The Rock From Mars (3 page)

The blue ice here was different in important ways from blue ice in Alaska or at the margins of Earth’s other great ice sheets. Where the Antarctic ice rose into the light, it was exposed to the notorious katabatic (descending) winds. These dry howlers were generated over the polar cap as the colder, denser air sank and gravity drove it downslope toward the ocean. The winds swept loose snow off the ice, exposing it. Two effects then combined to wear away the naked ice: sandblasting by windblown ice crystals and vaporization by the heat of the summer sun. As surface ice was lost in these ways, the continental hydraulics moved just enough fresh upstream ice into the stagnant zone to replace the lost ice and maintain the surface elevation. This progression gradually carried buried meteorites, stones that had once been sprinkled throughout the volume of the ice, to the surface, where they were left lying. Stranded.

In the places along the coast where the landscape channeled the winds so that they converged, the mean annual wind speed was 50 miles per hour and people had reported maximum gusts of almost 200 miles per hour. Early Antarctic explorers sometimes had to crawl through the blast before they learned the fine art of “hurricane walking” at an extreme angle.

It appeared that the meteorite conveyor belt had been working away at various sites for tens of thousands of years, hundreds of thousands of years, or, at some surfaces, much longer. Some rare Antarctic meteorites had spent as many as two million years in their slow-moving terrestrial tomb before breaking out. The ones big enough to resist being blown away remained as a lag of cosmic rubble on the ice sheet. Much more than in the driest warm deserts of Earth, the natural deep freeze and incredible dryness here inhibited the weathering away (and contamination) of the rocks.

The specialists came to understand that, given a properly meticulous and methodical search over the long term, they could assemble from these sites a representative sample of all the meteorites that fell on Earth.

Out on the ice sheet for at least a six-week stay, Score and her comrades lived in two-person “Scott tents,” whose design had not changed much since they were first used early in the century. Double-walled for insulation, and nine feet on a side, the bright yellow pyramid-shaped structures were designed to withstand winds of 120 miles per hour. Boxes of frozen food (meats, seafood, vegetables, fruit, cheese, rice, breads, chocolate bars, soups, and so on) were stacked outside each tent.

Outdoor summer temperatures typically ranged between 5 above and 10 below zero degrees Fahrenheit, although a high wind would make it feel much, much colder—like living in a combination meat locker and wind tunnel. Inside, although the snow underfoot might be a subfreezing cold “sink,” when the stoves were going the top of the tent could reach 90 degrees Fahrenheit—good for quick-thawing some food items before cooking them.

All water had to be harvested from the polar ice—a time-consuming and laborious process that involved hefting masses of the heavy ice around, fueling up the stove, and so forth. As one Antarctic veteran observed, you never appreciated how little energy there was in a gallon of gas until you tried to use it to convert cold, cold ice to drinkable water. It was amazing how much energy that took. The daily chore of melting just enough ice for drinking, cooking, and other basic needs probably consumed more time in the field than any other daily activity—typically an hour a day per two-person tent. One consequence was that, instead of a good old civilized thirty-gallon shower every day, people in the field tended to take five-minute sponge baths—once a week, whether they needed them or not.

This season, there had been occasional storms with winds over forty-five miles per hour, which kept the team pinned down in their tents, telling each other about their lives. In the worst years, workdays lost to high winds could add up to maybe 80 percent. On this expedition, a tolerable day or less per week had been the norm. Score passed the time by writing in her journal, reading books, playing cards, and catching up on her sleep. She never felt bored.

Score shared her tent with a woman who had recently come through surgery. When the helicopters had dropped them off in the wilderness in a howling gale that first day, the roommate had started lamenting her decision to make the trip; she’d wanted to fly back with the choppers. Aside from the woman’s own plight, Schutt worried that this would throw Score off her stride just as she was getting started. But Score turned out to be resilient and relentlessly upbeat. She acclimated quickly and savored every moment. Like Schutt, she had fallen hard for the place.

Over the years, the notion of adventure on the ice had attracted applicants as diverse as Japanese flower arrangers and an occasional composer of symphonies. Some had never even been camping before. Those who made the cut, whether they tended toward the extreme-sport type or seemingly fragile geekdom, typically had a great desire to explore new places and to prove themselves at some level. When the winds rose, though, the capacity for confinement with a good book proved a more valuable attribute than the compulsion to skydive off a mountain. As the six-week tour on the ice neared its end, sometimes even the most stable among them would feel the stresses of survival and the forced intimacy with fellow hunters starting to wear them down mentally. And older hunters would find that, with faltering blood circulation to the extremities, their hands and feet would chill more easily, and the skin of their faces tended to develop the waxy-looking patches known as frostnip—the precursor to frostbite—without their realizing it. Still, generally speaking, the team members were happy to be there; they were intensely motivated; and they made it work.

Cassidy would sit in his tent in the mornings, as a first-year novice, “listening to the wind flapping the canvas and the sibilant whisper of ice crystals saltating along the surface” and cringe at the prospect of going out into it.

For Score and company, the typical workday would begin around seven-thirty
A
.
M
., with breakfast (usually a quick-and-dirty bowl of oatmeal), cleanup, and the daily radio check-in with McMurdo. The group met at nine
A
.
M
. to map out the day’s strategy. If their search stayed close to camp, the team might return at lunchtime to heat up some soup. Otherwise, they would eat a cold lunch “out there” and work through until about six
P
.
M
.—sweeping back and forth across their search grid, keeping their eyes and brains focused through the long hours and the chill. When the weather turned nasty, the search would be abandoned. It would be counterproductive to go on, because the hunters would wear themselves out while also missing a lot of meteorites.

The evening meal was the biggest production. Heavy on steak and sometimes lobster, the dining was as good as it could possibly be under the circumstances. A person could burn through five thousand calories a day in the cold, and many people lost weight despite the high-fat diet. They usually ate inside their own tents, but on Christmas, they would crowd together in the largest tent for a special communal feast and celebrate with silly gifts they brought for each other. They might hang their stockings upside down, for the anti-Santa at the South Pole.

Beverage intake sometimes required special thought. Kool-Aid was popular for fending off dehydration, but there were important distinctions. The staff at McMurdo routinely held clinics on urine color. Dark brown meant serious dehydration. Therefore, when venturing into protected parts of the Antarctic wilderness—where the international treaty agreement required a person to pee into a container, not on the local ecology—the old-timers cautioned that you wanted to make
purple
Kool-Aid for drinking, so there would be no possibility of confusion.

Just about everybody agreed that the biggest pain of all, what Bill Cassidy called a character builder, was the necessity of going outside to relieve oneself—no matter what the weather was, no matter how much the windchill burned. The destination would be a proper distance from camp, usually in the lee of a Ski-Doo, where you would squat in the age-old ritual over a hole in the snow.

At “night,” the trek took on an added splendor, because the sun was up all the time. And this was no ordinary light. It was (in contrast to the darkened interior where people tried to sleep) a
blinding
light like the end of creation, intensified by the glare off the ice. When someone opened the tent, there was the effect of the nuclear flash in that moment before the blast wave hits.

Robbie Score and her teammates had come into the experience with full knowledge that it would be a schizoid mission in which the wind was your enemy and it rattled your brain as it rattled your tent and, sometimes, seemed to suck every bit of heat out of you. But this same implacable nemesis was also your essential ally. It was why you had come. You relied on the wind to sweep snow off the blue ice and uncover the treasure. You were there in the hall of the winds on purpose.

December 27 was beautiful, relatively calm and mild. When Score spotted the rock, she got off her snowmobile and waved her arms. Gradually, others congregated around her, and someone put a flag in the ice to mark the location.

Schutt helped her collect the specimen. He could tell right away that this one was unusual. Some of the fusion crust—the glassy black charring from its passage through Earth’s atmosphere (13,000 years earlier, as people would determine later)—was gone, so he could see into the rock’s interior. It looked green to him, too. He and Score stripped off their layers of gloves. They needed the dexterity. Kneeling, they each tucked the gloves under a knee to keep them from blowing away. Score took one of the special “clean bags” provided by NASA (originally designed for collection of rocks on the moon) and used it to pick up the specimen—4.25 pounds of it, she would learn later—by wrapping the bag around it so that her hand never touched it. With Schutt assisting, and working as quickly as possible with her exposed hands feeling the air bite, she used the same care she used for any meteorite. The procedures were designed to minimize contamination by, say, nose drips, as well as from gloves, hands, or other nonindigenous sources. With the rock inside, she quickly sealed the specially sterilized nylon bag with Teflon tape. She wrote a field number on the tape. She and Schutt used a surveying instrument and an electronic distance-measuring unit to record the location (relative to survey stations located all up and down the ice field; the infinitely more convenient Global Positioning System of satellites was not yet available).

The field notes they jotted down that day described the rock as “highly-shocked, grayish-green . . . 90 percent covered with fusion crust” (with the additional comment “Yowza-Yowza”). They added the odd rock to the day’s catch in one of the backpacks that a couple of teammates carried. Back at camp at the end of the day, the specimen would go into the expedition collection box.

For most rocks, the retrieval was considered a team effort and no one hunter was singled out as the discoverer. True, the search involved skills and powers of concentration, but luck also played a big part. So, together, the team would take the hits and misses, the good days and the “tent days” when the winds screamed. But Score and this rock would be forever linked. This was partly because she saw the rock as special and felt an abiding, proprietary interest in its destiny; and it was partly because she was well acquainted with others whose lives would become caught up in the fuss over its meaning: Duck Mittlefehldt, David McKay, Everett Gibson, Kathie Thomas. They would be working in the same building as she—Building 31 at Johnson Space Center in Houston—and she would run into them there and at parties, and they would chat about the twists and turns in the saga that began on this day. More than a decade later, when journalists and others around the world were clamoring to hear how the rock had been plucked off the ice, everybody would point toward this spunky woman, and toward the beguiling smile—not toward a team. She made a better story. That would be fine with Schutt. In his view, she was a most worthy ambassador for the meteorite hunt.

The team had already bagged over one hundred specimens that season, a total that would grow to three hundred or so before their expedition ended. This particular find at Allan Hills was noteworthy at the time only because of its green cast and large size out there in the clean dazzle of sun and ice.

When they were ready to head home, the team packed their collection into ice chests, in burglar-resistant containers, and put them aboard the end-of-season ship out of McMurdo for the long sail northward. To further minimize the risks of contamination, the specimens were kept frozen en route. In keeping with the international treaty, the bulk of the ship’s cargo was the season’s accumulation of trash and waste, all routinely carried home.

When the ship docked at Port Hueneme, California, technicians packed the rocks in dry ice for air transport to Houston, to their new home at the meteorite curation laboratory at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, not far from the lab where the lunar samples from the Apollo moon missions were still carefully preserved and tended.

After the season’s haul arrived, the NASA meteorite archivists followed the routine protocol by which they were able quickly to characterize and describe large numbers of new finds: they took the specimens out of the bags and put them in a nitrogen chamber. Using a stream of dry nitrogen, the staff freeze-dried the meteorites to remove any attached ice and snow, and to avoid possible contamination from the leaching effects of liquid water during transit. They photographed them and examined them carefully, using both eye and microscope. Finally, they broke off a small chip from each specimen for the initial classification by specialists at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

Score, returning from her first hunt, looked forward to showing off the strange specimen to colleagues. “Wait till you see this green rock!” she kept saying. But as the treasures were decanted, Score was startled to see that she had been the victim of an illusion—perhaps not the last one the rock would foster. In normal laboratory light, the rock did not look so green. It resembled nothing so much as a chunk of gray cement, although parts of it had a greenish cast. She and Schutt would talk about this optical trick off and on over at least the next couple of years. They chalked up the misimpression to the eerie Antarctic light, or possibly an effect of the sunglasses they had worn, or both. But then such distortions should have applied to other rocks as well, and didn’t, so the question would remain something of a mystery.