Antarctica

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “The old scientists die,” Misha said, kicking Michelson as an example.

  The corners of the moustache lifted. “That’s the point,” he said to Wade. “It’s careers, you see. Whole careers have been given over to the stabilist position. Grad students are getting Ph.D.s, assistant professors are getting tenure, all on the strength of papers advocating the stabilist position. They can’t just admit they were wrong all along. But biostratification is a very solid dating method. So the diatoms are a problem for them. Not to mention the beetles and moss and beech trees.”

  “But what do they say about those?” Wade asked.

  “They say the beech forests are older than fourteen million years, perhaps even Cretaceous. They say the diatoms blew in from elsewhere. They ignore the beetles entirely.”

  “The beetles flew in too,” Misha suggested. “Flew down from Lemuria.”

  Michelson chortled, then raised a finger. “Mostly they ignore us now,” he said. “They concentrate on finding areas that have been dry or covered with ice for more than three million years, which is certainly possible. Even at its warmest there would certainly have been glaciers down here. All we’re saying when we call it warm is that there was liquid water possible for a minimum of five months of the year, which is all that Nothofagus need to survive.”

  “And you’re also saying that the eastern ice cap was gone,” Wade added.

  “Yes, but there would certainly have been glaciers in the higher or more southerly places, probably big glaciers. But the diatoms are sea-bottom diatoms, so there must have been seas. The cap was melted in the Pliocene! It’s the only explanation that works for all the evidence we have. Glaciers in the mountains, and in the permanent shade, sure. And sea ice in the winters, of course. But water, nevertheless, over much of this area. Fjords filling the big glacier basins.”

  “They have kind of a hard case to prove,” Val noted. “They have to try to show that it stayed iced over everywhere.”

  “Very true,” Michelson said. “And a hard thing to do.”

  “They could find climate data showing it stayed cold throughout,” Val said.

  “Yes, and the oxygen isotope ratio in the offshore sediments even seems to support them in that idea, I must admit. But there is a lot of other climate data from the north that show that the early Pliocene was quite warm. It was a high CO2 era, just like today.”

  “Can’t you date the ice cap outright?” Wade asked. “Drill right to the bottom and count layers of ice, like I counted the layers today?”

  “There are no layers below a certain level. They get crushed together. After that the ice has certain chemical signatures revealing a bit about the atmosphere that the snow fell out of, but it isn’t useful for precise dating.”

  “Ah.” Wade thought about it. “So if the Pliocene climate was CO2 high, like today, and Antarctica was an open sea with islands and some glaciers, then why isn’t it like that today?”

  “Well,” Michelson said, “maybe it’s on its way. The ice shelves are going, the ice streams are speeding up, the grounding line under the west sheet is receding fast. The east sheet is higher and thicker, so it will take longer. But it could happen.”

  “How quickly could it go?”

  “Very quickly indeed!”

  “Meaning …”

  “A few hundred years, perhaps.”

  Wade and Val laughed, but Michelson waved a finger at them: “No, that’s very fast. A blink of the eye!”

  “I’ll tell Senator Chase that,” Wade said.

  “No no,” Michelson protested, “what you have to tell him is that nobody knows. No one can say. The Laurentian ice sheets went in just such a short time, a few thousand years perhaps, and they didn’t have humans around pumping CO2 into the air. There’s some powerful positive feedback loops involved. Things can change rapidly. These methane hydrate deposits on the sea bottom are likely to stay put at first, because that’s a matter of water pressure holding them in. But if the methane hydrates under the ice caps are substantial and that methane is released, then the greenhouse effect will be pushed even harder.”

  They sipped Drambuie as Misha washed and Val dried the dishes. It was steamy warm in the tent. Wade’s neck was killing him. The Drambuie was salty.

  “There must be people who don’t want to believe your scenario,” Wade said. “I mean people besides the stabilists.”

  “Oh yes. The same people who found Professor Warren, eh? You can always find a potted professor to back your claim.”

  “So the stabilists are like Professor Warren then.”

  “Oh no. Not at all. Warren is saying there is no human effect on global warming, when the entire scientific community outside of conservative think tanks believes the evidence is obvious that there is. Warren is a charlatan, or delusional. The stabilists on the other hand are serious scientists. They are trying to prove a hypothesis, they are down here gathering data every season, they’re publishing results in peer-reviewed journals. They’re wrong, I think, but they are still scientists. Many scientists are wrong, perhaps most. They end up serving as devil’s advocates for the ones lucky enough to be right. Even we may be wrong.”

  “No!” the others cried.

  “No,” Michelson agreed. “Those are Pliocene diatoms, and they grew here.” He raised a mug to toast them. “Here in this cold frozen hell.”

  The conversation shifted to the day’s work in the field, and a long discussion of what they would do the following day. Wade and Val would be hiking out in the afternoon, to make their rendezvous with a helicopter on the edge of the no-fly zone. The scientists would hike downvalley partway with them. Harry said, “We’ll either find some Sirius above Lake Vashka, or else just have a day of shits and giggles.”

  “Shits and giggles?” Wade said.

  “Recreation,” Misha explained.

  “I hate that expression,” Val announced firmly. “As if if you’re not doing science you’re not doing anything. It’s offensive.”

  “Sorry,” Harry said, looking surprised. “It’s something the grad students say.”

  “I know.”

  “The grad students who never get to leave their one research site,” Michelson added. “It’s no doubt compensatory.”

  “No doubt.”

  The Coleman stove roared airily in the awkward silence.

  “I suppose there are people in Washington who think that all activities down here are nothing but shits and giggles,” Wade said. “Science as much as anything.”

  Val gave him a grateful look, but the awkward silence persisted.

  “So that eastern ice sheet,” Wade went on. “If it wasn’t here three million years ago, then it grew back pretty fast, didn’t it?”

  Michelson raised an eyebrow. “The three sounds small, but you have to remember the millions. Snow accumulation at the South Pole was ten centimeters a year before these so-called superstorms became a regular thing, and at that rate you get the three kilometers of the ice sheet in three hundred thousand years.”

  “Compaction,” Forbes pointed out.

  “Yes, but it’s already almost firn, so the compaction rate may not be as great as with snow. Even if it is, a centimeter of ice for every ten of snow, that’s what …”

  “Three million years,” Forbes said.

  “Well, you see,” the V under the moustache, “there you have it! Just as thick as expected.”

  Much later they crawled out into the blaze and bite of the frigid brilliant midnight, and Val and Wade went to their tent. Already they had a little domestic routine, he noted; he peed outside, she peed inside; when he crawled in she was already in her bag, on her side of the tent. Their second night together; and in the weird yellow overexposure she was as beautiful as before. It was ridiculous what a little pitter-patter of the heart he got from lying next to her. Even as exhausted as he was—from the day’s fight with the cold, he assumed—it still kept him awake for a while; at least ten minutes; then he followed her into slumber.r />
  Sometime in the bright yellow night, however, Wade woke to find that he was on his side, and wedged against Val’s backside. And something about the pressure of the contact, or the warmth, or the contents of a dream, or simply the physiology of the REM state, had given him an erection. If it were not for their thick sleeping bags it would be pressed firmly against her bottom.

  This comfortable snug was a position he and his girlfriend Andrea had often taken. She too had been a big woman, taller than he. She had hated Washington, D.C., however, and their relationship had not long survived the move there. And after that Wade had been too busy to start any other relationship, or so he told himself; it had been a hard thing, having Andrea leave.

  Now that was not what he was thinking about. He felt he should move; he did not want to be misunderstood. The sleeping bags were extremely thick, however, so that nothing could be felt through them. And the tent was quite small. And bitterly cold; though the sky was still bright, the sun seemed to have dipped behind the Apocalypse Peaks. So it made sense to snuggle for warmth. In any case Val was asleep, breathing deeply. He couldn’t see anything of her face from where he lay, but he could remember it. She had been really good in the Scott tent, very easy in the company of those men, trading banter with Misha, pressed unselfconsciously against people, joining the conversation when she felt like it, listening when she didn’t. Everyone at ease, even with this big beauty in their midst. The men might have been even happier than on an ordinary evening, more alive and on their toes, as if the Drambers had an extra fire in it; but nothing more than that, nothing to draw any notice. It was skillful; as a diplomat Wade admired it. Not everyone could have ensured that the situation be so normal.

  And the same with sleeping with a strange man in a small tent. Except now she was stirring. Quickly Wade rolled over in his bag.

  But now it was she who was pressed up against his back. Hard against him, in fact, from his head to his heels; and she was so much taller than he that she enfolded him entirely, the back of his head down against her chest. More than ever before he realized he liked being smaller than the woman he was with. It was ravishing. No chance of that REM erection going away. He turned his head ever so slightly, and there was her face, inches from his; again the surgical glare of tent light; again her disconcerting beauty. The weathering of an outdoor life made her face look fiftyish, though asleep of course she also looked like a child, as everyone did. Mouth open, deeply asleep, breathing smoothly, pressed against him hard. He turned his head back and snuggled it into his parka hood, and after a long while his heart rate returned to something like normal, and after another while he fell asleep again.

  The next day, after breakfast and taking down their tent and packing their backpacks, Wade followed Val down the piebald snow-and-rock valley toward Lake Vida, which from certain high points along the way was visible as a white line on the valley floor. Again, it looked only an hour’s walk away, but now Wade knew better. Professor Michelson was accompanying Harry and Graham down to look at the striated cliffs above Lake Vashka, and so for the first part of the walk they kept Wade and Val company. Wade and Michelson lagged behind to talk.

  As they conversed, a red fly appeared in the distance over Lake Vida. No sound; but it was a helicopter. It descended on Lake Vida, and then flew up again and away, toward Wright Valley.

  “Were we late, or they early?” Wade called down to Val.

  “Not for us,” Val called back.

  “That was one of the NSF trekking groups,” Michelson said. “Starting an expedition, or ending one, or both.”

  “I’m surprised NSF has gotten into that.”

  “Are you?” Michelson glanced at him, once again in his Breughel nose guard. “They need money like anyone else.”

  “But here they are, in charge of this whole continent …”

  “On a budget smaller than that of most universities. Besides, they are not really in charge. I mean they control the American presence here, which is in itself amazing, I agree. I’m astonished some of your State Department colleagues haven’t taken it over.”

  Wade gestured at the brown-and-white desolation around them. “They probably don’t see the point.”

  Michelson laughed. “Well, so NSF keeps control. But with an ever-shrinking budget. It’s Mars that is the hot place these days, scientifically speaking at least, and that’s where all the money is going. This is a kind of backwater now, scientifically. Anyway, your NSF is just one player down here. There are about thirty national groups in the Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research, and that’s the group that decides how things are run down here. NSF generally just goes along with SCAR. And within SCAR there’s the old boys’ club, of the countries who were down here from the beginning in the IGY, and then the new countries that have joined since, to make sure they have a say in case resource extraction ever starts. There used to be conflicts between those two groups, but all that has been forgotten because of the conflicts between SCAR and the UN, and SCAR and the non-Treaty nations. And now that the Treaty renewal is being held up—by people in the American government, as you know, though there are others who are not unhappy about that—it’s more uncertain than ever. There are people in the UN who would like to be running Antarctica, because then the votes in the General Assembly could overwhelm any scientific advice, and the UN bureaucrats involved would be in charge here.”

  “Complicated.”

  Michelson laughed. “Very complicated. Land without sovereignty! That’s too odd not to be complicated, in this world. The Antarctic Treaty held in its time, but now it’s a new world.”

  “The Treaty always seemed fragile.”

  “Fragile, idealistic—all those things. And even when it was in effect the Treaty nations broke its rules all the time. France, Russia, they did what they wanted, more or less. Now that the stakes are getting higher, the Treaty is revealed as the house of cards it always was.”

  “I see.”

  “So the NSF running trekking expeditions down here is actually a very small matter. It preempts the private companies, so that NSF can keep control of the visitors—keep them from coming up here, for instance. Keep them clean and neat, and so on. It’s a good idea, I think.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Yes. The conflicts are endless. Not unlike your turf battles back in the Senate, I would guess.”

  “Yes,” Wade said absently, watching Val’s backside as she hiked down the valley with Graham and Harry. She walked like someone who had hiked a million miles, and no doubt she had. Now it was a kind of boulder ballet, a very graceful flow. He pulled back out of his distraction: “Very much the same. In fact it’s the same battle, I’m afraid. Different parts of the same battle, everywhere. This is only the outermost edge.”

  The geologists said their farewells and took off around the other side of Lake Vashka. Wade and Val continued on down Barwick Valley together.

  blue sky

  brown valley

  “Did you enjoy your visit?” Val asked when they were some way down the valley, and out of earshot of the scientists.

  “It was very interesting.” So interesting that he could think of nothing further to say about it. He was still sorting out his impressions of the final conversation with Professor Michelson. Which was too bad, as he would have liked very much to say more to her. He didn’t want to seem to be holding his cards close to the vest, when he had no cards at all. “I don’t know quite what to make of them,” he confessed.

  She nodded. “Beakers are funny people.”

  “You must find it interesting, the way they look at mountains.”

  “Yeah, that’s pretty amazing. The things they notice. And the time spans …”

  “Only three hundred years! Blink of the eye!”

  They laughed. She waved a hand at the abrupt ridges walling the valley on both sides: “As if rock were toothpaste, flowing from one position to the next.”

  “Strange. Do any of them climb?”

 
“Oh sure. Bob, over in Taylor Valley, he climbs a lot. And vice versa—some of the mountaineers have degrees in geology. Misha back there is a geomorphologist, for instance.”

  “I knew he was into it somehow.”

  “Oh yeah, he tries to fit his research in when he can, although it’s hard to do—they’re never in the right place for him, and he has a lot of work to do just to take care of them.”

  He looked at her. “You talk about it like it’s babysitting.”

  “Well, you know. This place can kill you in a matter of hours if you blow it. And a mountaineer’s profession is keeping people from blowing it, and then also knowing how to stay alive even when you have blown it. You wait till your first storm, then you’ll be happy you have me along.”

  “I’m already happy to have you along.”

  “Thanks,” she said, dismissing the comment. “Anyway, a lot of these beakers are not thinking very much about survival, to say the least. The mountains are just data for their papers. For some of them, if they could get the data while sitting back home, they would be perfectly happy. I hiked with a group of them around a nunatak up on the ice, after a helo didn’t make skeds, and it was incredibly beautiful, the ice pouring around the rock, you know, and they complained the whole way home because the nunatak was nothing but dolerite. They hiked along singing ‘Dolerite, dolerite, dolerite, dolerite.’”

  Wade grinned. “They were teasing you.”

  “Sure. But the beauty of it, for them, it was only—whatever.”

  “Data.”

  “Yeah. And data can be beautiful, but still.”

  “Beakers.”

  “Right. Still, you gotta love ’em. For one thing they’re really what gets the rest of us down here.”

  “The continent of science.”

  “Right. Science, and some really incredible shits and giggles.” She shook her head, disgusted again at the phrase.

  “Expensive.”

  “You aren’t kidding. Once Bob told me he and a friend had calculated how much it costs to do science down here, just by taking the total Antarctic budget and dividing it by the number of scientist days—you know, it was the usual kind of beaker calculation—and it came out to something like ten thousand dollars a day per scientist.”