In Cold Pursuit

by Sarah Andrews

  “Well, they’re hurrying,” said Peter. “That means he’s still breathing. But what was he doing clear out around the point? I mean, even if you’re confused from some kind of injury, you don’t wander that far.” He shook his head. “I don’t know Steve except to say hi, but he seemed a reasonably smart man. Better than smart. In fact, he used to be a pharmacist.”

  Valena cocked her head in question.

  Peter chattered on. “Oh, yeah, you get all kinds down here. PhDs driving Cats just to be here. People get jealous of me because I’m actually doing what I was trained for.” He smiled shyly and looked intently into her eyes, as if mapping her.

  Uncomfortable with this scrutiny, Valena turned toward the cross that dominated the top of the hill. “So this is a monument to Sir Robert Falcon Scott,” she said.

  “Oh yeah. Right. He didn’t make it. Died just a hundred miles or so out there on the ice shelf, coming back from the pole.”

  “They didn’t have helicopters back then.”

  “Or radios to call for help. Or McMurdo Station, for that matter.”

  They stood shoulder to shoulder, looking down at the amphitheater of buildings, Quonset huts, gravel roads, fuel tanks, miscellaneous vehicles, and layout yards that was McMurdo. “What a strange place,” said Valena. “It’s kind of like a mining camp, only without the mine.”

  “Oh, it’s ugly as hell, there’s no way around that. But we call it home.”

  Valena turned her attention back toward the far distance from whence the helicopter had returned. “What’s out there, anyway?”

  “There’s a flag route leading around to the north toward Cape Evans and Cape Royds, with a fork continuing straight west to the Penguin Ranch. Beyond that there’s a drilling project… something about the ocean floor.”

  “The ANDRILL Project,” Valena said.

  “Yeah.”

  “They’re gathering data from the sediments that are dropped by the ice as it slides off the edge of the continent. The ice carries all sorts of clues about climate variation.”

  “That’s what you’re doing here, right? Gathering climate data from the ice?”

  “Yes. When we get our core back to the States we’ll analyze the stable isotopes of oxygen and hydrogen in the water, the gasses caught in the bubbles, and also the fine dust that settled out of the air into the ice.” She began to walk back down along the trail, descending the hill.

  “Peter followed her. I didn’t know that there were different isotopes of oxygen and hydrogen in water,” he said.

  “Oh, yes, there are,” she said, bending down to tighten the laces on the soft FDX boots in the hope that her feet would not slide forward inside them. “Most of the O in the H2O that makes up the snow that recrystallizes to form all this ice is good old oxygen 16—eight protons and eight neutrons—but a small percentage of oxygen has extra neutrons, making oxygen 18, which is heavier. The thing is, the ratio between the two—how much 16 versus 18—is governed by the temperature of the clouds from which the snow falls.”

  Peter said, “Oh, I get it. You can figure out when the global climate was warmer and when it was cooler by measuring that ratio.”

  Valena shrugged. “The isotope ratios are a proxy for temperature. It’s simple physics. The laws of thermodynamics. The hydrogen in the water molecule is a slightly different story. Hydrogen typically has just one proton, but sometimes two. We call that deuterium. How much deuterium you find in the ice is a reflection of the temperature of the water that evaporated to form the cloud. So by analyzing the isotopes in the ice, you can read the surface temperature of the ocean waters up in the tropics where the water left the ocean and entered the atmosphere as vapor.”

  “So even though you drill in Antarctica, it’s not just about Antarctica.”

  Valena laughed. “Why would the taxpayers who are paying for this research care how cold it is in the middle of Antarctica? We chose the WAIS Divide site because it will give us a global record. We’ll study the dust in the ice to figure out where it came from and how hard the wind was blowing. That tells us about atmospheric circulation patterns throughout this hemisphere. The amount of salt tells us how far into the ocean the sea ice extended around Antarctica, another indicator of ocean currents and global temperature. Organic compounds tell us about marine productivity in the southern oceans. The chemical and optical properties of summer snow and winter snow are different, so we can make measurements on the ice core that identify each annual layer of snowfall. It’s like counting tree rings, really old tree rings. But the gasses, they rock.”

  “Gas in the ice?”

  “Yeah, when the old snow gets buried by the new snow, it gets compacted into ice. The gas that was in the snow, like twenty percent of the volume, gets trapped in the ice. Grind up the ice, free the ancient air. You can study methane, CO2, nitrogen, free oxygen. The ice is the only way to get pristine samples of the ancient atmosphere.”

  “You’re going to do all that?”

  “Not me alone. It takes a team of twenty PIs, each with their own research team and lab, working for years to pull this off. We’re just getting started.”

  Valena was enjoying sharing her enthusiasm with Peter. He was easygoing and sweet, a soothing companion, and talking about her research topic moved her out of her tangled emotions and into the pleasure of the mind.

  They reached the bottom of the hill and began to stroll back down the road that led toward the center of McMurdo. Valena said, “There are people here who study the way the ice flows off the continent. That’s important because we need to know how fast it moves, so we can know how quickly the ice that’s on the land can flow off into the ocean, and what influences that. Just recently, we at last have really good and complete satellite imagery of the entire continent, but just as we’re really getting things dialed in, NASA gets funding cuts and we can’t get as good coverage to monitor the ice movement, or how fast it’s retreating. It’s all very frustrating.”

  “Budget cuts. Not good.”

  “Right, and there are people who’d prefer that we not spend even as much as we are to study these things, or who don’t believe there’s any point in it.”

  “I’ve heard the argument that the additional greenhouse gasses are a very small percentage.”

  “Sure. Greenhouse gasses always exist in the atmosphere—heck, you and I are exhaling CO2 right now—but it’s that percentage that is added by burning gasoline in our cars or coal to fire electric power plants that makes a profound difference in how much heat is trapped. And right now, the US and China are building several times as many coal-fired plants as we’ve had in the past, and each one is bigger and is going to burn more coal. We’ve learned to scrub the particulates out of the stacks, but still they will emit CO2. Tons and tons and tons of it. And per BTU generated, coal throws a lot more carbon into the atmosphere than other fuels.”

  “That’s not good.”

  “That, in fact, is bad. They argue also that the global temperature has been rising for other reasons, such as the natural oscillations caused by things like the earth’s orbit and that’s true. Either way, we need to know as much as we can about climate so that we can plan accordingly. During the ten thousand years that our species has gone from a bunch of hunter-gatherers to crop raisers to industrialists and from a world population of a few million to six billion, the climate has been unusually benign, making all that crop growing and industrialism possible. The likelihood that it would continue that way was low. The likelihood that the climate would become less predictable is high. But why kick it over the moon? Answer me that.”

  They were approaching Crary Lab, and they stopped to talk in the middle of the road in front of it. “Because they either don’t believe it’s going to make a difference or because they don’t care, I guess,” Peter offered.

  “I can think of a third possibility.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Because they don’t know. And that’s my job. To come up with the facts a
nd take them to the people, so they’ll all make wiser, better-informed decisions.” Impulsively, she reached out and tapped the front of his parka. “And people like you, whose job it is to make us all more efficient in the way we heat and cool buildings, can not only figure out how to use less fossil fuels but also make decisions about other ways to heat buildings so we can quit using fuels that throw CO2 into the atmosphere.”

  Peter considered this. “You keep talking about CO2. How about the methane?”

  Valena rolled her eyes. “Well, first, CO2 is the bigger problem, simply by volume, and second, it’s darned hard to persuade people to give up dairy products or to put methane scrubbers on cows. That’s the major source of methane emissions that humans can influence. Landfills would be second.”

  Peter leaned toward her, incredulous. “Cows?”

  Valena grinned. “Bossy and Bessie, you bet. Factory dairy farms are a big deal. The factory farms are also a problem because of their impact on groundwater. And once they foul up one area, they move them to another and foul that up, too.”

  “How do you know all of this?”

  “I spent a lot of time on a farm when I was a kid. And I did an internship with an environmental firm in California during college, just to make sure which way I wanted to go for graduate school. My undergraduate degree was in geology.”

  “And you decided to go into climatology.”

  “Glaciology. For climatology you have to put together oceanography, atmospheric science, geology—”

  “Geology?”

  “Yeah, so you know how the continents move, which strongly influences—”

  “The continents move?”

  Valena opened her mouth to say yes, but then saw the twinkle in Peter’s eyes and instead swatted him across one shoulder with a mitten. “What are you, a flat-earther?”

  “I am the center of the universe. Didn’t I mention that?”

  “Come on inside Crary, and I’ll show you dinosaur and fern fossils found underneath all this ice that prove that the continents move, Bishop Ussher.”

  “Who’s Bishop Ussher?”

  “A sixteenth-century monk who calculated the age of the earth from Biblical scripture. He came up with October 23, 4004 BCE. And then we can discuss the way particulate pollutants have dimmed the earth.”

  Peter’s eyes were twinkling again. “You’re into lots of thinky stuff, aren’t you, Valena?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  One of the heavy steel doors on the front of Crary Lab opened and a woman came out. “Hey, Peter!”

  Peter turned around. “Oh, Doris! I saw the helicopter come in. It looked like they took Steve to the hospital. And I heard they found his tractor not far from the runway, so I mean, wow, how’d he get clear out there?”

  Doris shrugged. “I don’t know. We’ll have to wait until he regains consciousness. It doesn’t look good.”

  14

  AN E-MAIL FROM TAHA HESAN WAS WAITING FOR Valena when she checked the computer at Crary Lab.

  Hello Valena,

  I know nothing that you do not. I was told only that there was a delay and that I should wait. This is very bad. I have spoken to the president of DRI and he says that everything possible is being done in Emmett’s defense. Emmett has not written to me but I imagine he is very busy with lawyers. They have him in Hawaii. At least that is a long way from New York City, where his accusers have their camp. We must wait and pray. I will write to you if I learn anything more. Meanwhile please work hard in McMurdo to make certain that everything is ready for our field encampment should matters improve.

  Yours most truly,

  Taha

  “Bummer,” Valena whispered under her breath. She glanced at her other messages. The reply from Em Hansen was still there, as were the cheery greetings from her friends back in Colorado. Somehow, these last seemed as insubstantial as frost on the window, far away and separate. She exited the mail program and rose to head down the hallway toward the galley.

  She was swept up into a hubbub of men who were slapping one another on the back. “Yo! My man! Way to go! Hey man, how’d you find him out there?” they were hollering.

  The hero among them was grinning a down-home kind of grin, all aw-shucks and glittering with unconscious pride. He was a hardy-looking man with dark, shining eyes and brilliant white teeth, and as he walked, he rolled his broad chest and muscular shoulders with strength and ease of carriage. When his gaze briefly connected with hers, he blushed, his mahogany tan turning ruddier and the spaces around his eyes that had been protected from tanning by his glacier goggles turning pink.

  Valena looked away. Had he found her features odd or disturbing? So many people stared. It made her feel ugly and increased her sense that she fit exactly nowhere. In this place, where she had somehow hoped to find a break from all that, the strange looks hurt bitterly.

  The crowd swept the man along with them toward the galley. “No shit, Dave,” one of them caroled, “it’s like you’re clairvoyant or something. He’s out there in how many thousand square miles of ice and you drive right to him! He wasn’t even wearing a big red! Shit, man, he was in Carhartts!”

  “Oh, stick it up your butt, Wilbur,” the man said. “Out there, anything that’s not white sticks out like a sore thumb, and he wasn’t all that far from the flag route.”

  The crowd turned the corner. Valena heard additional cheers emanating from the galley. She followed along more slowly and dawdled over washing her hands. When she at last picked up a tray and took her place in the cafeteria line, the ruckus had moved on into the main part of the dining hall. She stood for a while, watching well-wishers journey up to the man named Dave, patting him on his shoulders, scruffing up his hair. He good-naturedly swatted them away.

  “Bunch of sexist wackos,” said someone behind her.

  Valena turned to see who had spoken. It was Cupcake. “Oh, hi,” said Valena. “Guess they found the missing man.”

  “We found the missing man,” said Cupcake. “I was with him in the Challenger. Yeah, he spotted him first, but only because I was scanning the other hundred-eighty degrees of the landscape.”

  “Sorry to hear,” said Valena. “I mean, I don’t like discrimination wherever you find it.”

  Cupcake took a long, candid look at Valena’s face. “I’ll bet you don’t,” she said. “Just what are you, anyway? Quarter black, quarter Asian, quarter Cherokee, and quarter WASP?”

  Valena’s head jerked at the epithet that finished the list. “I haven’t heard that term in a while.”

  “And never attached to you, I’ll bet,” said Cupcake.

  “Excuse me,” said Valena. “Like I said, I despise discrimination.” She set her tray down and left the galley through the door she had entered.

  IT TOOK HALF AN HOUR LYING ON HER BACK ON HER bunk staring at the ceiling for Valena to pull herself together enough to return to the galley. She was extremely hungry, having eaten nothing that day but instant oatmeal, a chocolate bar, cocoa, and half of a stale sandwich, washed down with a six-ounce box of juice that she’d had to whack against her palm to break the frozen parts up into slush so she could suck it through the tiny straw that came with it. After twenty-four hours of exposure to cold at Happy Camp and the hike up Ob Hill, her body screamed for calories, and she reckoned that she was dehydrated.

  Stuffing her feelings behind her best attempt at a game face, she hopped down off her bunk, ran her fingers through her hair, and headed back out to the galley. Once there, she picked up another tray and loaded it with broiled fish and a medley of vegetables that had obviously spent a lot of time in a very large can. She ladled a large wad of mashed potatoes on top of them, doused the whole mess with gravy, and headed for the drinks bar. There she mixed orange with cranberry juice, and in a separate glass, drew a volume of water. She guzzled the first glassful on the spot and then filled it again. Turning, she grabbed a fork, knife, and spoon out of the central island and then turned toward the dining hall.

 
The celebration involving the man named Dave had expanded, and now Cupcake was right in the middle of it. In fact, she had perched herself jauntily on the edge of the table and was giving one of the men a Dutch rub. People were offering her high fives, and one man came along and hoisted her right off the table to give her a squeeze.

  Valena stared out across the room, trying to figure out which way to dodge the party. Suddenly, a man stood up from the first table to her right and waved to her.

  “Hey, Valena!” he hollered. “Over here!”

  It was the mustached guy from the Airlift Wing. He was sitting with the same sleepy-eyed woman firefighter. Valena lowered herself strategically into an open seat that allowed her to keep her back to the party. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I can’t remember your names.”

  “You’ve probably met two hundred people in the few days you’ve been on the ice,” he said. “I’m Hugh, and you’ve met Betty.”

  Betty said, “Here, have some wine. I’m celebrating not being out there searching for that man.” She produced a bottle of New Zealand merlot and a glass and poured three fingers for Valena.

  “Thanks.” Valena settled in and ate several forkfuls of fish and potatoes before risking a sip of the wine. Even under the best of circumstances she was a cheap drunk, and going at it on an empty stomach while dehydrated seemed a bad bet, especially considering her mood. “So he’s going to be okay?”

  Betty said, “He’s out cold, and I do mean cold. The docs have decided to warm him up a bit before they have the marvelous Major Hugh here medevac him to Cheech.”