Antarctica (14 page)

And just as on Mars, there are no visible signs of life. True, you sometimes see the twisted, mummified body of a seal, its teeth bared in a rictus grin where the skin around the mouth has shrunk back. Nobody knows how old these mummies are, nor why the seals they once were took that wrong turning from the coast and perished up here for lack of food and water. But apart from them, the land is bare and apparently lifeless. When Scott first observed the valleys in December 1903, he wrote this: ‘It is worthy to record . . . that we have seen no living thing, not even a moss or a lichen; all that we did find, far inland amongst the moraine heaps, was the skeleton of a Weddell seal, and how that came there is beyond guessing. It is certainly a valley of the dead.'

His description was accurate, but his conclusion was dead wrong. The DryValleys are home to plenty of life, though it's not as we usually know it. That's because, though dry, the valleys are not entirely devoid of water. A few days each year the temperature there creeps above freezing, just long enough to melt a little ice from the glaciers that spill down into the valleys, and to make trickling streams that flow into long thin lakes on the valley floors. The lakes are, all of them, covered with a thick layer of ice; but they don't freeze solid thanks to this small annual injection of liquid water, and warmth.

Where there's water there is—usually—life. And this bleak landscape is already telling us extraordinary things about the possibility of life on Mars.

 

The valleys are just a short helicopter ride from McMurdo, and their unofficial capital is Lake Hoare in Taylor Valley. There has been a camp of sorts there since the 1970s, but the modern version, built in 1993, has three laboratory huts—one for radiation work, a general chemistry lab complete with fume hood for anything noxious, and an instrumentation lab bristling with electronics. Though residents sleep in tents, they eat and hang out in a further communal hut that is warm, spacious and jaunty with fairy lights. The camp manager, Rae Spain, fitted much of it out herself a few seasons ago when she worked here as a carpenter.

Rae was warm and welcoming, with a long blonde plait and a friendly smile. She was the archetypal camp mom. She had been coming to the ice since 1979, from the very earliest days that women fought their way on to the continent and into the programme. At first she intended to come just that one time, for the adventure. But she couldn't get Antarctica out of her head. ‘It haunts you,' she says.

Though it was technically a camp rather than a fully fledged base, the living and working quarters were unusually comfortable. Meals there were spectacular. After a hard day in the field you might come home to hand-rolled sushi, sesame chicken, miso soup or pork vindaloo, or a tasty barbecue with rosemary potatoes, carrot cake and freshly baked cookies. Then you could check your email (internet available 24/7), make a phone call anywhere in the world, or e-order something that would arrive by helicopter just a few weeks later. Camp residents might drink their water out of old jam jars, but this still felt more like the gimmick in a trendy pub than a disagreeable necessity. This was about as cushy as it got.

It was also a literary camp. I noticed Margaret Atwood novels on the shelves, and Rae told me she travels into Canada from her native Washington State to pick up books for the base. Next to the books were board games and piles of knitting yarns for the times when the weather closed in and there are no chores left to do. As with most parts of Antarctica, patience is a virtue here.

Rae had worked at all three of the main US stations—McMurdo, Palmer, out on the Peninsula, and the South Pole—but she was happiest here. It was even good, she said, on a bad day. Once someone had crashed an all-terrain vehicle into the edge of the lake, where the ice was thin and the water very close to the surface. The vehicle was wrecked and was going to have to be sling-loaded home on the base of a helicopter. Sling loads are always tricky. The helo doesn't actually land. You have to stand beneath it like the Statue of Liberty, holding the hook from the chains high in your outstretched hand, balancing yourself against the downdraft and the noise, trying not to think about the massive hunk of metal hovering just above your head as the helo pilot inches down to reach you.

On this occasion, she got word that the helo was on its way so grabbed eighty pounds of chains and webbing and struggled onto the lake, crashing into melt pools until she was wet and frozen. She arrived at the vehicle to find that it was in pieces and needed to be reassembled so had to send the helo away. And then she trudged back to the camp, dragging the chains miserably behind her, only to discover that the U-barrel had been overfilled with urine, and she had to try to siphon some off the top. But going outside, looking at the view, taking a few deep Antarctic breaths, she realised that even the worst day here was better than the best day back in Mactown. ‘After all, where else would I get a job as varied as this? Doing helo ops, building schedules, monitoring the generator and the solar energy systems, cooking food . . . burning shit.'

For yes, even that came under her purview. Rae lays out the Dry Valley rules to every new arrival, including those of the scatological variety, and the environmental regulations are strict. Solid matter goes into ‘rocket' toilets that are burned in rotation. Pee goes first into a bottle and is then poured into large U-barrels. (One of the Antarctic rules repeated most often to newbies was this: Never
ever
drink from a bottle marked ‘P'.)

If you're caught short out in the field you carry an empty pee bottle with you, and then bring the full one back to camp. Anything solid goes into plastic bags that you also carry with you. It's best to avoid needing them, if you can. I've heard some useful tips about pee bottles. In the endless thermodynamic battle to keep warm in a cold place, one researcher told me that it's always best to use a pee bottle during the night if you can. Any pee in your bladder costs you energy to keep it at body temperature. When the pee is in its bottle, on the other hand, you can even keep it with you in your sleeping bag, as a mini hot-water bottle. The science makes sense but I admit I didn't try it.

You were also strictly forbidden to move rocks or stones, or to take any souvenirs. In this, as in all the Dry Valley environmental rules, there was no tolerance. Rae was a formidable exponent of the regulations. Though she was mild in appearance, I didn't need to hear the stories about sling-loading to know she was made of steel when necessary. In the early days she saw off her fair share of foremen who didn't think women should be on the ice, and tried to send her home. I would not like to be caught by her with an illicit souvenir in my pocket.

I had come here mainly to see biologist Peter Doran from the University of Illinois in Chicago, who had promised to take me out on to the lake.
²
This turned out to be a wide expanse almost filling the valley floor and running nearly all the way up to the steep sides of the Canada glacier. Around the edge was a ‘moat' of clear, dark, glassy ice, but as I stepped gingerly over this I found myself on a frozen surface that looked nothing like I had imagined. I'd assumed it would be flat and white, but this was a tortured terrain of ice towers, pinnacles and hollows, streaked with patches of dark brown soil.

Some of the towers were almost at eye level; if I crouched down, I could peer into miniature ice caves with filigree walls, and what seemed to be an earthen floor. But I knew that beneath the soil was more ice, ten or twelve feet of it, capping the liquid lake beneath. In fact, the ice was so thick that there was no chance of accidentally breaking through into the lake, but we could still crash through a sliver of ice masking a pool of frigid surface meltwater, or break an ankle in a crack. Peter was taking no chances. ‘This is where it gets dicey. Follow my footsteps.' He placed his feet carefully on the ice and I matched him meticulously, step for step.

As we walked, Peter told me that the dirt came in with the winter storms, and that the glacier up ahead plugged the end of the valley, and acted as a windstop, forcing the wind to drop its load of soil on to the ice. Where the soil landed, it formed an insulating layer, protecting some parts of the ice while the rest evaporated away into the dry air. Hence the towers and sculptures. Confounded by the unearthly landscape I asked Peter how he would describe it. He grinned, and said: ‘Mars-like'.

Peter had been studying Antarctic lakes for most of his career. He was tall and slim and precise. When you first met him he seemed flat, his voice dry and mechanical, his language scientific. But when he smiled, you could see the other side of his personality, the part that brought him down here. He had never been one to sit patiently in a lab looking through a microscope, always preferring the bigger picture, what he called the ‘flashy stuff'. He was a bit flashy himself. Peter came here because he read a paper about these strange frozen lakes that could be analogues for Mars. He was fascinated by places that don't belong on Earth, and if you could add a pinch or two of adventure, so much the better.

It wasn't enough for him to study the lakes from the outside. His first dive in an Antarctic lake came in the early 1980s, on an expedition to the Bunger Hills Oasis, near the Russian station of Mirny, on the other side of the continent from here. In fact it was the first time anyone had plunged into this particular lake. No one knew what to expect. Finding himself close to the bottom of the gloomy water, he sank into the soft mud, up to his waist. He had no idea whether he'd sink farther, or if he'd get safely out. As he told me about it, his eyes shone. ‘It was wild. It's true discovery. I think that's one of the things that attracts people to Antarctica. A lot of science has become routine, but here you're genuinely exploring.'

He had now done dozens of Antarctic dives, but it was still far from routine. Out here in the middle of Lake Hoare, he showed me the dive hole we'd come to see: a neat circle melted through the ice, now filled with dark green water.

The first challenge in a dive was getting into the lake proper; the ice here was sixteen feet thick, making the entrance more of a tunnel than a hole. Though the water looked forbidding, he told me that it wasn't as cold as you'd think. You could be down there for an hour and a half and be perfectly warm. You were wearing a dry suit, thick rubber gloves, a full-face mask with communications to the surface through a safety tether. When you made it to the lake itself you were free to wander, but you were also relying on the tether to see you safely home. Though some light did diffuse down through the ice, there was no beam coming through the hole to guide you back. There have been times when divers have lost their tethers. ‘That's the scariest story I've ever heard,' Peter said. ‘It would be like being buried alive. Or lost in space. Diving in the Dry Valley lakes is the closest thing to a space walk I'll ever do.'

Unlike the myriad sea creatures back in McMurdo, the life here took the form of giant mats that look as though they're woven of some sludgy seamless material. In fact, they were made from microscopic cyanobacteria, held together by a sticky mucus. One of the strangest aspects of this primitive life was that, though the mats formed on the sediment at the bottom of the lake, some 30 m below us, they also generated bubbles that lifted them up and made them float around like mocking ghosts. One mat, which Peter and his colleagues dubbed ‘the ghoul', bore holes eerily reminiscent of a skull's eye sockets and nose. Another, a shroud-like cylinder nearly two metres high, looked like a dead body rearing up from the depths. ‘I turned round and saw that lurking in the darkness. It makes you start at first, and then you realise there can't be anything down there, there's nothing moving, it's all microbial. You make yourself swim through this stuff, but it's bizarre, it's really bizarre.'

And if he's right, similar creatures might once have floated in the freezing lakes of Mars, before they finally dried up and blew into dust. Walking back over the crunchy lake surface, we saw scraps of these mats, like soggy yellow strips of chicken skin, embedded in the dirt and ice. I picked one up and rubbed until it disintegrated in my hands. As pseudo-Martians go, this wasn't exactly glamorous, but it did prove that life could survive even in these harsh conditions. The annual average temperature here was zero and in the winter it could drop to 40° below. And yet, even today in the height of summer, when the temperature was a drop below freezing, there was enough direct sunlight to melt a little of the glacier beside the lake, sending a thin trickle of water to penetrate through the cracks in the ice. Peter and his colleagues have calculated that this trickle, running for just a few days a year, fuels the lake with enough heat to keep it liquid.

So that was one answer that research here has provided to the Martian question—you don't have to have temperatures above freezing to maintain liquid water on the planet's surface. The Dry Valleys show that cold is not necessarily dead.

Peter was also fascinated by another of the Dry Valley lakes: Lake Vida. This had an ice lid sixty feet thick, so thick that for decades scientists thought it was frozen solid. But when Peter took radar instruments to map the bottom he saw a strange reflection about fifty feet down, in a pocket about one mile long and a half-mile wide. It couldn't be water. Down there the temperature should be around 10°F, and water would definitely freeze. But it could, perhaps, be brine. If so, it would be about as salty as water can get without turning to pure salt. That would be hard for anything living to take. But the lesson from the Dry Valleys was that life has a knack of finding a way.

One reason Peter cared was that these would be some of the most hostile conditions on Earth. ‘What are the extremes of life on this planet?' he said. ‘How far can you push life before it doesn't become life any more? Maybe life on Earth started like this. Maybe it will finish like this. Maybe this is the end.'