Antarctica (35 page)

“Oh of course, of course.”

“But do you think he means trouble for NSF?”

“No no, not necessarily. But I think he might have stumbled into the local culture at Pole, and been told some things that he thinks we don’t know.”

“Ah, I see.”

“Tell me, Geoff, did the discussions at SCAR last winter shed any light on what we were calling the unfunded experiments?”

“Not really, no. There were stories, of course. Everyone agrees that there is some of that going on, but no one really knows how much. That’s the nature of the beast, isn’t it.”

“Yes. Do you think Mai-lis is still part of it?”

“I would guess so, yes. I think it very likely.”

Sylvia stared at the wall map. The colored dots on it were like the connect-dots of some foreign alphabet. “Well, thanks, Geoff. How is your work going out there?”

“Oh fine, fine. Field work. You know how that is, Sylvia.”

“Yes,” she said with a pang. Compared to NSF administration
in McMurdo, he meant to say, it was paradise. Beaker heaven, as the ASL staff put it. But it was after the fall for her. “Let me know if you hear anything more.”

“I certainly will, although out here we are not in much of a position to hear anything. But some nights we surf the radio waves for entertainment, and if we hear anything interesting I’ll let you know.”

“Thanks, Geoff. Good luck out there.”

“And the same to you, Sylvia. You need it more than we do.”

“I suppose so. It would certainly be nice to have some kind of serious regulatory ability for a change, that’s for sure.”

“Well, you’re a U.S. Marshall yourself, right?” Sounds of laughter behind him.

“That’s right,” she said. “But it may be that we will end up needing a bit more firepower than that.”

Graham walked some distance behind Geoffrey and Harry and Misha, over broken dolerite. They were checking a beautiful long band of Sirius sandstone plastered above them against one of the dolerite cliffs of the Apocalypse Peaks. The band was a succession horizontally stratified at scales both large and small. Diamictons containing different mixes of boulders, cobbles and laminated silts, and bounded above and below by distinct disconformities, horizontal to slightly inclined. Planar to slightly undulating small-scale relief. One line was traceable for more than thirty meters as Graham walked it off. Certainly this succession had been deposited
in situ
, and then plowed away by the next grounded glacier to pass over, leaving only this sandy blond band against the rock, where the force of the passing ice was lessened just enough to leave a trace against the wall.

He leaned down and tapped at white diatomite with his geological hammer, then scratched at it. The D-7 disconformity, about a centimeter wide. Below it all the
diamictons were marine; above it they were subaerial. Which did not mean that this line had been sea level, but that the rise of the Transantarctics had lifted this region out of the seas for good at about the time this disconformity had been laid. As they were now at some fifteen hundred meters above sea level, it implied an uplift rate of about five hundred meters per million years, if you accepted the Pliocene dating of the Sirius, as Graham did. That was a fairly rapid uplift rate, and one of the ways that the stabilists criticized the dynamicists’ conclusions; but faster rates were certainly known, and it was hard to argue the evidence, displayed here on the cliffside like a classroom diagram. Graham would have very much liked to take his first thesis advisor by the scruff of the neck and haul him to this very point and shove his face into such a display, clearer even than the Cloudmaker Formation. See that! he would have said. How can you deny the facts!

But of course it was not actually a cliff of facts, but of stone. Interpretations were open to argument, at least until the matter was firmly pinned down and black-boxed, as Geoffrey put it, meaning become something that all the scientists working in that field took for granted, going on to further questions. Some scientific controversies resolved themselves fairly quickly, and others didn’t; and this was proving to be one of the slow ones. As they had not black-boxed this particular question, it was still sediment only and not yet fact.

This process was something that Graham had not understood early in his career, and it had gotten him into considerable trouble. He had started his graduate work in geology at Cambridge, working with Professor Martin, unaware of the fact that Martin’s own work dating ash deposits in the Transantarctics allied him with the stabilists in the Sirius controversy. Graham
had merely wanted to work in the Antarctic and knew that that was Martin’s area of research. He had been very naive, having been educated mostly in physics, with only a late switch to geology because of the field work, and the tangibility of rock—a switch just begun at that time in his life, and by little more than his entry into graduate level work in Martin’s group. Then he had been so immersed in catching up on the basics of geology that he had not been fully aware of the Sirius controversy and how Martin fit into it, and so he had not understood why Martin had been so cool to his geomorphological research into the question of why the Transantarctics were there at all. As part of that study Graham had examined the question of how quickly the range was uplifting, and had come to the conclusion that although the range was quite old, dating from about eighty million years ago, when the East Antarctic craton began to show intracraton rifting, still it looked like it had been rising at a fairly rapid clip in the most recent period, perhaps (he had ventured rashly) because of the lithostatic pressure of the ice cap. And Martin had been cool, and had never devoted any of his time to critiquing Graham’s papers on the subject, or contributing any of what he needed to contribute, as second author and principal investigator, to make the papers publishable. In a fit of angry frustration Graham had sent one paper to a journal without Martin’s approval, as the approval seemed likely never to come; and the paper had been rejected, Martin informed of the submission, and Graham basically dismissed from the program, as he was not invited to return to Antarctica in Martin’s group the following season.

This experience had made him bitter. He had gone back to New Zealand, and there one night in a pub one of his old teachers from the university in Christchurch
had shaken his head and explained some things to him. Martin had cast his lot in with the stabilists in the Sirius controversy because his findings in volcanic ash convinced him that the Transantarctics and Antarctica generally had been in the deep freeze for at least twelve million years. One of the many other aspects of the controversy had to do with the rate of uplift of the Transantarctics, with the stabilists maintaining that there was no reason for the range to be rising anywhere near as fast as the dynamicists claimed, so that the Sirius formations had to be older than they claimed in order to be found now at such high elevations. And so naturally, his old teacher told him, Graham’s conclusions had not been welcome.

This had outraged Graham. A perversion of science! he cried. But his old professor had chided him. No no, he had said, it’s your own fault; you should have known better. Perhaps it’s even my fault; I should have taught you better than I did how science works, obviously.

There was nothing particularly untoward in Martin’s response, Graham’s teacher explained to him, with no outrage or indignation whatsoever. Indeed, he said, if Graham had joined the program of one of the dynamicists, and begun to produce work indicating that the ice had lain heavy on Antarctica for millions and millions of years, he would not have prospered there either. It was not a matter of evil-doing either way; the simple truth was that science was a matter of making alliances to help you to show what you wanted to show, and to make clear also that what you were showing was important. And your own graduate students and post-docs were necessarily your closest allies in that struggle to pull together all the strings of an argument. All this became even more true when there was a controversy
ongoing, when there were people on the other side publishing articles with titles like “Unstable Ice or Unstable Ideas?” and so on, so that the animus had grown a bit higher than normal.

So, Graham had been forced to conclude, thinking over his talk with his old teacher in the days after: it was not that Martin was evil, but that he Graham had been naive, and, yes, even stupid. Thick, anyway. Bitterness was not really appropriate. Science was not a matter of automatons seeking Truth, but of people struggling to black-box some facts.

So his education began again, in effect, after two years wasted in Cambridge. Which was not so very great a length of time in scientific terms. Many scientists had taken far longer to learn how their disciplines worked. And so Graham had become reconciled to the experience and had shelved it, and gotten into a program in glaciology at the University of Sydney, and gone on from there.

That had all happened a long time ago. And yet still the Sirius controversy raged on, with both sides finding new allies and students, and producing papers published in peer-reviewed journals. Graham thought he began to see a tilt on the part of outsiders toward the dynamicist interpretation; but as he was a dynamicist himself now, he supposed he could not really tell for sure. Anyway, the case was beginning to look stronger to him as the years passed and evidence from other parts of Antarctica was collected. Over in the Prince Charles Mountains, for instance, on the other side of Antarctica, the Aussies were making a good case that there had been Pliocene-era seas as far as five hundred kilometers inland from the current shore. The Beardmore Glacier had been pretty conclusively shown to be a paleofjord, and there were unallied scientists
referring to a “Beardmore paleofjord” in other contexts, also to
Nothofagus beardmorensis
, the beech type found in the Cloudmaker Formation and named by dynamicists to underline its location of discovery. And evidence of beech forests was showing up elsewhere in Sirius formations, with seeds and beetles and other plant material all pointing to the Pliocene or late Miocene. No, the case was coming together at last, after all these long years; all of Geoff Michelson’s career, effectively, and passed on to him from his advisor Brown, who had also spent a career working away at it; and now, come to think of it, a good fair fraction of Graham’s career had been devoted to it as well. All to build the walls that would box this part of the story up for good, building it brick by brick over years and generations. Because the stones did not speak, not really. They had to be translated.

The sun wheeled and the steep wall of dolerite overhead now cast them in the shade, and it got markedly colder. They were truly much younger-looking mountains than any other eighty-million-year-old range, still as steep and jagged as the Himalayas or the Alps, both only a fourth as old; saved by the cold from the ravages of water erosion, and so aged by the winds only, and rising so fast that the rise more than compensated for that abrasion. Cryopreserved, so to speak.

To keep warm Graham went to work taking some samples from the disconformity just above head level. The diamictite would rub away with a gloved fingertip, but hacking out a good sample was work to warm one up. Certainly water had been here, and seafloor diatoms, the paleobotanists told him, benthic genera that indicated brackish to near-normal marine conditions. A
shallow seabottom, a fjord probably, perhaps later a lake that slowly dried out. Shoreline of a fjord. Above the shore, a low hardy beech forest. The Pliocene had without a doubt had temperatures high enough to support
Nothofagus;
this was agreed upon by everyone, having been an earlier case that some other group had already black-boxed: warm Pliocene, no questions asked. And now a fact basic to the dynamicist case; that was the crux of their whole argument, really—that if you got global temperatures as high as the Pliocene, the Antarctic ice sheets melted both east and west, leaving glaciated archipelagoes and an embayed craton, in a sea covered every winter by substantial amounts of sea ice. That would account for the clear varving here, now that he thought of it; it need not be just the tidal marks on a seashore, but annual sediment fall on a seafloor that in winters was covered by a roof of sea ice. “Hmmm …” Graham said, glancing at Michelson.

Beech trees had not evolved greatly, and any fossil fragments of them found here could have been much older than the Pliocene. Indeed when they had first found beech wood in the Sirius they had assumed it was Triassic wood picked up by a glacier much later. Only when they had come on thousands of beech leaves as well did they realize the wood had been alive when Sirius was laid down. And beech forests supported an array of smaller life as part of their ecology, of course, mostly mosses and lichens, but also weevils and other beetles, freshwater snails, and perhaps even some amphibians. Some of these would be specifically Pliocene species, or could be dated by chemical tests that worked specifically for them. So that looking into the rock of this ancient seafloor (granting for the moment that that was what it was), it was quite possible that one might find fossils larger than the microscopic
foraminifera and diatoms. Michelson often mentioned the possibility at the beginning of the day when they set out, or when the helos arrived to carry part of the team to a distant site; cheerily and with no expectations he would call out in farewell, “Keep an eye out for scallop shells!” A kind of joke. Actually the foraminifera and diatoms, although too small to be seen by the naked eye, were enough to prove their contention that the Sirius group was the remnant of a seafloor, and date it as well. But certainly a fossil clam shell would be welcome.

And so when Graham’s finger took a big flake of the diamictite off, revealing a band of yellow-red rusty clayey material, he said “What have we here!”

It was not a clam shell, of course. But it was unusual.

He climbed up the strata to have a closer look at it. He pulled a lens from his pocket and took a glance at 30x power. Crushed plant material.