Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Future of the Earth by Craig Childs

Author:Craig Childs [Childs, Craig]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780307907813
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-10-01T16:00:00+00:00

Two days later, Koni threw me a GPS and said, “We need a hand at JAR 1.”

JAR. Jakobshavn Ablation Region. A remote weather station. Koni had Frankensteined the snow machines back together, and gentlemen, start your engines. Lead scientists and their help shot out in all directions to service and download their remote sensors, hauling behind their snow machines sleds loaded with tools, ladders, and cases of electronics. From the back of a swift, snow-grabbing Ski-Doo, I clutched Koni. Looking around his sleek fur-lined leather cap and the strap of his ski goggles, I saw a larger country unfold. We raced miles past the meager distance I had walked the day before. Camp disappeared behind us in the three-mile-long swells of ice, oceanic rises and falls, where we half bogged down in powder drifts and launched airborne over wind curls. I hung on tight, trying not to grunt in Koni’s ear.

The cause of these three-mile-wide waves in the ice sheet, the ones I first noticed when I landed at camp, was a mountain range thousands of feet below. As the ice sheet moved over those buried mountains at about a hundred yards a year, the ice surface became a series of standing waves, like a river flowing over an invisible boulder. The ice was right now moving at about one foot per day. We had been joking about the speed around the table one night, clutching whatever we could as if we were being swept away, a tent-full of laughing nerds. When the camp was first built in the early 1990s, it was at the highest point in the region and had a gentle vantage of everything around. Now, a decade and a half later, it was a full mile away from where it started, anchored into flowing ice where it surfed down the slope to the bottom of the wave. Koni said he’d be long retired by the time it rode up the next side of the wave and topped out again.

Ahead I saw a cloud hugging the ground like a whale. Only after a few minutes did I realize it wasn’t a cloud, nor was it a whale. I kept waiting for us to pass through it, but instead we rose onto it. It was the ice sheet itself lifting, and we rode up its smooth slope. The farther east we traveled, the shorter the wavelength of these great ripples became, just like on a stream riffle where big waves become smaller, tighter, until they play out. We plowed up and over their long miles until reaching JAR 1, a metal mast decorated with sensors taking temperature, humidity, snow height, air speed, and GPS coordinates to record gradual ups, downs, and side-to-side movements in the ice. Only the mast had fallen over and was mostly buried. Reports had been coming back from almost every station like this where they were either melted out from a surprising warm spell last autumn or bent almost flat by the same winter storm that damaged camp.

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