But death of habits. That’s all it is, I told myself. Remember the poem; you can’t help being yourself. You’ll drag yourself with you all over the Earth, no matter how far you flee. You can’t escape yourself even if you want to. If what you fear is losing yourself, rest easy.
No: the fear I was feeling was perhaps the fear that even if things changed, I would still be just as unhappy as before. Ah yes, that was a real fear!
Well, but I was always afraid. So this was no different.
Would I miss this place? The beautiful mountains, the beautiful faces …
No. I would not miss it. This I promised myself; and it seemed like a promise I could keep. Maybe that was my form of happiness.
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Project Slowdown had been active for a decade, and the thirty largest glaciers on the planet, all of them in Antarctica and Greenland, had seen expeditions to their crux points where wells had been melted through their ice and the meltwater under them pumped to the surface and spread to refreeze as near the pumping wells as was convenient. Our team had been involved with the Weddell Sea area effort, which was particularly complicated, as a dispersed fan of glaciers and ice streams had fed into the Filchner Ice Shelf and the Ronne Ice Shelf in a way that was difficult to deal with. The landforms under the ice resembled a half bowl, not steep enough to easily identify the places upstream where glacial input was fastest. But we had done the best we could with that, and drilled 327 wells over a five-year period, focusing on the crux points we could find and hoping for the best.
It wouldn’t have been possible without the navies of the United States, Russia, and England. They let a little village of their aircraft carriers freeze into the sea ice and overwinter in the Weddell Sea, and from these carriers we were able to keep the work going year round, and supply the land bases that were set on the ice of the Ronne and Filchner. Fleets of helicopters kept these camps supplied, and helped to move camps from drill site to drill site. Something like ten billion dollars was spent on the effort just in our zone alone. Such a deal, as Pete Griffen used to say. A lot of us had worked with him back in the day, and he was often remembered.
All good. Only four deaths, including his, all from accidents, and three of those accidents resulting from stupid decisions, including his. The other death, weather. Pretty good. Because Antarctica will kill you fast. And none of the deaths were people on our team, although we never said that of course. But it was a comfort, given what had happened to Pete. No one in my group wanted anything like that to happen to us.
So; ten years in Antarctica, with good work to do, and no more grant applications either. Papers got written, science got done, but mostly it was engineering the drills and pumps and dispersion technologies. There were papers to be had there too, even if it wasn’t exactly what we had gone down there for. Actually the glaciologists were getting data like never before, especially structures of ice and flow histories, and most of all, bottom studies. For sure no one had ever had the kind of information about glacial ice/glacial bed interactions that we have now! If we had been doing that research only for its own sake, it would have taken centuries to learn what we’ve learned. But we had an ulterior motive, an overriding concern.
So, at the end of the season, we were flown into the middle of the Recovery Glacier, where we had drilled a double line of wells five years before. One of the lines was reporting that all its pumps had stopped.
Helo on up to a pretty dramatic campsite, on a flat section of the glacier between icefalls upstream and down, with the Shackleton Range bulking just to the north of us, forming the higher half of the glacier’s sidewalls. Lateral shear at the glacier’s margin was a shatter zone of turquoise seracs, so tall and violently sharded that it looked like a zone of broken glass skyscrapers. You never get used to helo rides in Antarctica. Not even the helo pilots get used to it.
Out on the flat we went to the wells that were reported as stopped. We had drilled these long before, back at the beginning, and now it was a familiar thing to check them out. Everything looked okay on the surface, and it wasn’t the monitoring system. Very quickly the problem noticed by the automatic monitoring was confirmed, pump by pump, just by looking in the exit pipes and seeing nothing there. The closer to the center of the glacier the holes were, the less water they were pumping. Most were pumping nothing at all.
We were moving around on skis, and roped together, just in case the crevasse-free route between the wells had cracked in the years since someone had been there. There were no crevasses, so we flagged the new route, then got on the snowmobiles and tested the route to be sure. No fooling around in our team.
The wells were in the usual line cross-glacier. Tall pole with transponder and meteorological box, tattered red flag on top. Under that a squat orange insulated plywood box covering the wellhead, a very small shed in effect, heated by solar panels set next to
