The Rock From Mars (2 page)

One of Cassidy’s first finds in his inaugural season came from Allan Hills, not so far from where Robbie Score would kneel almost a decade later to pick up her green rock. It was inconceivable, at the time, that during the first decade and a half of operations, U.S. expeditions to Antarctic meteorite-stranding surfaces would recover more than ten thousand specimens, on top of a like number collected by Japanese and European groups. The samples would be distributed to hundreds of researchers from some two dozen nations.

Some of the rocks carried unique information that would make them celebrities of the meteorite archives, more sought after than the rest. The meteorite trove was what one rock hunter called the extraterrestrial equivalent of the placer deposits mined during the California gold rush. In both cases, it took a lot of careful and methodical sifting through vast quantities of material to pick out the gold nuggets.

And Robbie Score, this day in 1984, had come across just such a one.

For the preceding six years, as she worked in her Houston lab, Score had watched the parade of adventurers willing to brave the rigors of Antarctica for the promise of these burnt offerings from the skies. She had contented herself with studying the specimens that other people had plucked off the ice. She certainly knew her space rocks. She had worked with every meteorite collected in Antarctica, and had helped ship the supplies for each field expedition. She knew most of the hunters and had heard their stories. But people constantly asked her about proper collection procedures, what materials worked best, and so on, and there was only one way to learn that. Going to the ice would fill in a critical gap in her knowledge of meteorite science, so it was a practical move. Aside from that, she craved the adventure, and the sheer physicality of it. She had to visit the mother lode at the bottom of the world.

Having passed the extensive medical and dental checks required for expedition members (not only to avoid emergencies in an inhospitable place but because dental records could aid in the identification of badly damaged corpses), she found herself in a warehouse-like enclosure in Christchurch, New Zealand, laughing at one of the staple ironies of these treks: the team members standing there sweating like pigs in the uncomfortable heat as they got fitted out for the opposite extreme. Looking for the right sizes, they tried on the used government-issue long underwear, wind pants, wind-pant liners, flannel shirts, down vests, polar jackets, extra-heavy socks, thermal boots, glove liners, wool gloves, outer bear-claw gloves that would cover the other two pairs, balaclavas (face coverings), hats, and goggles.

At last, they boarded an LC-130 transport plane equipped with skis, for the cramped eight-hour flight to McMurdo Station, the main U.S. research base in Antarctica. McMurdo sits at the southern tip of Ross Island, about 2,400 miles south of Christchurch and 850 miles north of the South Pole. Founded in 1955, the village was constructed on barren ash and lava hills on the flanks of a steaming, active volcano called Mount Erebus, after the mythological gateway to hell. As the plane banked toward landing, Score got a heart-stopping view of the snow-covered Royal Society Range to the west.

The south polar landmass, Score knew, was twice as large as the continental United States (the “Lower 48”) and covered by an ice sheet two miles thick—so massive that its weight had depressed the bedrock beneath it, forcing it deeper into Earth’s crust and squeezing the planet’s bottom. The continent held about 80 percent of Earth’s fresh water, and 91 percent of its ice. There was virtually no atmospheric humidity. In the United States, when the humidity fell as low as 30 percent you could get a static-electricity shock from a doorknob. In Antarctica, 1 percent was considered a really damp day, and the level never got higher than 5 percent.

The dry valleys of Antarctica probably provided the closest approximation on Earth to typical conditions on the planet Mars.

On the warmest days of the Antarctic summer (December and January), when the population swelled with scientists, McMurdo’s temperature typically hovered just below freezing, and some other parts of the continent
might
climb that high. The sun was up twenty-four hours a day, its angle always about that of midmorning. As for winter, the temperatures were known (rarely) to sink below minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit at the pole. (The record low for the continent is minus 126 degrees Fahrenheit.)

McMurdo—“Mac Town”—was the jumping-off point for the meteorite hunters, as well as for troops of other scientists and explorers who came here. With its cloak of prehistoric volcanic ash, during the summer snow melt it sat like a black cigarette-burn mark on the white continent. Score found it to be a motley sprawl of construction with the spartan intimacy of any frontier town. However, it had also come to embody the government bureaucracy’s approach to defending itself against frontier risks: it engulfed visiting field-workers in a rigid system laced with Washington-style red tape. Some people were happy to swap this stifling protective maze for the simpler dangers out in the field.

In 1839–40, James Clark Ross had maneuvered his ships
Erebus
and
Terror
into the McMurdo Sound here before sailing eastward along the front of the great ice shelf that now bears his name. It was from this area, in the early 1900s, that Robert F. Scott and Ernest Shackleton deployed their sledging parties.

Knowledge of the whole of the ice continent had been bought slowly and painfully—most of it coming in a burst during the twentieth century. In the earlier days of Antarctic exploration, the profits to be taken from whaling and sealing and penguin oil had lured some to Antarctica’s margins. The early 1900s brought a succession of “heroic” explorers. Later, Cold War military interests looked to Antarctica as a site for bases and materials testing as well as an international competition to claim it. The ice continent became, as one chronicler put it, “a powerful magnet for human fancy.”

Then something remarkable happened:
scientists
won the battle for Antarctica. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the drive to conduct research here on varied fronts, as well as a new appreciation of the fragility of the environment that made it possible, led to an international accord. The treaty prohibited military activity and the removal of specimens of any kind—except for use in scientific research. (Among the disciplines pursued here would be glaciology, meteorology, upper-atmosphere physics, astrophysics, mapping, biology, ocean sciences, biological and medical sciences, and environmental studies.) Since the early 1960s, no nation has owned Antarctica. No passport has been required to enter.

The men and women of the more or less permanent blue-collar workforce at McMurdo referred to seasonal visitors like Score as “beakers,” a term of friendly derision. Some beakers managed to get along well. But they had shockingly little time for socializing; their weeks in the Antarctic would often constitute their research for the year. Their livelihood and their careers depended on how much they could get done here.

The first job facing Score and her colleagues was to gather all the field gear, spare parts, food, and fuel they would need for their six-week expedition some forty miles beyond the edges of the Transantarctic Mountains (a chain that spans the continent and therefore has two northern ends). Once in the field, they would have to be completely self-sufficient, able to make their own repairs and manage their own safety and health. To that end, geologist John Schutt—the resident field safety officer and crevasse expert—led them on a two-day mock outing to teach them minimal survival skills and how to use the research equipment. They also had to learn routine chores—how to set up a tent, light the stove, lash a sled, and avoid cold-related injury.

Schutt had fallen in love with the Antarctic—the light, the freedom from traffic jams and crowds, the landscape like no other. It was a place where, as the mantra went, “you challenge yourself every day.” Schutt had been a skier since he was five, and had learned his love of mountain climbing as a boy growing up in the Pacific Northwest. He showed a special enthusiasm for the world’s remote, cold, and snowy places, having worked on Alaskan ice fields and an ice island in the Arctic. He had been on mountaineering expeditions to Alaska, South America, and the Himalayas, where he had scaled the 27,800-foot peak of Makalu. Since 1976, Schutt had worked with the meteorite hunters in the Antarctic and, as their sherpa, was well on his way to becoming a legend.

His reputation had grown through stories like this: Schutt and a friend were climbing a ridge, roped together for safety, when the friend fell without warning. Seeing that the much bulkier man threatened to pull both of them into a fatal nine-hundred-foot free fall, John quickly threw himself off into space on the
opposite
side of the ridge and saved them both.

In Schutt’s view, tent fires were the biggest danger for the search team members, because their stoves burned continuously to warm the interior, to melt water, and so on. People sat inches from the open flames fueled by white gas. It was prudent, he advised them, to carry a butcher’s knife in case you had to cut your way out. One time, a team member violated the cardinal rule: never fill the stove
inside
the tent when another stove is already turned on. The fellow spilled some fuel and started a small conflagration. He was lucky to escape with only minor burns on his hands.

Schutt also impressed on the novices the need to treat the crevasses with respect. Where the mountain ranges or other features obstructed the progress of the ice, the resistance forced these deep, treacherous cracks in the sheet—cracks big enough to swallow a hapless snowmobile or much worse. Schutt had seen one near disaster, when a team member pulling a very heavily loaded sledge tried to cross a crevasse via a snow bridge that had been weakened by several other people proceeding ahead of him. Visibility was poor. The sledge broke through and fell into the chasm. The man just managed to pull it back out before it could suck him down.

In many of the meteorite-stranding fields, the relentless winds had hardened the snow into the consistency of concrete, Schutt explained, and these hardened bridges were usually sturdy enough to allow a safe crossing. But you had to watch out for soft spots. The options for dealing with that sinking feeling, when a crevasse opened beneath you, were covered pointedly in a field manual: “Experience and circumstance will dictate whether to brake . . . or continue driving forward in hopes of getting across. . . . In either case, a change of underwear is recommended.”

Score trusted Schutt absolutely. As part of the training, she and the others followed him single file out into treacherous terrain near McMurdo, where each member of the hunt team, in turn, was lowered into a crevasse. Each was then “rescued” by the others. When Score’s turn came, she descended with complete assurance.

In general, Schutt advised his charges to cultivate a healthy, controlled fear of frostbite, snow blindness, hypothermia, tent fires, flying, and injury. As Ralph Harvey, another expert meteorite hunter, remarked, “It promotes awareness and points out the true killer of Antarctica: rationalization.”

By early December, the team was packed and ready to leave the relative comforts of McMurdo. It took seven helicopters to carry all of them and their equipment into the field. And they had picked a hellish day for it. As they disembarked at their destination on the heavily crevassed ice sheet, they found themselves standing in a cutting thirty-five-mile-an-hour wind. As they watched the last of their chopper taxis disappear, Score felt overwhelmed with a sudden sense of being absolutely, utterly alone.

The feeling, at least in her case, passed. The scouring wind and the biting cold, after all, were what had brought her here. She had work to do.

It was the paradox of the meteorite hunter. The wind and the cold that made the Antarctic so brutally forbidding were crucial to the success of the enterprise. This was the secret that Bill Cassidy and others had figured out, thereby handing the meteorite hounds a gift beyond price. The reason had nothing to do with the rate at which meteorites fell in this place. Earth, rotating on its axis daily as it traveled around the sun yearly, encountered a steady rain of space debris over its entire surface—a relatively uniform distribution over time, as far as anyone knew.

Cassidy and the others had deciphered the action of a majestic natural conveyor belt: over many millennia, meteorites that fell here would get buried under falling snow; that snow would get buried under yet more snow, and so on, and so on. The pressure of the accumulated weight turned the snow to ice, entombing the fallen stones. Powered by gravity, this glacial raisin cake of meteorites would creep slowly but relentlessly overland from the 13,000-foot elevation at Dome Argus, near the center of the continent. It would advance at the proverbial glacial pace of perhaps four feet (1.2 meters) each year—toward the edges of the landmass. When it reached this shore, some of it calved off into the Southern Ocean and was lost. Where this slow flow was forced through narrower passages, it accelerated. In some places, though, the flow was blocked by a mountain range—a barrier too broad for the ice to flow around it—creating stagnation points. Like surf hitting a steep shoreline, the trapped ice sheet shouldered upward at these places as its billions of tons collided in slow motion with the immovable impediment. The clean, ancient blue ice was thrust up from deep, deep under the glacial mass to the surface.

The old ice was blue for the same reason that the sky and the ocean were blue: because of the way it scattered light. Familiar ice, like the cube from your fridge, is whitened by air bubbles frozen in millions of little facets. The ancient ice was pressed clean of these “whiteners.” Stepping out on an expanse of blue ice about ten thousand feet thick could seem—visually—like walking on a patch of the Caribbean. Under certain circumstances, Bill Cassidy and his comrades had learned, it was possible to melt a hole in the snow, exposing an expanse of the clear ice, and thus allow the reflected sunlight to fill a dark tent with the azure glow of a jazz club.