Antarctica (28 page)

Seismic waves travel by squeezing and stretching whatever material they are going through, just as sound waves squeeze and stretch the air on their way to your ears. They will pass easily through rock. Though some will stay close to the surface, others will skim the liquid outer core of the Earth or sweep through its solid centre before emerging here, to be picked up by SPRESSO's listening ear. These waves will be full of fascinating information about the rocks they have passed through. They can tell us about the subtleties of the parts of our planet that drillers will never, ever reach. They can help us understand how the iron core of the Earth feeds our planet's magnetic field and why sometimes in the ancient past it suddenly switched, making north become south, and south become north. Or what sets off vast plumes of hot rock that start at the boundary between core and overlying mantle and slowly make their way to the surface. (These events are mercifully rare in Earth's history—when these gigantic mantle plumes reach the surface, they can cause the kind of epic volcanism that can flood half a continent with molten rock.)

The seismic waves from our Aleutian quake would be rich with such information, just waiting to be read. The detectors waiting 900 feet below ground would feel the first stirrings. And they would send their message up to the instruments here, which would wink and beep to register the shock, providing us with a unique window into the world far beneath our feet.

We watched, but for now nothing happened. All was quiet on this quietest of southern fronts. Kent and Steve decided to climb out and test out a new communications system, burying an antenna in the snow and going out on to the plateau. I waited around for them, taking in the view.

Out here, with nothing but wasteland in all directions, I felt for the first time as if I were truly on the Moon. On the horizon there was a single soft white wedge of cloud; the rest of the sky was a clear cerulean blue. The sastrugi stretched out in that familiar pattern of frozen white wave tops. Some looked like porpoising dolphins, caught in mid-leap; some were stippled as if a giant hand had blotted paint; some looked like writhing coils and some just smooth drifts of sugary snow. For all of them the side shaded from the sun had a dull bloom, the colour of pewter, and the hollows were in deep blue shadow. Cutting through it all was the stark white scar of the Sloth's tracks. It was a beautiful, guileless scene. My eyelashes and hair had quickly frosted, and inside my gloves my fingers were already numb. But I still found it hard to believe that this place could ever be cruel.

When Kent re-emerged from the sub-glacial chamber, I asked him what he thought of the place. Was he just in it for the science, or did he find something special about the landscape? Definitely, he said, the landscape was a big part of it.

‘People find beauty in different things. I live in the desert in New Mexico. Coming out here, which is the world's largest desert, there is absolutely no life, nothing green to look at. Maybe I'm a strange person for cherishing it, but it puts into perspective what's important to me.' He was earnest, struggling to explain something that clearly mattered to him.

‘I study seismology, I look at the power of the Earth; when an earthquake goes off, just a little tremble on the surface can wipe out whole swathes of civilisation. And Antarctica is so big, it kind of scales everything. I mean this is a fairly big operation at the South Pole but compared to the vast nothingness around us, we're hardly anything here. We're so insignificant compared to what the Earth can do.'

I heard this sort of thing a lot on the ice. ‘It makes you feel small,' people kept saying to me. And they didn't mean small in a bad way. It wasn't about feeling humiliated. They seemed to find something reassuring about being in the presence of something that was unquestionably bigger and stronger than they could ever be. It didn't matter how much money you had, how big a superpower you were, what technology you had devised. Sometimes it might look beautiful, sometimes guileless, but down here, if Antarctica said no, then that was final.

‘Believing you are important as a human being brings with it a certain responsibility,' a French doctor told me at Dumont d'Urville. ‘You're important so you have things to prove. Here you have nothing to prove because you can only submit. It's almost a relief. You are relieved of your image of being important.

‘It's different from choosing not to prove things—that implies you can't get better, it's pretentious. The value here is that the choice itself is taken away. And if you take away false choices you can ask yourself the true questions: what's important for me? What direction should I take? Who are the people I miss and why? Who misses me?'

 

South Pole winter, September-October

 

Ever since midwinter the sun has been creeping up on the dark side of the horizon. And now, with September, comes the return of twilight. The stars fade and so—largely—do the auroras. By the end of the first week, you can take down the blackout sheets that keep the artificial lights inside the station from leaking out. The solstice, around the third week, brings the first signs of sunlight and the beginning of the long slow polar sunrise.

Perhaps you'll be one of the people who's excited by this, who plays ‘Here Comes the Sun' incessantly over every available loudspeaker. Perhaps, like the rest, you'll be feeling sadness at this loss of the comfort blanket of darkness and the beginning of the end. But as the sun slowly rises and the time of the long shadows returns, don't be fooled into thinking that the light has also brought warmth. The temperature will still be south of -75°F and those first feeble rays do little more than stir up the winds. ‘That fucks you up,' says Jake. ‘You associate dark with cold and light with warm. It's light out but it ain't warm. Everyone's tired, you want it over with. The ones who haven't cracked yet, that's when they crack.'

And there will now be stacks of work for everyone, making the station ready for opening. There's heating the summer housing for the people coming in, taking down the flags that helped you feel your way in the darkness, marking and grooming the skiways for planes to land, and preparing the fuel lines ready to recharge the station for another year.

Still, just as with the coming of the sun, the station will probably be split between those who can't wait to get out of here and those who dread the coming invasion. For with the station opening comes the promise, and the threat, of the world beyond the ice. ‘Travel plans. “I can't wait to see my girlfriend” plans. I can't even listen to those conversations,' says Jake. ‘Everyone is checking out. It's not over yet but they're already done. I think they're missing out on a major part of the winter. I'm in a different place. I'm putting all my energy back in. Storing it. All the patience is paying off at that moment. It's blossoming. It's the first spring flower starting to stretch itself towards the sunlight.'

If you're lucky, and you're also one of the people dreading the invasion, the weather might conspire to hold it off for a few more precious days, as happened in 1997. ‘That year, it was a very late opening,' says Robert. ‘The weather at the beginning of November was awful. The first plane was trying to come in for twelve days. Every day we were in comms, getting reports, “the weather is still too bad”. We were celebrating. One day they flew over, three passes, but still they couldn't land. We were getting emails from McMurdo saying, “It must be terrible for you”. Not at all, we had a big party, twenty-eight people and food for a hundred!'

But in the end they will come. You will be kicked out of your room, bewildered by the new people running down the corridors. Someone will hang a parka on your peg. Someone else will sit on your chair. They will be fresh from the world outside, amused by your pale faces and toasty stares. As well as running AST/RO, Nick Tothill was last year's winter science leader. He began his final report leading up to the Opening with a quote from
The Epic of Gilgamesh:

 

I shall break the doors of hell and smash the bolts,
And the dead shall eat with the living . . .

 

But at least the living bring treats along with them—magazines and newspapers, physical mail, and freshies. The hydroponic greenhouse will have been supplying you with some green stuff over the winter, the odd bit of lettuce and the very occasional tomato. But now there will be fruit and veg by the planeload. ‘When the first strawberries arrived, Cookie slipped me one while I was waiting in the queue,' says Nick. ‘I took a bite. I can't describe the sensation. I stood stock still for five seconds. Perhaps in three weeks I'll be back to being as spoiled as everyone else, but right now every bite of fruit is so very good.'

You may feel more exposed that you ever have, but perhaps also more balanced. ‘So many of your crutches get knocked out from under you,' says Nick. ‘Down here, you have to learn to trust yourself. Stuff that you may have been struggling with for years just kind of goes. An Antarctic winter scours your personality down to the bedrock.'

And whatever happens when you return to civilisation, don't expect the experience to fade quickly. ‘I don't think this place ever leaves your body,' says Larry. ‘You can't ever fully get away from it. Five years later you can look at a calendar in February and think “station's closing”. Ten years later, on 21 June, you'll think “it's midwinter”. It never leaves you. Why? I don't know. Coming down here isn't hard, it's going back that's hard. You've got to pay for things. Try walking into a supermarket after winter. It's probably one of the most daunting experiences you have. You're used to “this is what's for dinner” and then suddenly you're faced with that kind of choice.

‘You get back and the world is different. Things have changed, of course they have. Watching the sun rise and set in a twenty-four-hour period. Not treating everybody like your best friend, as you would here. Getting used to the idea that you're not living on top of everyone any more. Sitting in your room, listening to your clock tick and thinking: what do I do now?'

So, however toasty you might now be going, however eager to click your ruby slippers and get yourself back to Kansas, there's another piece of Antarctic slang that you should probably now be made aware of. According to Polies, the phrase ‘I'm never coming back here again' translates into Antarctican as ‘See you next year'.

 

It was Jake Speed's penultimate day at the Pole and he had offered to drive me round in a skidoo, showing me some of his favourite places. We visited an igloo that the winterers built, swooped around the berms where much of the station's supplies were stored and where Jake had spent a large part of the past five years. And then we ended up just outside the station, on the empty plateau, to watch a sastruga grow.

In the winters, great windstorms sculpt these sastrugi into magnificent forms that can be ten feet high. Today we had to make do with a stiff, trickling breeze that sent the snow curling and writhing over the surface like parallel threads of smoke. Jake pulled out a lighter and stuck it upright into the snow to make a suitable obstruction. He lay down with his face close to it and I followed suit. And, sure enough, grain by grain, the snow began to build into a miniature hill on the windward side of the lighter, leaving a growing trail in the lee.

We both lay there for a while in silence. Then I asked Jake the question that had been bothering me for days. I'd noticed that Robert and Steffen, the two telescope nannies—and, now I thought about it, other people who had spent winters at the Pole—were all happy enough to talk to me about mechanical details, but guarded when I tried to dig deeper. So why did Jake agree to speak to me?

He smiled. ‘It's hard to break in,' he said. ‘You caught me in a strange place. Normally I wouldn't have talked to you. I'm pretty protective of all this. But I've just done what no one else has done and I felt like it was important for me to share.'

So why are the others so much more guarded? ‘Obviously the weather and the climate are intense, but the most intense thing about this place is the people, the interactions that you have with them. I know that Robert gets up every morning, then takes his right eye with his left index finger, rubs it three times and then brushes his teeth. I know that guy like a wife.'

‘Does it feel like a betrayal to talk about it?'

He considered this for a moment. ‘I know a guy who did one winter and did it poorly and then he ran out and started shooting his mouth off about it. Number one, I thought he was an asshole when he was here. Number two, now he was making himself look even more of a clown. Number three, he was romanticising this place way out of proportion, giving away all of our intimate details without our consent. This is home for us, this is where we live, this is where we breathe, this is what we do. There's a lot of things we do in the wintertime that we won't tell people about because it is ours.

‘You feel that once you become more intimate with this place, it would be dishonourable to give away all those little treats and cherished moments and insights and knowledge and experience to somebody . . . it's very heartfelt. It's like getting involved in a relationship.'

So it wasn't just machismo; nor were the winterers some kind of Masonic order where only the initiated were allowed to see the inner sanctum. Jake talked about Antarctica as if it was a person, a lover. To him, and perhaps to most of the people who have been really touched by the experience, the hidden stories of Antarctica's winters were like whispered secrets across a cold white pillow. The only way to hear them was to be there. And it occurred to me then that a lover's secrets are so intoxicating not just for what they tell you about your lover, but for what they tell you about yourself.