Blazing Ice

by John H. Wright

  In the still, cold air of a day when the sun simply would not set, we stood on the snow looking east at our job. Build a road across this place. Build it twenty feet wide. Make it safe for tractors and sleds. Search all ground in front with ground penetrating radar. If it detected a void lurking under a bridge, stop. Blow up the bridge. Bulldoze snow into the slot. Fill it. Pack it. Drive over it. Look for the next crevasse. Search and destroy.

  There were four others besides me. Richard “Stretch” Vaitonis, a tall Wisconsin corn farmer, would run the new D8R bulldozer. Shaun Norman, a world-class mountaineer from New Zealand, and American mountaineer Eric Barnes knew alpine crevasses well. Russ Magsig, the mechanic, was the only one among us who had seen the Shear Zone.

  CRREL radar experts were scheduled to join us, but the program’s ponderous deployment process delayed their arrival. We’d trained with them in New Hampshire months earlier. Everything in New England then was green. Working in leafy woods, we practiced finding bedrock cracks in abandoned quarries. We studied printed radar images of hidden crevasses.

  At McMurdo early in October, we cobbled a vehicle-mounted radar platform to a PistenBully. This was a light, ten-thousand-pound snow crawler borrowed from the science fleet. Painted red and black, it looked like a lady bug on tracks. Its cab sat two. Behind the cab, a passenger box could hold four. A twenty-foot-long radio tower from McMurdo’s scrap yards became a prod we pushed in front of the PistenBully. The radar antenna fit to the front of the prod, cushioned off the ground by an inflated inner tube. A cable ran back from the antenna into the cab. It connected to the smart part of the radar device where a computer screen displayed what the antenna saw.

  In tests over known crevasses near McMurdo, one of us drove the Pisten-Bully while another monitored the radar. At seven miles per hour we could detect a crevasse under the antenna and stop the vehicle before it overran the crevasse edge.

  Five days earlier, the McMurdo surveyor came to our Shear Zone camp and planted a line of red flags on bamboo poles. The flags pointed past GAW toward HFS over the horizon. We couldn’t see HFS, even with binoculars. High ground, perhaps a snowdrift or an ice rise, hid our target. But the surveyor’s back sights showed us which way to go.

  There were no more preparations to make. I focused on the enormous whiteness ahead and held back loving visions of my wife, son, and growing family. This was how I made our living for now. There is no other job. This is the job.

  We crossed the imaginary line at GAW and entered the Shear Zone for the first time. We went hunting for crevasses.

  One thinks of ice as a solid substance, not as a dynamic piece of real estate.

  But with masses of ice hundreds of feet thick, the ice at its base turns plastic under the sheer weight of the ice above it. The mass flows like a viscous fluid seeking its own level, impelled by gravity. Ice near the top of the mass does not flow like plastic. It remains brittle, breaking into cracks called “crevasses.”

  A belt of such crevasses stretches seventy-five miles from the tip of Minna Bluff to the tip of Cape Crozier. The belt forms where two floating masses of glacial ice come in contact. These masses are so large they go by the name “ice shelves”: the McMurdo Ice Shelf, the size of a small county, and the Ross Ice Shelf, as big as France. Both are covered by deep snow.

  The ice shelves meet twenty-three miles east of McMurdo. Where they meet, they flow at different speeds and in slightly different directions. As one shelf drags against the other, the ice along their contact shears into crevasses. That is the Shear Zone. And as the two ice shelves flow implacably north, out to sea, new crevasses constantly form in the zone and old ones close.

  The first 640 miles of our route to South Pole led over the Ross Ice Shelf. To get onto the Shelf from McMurdo we had to cross the Shear Zone. If we could cross it, we’d have done plenty this first year.

  The PistenBully crept past GAW. Eric Barnes sat shotgun operating the radar while I drove. Three hundred feet forward … nothing. Another three hundred feet … still nothing. Another, and another. Nothing. I stopped.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “Nothing but flat lines,” Eric confirmed. “Horizontal stratigraphy.”

  At thirty-ish, Eric was the youngest of us, cheerful and astute. He wore a goatee but kept a clean-shaved head. Evident even under his fleece jacket, knotted arm muscles signaled the rugged climber he was. We steadied our nerves, and tried again.

  Three hundred feet more. Nothing. Three hundred feet more. Nothing. Three hundred feet more. Nothing.

  “This is getting ridiculous.”

  “STOP! We got one!”

  We stopped exactly as we’d practiced. The radar screen showed a slender, vertical black image reaching from the bottom of the screen to nearly the top. Our first crevasse hid under the snow, somewhere between the end of the boom and the front of our vehicle.

  “We have one here,” I radioed back to the others waiting at GAW. “Come forward with the ropes and probes. Follow our tracks.”

  Two snowmobiles pulled up behind us. Shaun and Eric roped up like a well-practiced team, tying off to our PistenBully. They probed along the length of the boom, poking their slender metal poles into the snow, looking for a void beneath them. The rest of us watched.

  Shaun shrugged. He was another compactly built mountaineer and, at sixty-ish, the oldest of our group. His weathered face sported a stubble of whiskers, and he too kept his topknot close cropped. Crevasses were nothing new to Shaun. “Could you have been wrong?” he asked.

  We could’ve been. We were not yet experts with the radar.

  Shaun walked back toward the three of us waiting behind the PistenBully. Just in front of the vehicle he tripped and fell forward. “There it is,” he said.

  Shaun’s boots had poked through a thin snow bridge. We looked into the hole and found a vertical crack, six inches wide. We exposed more of the thin crack with shovels, then a long tape measure plumbed it to seventy feet. With the radar we traced its long course, and marked it with a line of black flags.

  “This thing’s just a minnow,” I laughed. “We might as well throw it back in.”

  We named it “Baby,” and that was good enough for now. Then we headed back to in McMurdo to get our PistenBully into the shop, showers for ourselves, and a home-cooked meal. Sunday we’d have another go at it.

  But they wouldn’t all be like Baby. And we didn’t know where they were. If we had some way of looking through all that snow, from up in the air… . If we could map the whole field of crevasses laid out all at once… .

  A wretched blow of foul, horizontal weather pinned us down for two days after we returned to camp. When it blew itself out, a clear line of seven green flags, spaced every three hundred feet, led out from GAW and stopped at the black flags marking Baby. We were safe to that point. Beyond the black flags lay the white sameness.

  Tiptoeing into it, one hundred feet past Baby, the radar found the second crevasse. It lay just south of our road. This time we brought up the drilling and blasting supplies.

  Shaun and Eric rigged ropes and belays. I dragged a pair of wood planks over what we thought was the bridge. If I fell through, the ropes might save me. But I tested the boards, and the snow bridge did not collapse.

  I brought the Jiffy drill back over the boards. Its power head was a two-stroke gasoline engine weighing twenty pounds. It took both hands to run it. The drill chucked five-inch-diameter steel auger bits, each one three feet long and five pounds. I drilled one bit section down, added another, and then drilled down some more.

  At twelve feet deep, my hole had found no void. I lifted the whole string a couple of feet, and then slammed it all back down. It landed on firm bottom. Drilling farther, at fourteen feet the hole broke through, I lurched forward, and fell off of the timbers.

  “There she is.” I regained my footing and withdrew the drill string.

  Four more holes made the five-spot pattern. The first hole made the middle spot, like on a dice, a
nd one more in each corner, five feet to a side. Russ volunteered to drill them, but I needed to see how it went. The whole business was awkward. Ropes in the way. Balancing on the boards.

  After drilling, it was time for blasting. I talked through the next moves while all of us squatted on the snow. “We drilled five-inch holes because we brought out three-inch dynamite. Next time we’ll use the inch-and-a-quarter dynamite and drill two-inch holes with the little power head. Now, this is this end of the stick; this is the other end. The ends are different. This is how you punch holes in the stick, and this is how you lace it with detonating cord …”

  Each one helped assemble the charges, then I carried them back over the boards and lowered them into the holes. We pulled back all our gear to the firing line. I walked one end of the wire from a blasting reel back to the loaded holes. The electric blasting cap I carried was no bigger than a short nub of pencil, and it had two thin wires wrapped around it.

  “Nothing with these explosives is particularly dangerous until I connect this blasting cap with those charges. Each of you will be handling dynamite and detonating cord. Nobody but me handles the blasting cap.”

  After fixing the cap to the detonating cord and connecting the wires, I smiled: “Now let’s see how this will work.”

  Back at the reel, the other end of the blasting wire connected to two brass lugs on a wooden box. The box had a T-shaped handle. Lifting the handle pulled up a toothed metal rod through the box. I explained to Shaun, while demonstrating: “Stand like this, grab the handle like so, and when you hear me say ‘Fire in the hole,’ push the handle down. Hard. Don’t be shy about it.”

  Taking one more look around the place, I started the count: “Blasting in five … four … three … two … one … Fire in the hole!”

  Ka-whammmmm! Bits of snow and ice filled the air, though they didn’t amount to near the volume we had just drilled and shot.

  Shaun roped up after the smoke cleared on surface, and Eric belayed him to the edge of the hole. “The crater’s about eight feet in diameter,” Shaun announced over his shoulder. Peering over the edge once more, he turned back to us, wide-eyed. “Now that’s a hummer! And it’s all black down there, full of smoke.”

  We’d let it air out and have a look into it tomorrow.

  GAW was just a post in the snow the week before. Now we relaxed there in our Shear Zone camp. A carpenter crew had come out from McMurdo and erected a Jamesway tent for us. An olive drab, canvas-covered relic of the Korean War, it would be our shelter for the season. Its insulated skin stretched over wooden arches in the style of a Quonset hut. Ours measured sixteen feet wide by forty-eight feet long. Wooden boxes that contained the tent pieces for transport now formed its plywood floor. Exposed ribs inside the tent caricatured the inner belly of Jonah’s whale.

  The carpenters built in conveniences for which we’d have never thought to ask. A partition inside the tent separated sixteen feet of sleeping space from thirty-two feet of common space. Two dormers in the common room, one on each side, were both fitted with windows. A long, narrow plywood table hung from the arches along one wall. It served as our radio station and catchall working surface. A propane cooking stove fit neatly into one of the dormers. Farther down that wall a fuel-oil heater not only heated the room but also melted snow for drinking and cooking water. At both ends of the tent, vestibules gave us space to sweep snow off our boots and clothing.

  Having several metal folding chairs, tables, and cots, we arranged our inside space to suit us and wound up with a cozy home. The mountaineers, preferring comforts peculiar to their trade, set up their own small field tents apart from the Jamesway.

  We kept our frozen food outside, upwind, in large cardboard boxes covered with shoveled snow. Downwind and off to one side, we located our bucket-equipped privy. Downwind and to the other side, we stationed our bulldozer and camp generator in the lee of the huge steel fuel tank Stretch had skidded out from McMurdo.

  Our camp lay within very high frequency (VHF) radio range of town. Daily we reported our well-being to Mac-Ops, the radio communication center. In case our VHF radios failed, we set up a ultra high frequency (UHF) unit, running its long-wire antennas outside, suspended to the tops of bamboo poles. Sometime later, radio technicians would set us up with a radiophone and e-mail links to McMurdo and the world.

  This was our home for now. At season’s end, it all would vanish, boxed up and carted back to McMurdo. For the time being, we were warm and comfortable in camp, thinking about the “Hummer.”

  Shaun and Erick rappelled into Hummer’s hole while I lay on my belly, peering over the edge. We were all tied off to the PistenBully, its brakes locked and parked a safe distance from the crater.

  “This one measures fourteen feet across at the base of the bridge,” Shaun called up.

  “What does the underside of the bridge look like?” I hollered.

  “It’s arched, and smooth for as far as I can see. Blocky around the shot hole, but I’m not worried. “

  Dangling from the slender rope, Shaun spread his arms to show the direction the fissure took. It ran back toward our road, though our radar had not traced it that far.

  “I want to go to the bottom now. This crack pinches to nothing, but there’s a big pile of snow right below me. Must be the stuff we shot.”

  A person could get wedged tight at the bottom, but Shaun stood safely on the snow pile. I lowered the zero end of our measuring tape. It was three hundred feet long, if we needed all of it.

  “I got it. Take your mark.”

  “Seventy-nine feet,” I hollered loud enough for the others to hear.

  Shaun stood on a fifteen-foot-high pile of snow. That made the overall depth ninety-four feet. From the top of the pile he looked back through the shadowy gloom toward the road. The crevasse ended in that direction like a ship’s prow, eighty feet from where he stood. Shaun described the crevasse walls below the bridge: nearly solid ice, frosty, and bluish.

  “It’s actually quite lovely down here. It is cold. And quiet.” He took pictures for us before he came out.

  We were going to school. If big crevasses could hide right next to us and pinch to nothing a few feet away, how would we know that without going over every square inch of ground? We needed some kind of map to make sense of the place, but those maps didn’t exist. We’d have to make our own.

  Over the next weeks, like blindfolded men probing a chessboard, we groped forward with the radar. Black flags became our pawns. The PistenBully ran down our centerline a tenth of a mile at a time. If we found a crevasse, we stopped and planted a black flag. If we found nothing, we marked the end of that run with a black flag. Then we backed straight in our own tracks, retreating to our starting point, and started another search parallel to our first line. Maybe we found something on this new line, maybe we didn’t. But when we’d searched out a hundred-foot width on both sides of our centerline, the white field before us took a shape we could now see: pickets of black flags marked either a “found” crevasse, or the limits of clear forward progress.

  We parlayed in camp over the meaning of the radar images, our chessboard maps, and how we could do things better. We assigned numbers to the crevasses. Baby became Crevasse 1. Crevasses 2 and 3 lay to the south, and as far as we could tell, neither crossed our road. Beyond those, the radar showed us mysterious black blobs. They didn’t look like crevasse images we’d seen in New Hampshire. But black images meant whatever caused them did not reflect radar back to us, like a void would not. Since real voids were black and shadowy, any black image on the radar conjured that same sort of demon. Some black blobs looked like amorphous amoebas. Many looked like eyes staring back at us.

  We didn’t know what the black blobs were. But we did have tools to look into them: our little drill and a twenty-one-foot string of auger bits to go with it.

  While two of us mapped ahead with the PistenBully, others drilled black blob targets in the middle of our road. We found no voids down where the blobs li
ved. Shrugging, we marked those spots with black flags, called them “questionable areas,” and moved on.

  At the site of Crevasse 4, just beyond the black blobs, our radar identified a distinct crevasse image striking across our path.

  Again, we brought up the explosives and drills. Stretch and Russ drilled the pattern through the snow bridge. Shaun and Eric belayed them. I sat off to the side, preparing the charges, watching the two men drilling. Their first holed through at nine feet. The two-inch holes and little sticks would work fine.

  Everybody helped finish making up the charges and loading the holes. The shot came under a beautiful blue sky, near the end of our day. When the smoke cleared away, Shaun peeked over the crater’s edge.

  “Not so big …”

  By next morning the air inside Crevasse 4 had cleared, and Shaun and Eric explored it.

  This one was only four feet wide. It measured 102 feet deep, and bottomed to a pinch once again. When they came out of the hole, Shaun approached me. “This is a pretty one. What do you say to us taking the others down?”

  “I’d say that is a good idea. Ask if they want to first. I’d like to go.”

  The blueness inside the crevasse was dazzling. The graceful sweeps and curves of the crevasse walls seemed feminine; its space both quiet and close. It seemed anything but treacherous. Seductive perhaps.

  And cold enough that an hour shuttling up and down the ropes ran us out of the hole. We had work to do, and we were much warmer on top. The skies had grown overcast, flattening our light. A light wind brought ground snows swirling around our ankles.

  We needed a slot here, one that measured as long as our road was wide. I’d open the slot by breaking the bridge toward the access hole that we’d just climbed out of, and I laid out the drill pattern to do that. “Russ and Stretch, you guys will drill.”

  With no particular reaction, they nodded in assent.

  “Use the big auger. You won’t have to drill as many holes. Pound for pound, the big stick weighs ten times the little stick and packs that much more wallop.”