Icequake: A Prophetic Survival Thriller

by Crawford Kilian

  “Not till noon.” He scratched at the white beard that made him look a little like Santa Claus and a lot older than 44. “The Otter’s got fuel-pump trouble. Howie’s working on it.”

  Hugh Adams looked at her. As always, the directness of his gaze made her feel both wary and exhilarated. He didn’t attract her physically, but she could sense why men liked and respected him — and obeyed him. It was certainly more than his strong resemblance to Shackleton — the solid build, square jaw and hard mouth — that made him the leader of twenty-six very different men and women.

  “I’m not letting this lazy sod sit about all morning,” Hugh said; his voice still had more of Ulster in it than New Zealand. “He can take Steve and Tim, and Will and Jeanne, out to the remote stations. They can run some tests, collect the tapes and be back for lunch. Would you like to go along with them?”

  “Yes, of course. I’d be delighted.” She knew that Hugh was very aware of her dislike for Shacktown; this little surprise was meant to sweeten her mood, and the tone of whatever she published about this place. But at least she’d see something, and set foot on the mainland.

  “So this is it,” she observed. “Supper at McMurdo, breakfast in Christchurch.”

  “Don’t bet on it,” Hugh said. “We could be stuck at McMurdo for weeks. But I hope you’re right. We’ll annoy the Yanks enough by asking for one of their precious Hercs. They’ll really sulk if they have to put us up for a while.”

  “Will the Americans really give you a hard time?” she asked.

  Hugh looked at Al, who nodded. “It’s a lot different these days,” Al said. “When I was flying for the Navy in VXE-6, ten-twelve years ago, we were one big happy family down here. We’d run errands for the Russians, they’d do things for us. The Kiwis and Aussies and Brits were all over the place — McMurdo, Eights, Amundsen-Scott. But nowadays it’s all super-political.”

  “Dynamic Self-Reliance may be a good policy in America, but it’s not too suitable for Antarctica,” Hugh murmured. “Ah well — Al and I are just a couple of old fogies, moaning about the days of our youth. Don’t mind us — and here they are,” he interrupted himself as Will Farquhar and Steve Kennard came in. Steve was only thirty-four, but his greying hair and beard made him look older. Long months in the Antarctic had weathered and roughened his strong features, but his eyes still had the clarity and directness of a boy’s. He spoke with deliberation but no hesitancy, and moved in the same way; his tall, spare frame had a slow grace suggesting great reserves of power.

  “Morning, everyone,” said Steve. “When can we leave, Al?”

  “Any time. The Huey’s all gassed up.”

  “Good. If we’ve only got till noon, I want to leave at once. Terry, can you put some breakfast in a box for us?”

  “Right, Steve.”

  “Thanks.” Steve sat down at the next table and said to Penny: “Coming with us?” She nodded. “Good. Wear your regular cold-weather outfit, and don’t forget sunglasses and sunburn cream. The ultra-violet’s getting worse.”

  Penny nodded again, but without conviction. She knew that the ozone layer had been seriously damaged by the continuing solar flares, but it was still hard to imagine being sunburned while wearing ten kilos of clothing.

  “Where do you want to go?” Al asked. Steve glanced at the others.

  “It’s already almost 0630. We can’t go across the mountains and be back by noon. So how about Remotes 10, 11 and 12?” Those, Penny knew, were near Shackleton, Ramsey and Beardmore glaciers.

  “Good enough,” Will agreed. “Tell you what — let’s hit Remote 10 on our way back. If we’re running short of time we can skip it, but I don’t want to miss Ramsey and Beardmore.”

  “Is that all right with everyone?” Steve asked. “Good. Let’s get our stuff. I’ll come back here to pick up our breakfast; the rest of you meet at the helicopter.”

  In their room again Penny felt a bit breathless as she and Jeanne pulled on their anoraks and wind-pants and struggled with their mukluks. “Steve really moves fast, doesn’t he?”

  “He and Tim have been itching for this,” Jeanne said. “So have Will and I. It wouldn’t be so bad if the telemetry from the remotes was reliable. But when you know you’ve got almost two months’ worth of data out there on tape, and you can’t get at it — God!”

  “Are you feeling all right now?”

  Jeanne gave her a cold blue stare. “I wouldn’t go if I weren’t up to it.”

  Fully dressed, their faces smeared with sunburn cream, they went down the service corridor to Tunnel C — to avoid the men in Eunuchsville who were just getting up — and through the labs to the cold porch that led to Tunnel D.

  This was Shacktown’s main thoroughfare, from which everything else branched off. Tunnels A, B and C, and the hangar, were north of it. South was Tunnel E, sealed off by heavy doors and over five hundred metres long; at its end was the reactor facility. Smaller tunnels led to the snow mine, seismograph arrays and climatologist Sean McNally’s ‘oubliette’ — a narrow shaft, almost seventy metres deep, down to the ice that had been fresh snow during the climatic optimum of the early Middle Ages.

  Tunnel D was garishly lit by fluorescent lamps. The floor was duckboards, glittering with frost but safer than bare ice. Along both sides of the wide tunnel, the walls were piled with supplies: crates of food, spare mechanical parts, surplus wiring and furniture and insulation. At its western end the tunnel led up a broad ramp to the hangar itself; alongside the ramp a flight of stairs gave access to a big hut just inside the hangar: this was the machine shop. Jeanne and Penny bypassed it and went up the ramp.

  Temperatures in the tunnels usually stayed between -10°C and -15°C. The hangar, now that its outer doors were open, was probably closer to -25°C. Its floor was ice, discoloured by spilled gas and diesel fuel; the place stank. Crowded under its high, curved roof was a collection of unlikely vehicles: Sno-Cats, snowmobiles, a big D8 bulldozer and a smaller D4, and an ancient green Nodwell tractor that looked like a truck with caterpillar treads. The Twin Otter and the Huey took up a good deal of space. The women said hello to Howie O’Rourke, a big, taciturn Canadian mechanic who was working on the Otter; he paused long enough to nod shyly at them.

  They reached the Huey as it was being winched outside. Will and Tim Underwood, a student seismologist, were walking along beside it, throwing gear inside: explosives, geophones, bamboo and aluminium marker poles, survival packs and an insulated box containing the breakfast Terry had prepared for them. As the cold bit at her face, Penny felt a twinge of envy: if you wore a beard and moustache, as most of the men here did, they frosted up rather prettily. If you had a hairless upper lip, it soon acquired a lump of frozen mucus from your runny nose.

  “Where’s Steve?” Jeanne asked.

  “He’s already inside. Up you go,” Will smiled, helping her through the door. Penny followed, and found the rest of the party in the passenger compartment. Steve and Al were discussing the flight plan; then they went forward to the flight compartment while the others buckled themselves in and pulled on light helmets, which were plugged into the helicopter’s intercom. As she fumbled with her camera, Penny heard Al’s voice in her headphones, a parody drawl:

  “Ah tole ’um, ah said, “Orville an’ Wilbur, you all will nevuh git that thang off of the ground.” Ah did. An ah still thank those boys shoulda stuck to bah-sickles. Ah do. Ain’t nobody evuh crashed in thuh Annoctic on a bah-sickle. Idnat right? Nevuh!”

  The helicopter lifted off in a cloud of dust-fine snow, gained altitude, and tilted away towards the mountains.

  Chapter 2 – Beardmore

  In the upside-down world of the Antarctic, where the sun shone all day in December and winter was in July, it made a kind of sense to Penny that directions should be reversed as well. Have you travelled by ‘the Grid’, an arbitrary act of cartography. On the Grid the North Pole was in mid-Atlantic, the South Pole in the Pacific and the equator ran through the true South Pole. To fly from Shack
town to the mainland, they would be going Grid North; this afternoon Al would fly Grid South to Ross Island, where McMurdo Station and its airstrip, Williams Field, were located. Penny reminded herself of this change in bearings as Shacktown fell away below them and swung out of the field of vision.

  The mountains ahead stood out with unnatural sharpness in the clear air. But, from an altitude of almost a kilometre, Penny could see that the weather was already changing. The sky was still cloudless, but patches of ice fog had begun to form over the Shelf and around the glacier mouths.

  God, if the weather breaks before we can evacuate, I’ll go nuts.

  She pushed the thought out of her mind and squinted through the window. With each moment, the view changed: shadows on the Shelf and the mountains went from deep blue to black to purple; snow was an impossibly pure white one instant and a rich cream the next. The glaciers were densely textured, their surfaces patterned with countless crevasses and tinted blue, green, amber, mauve and black. Penny took a few pictures, though it was clumsy to handle the camera while wearing heavy mittens.

  The flight to the first remote was brief. They landed on a shelf of bare, pinkish-beige rock near the mouth of Ramsey Glacier. The remote was a small prefab hut, bolted to the rock. A small windmill, its blades scarcely turning, rose from the roof of the hut, and there was also an antenna array made useless by the radio blackout.

  They stepped out into silence. The helicopter’s rotors murmured into stillness; mukluks scuffed on the smooth rock. Otherwise there was a quiet such as few people ever experience. It seemed much colder here than at the station; Penny’s eyes began to water at once, and a tear froze halfway down her cheek. Her nose began to run again, and she appreciated the absorbent backs of her bear-paw mitts. Her nostrils hurt, and when she tried breathing through her mouth, the air made her fillings ache.

  “Welcome to the Dufek Coast,” Steve said to Penny. “Let’s get inside.”

  Will and Jeanne, however, would have to stay outside for a while. They collected their gear and set out down the slope to the glacier’s edge less than a hundred metres away. Up this close, it looked dingy and grey, almost like old city snow. The surface was rough, with many sastrugi and ice thrusts taller than a man. It was impossible, as Will and Jeanne were demonstrating, to take more than four steps without clambering over a hummock or striding across a crevasse.

  After watching them for a minute, Penny turned and followed the rest of the party into the hut. Steve had already turned on the lights and heater.

  “There are over three dozen of these huts all over West Antarctica, and they let us gather a hell of a lot of data,” Steve told her. Most of the hut was taken up with seismographs, tilt-and creep-meter equipment, a small radio and the windmill-charged batteries that powered everything. A double bunk and some shelving gave the hut some value as an emergency shelter as well. Penny slid into the bottom bunk to keep out of the way, while Al climbed into the top one. Steve and Tim studied the equipment.

  “They’re taking forever to set up that damned shot,” Tim growled. He pressed the video outlet of the seismograph, and on its screen watched the tracks made by the glaciologists’ footsteps.

  “As soon as they fire the shot, I’ll collect the tape reel,” Steve said to Tim. “You get the other tapes.”

  “Right.” Tim pulled out the reels that held two months’ worth of seismic and meteorological data. Played back through a computer, they would provide an exquisitely precise account of the movements of earth, ice and air around the hut.

  The video screen erupted into jagged multi-coloured lines as the hut shook from the thump of the shot. Steve pressed a button and the seismograph spat out a strip of paper, the hard-copy record of the shock waves’ path through the ice to the bed of the glacier and back again. He shoved the paper in his anorak pocket, removed the tape reel and replaced it with a new one.

  “At least that’ll record the next three months before it runs out. Let’s go.”

  They all helped Will and Jeanne carry their gear back to the helicopter. After her few minutes of relative warmth inside the hut, Penny felt the cold more than ever.

  “Ice is full of bloody great crevasses,” Will panted as they walked up the slope from the glacier. “We nearly went in a couple of times. The glacier’s moving fast near the bottom, and that breaks up the surface.”

  “How can you tell it’s moving?” Penny asked.

  Will turned and pointed to a fluorescent orange pennant hanging from a bamboo pole some distance down the glacier. “I planted that marker three months ago — beginning of December. It’s moved over a hundred metres downstream. Normally the Queen Maud glaciers travel less than half that distance in three months — they’re doing well to cover three hundred metres in a bloody year.” He laughed as they threw the geophones into the helicopter. “Maybe that’s your famous surge right there, Steve.”

  “Maybe.” Steve didn’t look amused. “But I doubt it.”

  He really did have a bee in his bonnet about surges, Penny thought. Up to a point she could buy his arguments. He had recorded ‘seismic swarms’ in the Queen Maud Range for two years running now — micro-earthquakes that often foreshadowed a major quake. As far back as the late ’50s, the Kiwis and others had recorded similar tremors around Ross Island; they’d called them ‘icequakes’ on the assumption that they were caused by big tabular icebergs calving off the edge of the Shelf. Will and Jeanne had found unusual amounts of radon gas dissolved in the sea water under the Shelf — another sign, though not a reliable one, that a quake was imminent. The freshness of the water under the Shelf also indicated that more ice than usual was melting under the ice sheet and leaking down under the glaciers into the sea. But that ice sheet was up to three kilometres thick; as Tim had said in one argument with Steve, expecting a quake to move that immense mass was like expecting a gnat to push the meringue off a pie with one shove. Steve had laughed at that, but he hadn’t changed his mind.

  They followed the mountains Grid East for two hundred kilometres, past bare brown mountain slopes and blinding glaciers. The ice fog was thickening, obscuring much of the Shelf off to their right, but the peaks of the Queen Maud Range stood out sharply against the deep, empty blue of the sky. The helicopter curved around Mount Kyffin, an ice-drowned island, and then they were over the Beardmore.

  “My God,” Penny said.

  Will, sitting beside her, smiled as if he owned it. “Bloody gorgeous, isn’t it?”

  In its length and breadth it dwarfed the mountains. From the polar plateau to the Shelf, the Beardmore was two hundred kilometres long and thirty wide; when the helicopter was halfway across it, the mountains on either side seemed like children’s sand castles, about to be swept away by the tide. The surface of the glacier was a multi-coloured jumble, streaked by long bands of darkness: crushed rock, ground away from mountainsides and carried down by tributaries. Crevasses yawned up at the sky, wide and deep enough to swallow a super-tanker without a trace. Across the monstrous labyrinth of that cracked and mottled surface, an endless wind screamed down from the Pole, carrying ground drift that made the whole glacier seem to be moving.

  The sheer scale of it made Penny feel shrunken. If mountains could be overwhelmed and ground to dust by such a torrent of ice, of what significance were human beings? Scott and Shackleton, and their men and ponies, had somehow fought their way up and down that glacier; Scott had been grateful for such a highway to the Pole. Penny thought they must have been mad. Against such blind mass and inertia, courage and intelligence and resolve were no more than the buzzing of a mosquito as it flew to meet an avalanche.

  The helicopter crossed the glacier. On the far side, a nunatak — a mountain peak half-buried in ice — rose near the mouth of Garrard Glacier, a tributary of the Beardmore. They landed on a lonely outcrop of black rock on the shoulder of the nunatak, and fifty metres from a small yellow hut identical to the one at Ramsey. Al and Steve came into the passenger compartment.

  “Here
we are,” Al bellowed over the continuing roar of the engine. “I’m going to try to contact Shacktown for a weather report. Be with you in a few minutes.”

  It was even colder here than at Ramsey, and Al kept the rotors turning slowly to prevent the engines from freezing up. Again Will and Jeanne went straight out onto the ice while the others hurried into the hut.

  Soon it was warm enough for them to shed at least their anoraks. Steve sat on a little table and unpacked the breakfast, while Penny and Tim crowded into the lower bed of the double bunk. The equipment hummed and chattered.

  “What an ideal spot for a picnic,” Penny said.

  “Not many flies,” Tim agreed. He looked around the cramped, windowless little room. “You know, I must be crazy, but I’m going to miss this whole lousy continent.”

  “It gets in your blood,” Steve said. “Well, we’ll be back next year.”

  She felt a brief, irrational envy of them all. Then she remembered the stink and squalor of Shacktown. God, that was too high a price to pay for some spectacular scenery.

  Al burst in, a grim expression on his face.

  “Get through?” Steve asked.

  “I got McMurdo, not Shacktown. Just for a minute. They’re having an eruption.”

  “A what?” Tim asked after a shocked moment.

  “Mount Erebus is erupting — has been since early yesterday.”

  Penny remembered Erebus. She’d seen it as their plane approached Ross Island, a huge, gnarled mountain with a thick plume of steam trailing from its peak. McMurdo and its suburb, Scott Base, stood at the foot of the volcano, just where the edge of the Shelf met the waters of McMurdo Sound.

  “Most of it’s coming from the summit,” Al went on, “but there’s a new vent right on the shore, a few kilometres past Scott Base. They’re getting great chunks of rock falling all around them. A Coast Guard ice-breaker in the Sound was hit last night and went right to the bottom. They’ve closed down Inner Willy.” That was Williams Field, the airstrip bulldozed into the surface of the Shelf; an auxiliary strip, Outer Willy, was twenty or thirty kilometres Grid North of Ross Island.