Black Ice (6 page)

By the time she was eleven she was at the ice rink every weekend. To onlookers she was just another kid, her dark hair a mass of ringlets, pushing herself around the rink, never trying any fancy moves or routines.

For Lauren it wasn't about the skating, it was about the ice. The rink was a place to let her imagination fly. In her mind the ice became the surface of some great glacier—she saw herself skating for hundreds of miles across the frozen wonderland of Antarctica.

Years later, for her fourteenth birthday, her father fixed her up with a treat—a journey to Switzerland, where, in the Alps, she saw her first real glacier. It was the Eigergletscher, sinuous, fissured, filled with unexpected power.

‘It's beautiful,' Lauren said with wonder as they stood looking down on the glacier. ‘Look at the colour of the ice.' A new light filled her eyes: glaciers would be the new love affair; they were dynamic, exciting, somehow alive.

She began to devour Antarctic literature, consuming Cherry-Garrard's
Worst Journey in the World
in one weekend session. She soaked up the privations of Scott, shivered at Shackleton's narrow escape from the pack, stacking the precious tomes side by side until she had so many South Polar editions you could almost feel the blast of chill air seeping from the bookcase.

Some of the things she had learned about Antarctica were truly amazing: that a boiling cup of water thrown into the air will instantly freeze into a shimmering cloud of ice crystals, that winter temperatures of seventy degrees below freezing are regularly recorded.

Antarctica, Lauren now knew, was the coldest and highest continent on the planet—an environment so obstinately hostile to human life that it might have been created in the mind of some sadistic science fiction author. In total it was covered by fourteen
million
square kilometres of solid ice, constituting almost ten per cent of the total land surface of the earth.

Lauren was hooked, and now she interrogated her father on every minuscule detail of his Antarctic expedition—particularly about the lake which she had first learned about all those years before. Now her curiosity had a scientific edge: was there a way to measure the size of the lake? What type of life could be down there?

‘We'll go there together one day,' he told her, ‘but first get your A levels out of the way.'

But as Lauren revised for her exams a tragedy befell the family. Her father, who had been troubled by stomach pains for some months, finally went to have himself checked out; he was wheeled into a CT scanner on a bleak Monday morning and learned, twenty-four hours later, that he had cancer of the pancreas—the fastest and most deadly of all the intestinal cancers. It was inoperable, and five weeks later he was dead.

His last words to Lauren were: ‘Sorry we won't be going south together.'

‘I'll go for you,' Lauren told him, ‘and I'll find out more about your lake.'

Her mother begged her to postpone her exams, certain that grief would destroy Lauren's chances of doing well. In fact the opposite happened; she found herself fired by a fierce determination to do her father proud. She got four straight A's and won a place at Cambridge to study Glacial Biology. Why Cambridge? Simple: the Scott Polar Research Institute was there.

Lauren knew that the Scott Polar would, one day, be her ticket to the south, and she was right. After completing her degree, she joined the Scott Polar and was posted to Rothera, then Halley base, then seconded to the US Department of Science facility at the South Pole. She completed her postgraduate studies and moved on to her doctorate, but the lure of her father's lake stayed with her throughout.

One day, Lauren knew, she would raise the money to build her own base, right above the subterranean lake he had discovered.

15

Lauren leaned into the wind, trying not to spill a drop of the coffee as she made her way to the drilling shed. Inside, drill extension number 58 was being attached to the head of the gantry. Sean was swarming all over it, tending to the massive Perkins diesel and the rig which stood in a tripod above it.

Sean Lowery had proved to be a brilliant addition to the team, coming to Lauren's attention after a series of sparkling recommendations by several of her colleagues. The young American engineer had spent three seasons up in Greenland working with a Scott Polar Institute team drawing cores from the ice cap, and his references were first rate.

‘Sean's your man,' a fellow scientist had told Lauren. ‘He's a brilliant mechanic, and he understands ice. He loves being out there in the wild too, any spare time we gave him he was out there climbing in the mountains all on his own.'

‘Can he get along with a team?'

‘No worries. He's really laid-back. A little weird sometimes—like he talks to his machines—but he's basically sound.'

Lauren had flown Sean across from his Colorado home for an interview at her London laboratory. He was younger than she'd expected, still weatherbeaten from his most recent Greenland contract, his blond hair tied back in a ponytail that made him look more like a climber than an engineer. Lauren liked him instantly: there was something in his nomadic existence that echoed her own restless progression from one base to another.

Sean said yes to a coffee and pulled out one of the lab stools to sit on as they got the small talk of weather, flights and the extortionate cost of London taxis out of the way. He watched her carefully as she poured steaming water out of the ancient kettle, deciding that his previous theory regarding the undesirability of female scientists was now blown firmly out of the water. Dressed in a simple white T-shirt and a pair of faded denim jeans, Lauren had the unmade-up beauty—and certainly the figure—of a model. With her dark, naturally curled hair and her earnest brown eyes, she looked a bit like a young Sigourney Weaver, Sean decided, back in the
Alien
days when a million male fantasies had been fuelled by the single scene on the spaceship when she strips down to her underwear.

If she knew what I'm thinking right now, Sean mused, giving himself an internal rap on the knuckles, I'd never get the job. Then he saw the half-smile in Lauren's eyes as she looked at him appraisingly and thought: Or maybe I would.

‘Tell me about the expedition,' Sean said with a cough as he reddened slightly. ‘Are you drilling a core like the Greenland team?'

Lauren handed him the coffee.

‘Drilling a core … with a twist,' Lauren told him, wincing at her own pun. ‘At the far end of the core is a lake. I want to pull up a water sample, and it has to be completely sterile.'

‘A lake? Beneath Antarctica? I thought the whole place was frozen.'

‘So did scientists,' she told him, ‘until the early 1970s. That's when aircraft from various scientific missions began running airborne sounding radar over certain stretches of Antarctica. That type of radar can penetrate ice and find a reflection off the underlying rock or whatever's beneath it.'

‘I got you.'

‘They found something pretty staggering in Eastern Antarctica—a fresh-water lake about the size of Lake Ontario, and twice as deep, was sitting four kilometres
beneath
the ice. They called it Lake Vostok after the Russian base situated above it. Some cynics doubted the data, but in 1996 the European Remote Sensing Satellite confirmed that it really was what we thought it was.'

Sean leaned forward, his attention caught. ‘So why doesn't it freeze?'

‘We believe it's because it's sitting in a kind of tectonic rift, a valley—the type of fault that Lake Baikal and the Red Sea occupy. The heat from the earth's interior is sufficient to melt down the lake, and there it is—perfectly locked away from the rest of the planet—a source of pristine water … and potentially a source of new life forms.'

‘So you want to drill down and explore that lake?'

‘Not Vostok. Vostok has too many problems, as I'll demonstrate.'

Lauren crossed to a flip chart. ‘This is a cross-section of the ice cap, right?'

Sean nodded as he watched her draw two lines—the lower one representing the earth's surface, a higher, wavy one representing the thickness of the ice above it.

‘Lake Vostok is believed to be just below sea level. And the surface of the ice is at three thousand nine hundred metres. To reach it, those scientists will have to drill a colossal four kilometres or more through the ice.'

‘Four kilometres!' Sean was astounded. ‘But that's just about impossible. Ice moves—it's always moving. The risk of the drill core bending and breaking is too high. Up in Greenland we were pushing it to achieve five hundred metres.'

Lauren flipped the chart to find a blank sheet.

‘Exactly. And that's why I've got a different proposal. About a thousand miles away from Vostok, there's a volcano locked beneath the ice. We're talking about a location just about as remote as it is possible to get.'

Lauren drew the same lines as before, but this time she added a cone-shaped mountain jutting high into the mass of ice.

‘How do you know that volcano is there?'

‘It was discovered by British scientists back in 1956. They were working in Antarctica as part of the International Geophysical Year. But since there are plenty of under-ice volcanoes in Antarctica, no one paid this discovery much attention.'

‘So how come you're so interested in it?'

‘Firstly because my father was one of the scientists who discovered it, and second because this volcano is the one closest to the surface. The crater is just two thousand feet beneath the ice. That's about seven hundred metres compared with four kilometres to reach Vostok. Much less chance the drill bit will break, much better chance of getting a probe down into a lake.'

‘Wait a second. I'm confused. Why should there be a lake connected with this volcano?'

‘It has a true crater, we can deduce that from echo location. And it's an active volcano. There
has
to be heat. Where there is heat, ice becomes water. It really is as simple as that. I believe there is quite a large mass of fresh water down there, and where there is water … there is life.'

‘But how did this life get down there?'

‘Millions of years ago perhaps. Before Antarctica existed. We may be talking about life forms that have actually evolved completely independently. Or life forms from an era when the continents were in different places. That's the challenge for science—these lakes are like a time capsule—we can push our knowledge of how life forms far beyond where it is now if we can just get to them.'

‘What are the practicalities?'

‘I want to set up a tiny, independent base, perhaps no more than a handful of scientists and a couple of supporting personnel. I'll hire a Hercules C130 to fly everything in. I want to rent or buy a drilling rig and put seven hundred metres of probe down into that lake and find creatures no one has ever dreamed of before. Can you imagine what a thrill that would be?'

Sean laughed at her raw enthusiasm. ‘When you say creatures, are we talking things big enough to see?'

‘Almost certainly not. The most likely life forms are diatoms—simple single-celled organisms. But just because they're microscopic doesn't mean they're any less important. Some of the greatest advances in life sciences have come from studying creatures which can only be seen through an electron microscope.'

‘I like the project,' Sean told her. ‘I've been looking for a chance to get down to Antarctica for years. You can count me in.'

16

Setting up Capricorn had been the most thrilling experience of Lauren's life—a roller-coaster logistical ride so packed with highs and lows she sometimes felt that it would be easier to set up a base on the moon than in the wilds of Antarctica.

The money had been tough to find, particularly as her project was regarded as risky by many of the bigger grant-giving scientific organisations. But by sheer power of persuasion, allied with her fast-growing reputation for getting results, Lauren pulled it together.

There was £300,000 from the Scott Polar and a quarter of a million from the National Foundation for Science. Charitable trusts came in with a further £150,000, and Lauren won grants from several leading scientific publications who were keen to gain first access to the expedition findings.

There was still a one-million-pound hole in the budget when Lauren got a call from Alexander De Pierman, chief executive of Kerguelen Oils. De Pierman was a billionaire oil prospector with a serious image problem: his company had encountered the wrath of the green lobby for its oil prospecting in the waters around the Falkland Islands, and his share price was suffering as a result. His PR advisers had decided to look around for a worthy project to ‘adopt' as sponsor and—luckily for Lauren—had stumbled across her expedition.

Lauren was uneasy with the association with a less-than-squeaky-clean oil exploration company, but she agreed to meet the sixty-year-old De Pierman to discuss the idea. To her surprise, the two of them got on extremely well. De Pierman immediately grasped the scientific objectives of the base and impressed her with his insight into some of the technical problems the drilling operation would face.

De Pierman, likewise, was very happy with the meeting. As an entrepreneur, he had always admired those who had the conviction to push risky ideas into existence. Lauren was a winner, De Pierman decided, and agreed to back her project—anything that got rid of the placard-waving earthies outside his Park Lane offices was worth a million to him, and Lauren finally got her cash.

Lauren and De Pierman posed together for press photographs when the sponsorship was announced, and De Pierman's new public role as scientific benefactor lifted Kerguelen Oils' share price nicely off the floor. He got to choose the base name too, christening it Capricorn after Lauren's star sign.