Antarctica (20 page)

“Well, these silt or clay layers suggest the bottom of a lake, and as you can see, boulders have dropped onto the layers while they were still wet and could be bowed down under the weight, see that? One explanation of that could be that this was a lake in a glacier’s margin, and icebergs calving would melt, and drop the boulders in them onto the silt on the bottom of the lake. We certainly see results just like these around living glaciers. So we may be looking at the bottom or shore of a lake.”

Michelson and Forbes got on their knees and began dismantling some of the precious layered deposit, putting chunks of it into sample bags, discussing more invisible features in their highly technical language. “Here,” Michelson said to Wade. “If you care to help, you can count the number of vertical layers this deposit has.”

Wade got on his knees and went at it, getting colder by the minute. The other two continued inspecting the sandstone inch by inch, apparently oblivious to the biting
chill air, even though they were wearing less than Wade was.

Michelson looked back at Wade. “Try counting how many fit against your fingernail, then measuring how many fingernails high the stack is, and multiply,” he suggested.

Wade, shocked at the idea of that sort of approximation entering the pure realm of science, continued to count the layers one by one.

Eventually they all stood up. Wade was cold, and very stiff from the previous day’s hike, and his hands were numb inside their mittens. “Six hundred and six,” he reported. “So there was liquid water down here for six hundred years!”

“Or six hundred tidal cycles,” Forbes said. “Which would be about one year.”

Wade saw the little smile reappear under Michelson’s moustache. “Liquid water, in any case,” Michelson said. “And very possibly this disconformity in the succession represents the transition from a marine environment to a subaerial one. What we called D-7 over on the Cloudmaker.” At the end of his black noseguard an icicle curved down almost to his chin, turning his face from a Breughel into something out of Bosch. “Let’s get back to camp,” he said, glancing up at the sun as if consulting a clock. “I’m famished, and we mustn’t be late for dinner. It’s Misha’s turn to cook, and he’s planning something special, I can tell.”

Indeed he was. After a long walk back weighted down by many sample bags filled with rocks, they crawled into the Scott tent and the sharp smell of cooking garlic butter raked down their nostrils directly to their empty stomachs. They oohed and aahed and knocked around
against the sloping canvas of the tent until they were properly arranged, Wade back in his corner, which was very hard on his back—harder work physically than the whole rest of the day. But on this night Val was seated next to him, in fact jammed against him leg to leg, so that the entire evening he had the more-than-just-somatic warmth of that contact pouring into him. “Just in time,” Misha told them, handing out hors d’oeuvres: mugs of cold Scotch and melted brie on camp crackers, followed quickly by the main course: lobster tails sautéed in the garlic butter, with a side of corned-beef hash, followed eventually by a dessert of chocolate bars and Drambuie.

It was heavenly. Wade sawed away at the flesh of his lobster tails with a big Swiss Army knife, marveling that food could taste so good. “Four star,” someone muttered, and there were various hums and purrs and clattering as they all gulped down their meals. Near the end of the main course Michelson leaned on one elbow next to the radio and stretched out like a Roman emperor, the little V of a smile lifting his moustache. “Remember,” he said to Wade, “you must tell them what hell it was down here.”

“Ninth circle,” Wade agreed, wiping melted butter off his chin and licking it from his fingers.

“You liked the lobster?” Misha asked him.

“Kind of salty,” Wade said, which caused Val to choke.

“Don’t worry,” she said to the frowning Misha when she had recovered, “things are going to taste salty to Wade here for the rest of his life.” She explained what he had done at Don Juan Pond and the scientists laughed at him.

Then as they slowly downed dessert, and Misha heated water on the Coleman stove to wash dishes, the
talk turned to the day’s work. Wade asked them to tell him more about the Sirius group controversy, and Val seconded the request, and the scientists were happy to oblige. All four of them contributed to the telling, even Misha, who to Wade’s surprise took the lead; he had had training in geology, that was clear. “The old view,” he explained, “was that the East Antarctic ice cap is an old and stable feature. The west sheet comes and goes, but the east sheet was established after Antarctica detached from South America, forty or fifty million years ago. Then it was here in place, and growing ever after, except for some warming periods, maybe, but those all long ago; most recently fourteen million years, at the latest.

“Then in the 1980s Webb and Harwood and their group found diatoms in the Sirius sandstone, and dated the diatoms at three million years old. When they published that data and their conclusion, that the eastern ice sheet hadn’t been there three million years ago, the battle was on.”

“Battle,” Wade said around a final salty mouthful of lobster.

“Well, you know. Scientific controversy.”

“Battle,” Harry Stanton confirmed.

“The two sides wouldn’t shoot each other on sight,” Michelson objected.

“No no,” Misha said, “it’s not like people after a divorce or something, you know, totally personal and vindictive. But still, they were both convinced that the other side weren’t being …”

“Scientific,” Michelson supplied with his little smile.

“They both thought the other side was being a blockhead,” Harry said. “Scientifically speaking of course.”

“Yes,” Misha said. “They didn’t like each other, after a while.”

“Suggesting lab contamination didn’t help,” Michelson said.

“Lab contamination?” Wade asked Misha.

“Well, when Harwood and Webb first said they had found these diatoms in the Sirius sandstone, some of the stabilists suggested the diatoms had come from other studies in the same lab. That went over very poorly in Ohio, as you can imagine.”

“Indeed. Stabilists?”

“The old ice group. This is the battle of the stabilists and the dynamicists.”

“So we won the name battle at least,” Michelson murmured.

“Then next, when it was established that the diatoms were actually inside Sirius rocks, the stabilists suggested there were so few diatoms that they had probably just blown in on the wind from the coast.”

“That infamous coast-to-plateau wind,” Harry noted.

“Which blows so hard that it shoves the diatoms right under the ice cap that the stabilists claim has always been there,” Michelson said.

“Yes, of course,” Misha said. “Blown over from Australia, perhaps. But they did find some diatoms in the ice at the South Pole, so the stabilists had some support for this idea.”

“And how did the Ohio group deal with that?”

Misha grinned. “With
quantity
. Sometimes you have quality results, and sometimes you need
quantity
results. They blew up tons and tons of the Transantarctic Mountains. They went to every Sirius site they could find with a great big dynamite license from NSF, and they blew up great masses of Sirius and took them back
home and dumped them on the stabilists’ desks, metaphorically speaking of course. Diatoms by the
ton.”

“Not tons,” Michelson objected. “Nothing in excess.”

“
Tons
. Whole nunataks you see on the map, now entirely gone and removed to labs at Ohio State.”

“No no—”

“Yes yes,” laughing, “I was the mountaineer for one of those expeditions, I set the charges myself! It was awesome. There should be an Ohio State Glacier named up there, we tore a brand new pass in the Transantarctics.”

Much laughter in the tent at Michelson’s expense, who clearly had been involved with this project. Wade saw that the younger scientists were fond of him. “And they found good evidence?” Wade said.

“Quite good,” Misha judged. “No doubt there were beech forests here when the Sirius group was laid down.”

“Parts of the Sirius group,” Michelson qualified. “It could easily be that the Sirius group is fossil till from several different glacial periods.”

“And so the stabilists were convinced, and they recanted,” Wade said, to more hoots of laughter.

“Of course not,” Misha said, grinning and refilling their mugs with Drambuie. “That isn’t how it works, of course. No one is ever convinced of anything.”

“So how do new ideas take hold?”

“The old scientists die,” Misha said, kicking Michelson as an example.

The corners of the moustache lifted. “That’s the point,” he said to Wade. “It’s careers, you see. Whole careers have been given over to the stabilist position. Grad students are getting Ph.D.s, assistant professors are getting tenure, all on the strength of papers advocating
the stabilist position. They can’t just admit they were wrong all along. But biostratification is a very solid dating method. So the diatoms are a problem for them. Not to mention the beetles and moss and beech trees.”

“But what do they say about those?” Wade asked.

“They say the beech forests are older than fourteen million years, perhaps even Cretaceous. They say the diatoms blew in from elsewhere. They ignore the beetles entirely.”

“The beetles flew in too,” Misha suggested. “Flew down from Lemuria.”

Michelson chortled, then raised a finger. “Mostly they ignore us now,” he said. “They concentrate on finding areas that have been dry or covered with ice for more than three million years, which is certainly possible. Even at its warmest there would certainly have been glaciers down here. All we’re saying when we call it warm is that there was liquid water possible for a minimum of five months of the year, which is all that
Nothofagus
need to survive.”

“And you’re also saying that the eastern ice cap was gone,” Wade added.

“Yes, but there would certainly have been glaciers in the higher or more southerly places, probably big glaciers. But the diatoms are sea-bottom diatoms, so there must have been seas. The cap was melted in the Pliocene! It’s the only explanation that works for all the evidence we have. Glaciers in the mountains, and in the permanent shade, sure. And sea ice in the winters, of course. But water, nevertheless, over much of this area. Fjords filling the big glacier basins.”

“They have kind of a hard case to prove,” Val noted. “They have to try to show that it stayed iced over everywhere.”

“Very true,” Michelson said. “And a hard thing to do.”

“They could find climate data showing it stayed cold throughout,” Val said.

“Yes, and the oxygen isotope ratio in the offshore sediments even seems to support them in that idea, I must admit. But there is a lot of other climate data from the north that show that the early Pliocene was quite warm. It was a high CO
₂
era, just like today.”

“Can’t you date the ice cap outright?” Wade asked. “Drill right to the bottom and count layers of ice, like I counted the layers today?”

“There are no layers below a certain level. They get crushed together. After that the ice has certain chemical signatures revealing a bit about the atmosphere that the snow fell out of, but it isn’t useful for precise dating.”

“Ah.” Wade thought about it. “So if the Pliocene climate was CO
₂
high, like today, and Antarctica was an open sea with islands and some glaciers, then why isn’t it like that today?”

“Well,” Michelson said, “maybe it’s on its way. The ice shelves are going, the ice streams are speeding up, the grounding line under the west sheet is receding fast. The east sheet is higher and thicker, so it will take longer. But it could happen.”

“How quickly could it go?”

“Very quickly indeed!”

“Meaning …”

“A few hundred years, perhaps.”

Wade and Val laughed, but Michelson waved a finger at them: “No, that’s very fast. A blink of the eye!”

“I’ll tell Senator Chase that,” Wade said.

“No no,” Michelson protested, “what you have to tell him is that nobody knows. No one can say. The Laurentian ice sheets went in just such a short time, a
few thousand years perhaps, and they didn’t have humans around pumping CO
₂
into the air. There’s some powerful positive feedback loops involved. Things can change rapidly. These methane hydrate deposits on the sea bottom are likely to stay put at first, because that’s a matter of water pressure holding them in. But if the methane hydrates under the ice caps are substantial and that methane is released, then the greenhouse effect will be pushed even harder.”

They sipped Drambuie as Misha washed and Val dried the dishes. It was steamy warm in the tent. Wade’s neck was killing him. The Drambuie was salty.

“There must be people who don’t want to believe your scenario,” Wade said. “I mean people besides the stabilists.”

“Oh yes. The same people who found Professor Warren, eh? You can always find a potted professor to back your claim.”

“So the stabilists are like Professor Warren then.”

“Oh no. Not at all. Warren is saying there is no human effect on global warming, when the entire scientific community outside of conservative think tanks believes the evidence is obvious that there is. Warren is a charlatan, or delusional. The stabilists on the other hand are serious scientists. They are trying to prove a hypothesis, they are down here gathering data every season, they’re publishing results in peer-reviewed journals. They’re wrong, I think, but they are still scientists. Many scientists are wrong, perhaps most. They end up serving as devil’s advocates for the ones lucky enough to be right. Even we may be wrong.”

“No!” the others cried.

“No,” Michelson agreed. “Those are Pliocene diatoms, and they grew here.” He raised a mug to toast them. “Here in this cold frozen hell.”

The conversation shifted to the day’s work in the field, and a long discussion of what they would do the following day. Wade and Val would be hiking out in the afternoon, to make their rendezvous with a helicopter on the edge of the no-fly zone. The scientists would hike downvalley partway with them. Harry said, “We’ll either find some Sirius above Lake Vashka, or else just have a day of shits and giggles.”