Sunlight glared off of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. Slawek Tulaczyk, a 46-year-old glaciologist, squinted in the slanted summer rays as he watched a drama unfold 600 feet away.
A Hercules military cargo plane sat stranded, unable to take off. Its skis had frozen to the snow. The plane had just dropped off Tulaczyk along with 12 workers and 10,000 pounds of gear. They were here to probe one of the last unexplored places on Earth. Beneath the snow’s deceptively flat surface, under 2,600 feet of ice, lay a mysterious lake that human eyes had never seen. Tulaczyk, from the University of California in Santa Cruz, had waited six years for a chance to investigate this hidden body of water, called Subglacial Lake Whillans.
Now, as he watched the Herc make its second attempt to take off, he worried. Tulaczyk’s flight was the first to shuttle expedition scientists, engineers, technicians and gear to the field, and a stranded plane could prevent the rest of the crew and the last of the equipment from arriving in time.
The Herc’s four propellers roared, kicking up a blizzard of snow. The plane did not move.
Four men shoveled around the Herc’s skis, trying to free them. This cold-blooded butterfly could stay alighted on the ice sheet for only so long. If its engines were shut down for more than a few minutes, they might not restart in the cold.
