Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
would not send us crashing into the glacial water, just down a foot or so through a pocket of blue
neon air and on to the next layer of ice.
In the small hut in the middle of the lake, LD and Roland fiddled with their instruments.
'The lake was formed about 1,200 years ago by meltwater from the Canada Glacier,' LD ex-
plained. 'It's the forty-eight feet of water underneath the ice which interests us. The permanent ice
lid facilitates a uniquely stable water column.' When they shut the door of the hut, natural fluores-
cent light shone up through the hole in the board floor. They had eighteen instruments in the lake
at that time, and when they brought water up from the bottom it was so full of sulphides that it
smelt of rotten eggs. While they pumped, they stowed the tubes inside their shirts. Like a lot of
Antarctic scientists, they were engaged in a constant battle against the big freeze. LD showed me
his mud; he called it 'very young rock'.
'What I'm into', he drawled, 'is phytoplankton on their long journey to oil and rock.'
As the light never changed, they were tied to the clock only by their daily radio schedule with
McMurdo. Although they always ate dinner together, it had to be convened well in advance by
dull, like old mirrors. Brian, the team leader, said that his body clock had died years ago.
It was an easy rhythm to follow. If I wasn't out on the lake with one of them I sat outside the
Jamesway listening to the moat ice crackling and watching the tobacco-yellow plumes of Mount
Erebus in the distance staining the cobalt sky. I took my turn to make water, dragging a cart over
to the frozen moat and chipping ice into pans. The salts had been frozen out, and the water tasted
delicious.
I spent a whole day out on the lake with Steve, an oceanographic consultant, and George, a
benthic biologist in his fifties.
'I'm happiest in the first ten inches of sediment,' said George. The pair dived together off Nan-
tucket, and they both enjoyed
getting away
to Antarctica.
'It's like stepping out of your life for a few months,' said Steve. The seventh member of the
team was Craig, a bacteriologist studying photosynthesis cycles.
'Looking under these lakes is literally like going back in time,' he said, 'It's a microbial won-
derland.'
Brian was a marsh and coastal ecologist and a bio-geochemist. He was much revered by the
team, but I only ever saw him exerting authority when he stood outside the back door of the
Jamesway beating a large frying pan against an even larger saucepan in order to wake up LD and
Roland. Brian had his finger on the pulse of camp dynamics, and if he got tired, the whole camp
began to deteriorate. The fact that it was a harmonious, well-oiled camp with its own distinct cul-
ture was in large measure a tribute to him.
One afternoon I crouched next to Brian in the hut in the middle of the lake.
'Nitrates are the single biggest cause of coastal erosion and pollution,' he said. 'That's why
we're here, finding out more about them. Oceans do have an assimilative capacity for nitrates, but
they shouldn't be introduced beyond that capacity. Many areas of the world are already way bey-
ond their limit, and they're in big trouble.'
