Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER NINE
Igloos and Nitroglycerine
I don't really mind science - I just seem to feel better when it's not around.
Observed on latrine wall,
Central West Antarctica deep field camp
RESUMING THE QUEST
for Seismic Man and his group, I wheedled my way on to a fuel flight to
Central West Antarctica, and after a series of false starts I was transported to the skiway with
four members of a science project staging at CWA en route to Ice Stream B. The West Antarctic ice
streams - fast-flowing currents of ice up to 50 miles wide and 310 miles long - are cited as evidence
of possible glacial retreat and the much-touted imminent rise in global sea levels. The project leader
pulled out
The Road to Oxiana
, the greatest travel book ever written and one which lies so close to
my heart that it gave me a shock to see it there, as if the paraphernalia of home had followed me. He
was a beatific man in his mid-fifties with a round, mottled face like a moon, and his name was Her-
mann. Ten years previously, he had climbed out of a crashed plane in Antarctica.
Later, when we were airborne, the scientists retreated into the hoods of their parkas, jamming un-
wieldily booted feet among the trellis of rollers, survival bags and naked machinery. I loitered on
the flight deck for a while, but I couldn't see much. It grew colder.
The previous evening, in the galley at McMurdo, I had run into a mountaineer from a science
group which had recently pulled out of CWA.
'Hey!' he had said when I told him I was on my way there. 'You can sublease the igloo I built
just outside camp. It's the coolest igloo on the West Antarctic ice sheet.'
When we landed at eighty-two degrees south, the back flap lifted and light flooded into the plane.
Tornadoes of powder snow were careering over the blanched wasteland like spectral spinning tops.
There were no topographical features, just an ice sheet, boundless and burnished. Lesser (or West)
Antarctica is a hypothesised rift system - a jumble of unstable plates - separated from the stable
shield of Greater (or East) Antarctica by the Transantarctic Mountains. On top, most of Lesser
Antarctica consists of the world's only marine-based ice sheet. This means that the bottom of the ice
is far below sea level, and if it all melted, the western half of Antarctica would consist of a group of
islands. The assemblage of plates which make up Lesser Antarctica have been moving both relat-
ive to one another and to the east for something like 230 million years, whereas Greater Antarctica,
home of the polar plateau, has existed relatively intact for many hundreds of millions of years. In
Gondwanaland, the prehistoric supercontinent, what we now know as South America and the An-
tipodes were glued to Antarctica. Gondwanaland started to break up early in the Jurassic Period -
say 175 million years ago - and geologists like to speculate on the relationship of Antarctica to still
earlier super-continents. Most exciting of all, Antarctica once had its own dinosaurs.
