We got the door to open, and went into the hut covering the wellhead. Nice and warm in there. Dark even with the lights on, after the glare outside. Wind keening around the sides of the thing. Nice and cozy; it had to be kept above freezing. Checked the gauges; no water coming up. We opened the hatch on the well cap, fed a snake camera down the hole. The snake’s reel was so big a snowmobile had had to haul it here on a sled of its own; two kilometers of snake on one big wheel.
Down went the camera. We stared at the screen. It was like doing a colonoscopy of an exceptionally simple colon. Or probably it’s more like the cameras that plumbers use to check out a sewer line. No water in the hole, even two hundred meters down; this was a sign something was wrong, because when a hole is open from the bottom of a glacier to its top, the weight of the ice pushes water up the hole most of the way. But here we were looking far down the hole, and no water.
Got to be blocked, someone said.
Yes but where?
Eventually we got to the bottom of the hole; no water at any point along the way.
Hey you know what? This glacier has bottomed out. There’s just no more water to pump!
So it will slow down now.
For sure.
How soon will we know?
Couple years. Although we should see it right away too. But we’ll need a few years to be sure it’s really happened.
Wow. So we did it.
Yep.
There would be maintenance drilling, of course. And the glaciers would still be sliding down into the sea under their own weight, at their old slower speed, so every decade or so they would have to be redrilled upstream a ways from the current holes. There were going to be lots of people working down here for the foreseeable future— maybe decades, maybe forever. A rather glorious prospect, we all agreed, after thawing out and getting into the dining hut, standing high on its big sled runners. Little windows on the south side of the hut gave a view of the Shackleton Range, oddly named, as he never got near this place. Possibly it was near where his proposed cross-Antarctic route would have gone, but when the Endurance got caught in the ice and crushed, all that plan had to be scrapped, and they had set about the very absorbing project of trying to survive. We toasted him that day, and promised his ghost we would try to do the same. Drop Plan A when the whole thing goes smash, enact Plan B, which was this: survive! You just do what you have to, in an ongoing improvisation, and survive if you can. We toasted his rugged black-cliffed mountains, rearing up into the low sky south of us. We were 650 meters above sea level, and ready for food and drink. Another great day in Antarctica, saving the world.
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The 58th COP meeting of the Paris Agreement signatories, which included the sixth mandated global stocktake, concluded with a special supplementary two-day summing up of the previous decade and indeed the entire period of the Agreement’s existence, which was looking more and more like a break point in the history of both humans and the Earth itself, the start of something new. Indeed it can never be emphasized enough how important the Paris Agreement had been; weak though it might have been at its start, it was perhaps like the moment the tide turns: first barely perceptible, then unstoppable. The greatest turning point in human history, what some called the first big spark of planetary mind. The birth of a good Anthropocene.
So the last two days of this meeting consisted of one day of people summarizing, listing, and celebrating various aspects of the positive changes made since the Agreement was signed. The second day was devoted to listing and describing some of the outstanding problems they had yet to solve if they were to secure the progress inherent or promised by the things mentioned on the first day. Both were very busy days.
On the first day, the day of celebration, Mary walked around the poster halls drinking them in and feeling first startled, then amazed. The big banner with the Keeling Curve stretching across it, with its continuous rise, then the leveling, then the recent downturn, stood over everything else like a flag. And under that, there was so much going on that she had never heard of. She felt again the power of the cognitive error called the availability heuristic, in which you feel that what is real is what you know. But there was so much more going on than any one person could know, reality was so much bigger than the self, that it was alarming to contemplate. This explained the error: one felt the vastness and shrunk in on oneself like a snail’s horns, instinctively trying to protect one’s mind.
And yet there was no real harm in it, this contact with the larger reality. Mary tried to feel that. She stuck her horns out and took it all in. The conference halls had the look of any other scientific meeting, poster after poster describing project after project. In this case all the posters, and the various organizational tables, and the panel discussions and plenary talks, described good things being done; but then again this was always true, at any scientific meeting ever held: they were utopian gatherings, spaces of hope. The difference here was that together the posters were describing a global situation that no one would have believed possible even ten years before; and forty years ago it had
