Terra Incognita by Sara Wheeler

Author:Sara Wheeler [Sara Wheeler]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1997-09-04T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

Igloos and Nitroglycerine

I don’t really mind science – I just seem to feel better when it’s not around.

Observed on latrine wall,

Central West Antarctica deep field camp

RESUMING THE QUEST for Seismic Man and his group, I wheedled my way on to a fuel flight to Central West Antarctica, and after a series of false starts I was transported to the skiway with four members of a science project staging at CWA en route to Ice Stream B. The West Antarctic ice streams – fast-flowing currents of ice up to 50 miles wide and 310 miles long – are cited as evidence of possible glacial retreat and the much-touted imminent rise in global sea levels. The project leader pulled out The Road to Oxiana, the greatest travel book ever written and one which lies so close to my heart that it gave me a shock to see it there, as if the paraphernalia of home had followed me. He was a beatific man in his mid-fifties with a round, mottled face like a moon, and his name was Hermann. Ten years previously, he had climbed out of a crashed plane in Antarctica.

Later, when we were airborne, the scientists retreated into the hoods of their parkas, jamming unwieldily booted feet among the trellis of rollers, survival bags and naked machinery. I loitered on the flight deck for a while, but I couldn’t see much. It grew colder.

The previous evening, in the galley at McMurdo, I had run into a mountaineer from a science group which had recently pulled out of CWA.

‘Hey!’ he had said when I told him I was on my way there. ‘You can sublease the igloo I built just outside camp. It’s the coolest igloo on the West Antarctic ice sheet.’

When we landed at eighty-two degrees south, the back flap lifted and light flooded into the plane. Tornadoes of powder snow were careering over the blanched wasteland like spectral spinning tops. There were no topographical features, just an ice sheet, boundless and burnished. Lesser (or West) Antarctica is a hypothesised rift system – a jumble of unstable plates – separated from the stable shield of Greater (or East) Antarctica by the Transantarctic Mountains. On top, most of Lesser Antarctica consists of the world’s only marine-based ice sheet. This means that the bottom of the ice is far below sea level, and if it all melted, the western half of Antarctica would consist of a group of islands. The assemblage of plates which make up Lesser Antarctica have been moving both relative to one another and to the east for something like 230 million years, whereas Greater Antarctica, home of the polar plateau, has existed relatively intact for many hundreds of millions of years. In Gondwanaland, the prehistoric supercontinent, what we now know as South America and the Antipodes were glued to Antarctica. Gondwanaland started to break up early in the Jurassic Period – say 175 million years ago – and geologists like to speculate on the relationship of Antarctica to still earlier super-continents.

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