Antarctica (25 page)

They shook hands. “I am Carlos,” the man said. “Welcome to Roberts Massif.”

“Thanks,” X said. It was frigid out, and breezy, but the man’s bare hands were warm. He led X to one of the buildings, and in through the meat-locker door. “Pretty windy to be out in shirtsleeves,” X remarked.

“Oh, yes, Roberts is a windy place. Even when it’s not windy it’s windy.”

“That’s too bad,” X said with feeling. Wind was the hard part of the cold.

“Yes, well, you know, the katabatic. Air is always falling off the polar cap just from its own weight, and we are right on the edge of the cap. So it can be perfectly still out on the ice, or down on Shackleton, but never here. We have entered it in the Windiest Town on Earth contest, but so far no reply.”

“That’s an environmentalist contest though, isn’t it?”

“Precisely. A great one to win when they finally admit we are the windiest.”

Carlos, as he told X while heating soup for their lunch, was Chilean. His father had been an officer in the Chilean Air Force, and during one of the periods when Chile and Argentina had been actively trying to substantiate their overlapping claims to the Antarctic, he had been stationed on the Antarctic Peninsula. So Carlos had spent the first ten years of his life as a resident of the Chilean stations Arturo Prat and General Bernardo O’Higgins, up in the Banana Belt as he put it, which was somewhat warmer than most of the continent, but notorious for storms.

“It was a wonderful childhood,” he told X cheerfully. “Wonderful! I can bicycle on ice, I can pilot a Zodiac through anything, I can talk to penguins and skuas. Not to mention the more usual skills. I’m a true Antarctican, one of the few. Most of them are Chileans like me, although there are some Argentinians as well, not as good at it of course. One of my first memories is of the time that their Almirante Brown station burned down, and the old
Hero
brought its people by on their way out. They were sad, and the commandante had fallen into a
loco antartida
. And of course now both countries have given up on the occupation program, so there are no Antarctic children growing up anymore, which is also sad, I think. Because it was a great, great childhood. The happiest time of my whole life.”

“And now you’re out on Roberts Massif.”

“Yes.” A quick glance from the stove, to see what X meant. “There is opposition to this project, admittedly. But from people ignorant of what we are doing and how we are doing it. This is a clean project, a very clean project, the latest in everything, you will see. Everything has been engineered with massive redundancies at the
criticalities. Because of the latest advances in extraction technology, that means it is very safe indeed. A sure thing. Here, there is some of our new stuff out the window now, look.”

He pointed out the little building’s one window, and X saw a vehicle like a ferry glide down from the high horizon and float across the slope of blue ice into the bay, then slowly up to the dock.

“A hovercraft. The latest thing, a Hake 1500a.” Something in his grin made it clear he was joking, but X didn’t get it.

“Wow.”

Carlos stroked his black beard, which was as dense and fine as seal fur. “Okay, let’s eat quick and go load it, and then we can go out to the drilling site itself. Your work will take you back and forth, but mostly you will be out there, on the ice.”

The hovercraft was not quite as smooth to ride as it was to watch, but once the pilot and copilot got it up and running, it was at least as smooth as flying a plane; and faster than a boat; and not quite so loud as a helicopter. One set of fans blew air down into the space under the skirts of the craft, lifting the body of it, which they called the tub, off the ice and onto the air cushion; then a big fan set in a tall housing at the back of the craft propelled it forward, kind of like an Everglades boat. Little stripped-down snowmobiles had been attached to outrigger booms on each side of the craft, and usually these machines hung in the air from the booms, but they could be let down and the snowmobile treads run, in order to give the floating hovercraft some traction against a side wind, or a steeper undulation than usual on the ice. These outrigger booms, as they called them,
were late additions to the craft, and the pilots were proud of them. It was an older vehicle than X had expected, functional on the inside, well-worn, even battered, which was perhaps the explanation for the joke Carlos had made back at Roberts. X inquired over the roar, and Carlos nodded. “A product of Corrosion Corner,” he replied loudly. “Miami Beach, Florida. Three Hakes cannibalized and rebuilt as one. With improvements.” He grinned.

The ice flowing past them on either side was a rolling white sea, broken by ferocious-looking shear zones, where for some reason the ice was broken to shards; perhaps a submerged rock reef, or a clash of two ice currents; Carlos shrugged when X asked him. Red flags flying on poles set at kilometer intervals marked their way, and at the base of the poles were round radio transponders, guiding the hovercraft’s automatic pilot; at this point the human pilot and copilot, Geraldo and German, were up and about, refilling their coffee mugs. Previous passes of the hovercraft had blown down the sastrugi en route, so that the craft traveled over a distinct road, dull white through bright white and vice versa, running from flag to flag. As the hovercraft floated along it tilted gently up and down, and sometimes side to side, as they hummed over the big shallow waves of the polar cap, its extremely slight hills and valleys, basins and mounds.

“There is our camp, straight ahead.”

A black dot on the sunburnt white horizon.

“Another ten kilometers, but we’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“We’re going that fast?”

“Yes, look—a hundred kilometers an hour! It is the fastest vehicle on the ice, by a long way. Not quite so
fast as helicopters, but it hauls a lot more. And helicopters, you know …”

“Yes,” X said. He had seen the wrecks on Erebus and in Wright Valley: burnt skeletons.

“The flying refrigerator, as they say. You talk about criticalities! But this thing, even if it fails you can get out and walk. No crash and burn. Now you can see the main building, just showing. It’s a very little camp, you see.”

Geraldo and German took over the controls and brought the hovercraft slower and slower into its parking lot, next to a fuel bladder and a warehouse. Carlos saw the look on X’s face, and laughed. “Ah good, I see you’re going to like this place, eh? Good man.”

The drilling station was even smaller than the supply depot on Roberts Massif. It was manned for the moment by Carlos, Geraldo and German, two Malaysians, a Namibian and a Zimbabwean. All of them greeted X in a friendly way, looking up at him from their seats in the station’s common room and grinning as one of the Malays said, “We can get you to do the work on the top of the derrick!”

After a ceremonial hot chocolate, Carlos took X around the facility to show him what they had. Carlos now wore a thick parka over his Carhartts, X noticed; it was really cold out here, even though the wind was not as stiff as at Roberts. As soon as they got back outside X asked, “Where’s Ron?”

“Oh,” Carlos said, looking at him. As always with people outdoors in Antarctica, sunglasses kept him basically expressionless. “You have not heard? Ron was let go.”

“Let go?”

“Yes. We had to fire him. I don’t know how well you knew Ron, but, well …” He shrugged. “He had ideas about how things would work out here that were not right.”

“Hmph. Well … I can’t say I’m surprised.”

Ron, the emperor of Antarctica. He had been so pleased to be quitting ASL and coming out here, and no doubt he had thought he would be secret boss of the system here as in Mac Town. X had no doubt he had done things that justified firing him. Still, to actually do it … It was hard to believe that anyone had had the guts. ASL had been trying to ignore Ron’s abuses for years, simply to avoid the confrontation that these folks had taken on within weeks of hiring him. Which must have made Ron even angrier. He’d burnt his bridges behind him to make this move, and now he was fired and presumably back home in Florida somewhere, stewing with rum and resentment. It was a creepy thought.

X turned his attention to Carlos again, who was leading him to the derrick and the drilling rig underneath it. Everything in the camp constellated around this derrick, a tall spindly structure much like the classic configuration of oil derricks from the very beginning, although this one had a substantial gantry standing next to it, a tall heated chamber, Carlos said, where the coupling of drills and pipeline units was accomplished. The technology incorporated powerful new ice borers with oil extraction techniques learned in the North Sea. Much of the work was automated, of course. X would be learning a variety of the jobs that remained for humans to do; not because he was to be a general field assistant, Carlos was quick to add, but because everyone on station was a generalist, by necessity. “It’s the best way—there are a lot of jobs to be done, and not
very many people to do them.” This looked right to X; the station was very small, the galley a single stove and a sink without running water, in an old blue beaker box that also served as meeting room and coms center. A Jamesway next door was the dorm, and for those who disliked the dry heat and noise of its Preway heater there were some tents staked out on the hard snow. Those, and a few heated and unheated warehouses, and a yellow bulldozer and a crane, and some forklifts in a shed, and a machine and carpentry shop, and a dozen big solar and piezoelectric panels in an array to the north—and that was it.

“This is just an exploratory station, you understand,” Carlos said. He took X into one of the heated sheds while they were talking, and opened a small freezer and took out a chunk of ice. He flicked on a cigarette lighter taken from one of his inner pockets, and applied the flame to the chunk of ice; after a moment blue flames flickered off the top of it.

“Whoa,” X said.

“This is methane hydrate. There is a lot of it under us, at the bottom of the ice cap. If we find there is enough of it, then they may decide to expand, and drill for extraction. We are also evaluating the possibility of oil, of course, but that is secondary. The methane hydrates are the thing.”

“And what are they, again?”

“They are single molecules of methane—natural gas, you know—trapped in crystalline ice cages. They only form under high pressure, but when they do form there is a lot of gas there, as much as thirty liters of gas per liter of sediment. Of course there is a great deal of natural gas in the world, but for the southern countries that have no oil, and are crippled by debts to the North, if
they could find even gas supplies of their own it would be very helpful.”

“But can gas be transported by tankers?”

“It isn’t how they do it. But there are new pipelines now, flexible and unbreakably strong, designed to lie under the surface of the ocean. It’s possible to run pipelines directly from here to South America and southern Africa. The materials are fantastic, they’re made of meshes like Kevlar, and include plastics grown in soy plants. The pipes have laser pigs, insulation, everything. Fantastic pipe. And so deep underwater nothing will disturb them. So these new technologies make methane a more useful fuel. And burning these methane hydrates could actually help the global climate situation. You see, if the polar caps melt, like we see them starting to, then this methane below us will be released into the atmosphere, and kick off a greenhouse warming that makes the one we have now look like nothing. We think now that some of the great rapid climate warmings of the past were caused by the release of methane hydrate deposits. So it’s possible we can capture this gas, and burn it for our own power, and reduce greenhouse gases at the same time. It’s very elegant in that way.”

X nodded, wandering the shop and looking at equipment. “What about the sliding of the ice?” He pointed in the direction of the derrick. “It must be moving a little, anyway. How do you deal with that?”

“The movement is not so big here as to be a problem,” Carlos said. “Here it moves only five meters a year, and does not seem to be speeding up, like so many places on the cap are. So we can simply add length to the pipe, and by the time the methane here is extracted the station will only be a few hundred meters to the north.”

“What about ice surges?”

“Don’t say that word! No such thing as ice surges on the polar cap!”

But ever since the Ross Ice Shelf had detached, and Ice Stream C had come unstuck from the position it had been frozen in for the last few centuries, surges had been common all over the place. The possibility couldn’t be denied that ice anywhere in Antarctica might move with startling speed, as Carlos now admitted: “If it surges, we are done here. But the hole will be capped by the surge, so that there would be no spill, even if we were pumping oil. Maybe the top part of the pipe, but we clean that up, and, I don’t know—go home, probably. We are underfunded as it is, as you probably have noticed. It would be hard to recover from the loss of that much pipe, and if there is one surge, there might be more. No, there can be no surges! They are forbidden here! Come on, let’s go in and get warm. It’s Geraldo’s turn to cook supper, and he is very good.”

Inside the steamy fragrant beaker box the others were talking about glaciology, and Punta Arenas, and laughing a lot; and X felt another glow of happiness. Carlos and Geraldo explained what X’s first jobs would entail; the ongoing exploratory efforts were still pretty wide-ranging, and though they were sure enough of this deposit to start drilling, they had not yet established the size of the deposit, or the location of others suspected to be nearby. So they were taking trips out from the station on snowmobiles, to do what they called “three-D seismics,” which involved setting out a grid of geophones, to record the shocks from explosions set off in the ice, and in the rock of nunataks to the north. Geologists working for the group would then look for “bright spots” in the record, and map the rock and the stratigraphy of the subsurface. Their well was therefore
an early “cost well,” and just one in a giant X pattern of them out on this sector of the cap. Down their well they would send tools to measure the gamma radiation, and take actual looks around with fiber optics, among other new detection methods. “We’re definitely on top of a big methane hydrate deposit,” Carlos said, “and under that is a seal rock, which is a lithologic seal over sedimentary rock that often contains oil. The drill is cutting through the seal rock now, which is a very hard old lava field.”