The hunters would never have included this area in their normal search grid.
She saw the dark shape—about the size of a grapefruit—against the blue ice. It was completely uncovered. It looked strange, a vivid green color, quite different from the hundred or so other meteorites the team had collected this season. And it was on the large side for one so unusual. Still, over the years the hunt had yielded up a variety of types—black, orange, big, small, smooth as a discus, rough as pinecones. She saw nothing to suggest that, more than a decade in the future, this particular specimen would put her name in headlines and cause her to be known in certain circles as “the one.”
Score got off her snowmobile and waved her arms. “Hey!” she shouted, but with the hunters spread out the way they were, sound wasn’t as effective as dramatic gesturing to get their attention. As she waited in the impossible silence of the place, she stomped her feet and flailed her arms in the familiar dance that tended to accompany a rock find. Aside from any benefit to science, the event always gave the hunters a chance to rev up their blood circulation a bit.
Robbie Score was still adapting to the rigors of life here in the planet’s coldest place, where the winds that screamed down the slope of the continent sometimes kept the hunters pinned in their tents for days, where the sky relaxed its guard against the sun’s ultraviolet radiation, and where the air you breathed was so dry that the Sahara, by contrast, might seem like a rain forest. The dryness could split your fingers and toes if you weren’t careful to keep a good supply of Bag Balm. An injudicious smile could open fissures in your chapped lips. The atmosphere was so thin it amounted to the equivalent of working at eight thousand feet or more. Here, it was easy to feel like an alien in need of a better space suit.
The fetching brunette geologist with the apple cheeks and the thousand-watt smile had actually
volunteered
for this perverse version of an Easter egg hunt. She’d
demanded
it. As a little girl, Roberta Score, nicknamed Robbie, used to fill grocery bags full of the “pretty” rocks she picked up along the shores and in the woods around the Great Lakes and the smaller lakes of Michigan where her family vacationed. Most of these finds never made it back to their Detroit home. Her dad would discard the bulk of them once he had bundled her into the car. Still, she managed to assemble a pretty good collection in the family basement.
Score graduated from high school with honors, but she lacked direction and had no mentor. She was afraid of science and started out at a local college taking liberal arts classes. At her first opportunity, she bolted from her home turf and moved to Los Angeles with a friend. She got a job as a dental assistant and, after three years, went back to school, enrolling at UCLA with the idea of becoming a dentist.
Dental students traditionally took degrees in biology. But Score found the UCLA biology department to be a forbiddingly huge and competitive jungle, and she was not particularly interested in the subject. At the urging of a friend, she enrolled in a few geology courses. She was captivated and soon adopted geology as her major. Along the way, she got to know a guy with the odd nickname of Duck, a UCLA graduate student in geology. Nine years later, he would play a key role in the destiny of Score’s odd rock.
After she graduated, Score wanted a break before going on for an advanced degree. It was at this point that she dropped dentistry forever and focused her career on rock—the particular kind of rock that falls from the skies, the geologist’s manna.
In 1978, fresh out of the university, she answered an ad for a job at a laboratory in Houston whose very name signified how things were looking up for the arcane enterprise of meteorite collecting: it was the new Antarctic Meteorite Laboratory at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. She arrived on the scene shortly after geologists had begun to figure out the extent of the treasure from space that might be theirs, as long as they were willing to spend weeks at a stretch scuttling around on the ice in the highest, driest, coldest, windiest, and emptiest place on Earth.
The society of meteorite hunters was pretty small when Robbie Score joined up. Until recently, the cost-benefit ratio of the game had been lousy.
The notion that extraterrestrial stones could plummet randomly out of the sky had been respectable since about 1803, when the French Academy accepted it. Gradually, people realized that this cosmic rain offered unique clues to the history of the sun and planets that made our very existence possible. From the perspective of the serious meteorite devotee, however, most of this heaven-sent material went to waste. And under most circumstances, the odds of any given person retrieving a meteorite were extremely bad.
Some incoming fragments mark their arrival with brief flashes of fire against the night sky. Sometimes they arrive in “showers,” as Earth passes through a lane of unusually heavy debris. Some turn into impressive fireballs that can approach the full moon in brightness, their glow fueled by incandescent gases and punctuated with a sonic boom as they plow through the atmosphere in one second, trailing a “tunnel” of vacuum behind them.
Every hour of the day, about a ton of micrometeorite dust sifts into Earth’s atmosphere, spicing the crevasses and pores of the civilized world. As many as thirty thousand meteorites the size of a fist or larger make it to the surface in a year.
But because more than two-thirds of this surface is covered by water, meteorites most often splash down and sink. Even the ones that slam into solid land are usually worn down by weather so rapidly that, within months, they blend right in with the local rock population. Very few come down where there are people around to find them. And in those cases, the character of the local landscape tends to dictate how many and what kind of stones are recovered. In the rocky terrain of New England, for example, a space rock is rarely noticed unless someone actually sees it fall. In the relatively rock-free soil of the Great Plains, farmers often uncover and recognize rocks from space as they plow their fields. And then there is the possibility that, in some cases, the plummeting rocks kill their only eyewitnesses.
Because people had found meteorites all over the globe—a total of two thousand in the two hundred years prior to 1969—it had not struck anyone as surprising that explorers had stumbled across them in modest numbers at the bottom of the world, where the ice sheets provided such a clean, revealing background.
Then a few alert people figured out that there was something remarkable going on here: a secret that lay in the wild, competing forces of the ice continent could rationalize meteorite hunting by providing it an efficiency of scale.
In December 1969, a party of Japanese glaciologists found nine meteorites lying on a blue ice flat near the Yamato Mountains. The natural assumption was that the meteorites came from a common parent and had fallen together. The investigators were surprised to learn from later analyses that the stones were of distinctly different types and had spent varying periods in the ice. These facts led team members to suspect that some mysterious process was concentrating meteorites on the ice—meteorites that had arrived on Earth at different times from a variety of starting points.
In 1973, at a meeting in Switzerland where Japanese researchers described the unlikely collection of stones, a young American named William A. Cassidy was captivated by the possibility: something was causing a strange convergence of meteorites on the Antarctic ice. There must be some natural mechanism actually winnowing meteorites from the chaff of polar history and dumping them out for easy pickings.
Cassidy took up the cause in the United States, following the Japanese lead. As they recovered meteorites from the ice by the dozens at first and then by the hundreds, he used their success as a spur to his own prospective sponsors. After bouts of rejection and frustration, in 1976 Cassidy won his government’s support for a modest systematic search program.
Sending teams to hunt meteorites in the Antarctic would certainly require less than a pittance of the money the United States had spent to launch the eleven manned Apollo missions between 1968 and 1972 (the equivalent of around $107.7 billion in 2005 dollars). The astronauts brought home a total of some 840 pounds (almost 382 kilograms) of moon rocks and soil. Once those flights were ended, indeed, the Antarctic would turn out to offer the most reliable and cost-effective—and, as Cassidy would put it, “mind-boggling”—source of rocks from beyond Earth. Nature delivered the specimens to the surface free of charge, without the aid of expensive rockets or standing armies of technicians and engineers. Cassidy called the Antarctic program “the poor man’s space probe.”
Like dashboard clocks that reveal the instant of an auto accident, meteorites are clocks stopped at different stages in the birth and evolution of worlds around the sun. Cassidy understood that these “stopped clocks” were actual bits and pieces of solar system bodies as they’d existed along this time line.
