Antarctica (30 page)

All the notices on the walls were in English, which turned out to be the official language of the camp though few people here were native speakers. I supposed it was better to choose an international language than to have squabbles between resident French and Italians about whose should prevail. But I thought it must make for a certain amount of confusion.

I dumped my bags and hurried back out into the bright light. I'd been trying to get to Dome C for a long time now to see a project called EPICA (European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica), a massive European-wide effort to drill down into the ice sheet and capture its climate record.
¹

EPICA was the scientific part of what drew me to the ice. Years ago, before I even imagined setting foot on Antarctica, let alone falling in love with it, I worked on the journal
Nature,
handling scientific papers about topics to do with earth, air, water and climate. I enjoyed finding the secrets that were hidden in our planet's mud and sediments and rocks and fossilised trees, how layer by layer the past wrote itself into the present, if you knew how to read the hieroglyphs. Find an old enough tree, pull out a core from its bulk like an absurdly elongated wine cork, and you can measure how thick or thin the rings are, and divine which were the good years and which the bad. Drill down into the mud beneath lakes, and—if you have a good enough microscope—you can measure the grains of pollen that fell in from the air, layer by ancient layer, and see which plants flourished when. The rocks themselves bear subtle signals written into the details of their chemistry; if you crush them and pass them through your high-tech machines you can catch lingering clues about the climate of the past.

But all of these methods of looking back in time have one thing in common: they need a vast amount of interpretation. The science is as sound as we can manage but it's still several steps removed from truly touching and tasting the Earth's real history.

And then I read about ice cores. Ice doesn't just keep a record of dust, volcanic ashes and the other subtle changes in atmospheric chemistry that together give us our weather. It has an extra property that belongs to no other history book on Earth. Living as it does on a perpetual knife edge between solid and liquid, strong and weak, ice is sensitive enough to capture tiny pockets of air, and strong enough to keep them. I read that scientists in Antarctica were drilling down into the ice cap and pulling up cores containing air that was older than the human race itself. Not interpretations of air, or subtle chemical signals where the air used to be, but genuine bubbles of the real thing.

I had already seen many scientific papers describing what that ancient air contains. I had talked to dozens of scientists about the results; I had visited the giant freezers back in Europe where the cores were held, watched while researchers sawed them and melted them and passed them through their machines. But I had never seen the drilling in action. This wasn't just a scientific expedition for me. It was a pilgrimage.

 

The drill tent was a short, blinding walk away from the main summer camp buildings. It wasn't hard to find. The arched roof was two storeys high and the white walls stretched to more than sixty-five feet long. Inside, the first thing that hit me was the heady smell of the drilling fluid. I could see a barrel near the door containing Forane 141b, a chemical now banned for its ozone-destroying properties and which drillers had to get special permission to use. It smelled dizzying, psychedelic, and I wondered how they could stand it. (I later found out. Within an hour or two, I was so inured to it that I no longer noticed it either.)

The fluid wasn't there as a lubricant—it was to keep the hole open. The ice was so plastic, so strong and so determined to revert to its original form that beyond a kilometre or so of depth the mere time it took to bring the drill up after one run and send it down for the next would be enough for the hole to start closing. This heady fluid was the perfect density to resist the shoving and squeezing of the ice sheet.

The floor of the tent was wooden, and the scene was dominated by a vertical steel drill tower that reached almost to the ceiling. A hefty cable fed by a winch was threaded through the tower and disappeared into the ground. On the far wall, three posters decorated with hand-drawn penguins marked the dates in past years when the drillers reached 1,000 m, 2,000 m and 3,000 m below the surface. This season they had only a few hundred metres left to drill and they were very close to the end.

One person—an Italian, judging by his outfit—was standing by the tower watching the disappearing cable. Several other people were inside a small hut with glass walls, crowded round a bank of computers. I recognised one of them, the chief driller, Laurent Augustin. I'd met Laurent before, when I went to interview him in Grenoble. He was compact of build, friendly but introspective, and I knew that some found him aloof. He wrote poetic descriptions of the landscape; he went for long solitary walks and he meditated; he was vegetarian, didn't drink alcohol and had banned smoking from any of his workplaces, to the great chagrin of many of the French workers; he was also one of the world's most experienced ice drillers, had spent decades both here and in Greenland, and understood better than most the strange, temporary intensity of life on the ice.

When I entered the hut Laurent greeted me with a smile and made room for me around the computer. But the atmosphere was tense and he told me that the drilling was getting steadily harder. Close to the surface the ice was at -65°F but, surprisingly, the deeper you went the warmer it got until, near the bedrock, the gentle heat emanating upwards from the Earth's interior was enough to warm the ice almost to its melting point. That was a double problem for the drillers. Soft ice was harder to cut, so barrel after barrel had returned to the surface empty. And worse, as the cutter's teeth bit, the ice around it could melt then refreeze, potentially jamming the drill down the hole for ever.

To try to get around this, Laurent was borrowing an idea from his Greenland days. For these last few runs, he was now attaching a long transparent sausage-like length of plastic to the barrel, filled with a mixture of alcohol and water. There was a spare one on the shelf beside me. It looked bizarrely low-tech, like the sort of party balloons that you twist into doggy shapes to amuse children. When the drill started rotating, a tiny screw would rip into the plastic, allowing alcohol to flood the hole right next to the drill head. This should keep any melted ice from refreezing long enough for the drill to get in and out without sticking. Or at least that was the idea. The team called this contraption a ‘cognac bomb'.

The drill head had just reached the ice and Saverio, who was at the controls, was about to start cutting. Coloured lines on the computer screen reared up as the various activities went into distant action. The drill was now rotating, the cognac bomb must have burst and spilled its contents around the cutting head. But something seemed to be wrong. The current was soaring in the cutting motor. Saverio hastily switched off the blades and instructed the winch to pull on the cable. Now everyone's eyes turned to a small white box, whose red LEDs showed a number that was steadily rising. It said 5,000, then 10,000, then 15,000. Heeeaaave.

As the tension on the cable rose, so did the tension in our small hut until, at 17,463, the cable suddenly rattled into upward action and there was a collective sigh of relief. There might be no core, but at least the drill was free. Everyone stood down from the computer and Laurent told me that we now had nearly an hour to wait until the drill—moving at a human walking pace—would reach the surface. I was astonished by this statistic. It was easy to believe that the ice extended more than two miles below my feet, but the idea that it would take me nearly an hour of walking vertically downwards to reach the bedrock made it seem both farther away and more real.

This run was likely to be a bust, but the team wanted to bring up the drill to see if there were any clues about why it nearly stuck. This was more important than it sounded, because six years ago, when the drill really did jam, the game was almost lost.

 

Dôme C, 20/12/1998.
Diary of Laurent Augustin

 

It's Sunday, 13k. I take the controls after the Saturday evening break and send the drill down for the first pass of the week. 700m, 780m, 784m. I stop the descent 2 metres above the bottom of the hole and start to approach slowly. Everything is normal: motor current, suspension, temperature, inclination, the values are all normal. The knife slowly starts cutting the ice. The motor current rises.

It is rising far too much.

‘What's happening? The current is more than 3 Amps.' I'm forced to stop the progress of the drill—if not it's going to jam in the bottom. Immediately the motor current returns to normal.

‘Ouf.'

I wait a few minutes for the whole thing to stabilise. All is perfect again.

‘But what happened? Perhaps an accumulation of chippings at the bottom of the hole during the Saturday evening break?'

I start the drilling again, even more carefully. The teeth have barely touched the ice at the bottom of the hole when the current
rises again to abnormal levels. I stop drilling for the second time. All returns to normal.

‘Why? What's going wrong?'

I check the computer screen very carefully. There is absolutely nothing to indicate that something abnormal is happening 786 metres under my feet.

‘Ok, I'll try one last time. If it doesn't work, too bad, I'll bring it back up to the surface. It would be one pass wasted, but better to play safe.'

For the third time the motor current rises to abnormal values. I stop the cutting and start to bring the drill back up.

The cable goes under tension, I hear the winch straining, 1.9 tonnes, 2 tonnes, 2.3 tonnes of tension. The winch has given its maximum pulling value. In front of my eyes, the cable has stopped moving. The drill isn't coming. I try putting some slack on the cable in the hole, once, twice, three times, ten times, nothing doing. The drill isn't rising.

‘Merde.'

This is serious. The news spreads quickly in the camp. ‘The drill is stuck!'All the drillers are now around me. The cable is at its maximum tension: 2.9 tonnes. Nothing is moving.

We need to find a solution quickly: the whole season of work is in play. Glycol. We need glycol—antifreeze—which could dissolve the ice chips around the drill that are undoubtedly making it stick. We call the Italian base at Terra Nova Bay where the Twin Otter is just about to leave for Concordia, loaded and ready to take off with four astrophysicists on board.

Our four colleagues are summarily disembarked and replaced by the barrels of precious liquid. Five hours later 800 litres of pure glycol arrive at Concordia. We tip 500 litres of glycol into the hole. After the first try nothing happens. After the second try, 12 hours later, the tension on the cable drops very rapidly. Hope
returns to the team. Spirits rise. The drill also rises but only by 2 metres before it stops again. Huge disappointment.

We try to help the drill by shaking the cable back and forth, sending waves down its entire length. All these attempts are in vain. The only hope is to wait for the glycol to do its slow job and dissolve the chippings. That could take weeks or even months.

Most of the scientific team is now redundant and returns home. A small team of drillers and a few scientists will wait until the end of the season, just in case the drill frees itself If not, we will have to come back next season. All scenarios are possible. The drill is free and we can carry on. The drill is still stuck and we have to start again with a new hole at the surface. In any case we will need more money. Assuming the European Community continues to have confidence in us!

 

That drill never moved again. It lay there still, nearly 3,000 feet under the ice, not far from where we were standing now. Laurent and his depleted team spent the last disconsolate weeks of the season trying hopelessly to free it. Two seasons of effort and hundreds of thousands of euros poured into a deep dark hole. And then they had to beg the money and time to bring a new rig in and start again from scratch. Luckily the European Community did continue to have confidence in the team, and the project. Everyone knew that this kind of work was hard. But still, you could tell that Laurent's pride was sorely wounded. It wouldn't happen again, not on his watch.

The new drill was now about to re-emerge. The two Italians—Sergio and Saverio—headed out into the cold outer tent and started lifting up a line of trapdoors. Beneath these, they had dug a long narrow trough in the snow perpendicular to the drill. The part next to the hole was perhaps six feet deep, but as it moved outwards the trench grew shallower until it reached the surface about thirteen feet away.

At first this puzzled me, but as the drill's head finally poked up from the hole I understood the logic. With the various barrels, the motors, drivers and all the paraphernalia, the drill was more than thirty-two feet tall. If they had had to bring it up to its full height at the surface the tent would have had to be twice as high, and the procedure would be ten times more unwieldy. Instead they simply levered it until it was lying on its side. The top part swung down behind the rig, the bottom part swept up through the trough in the snow and the two men quickly replaced the trapdoors and pulled in wooden frames for the drill to rest on horizontally.