Antarctica

by Gabrielle Walker

  Still, if you look for long enough, over a wide enough area, you can sometimes catch a neutrino in the act. Once in a very rare while a cosmic neutrino will crash into something—an atom of air, say, or of ice—and spit out another particle called a muon, which announces its presence with a tiny burst of blue light. Measuring this light will tell you exactly what direction the neutrino was coming from and how much energy it had. And that in turn will give a hefty clue about where and how it was created.

  The problem is that cosmic neutrinos aren’t the only things that create muons. In fact, the sky is filled with the wrong kind of muons. For every tiny burst of blue light from a genuine intergalactic messenger, there are a billion flashes from common- or-garden cosmic rays. Picking out that one in a billion is all but impossible.

  What’s really clever about both AMANDA and Ice Cube is that they were designed not to look up, but to look down. The idea is to use the Earth’s rocky body as a sort of gigantic sieve. Of all the useless muons generated in the far-off northern skies, only one in a million will make it through the centre of the Earth to this, the southern side. But all the neutrinos will slip through unscathed. Now the odds are more favourable. Using Earth as a filter means that you generate one special neutrino-derived muon for every thousand dud ones. And those are the kinds of numbers that astronomers can handle.

  The strings of detectors that make up Ice Cube would be sunk down more than a kilometre and a half, to reach the depths where the dark ice was at its purest and most transparent. It would cost $270 million, so much, in fact, that it required its own line in the Congressional budget (though the researchers point out on their website that, if you count in the ice as well, this amounts to a mere twenty-five cents per tonne).

  When it is fully operating, Ice Cube should pick up several hundred cosmic neutrinos a year, which should be enough to do some exciting physics. In a way, neutrinos are the latest in a long line of new ways of seeing the Universe. Prehistoric humans started off by looking at the visible light that shone from the stars; since then we have invented ways to pick up X-rays, gamma rays, radio, microwaves and now neutrinos; and each new way of looking told us more about the sky above us. The more literary of Ice Cube’s proponents are fond of quoting from Marcel Proust: ‘The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.’

  Unlike Tony Stark, I sensed that both Robert and Steffen cared about the landscape and the experience of the Pole at least as much as the science itself. In the end both of them told me certain stories about their experiences, but they were also guarded. They didn’t particularly want to share. During all our conversations, the message came through loud and very clear. They would readily tell me about the cold of an Antarctic winter, but not about its heart.15

  South Pole winter, March-May

  When the darkness has finally fallen, and the temperatures are too cold for skidoos, the only way to get to the Dark Sector is to trudge. The walk takes twenty minutes, maybe half an hour, in pitch black, as winds rise to 20, 30 or 40 knots and the temperature falls to mind-numbing depths. The telescope nannies will make this return trek at least once a day, sometimes twice. And that’s just fine with them. ‘Some years ago they talked about making a tunnel to the Dark Sector,’ Steffen says. ‘No way. We like to commute.’16

  The snow crunches under your feet. Construction workers often just wear normal work boots to dash between buildings; then the snow sticks to the soles and quickly accumulates into a dense ice layer, turning the boots into towering tap shoes. But for the journey out to the Dark Sector you need bunny boots, which slough off the snow, and have a trapped layer of insulating air to keep out the cold in all but the worst conditions.

  As the temperature slips down towards -76°F you start to hear your breath freezing. The sound is like blowing softly through into a piece of paper held up to your face, and making it reverberate. Hhhhhhwwwwwoooohhh. And your breath hangs in the air as a frozen cloud of ice blocking your view. If you’re working outside you have to blow to one side, and then work for a little while, and then blow to one side, and then work again.

  And all the time you are watching out for the signs of frost nip, the milder cousin of frostbite. Frost nip is basically a burn, but it’s impressive how much it hurts. First your skin goes white and numb and then, when the blood rushes back in, you feel as if someone has hit your hand hard with a hammer, or as if an elephant has crushed your toes.

  If you ignore the frost nip long enough it will become frostbite, the stuff that blackens your skin and takes first your fingers and toes and then entire limbs. When you finally make it to the Dark Sector buildings, people will inspect your face and hands for white patches. You’re supposed to look out for each other. Frost nip is not something to take lightly. ‘At home in the mountains you might get a bit numb,’ says Steffen, ‘but you won’t start losing body parts.’

  If anything, the darkness is easier to deal with than the cold. When dark stops defining night-time and becomes omnipresent it can almost be comforting. People call it enveloping, like a benign blanket. And if you’re an astronomer, chances are you’re going to be excited to see the night sky, the Southern Cross almost stationary overhead, and the other constellations seeming bigger and brighter than they do farther north. Whatever you do, don’t get into the habit of using a headlamp. They just give you tunnel vision, blinding you to anything that’s not in your immediate field of view. Instead, let your eyes adjust. The starlight is enough to help you feel your way; you get to recognise the landmarks, the dim outlines of the buildings, the shapes of the snowdrifts that redefine the landscape after every big storm. And when the moon is full, it lights up the snow like quicksilver. It’s almost dazzling. You could read a newspaper outside.

  If you’re lucky on your daily commute you will see the other great reward for braving the darkness and cold: Antarctica’s glorious light show. Just as in the far north, the south polar skies are periodically filled with the dancing colours of the southern lights, the aurora australis. Auroras can come and go at whim, but after a while you start to get a feel for it, like farmers looking at the sky and saying how the weather will be. Perhaps there will be a slight streak of green, a patch that will deepen and then grow. Then another patch on the horizon, like a green searchlight. And then shivering curtains of light can fill the sky, or looping spirals, or flickering flames of green and purple, and candy-apple red. It feels as if they should be accompanied by dramatic sounds, the bangs of fireworks or the roar of rockets. But these are utterly silent, almost solemn in their dancing. And yet they can be comforting in their own way; as if in this remote and frozen wilderness there’s something else out there that is alive.

  Inside MAPO and the other Dark Sector buildings the biggest problem, stupid as it sounds, is cooling. To enable the telescope dishes to sweep their eyes around the sky with pinpoint accuracy requires banks and banks of electronics racks, their rears sporting a mad tangle of multi-coloured spaghetti wires. These pump out massive amounts of heat, which the dry air of the polar plateau is very poor at soaking up.

  The next thing you have to worry about is sparking static. Thin, dry, cold air is also a very poor conductor of electricity and as you shuffle along the carpeted floors you will be building up static charge that leaps from your fingers in a shocking blue arc, like a bolt from Harry Potter’s wand, as soon as you touch anything metallic. This is a perennial problem throughout the station, and some parts are particularly prone to it. The metal doorknob on the library in the Dome was a particularly sore spot. It got me every time.

  But here in MAPO you’ll get more than just a jolt. The sparks are strong enough to break delicate electronic equipment. They can wipe out a laptop with one touch. You need to get into the habit of discharging yourself constantly by touching anything metal that you see. This can quickly become so ingrained that you find yourself doing it back home, obsessively touching anything metal that you pass, while your friends cast odd glances behi
nd your back.

  It’s easy to forget the dramas behind the star-bursting, cosmic-scale science when you settle into your daily telescope routines. The first thing to do is probably to download data and check that everything is working. Usually something will have broken and need to be fixed. If you’re lucky, whatever’s broken will be inside. But you’ll still have to pull your gear back on and head outside, to brush blown snow off the detectors and check that everything is intact.

  For that, the hardest part is keeping your hands warm, especially if you are working on some delicate task for which clumsy mittens are hopeless. Robert calls himself a ‘soldering iron and wrench physicist’ and for the sort of mechanical fixes he needs to do on equipment and cables he wears three layers of thin gloves; but even so after less than a minute his hands start feeling painfully cold. And below -67°F soldering irons don’t get hot enough, and cables become rigid and brittle, and can snap beneath your hands. Something that indoors would take a few minutes to mend can end up taking hours.

  But still, you mustn’t stay out too long, and above all never lose sight of the flag line. Nick Tothill was telescope nanny for AST/RO last winter and he has no patience with complacency: ‘We are here on sufferance. Sure we can heat things, we can create our little environments and we can make stuff work, but . . . you don’t even need stupidity or carelessness to die here. You can just be unlucky and it can still kill you. It’s a really hostile environment. Most of the time we do a good job of ignoring that. Scott would have made it back if he’d just had a bit more luck.

  ‘I’d be uncomfortable thinking that somehow I had matched myself against the power of Antarctica and emerged victorious. It’s more like I came down here for a year, and Antarctica never quite got round to swatting me like a bug, because it could. There were about three times over the winter when I got turned around out there in the dark; I made it back but it’s not that difficult to imagine how I could have missed my way entirely and died of exposure. One time I got turned around 180 degrees and ended up at the station when I thought I was heading towards the Dark Sector. It took me about three hours to go back outside again because, while I was sitting there telling people about it and laughing, part of me was thinking: “it wouldn’t have been that difficult for me to be dead right now”. You can’t fight Antarctica, you can only hope that it doesn’t try to kill you.’

  In all the fifty-plus years that people have spent winters at the Pole, nobody has yet died of the cold; but one person’s death in the winter there has cast a pall over all subsequent crews. Rodney Marks was an Australian astronomer, working out in the Dark Sector with the other telescope nannies in the winter of 2000. He was taken ill very suddenly; nobody knew why. The doctor put out a call for the trauma team; they tried to resuscitate him but he just . . . died. Was it food poisoning? Some strange illness? The doctor had to take samples for an eventual autopsy. Rodney’s body lay out under one of the frozen arches on a banana sled, until the carpenters made him a coffin and some of the guys buried him in the snow near the Pole, and planted an Australian flag to mark the spot.17

  This much is easy to glean from the official reports that came out afterwards. The cause of death is also a matter of record: he had died from methanol poisoning. Rodney used methanol all the time in his lab. But he was smart enough to know that methanol was poisonous, he had plenty of access to normal alcohol if he wanted it and he wasn’t behaving remotely like someone who had tried to commit suicide. The death remains a mystery. His parents have given up hope of finding out what happened. The only thing that’s really clear is that it had a profound effect on the winterers that year. Nick Tothill, who wasn’t present, advised me not to probe any deeper about Rodney. ‘Nobody will talk to you about it,’ he said.

  However foolish it might be to imagine that you are pitting yourself against the continent, it seems at first as if machismo is a fundamental part of what draws people, especially support workers, south.You don’t have to be on the ice long to discover that there is a strict pecking order according to how much ‘ice time’ you have put in. It’s not just a question of how many months, or how many seasons. It also matters exactly where you did your ice time. Palmer Station, off on the balmy Antarctic Peninsula, is considered to be a holiday camp. McMurdo is better, but the Pole is best, and winters at the Pole are best of all.

  In his book Big Dead Place, Nicholas Johnson has this to say about the implicit hierarchy among support workers in the US Antarctic Program: ‘Though Polies probably do have the most lucrative bragging rights, swaggering one-upmanship is common at every level of The Program. If you’ve only done one summer, you are a fingee [which stands for ‘fucking new guy/girl’]. If you do multiple summers you haven’t done a winter. When you do a winter . . . then you haven’t done multiple winters. If you’ve done multiple winters, you haven’t been to Pole. If you’ve done a summer at Pole, you haven’t done a winter at Pole. If you’ve done a winter at Pole, you haven’t done multiple winters at Pole. And, finally, once you’ve done multiple winters at Pole, you are afraid to leave Antarctica because you’ll have to pay for food and look both ways when crossing the street.’18

  By these criteria it was evident from the moment I touched down at the Pole who was the real king of the ice. Forget the current station leader, the biggest baddest man in town was one Jake Speed. I’d had him pointed out to me with a nudge as he crossed the galley surrounded, usually, by a gaggle of acolytes. Other people stepped respectfully aside to let him pass. He was tall and strong looking, in his mid-thirties but with a boyish face, a neat brown Jesus beard and long pony tail. He had spent five winters at the South Pole. And not just that, he had done his five winters in a row19. Ten months at the Pole, a hasty couple of months back in the north, and then back again for another long dark stint. Five times over, without ever taking a single one off. Jake Speed was The Man. And to prove it, I noticed with irritation, he chose to wear battered old Carhartts, which he no doubt stored each year to retrieve the following winter. ‘Your clothes are new and shiny’, this seemed to say, ‘because you are not an old hand here. But I am a rugged and experienced Antarctic explorer. Look and see how old my gear is. And weep.’

  I’d have to talk to him, I knew. But I kept putting it off. Eventually, a previous station leader, Bill Henrickson, caught me on my way somewhere and pulled me aside. ‘Talk to Jake,’ he urged. ‘He’ll play the clown, but if you can get him to open up to you, I think you’ll find something important. He’s a very deep thinker.’ I thought of the pretentious Carhartts and had my doubts. But that evening I went up to where he was sitting on a bar stool and politely asked if I could interview him. To my surprise (and, it later turned out, to his), he agreed. I was about to discover that in my initial hasty judgements of him I couldn’t have got him more wrong.

  I met Jake later that night in his shack, an insulated cabin a short walk from the Dome. It was full of bits of half-mended equipment, nuts, bolts and cables. A notice board was crammed with postcards from far-off places and scraps of paper bearing legends that I couldn’t quite read; the only one that stood out enough to catch my eye as I sat down said this: ‘All you’ve gotta do is . . . be excellent to your fellow man.’ Jake poured us each a whisky and lit a cigarette. He was nervous. We both were.

  We started with the easy stuff. Jake Speed wasn’t his real name—he was born Joseph Gibbons, but acquired this nickname along the way. He grew up near Taho in California in a vaguely hippy family, and as soon as he was old enough to leave home he found spectacular ways to exhibit an almost pathological restlessness. After six years of roaming the world with the US Merchant Marine, he then walked the entire length of Australia; he walked across China; travelled from Panama up to the north of Canada, all under his own steam. By the time he reached the Pole he had travelled to thirty countries, and it was years since he had spent more than six weeks in any one spot.

  And yet, when he stepped on to the ice, he was thunderstruck: ‘I fell in love as soon as I g
ot off the fucking plane,’ he said. ‘I came down through the entrance to the Dome, I was looking at the arches and all the crystals there and some snow cat was driving by and I thought oh my God this is it! This is so, so cool. It’s dynamic, it’s beautiful, it’s frontier, it’s all the things that really turn me on.’

  OK, I got that. It was a striking place and from the little I knew about Jake I could see why it would appeal. But why then spend so many winters here? For someone this restless, why would he choose to spend one winter trapped at the Pole, let alone five? ‘Wintering is just really enticing,’ he replied. ‘It’s a relief to be in a place where you don’t have any other options. There are very few times in anybody’s life when they are really that locked into a situation that they can’t get out of. A lot of people haven’t taken a good hard look at themselves before, and there in the middle of winter, that’s what they’re faced with. There is no place to go here. You have to deal. You do deal.’

  So perhaps if you had been running from one place to another all your adult life, the attraction of this place was that you had to stop. For those months when the planes weren’t flying, you had no choice, and maybe that helped you find peace. But it also meant you were forced to put the rest of your life on hold, with no chance to change your mind. Most people couldn’t do that. ‘It’s hard to carve ten months out of your life to spend a winter here,’ I suggested, carefully. He paused. ‘That’s an interesting perspective but it’s not one that I share,’ he said. ‘I’m not carving ten months out of my life to be here during the winter, I’m carving out two months to be away every year when they kick me out.’