Lab Girl (23 page)

I WAS COVERED
in dried, flattened leaves. My hair was full of them, and I could feel crunchy bits of stem on my scalp, slipping down into my collar. There were shreds of leaves stuffed into my boots and they found their way to the insides of my socks. My wrists were stained black with the grime of the dry leaf dust that rubbed itself in whenever I pulled my gloves off or on. Sneezing yielded a smear of mucus with leaf mulch in it and I could taste the grit of dry, dead leaves in my mouth. Every time I reached up with my knife a gush of compressed dried leaves rained down on me. I didn't even bother trying to keep the debris out of my eyes; I just shut them tightly while I dug.

Bill and I were spending the summer about seven hundred miles north of the northern coast of Alaska, on Axel Heiberg Island, which is part of the vast Nunavut territory of Canada. Thanks to our GPS we knew exactly where we were on the globe, within inches actually, and yet our overwhelming feeling was that we were completely off the map. Our group of twelve scientists represented the only human beings within a three-hundred-mile radius. The Canadian military flew in every few weeks to check up on us, but in between their visits we were completely alone with our thoughts and with one another.

One of the strangest things about being thousands of miles from anywhere is how incredibly safe you feel. Nothing surprising is going to happen. You aren't going to bump into anyone you don't know. Water bleeds from the melting permafrost, making the earth spongy and so soft that you can't even fall down and hurt yourself. In theory, hungry polar bears could wander inland and eat you, but the scientists I know who have been working there for more than a decade tell me that they have yet to see one that far inland.

The landscape is flat and you can see for ten miles or more because the air is crystal clear. There's no grass, no bushes, and certainly no trees. You don't see many animals either, because there's almost nothing for them to eat. The life forms that you do come across—a lichen glued to a rock, a single musk ox trudging across the landscape, a nondescript bird passing far overhead—are few and far between.

The sun never, ever goes down. It just endlessly circles you, low in the sky, as if it were riding a merry-go-round with you standing at the center. Life is quiet and surreal. You abandon your habit of keeping track of what day and what time it is. You sleep until you wake up, you eat until you're full, and you work until you're tired—trading back and forth among these three activities. No matter how long you work in the Arctic during the summer, you are there for exactly one day. Then you go home in order to avoid winter: a three-month night during which the sun never rises. You won't be there, but that lichen, that bird, and that musk ox will be, stumbling around in the dark and still searching for something to eat.

The place where we work in the Arctic is more than one thousand miles away from the nearest tree, but it wasn't always like that. Canada and Siberia are loaded with the remains of what were lush deciduous conifer forests that sprawled north of the Arctic Circle for tens of millions of years, starting about fifty million years ago. Tree-dwelling rodents climbed the branches of these forests and looked down upon huge tortoises and alligator-like reptiles. All of these animals are now extinct, but together they formed an ecosystem more reminiscent of Alice's Wonderland than of anything that can be found today. It's obvious that the climate of the polar regions was warmer during that time, and that there were certainly no frozen fields of unforgiving ice, like there are today.

What puzzles us as botanists, however, is that those forests somehow persisted through three months of total darkness each winter, to be followed by three months of continuous summer sun. Extreme light regimes are incredibly stressful to today's plants, which generally would not live through a year of such treatment. In contrast, forty-five million years ago, the Arctic was home to thousands of miles of dense, productive deciduous forests that thrived through these wild swings in illumination. The discovery of trees that could live in the dark is akin to a discovery of humans that could live underwater. We must conclude that either the trees of the past were capable of something that today's trees cannot do, or the trees of today no longer use these talents and instead keep them tucked away as an adaptive ace up their evolutionary sleeve.

Bill and I, and ten other researchers who hailed from the paleontology department of the University of Pennsylvania, had been set down on Axel Heiberg in groups of four, delivered by helicopter, after riding a twin-engine aircraft, after riding plane after plane, moving north from Toronto to Yellowknife to Resolute and on up for days. Standing in the mud, watching the helicopter fly off, we looked down at our backpacks and up at each other, and realized how profoundly alone we were in our little group.

Over the next five weeks, the paleontologists would spend day after day parked in one spot, carefully exhuming single specimens of the buried fossil trees. They worked painstakingly, basically digging a trench with ten toothbrushes. They uncovered amazing fossils: tree trunks six feet in diameter and almost perfectly intact. Because the ground was frozen, the sediment covering the fossils had to be scraped off centimeter by centimeter once the sun had thawed the top layer; it was like digging through ice cream that had frozen too hard for easy serving. The paleontologists had a few different specimens that they were unearthing, and they used small cards of plastic to do it, similar to the way that you might scrape ice off of a windshield using your driver's license. They rotated among fossils, the perpetual sun slowly assisting them.

The fossils were still made of wood, which is what made them precious. Most of the tree fossils you can think of have been petrified as fluids have passed through them for ages, swapping molecule for mineral until the tree has fully turned to rock. In contrast, the fossils of Axel Heiberg Island contained wood tissue that was still intact—you could even burn the fossils to heat your bathwater, which is what the rough-and-ready grizzly male geologists had done with it during the eighties when the site was first surveyed, if legends are to be believed.

The paleontologists of our trip were a more housebroken version of the classic mountain-man geologist, but still hard-working, hard-drinking, and fascinated with the gun that the Canadian government required us to carry in case of polar bears. I had learned to keep my distance from these types of colleagues, knowing that they would never accept me as having a legitimate intellectual claim to the site, even if our funding agency did. In their eyes, I was just a grubby little girl who couldn't lift forty pounds with a weirdo in tow, and I embraced this role, hoping it would result in their underestimating me to the point of leaving me alone. Somehow, all of our sleep cycles settled into a pattern where Bill and I worked while they slept and vice versa.

Bill and I also took a fundamentally different approach to the site, as compared with our more established colleagues. I was obsessed not with the fantastic individual fossils but with the incredible duration and stability of the forest as a whole. This was no flash-in-the-pan freaky ecosystem; this configuration of global biology had persisted for many millions of years—millions of years during which huge amounts of carbon and water flooded into the Arctic and were transformed into leaves and woods, and then shed annually in a gush of tissue. How in the world did the system sustain itself? There is nowhere near that kind of fresh, liquid water available in the Arctic now, not to mention the lack of soil nutrients.

Bill and I decided that instead of looking at a single snapshot of time by digging up a few individual trunks, we were going to tunnel vertically through the whole mess, looking for subtle changes through time in the chemistry of the mummified wood, leaves, and sticks. This meant digging apart and sampling layer after layer of the dead, compressed debris that had accumulated over millions of years. As we burrowed vertically through cross sections of dry, rotted leaves, we sampled centimeter by centimeter and recorded precisely where in the column we were. By the end of three summer field seasons, we'd sampled our way through a hundred vertical feet of time and were able to identify at least one strong swing in climate that the forests had been able to tolerate. From this we have argued that these ancient Arctic ecosystems are better characterized as “resilient” than “stable.”

We chose a spot across the basin, far from the place where the paleontologists were excavating, and for weeks on end, Bill and I dug up through sediment layers that were more than ten feet thick and interbedded with gravel and silt. Each week we'd thrash around in a different twelve-foot pile of forty-million-year-old dry compost. Often we worked while hanging off of one side of a gentle, sloping, and soft cliff that was continuously giving way out from under us, sending us tumbling down the hill covered in a debris slide.

We dug without secure footing while we tried to get a clean sample and keep track of our position relative to a base elevation. But in this environment it was difficult to the point of being silly, and we cycled back and forth between riotous laughter and rageful frustration throughout those long days of cartwheeling down the hills. One time when I dug up with the claw end of my hammer I cracked something odd and pounds of sparkling clear amber rained down on my head. “So this is what it's like to be an earthworm,” Bill remarked once after a particularly big avalanche, and I remember pausing in appreciation of how his observations were always so spot-on.

At least once a day, we indulged ourselves in the following way: we'd plop down waist deep in the crunchy rubble and pull out some treats. Nothing tastes as good as a Snickers bar and a hot thermos of coffee in the cold middle of nowhere, and once a day we focused all of our energy toward savoring this pleasure in quiet, companionable reflection.

One day, after we had chewed our last bites, Bill raised his arm and silently pointed at a gray speck many yards off. I puzzled for a moment and then saw that he was pointing out an Arctic hare. Coming across an animal—any animal—is a rare treat in the Arctic, because an herbivore must travel long distances to keep itself fed upon the sparse moss and lichen available, and a carnivore must, by extension, keep moving to follow wide-roaming prey.

The hare came closer, picking among the rocks, and then began to move away from us. Bill and I stood up and followed it, keeping a good distance and leaving our gear behind. We walked for about a mile without talking, following the hare and watching it, trying to exploit the visual novelty that it offered against the bleak and monotonous landscape. It was a large hare, big as a sheltie dog and with similar fur, long ears, and a long, lean body. It didn't seem to mind us following it at a distance of a quarter mile or so, so we hung back and followed for more than an hour. There was no real way for us to get lost; we could walk all day and still turn around and see the Day-Glo orange tents of our campsite.

When you are supremely isolated among just a handful of people, those few people can quickly begin to seem suffocating. And they did—except for Bill, I had discovered. Before that trip, I had never really spent twenty-four-seven with anyone for weeks on end, and it seemed that with every passing day it got easier for us and not harder. Regardless of whether we were awake or asleep, we were never more than a few feet apart, though always in separate tents. Some days we chattered incessantly; some days we said only a few words, and then we lost track of what we did or didn't say, of how much we were talking or not talking. We were just us being us.

On the day that we followed the hare, we eventually found ourselves on a geographical high point, and I turned to see that our colleagues back at the dig were only fuzzy specks in the distance, as we must have been to them. In the other direction, we could see the edge of a glacier that lay like a thick white layer of frosting, still several miles away. I sat down to admire it and Bill sat down a few feet away from me. We sat in silence for another half hour, until Bill finally said, “It feels weird not to be working.”

“I know what you mean,” I said. “And we've dug through every layer twice while sampling. It doesn't make any sense to do it again.”

“But we have to do something,” countered Bill. “Otherwise the Grizzly Adamses down there are going to wonder what the hell we're doing on this trip, won't they?”

I laughed. “They already wonder what I'm doing here. And digging to China and back wouldn't convince them that I'm a legitimate scientist.”

“Really?” Bill looked at me in surprise. “I always figured it was just me who felt like a random mistake.”

“Naw,” I assured him. “Look at those guys. I'm going to do this job for thirty more years, work as hard as any of them, accomplish just as much or more, and not one of them will ever look me straight in the eye like I belong here.”

“Well, at least you have two whole hands,” Bill countered, wiggling his incomplete set of digits. “That's a good start anyway.”

I lay back and looked at the sky. “Oh, come on, nobody ever notices your hand,” I said. “Honestly, you're more normal-looking than anyone I know; I don't know why you don't get that.”

“Are you sure? Why don't you poll some little kids about it?” Bill asked. “Like my second-grade class. And third grade. And high school, and so on.”

I sat up with a start. “They teased you? At school? About your hand?” The idea enraged me.

“Yup,” confirmed Bill quietly, still staring at the sky.

I pushed the point. “So is that your deal? You've carried that all these years? Is that it? Living in a hole, no friends?”

“That's about right,” Bill confirmed.

“You never did Cub Scouts, joined a team, all that crap?” I listed all the usual milestones that I had taken for granted.