Antarctica by Robinson Kim Stanley

Author:Robinson, Kim Stanley [Robinson, Kim Stanley]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-07-08T04:00:00+00:00

Ahead of us the headwall of the glacier, the crux of our climb, the heart knot of our pilgrimage. A most serious case of kao-yuan perspective. I’ll practice silence now, and keep the cameras on and let you see it newly. We’ll talk again at the top, on the ice cap.

glittering white

shining blue

raven black

(in Amundsen’s journal, December 1911)

Once they had gotten down onto it, the lower stretch of the Axel Heiberg Glacier turned out to be such a broad river of ice that Val’s group ascended long stretches where the ice was bare and crevasse-free. It was like walking on the surface of a pour of unbroken water, the flush surface of a smooth torrent, everything frozen in an instant, even the ripples. Hard work cramponing up this smooth slope, and they traded off the sledge-pulling every half hour, first Val and Ta Shu, then Jack and Jim, then Jorge and Elspeth; but it was quite straightforward compared to the steep broken ice of the mistaken traverse, and they made good time. It would have been a lark, in fact, except that every time they looked forward and up they saw the glacier rising ever more steeply before them, until it leaped right up in a gigantic headwall, the section of the glacier now called the Amundsen Icefalls, towering over them in a broad curve from black sidewall to black sidewall, the great broken crackle of the glacier’s ice gleaming like shattered mirrors in the sun. A thousand vertical meters in less than five kilometers. And they were going to have to get up that, if they wanted to continue.

As they hiked on toward it, hour after hour, crevasse fields began to appear on the ice, like rapids in the current. Here the GPS system helped tremendously, because when they looked up the great white flow the steeper sections beetled down at them, but the flatter sections were telescoped to near nothing, making their way seem steeper (but also shorter) than it really was; and making it hard to see enough to choose a way. One of Amundsen’s many talents had been an ability to read the unseen glacier above well enough to avoid impassable crevasse fields, and the shear zones where the ice was not so much fissured as pulverized.

For Val, whose wrist screen was giving her information from satellite visuals, radar, and a GPS location to within two centimeters, not to mention the pulse radar on her shoulder constantly searching for crevasses ahead, the skill consisted in correlating all that data to the actual icescape facing them, and then choosing from the alternative routes it suggested, where there were alternatives. Usually there were; it was a kind of multiple-path maze they were threading, and at no point in this lower stretch did they run into a set of crevasses and shear zones that was continuous across the front of the glacier. Although once or twice it was close; they had to twist and wind their way, and walked

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