A profound feeling of isolation sets in as the plane departs. Propellers roar. The twin-engine Basler, vintage 1942, bounces on skis over the wind-pocked ice, bobs into the air, and shrinks to a dot in the sky. Then it’s just the four of us standing here, a pile of boxes and bags, and flat, white horizon in every direction. We’re on our own in Antarctica for the next few weeks, in the middle of a million square miles of empty ice about 380 miles from the South Pole. Aside from a few invisible bacteria, we’re the only living things for hundreds of miles in any direction. We pause to let it sink in; then we grab our tent bags and set to work.
It’s a typical summer afternoon on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. A wind blows from the south, scouring the ice free of loose snow so it resembles weathered sandstone. We stand atop one of the largest hunks of ice on earth. You might call this place ground zero in the effort to predict climate change, sea level rise, and the fate of coastal cities around the world. With a volume of more than 700,000 cubic miles and an average thickness of 4,000 feet, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) holds enough water to raise sea levels by 15 to 20 feet—and it is already sweating off 130 billion tons of ice per year. Satellites have helped to monitor the changes in the region, but there are some things you simply have to come here and explore in person.
Ice sheets aren’t the static scabs of frost that scientists once imagined, but rather complex structures with many moving parts. In the WAIS, massive conveyor belts of ice (called ice streams) up to 100 miles across and hundreds of miles long ooze toward the ocean, where they splinter into icebergs. Guiding their movement is an array of unseen forces, including mountains, valleys, and lakes—and maybe even smoldering volcanoes—hidden beneath the ice. We cannot predict how the ice will respond to warming without understanding those forces.
Slawek Tulaczyk, a glaciologist from the University of California at Santa Cruz, has come to Antarctica to do just that. The wind whips at his tent as he anchors it to the snow with yard-long bamboo stakes. The rest of his team are also raising tents: myself, Tulaczyk’s Ph.D. student Nadine Quintana Krupinski, and Rickard Pettersson, a glaciologist from Uppsala University in Sweden. In the coming weeks we will venture far from this camp, using ice-penetrating radar to map the landscape half a mile below the surface of the ice. We’ll install seismic stations to eavesdrop on “ice quakes” that rattle the WAIS twice per day like clockwork, and we’ll plant sensors to monitor every slip and lurch of the ice sheet to the nearest half inch. It sounds simple, but in Antarctica nothing is.
Even in a shrinking modern world of supersonic jets and global FedEx, it has taken Tulaczyk 26 days to reach this spot from California. He was delayed eight days in Christchurch, New Zealand, as summer storms belted the Antarctic coast. Then came nine days of preparation in McMurdo Station, the main U.S. base in Antarctica, and nine more days stranded by weather at a remote airstrip deep inside the WAIS. Today the tiny Basler ferried us 200 miles south to our final destination, 84.45 degrees south of the equator.
During our weeks on the ice, we will travel as much as 10 hours a day on snowmobiles. We’ll navigate the featureless white using GPS technology, and we’ll walk in spots where Homo sapiens has never stepped.
Our first stop in Antarctica is McMurdo Station, home to 1,000 people during the Austral summer field season, from November to February. McMurdo’s cargo pallets, shipping containers, and metal buildings sprawl across a rocky corner of ice-cloaked Ross Island, 30 miles off the mainland. We spend most of our time here gathering cargo sleds, fuel for our snowmobiles, and other supplies for the deep field. One afternoon I sit in a cramped office as Tulaczyk and Pettersson browse satellite images of the WAIS. Pettersson hits a key on his Toughbook and pulls up an aerial view of the region we’ll soon visit: the massive Whillans Ice Stream, 3,000 feet thick and 50 miles wide, bounded on either side by slower-moving ice.
Pettersson’s picture is actually a patchwork of satellite photos and radar images that he has assembled. He and Tulaczyk have inspected these images for months, tweaking the routes that we’ll travel in order to avoid hazards. “In this area we have lots of crevasses,” Pettersson says as he runs his cursor over a striated patch of ice, several miles across, that our planned route skirts widely. “The crevassing probably continues,” he says, “but we don’t know.” Crevasses in Antarctica have a nasty habit of lurking beneath fragile crusts of snow. One wrong step and you can drop out of sight without a squeak, perhaps crashing 100 feet down and breaking a femur while your colleagues above are wondering where you’ve snuck off to. “These crevasses are like minefields,” Tulaczyk confides. “You would prefer to have them open and visible.”
We will use ice-penetrating radar to detect the hidden crevasses in our path when we ride our snowmobiles on the ice sheet. We’ll also travel with our vehicles roped together—just in case. But roped travel is no guarantee of safety, warns Allen O’Bannon, one of Antarctica’s better-known ice guides, during lunch in McMurdo’s dining hall. The British have already learned that one snowmobile falling in a crevasse can drag another with it. O’Bannon recommends that we rope a cargo sled between the first two snowmobiles. The sled will leverage the counterweight of the second snowmobile, should the first drop into a crevasse. And if worse comes to worst, we can do some fancy driving. “What the hell,” he says, as though discussing snowboard moves. If the snowmobile in front of you falls into a crevasse, “you’re probably going to get dragged forward all of a sudden at a high rate of speed. But slam that thing into reverse if you can and just gun it.”
One might wonder why people like Tulaczyk do it. The motivation isn’t fame; in fact, he and other glaciologists seem positively allergic to it. Tulaczyk himself had a bitter brush with fame thanks to Michael Crichton’s best-selling conspiracy novel State of Fear. One of the novel’s characters, an agent named John Kenner, cites a paper published by Tulaczyk and a collaborator, Ian Joughin of the University of Washington in Seattle, to support his claim that climate change is pretty much bunk. Joughin’s and Tulaczyk’s paper, published in Science in 2002, documents an increase in ice mass for one region of the WAIS called the Ross Sea Sector. The fictional Kenner contends that this and other research indicate that Antarctica’s ice is not actually melting.
Glaciologists say this is not the case: The Ross Sea Sector is gaining mass because one glacier, the Kamb Ice Stream, which periodically stops and starts, is currently in stop mode and therefore not dumping ice into the ocean. “It was overblown and exaggerated,” Tulaczyk says, “in terms of proving something that it didn’t prove.” But Crichton was an effective publicist, and Joughin and Tulaczyk—willingly or not—were taken up as heroes who “disproved” climate change.
Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) invited Crichton, based on the success of his novel, to testify before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works about the potential for bias in climate research, which he did on September 28, 2005. Several months later the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) honored Crichton’s novel with its annual Journalism Award. “It is fiction,” the group’s communications director, Larry Nation, was quoted as saying to The New York Times on February 9, 2006. “But it has the absolute ring of truth.” (Shortly afterward, AAPG changed the prize’s name to the more vague Geosciences in the Media Award.) The studies cited in Crichton’s book are still bandied about in chat rooms and climate blogs scattered across the Web. And a document released by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) in February 2007 lists some of those studies in a climate-science primer for members of the Senate Republican Policy Committee.
Despite all that spin, the state of Antarctica’s ice is more complex than a few hijacked factoids would imply. Much of East Antarctica looks solid, but the WAIS concerns many researchers. True, it is gaining ice in the spot where Tulaczyk and Joughin looked. But measurements from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites, which weigh ice by measuring its gravitational tug from space, suggest that West Antarctica as a whole is losing ice—together with the Antarctic Peninsula, about 150 cubic kilometers per year as of 2005. In 2008 a satellite study based on rates of snowfall and ice movement estimated a loss of 210 cubic kilometers of ice per year—a 59 percent increase in the past decade.
