So we got that first well melted, and the water came up about eighty-seven percent of the hole, so that I won the pool. Come on, Pete, they said, you can’t win a pool you set up yourself! Sure I can! I replied. And we pumped water from the top of the column and it kept refilling to the same level. This went on for four days. All good!
But then the water from below cut off abruptly. Some shift in the ice down there had presumably cut off our hole. Like capping an oil well, some said, but not really. A shift in the ice, I reckoned. There was a crevasse field about thirty kilometers upstream that made me wonder how far downstream the ice was broken up.
Anyway, not good. Clearly, if the method was going to work, the wells were going to have to be kept open. So it was a question of whether our cut-off was a typical thing or an unusual accident. We also had to find out if we could fix it. Re-open it, in other words, and then prevent whatever had happened to it from happening again. Failing that, we would have to abandon it and presumably start a new one. But if we couldn’t figure out the problem, and if this was what was going to happen all the time on these quickening glaciers, maybe the whole idea wasn’t going to work.
A team was dispatched out to us to run some seismic tests, also to bring in more cameras and other monitors to drop down the hole to see what we could see. We had to wait out a windstorm for them to be able to fly in, so for a couple of days there was nothing to do. I thought we were going to be able to figure it out, but the mood in the dining hall got more and more what you might call apprehensive.
Pete, this might turn out to be another fantasy solution, one of my postdocs said to me. One of those geoengineering dreams of redemption. Silver bullet fix that just shoots us in the head kind of thing.
I sure hope not, I said. I like the beach.
Hey, someone else said, geoengineering isn’t always just a fantasy. The Indians did that sulfur dioxide thing and that worked. Temperatures dropped for years after that.
Big deal, someone else replied.
It was a big deal!
But it didn’t do anything to solve the bigger problem.
Of course not, but it wasn’t meant to do that! It was a fix!
That’s why we’re here, I pointed out. This is a different fix.
Right. But look, Dr. G, even if we could get this to work, the glacier would still move downstream, so eventually this whole pumping system would get swept out to sea. It would have to be rebuilt up here again.
Of course! I said. It’s like painting the Golden Gate Bridge. All kinds of things have to be done like that. Maintenance stuff.
Besides, what’s the alternative? someone pointed out.
It’ll cost a ton!
What’s cost? I said. Postdocs can be so stovepiped, it would be funny if it weren’t so alarming. I clarified reality for them: Look, if you have to do something, you have to do it. Don’t keep talking about cost as if that’s a real thing. Money isn’t real. Work is real.
Money is real, Dr. G. You’ll see.
This method is the only way that will work.
But it didn’t work! It cut out on us!
Yes, but this was just the start. If at first you don’t succeed—
You’ll never get funded again.
30
When thinking about the suspended years before the Great Turn, what some have called the Trembling Twenties, historians have speculated whether it was part of the Great Turn itself, or the last exhausted moments of the modern period, or some sort of poorly theorized interregnum between the two. Comparisons have been made to the period 1900–1914, when clearly the twentieth century had not yet properly begun and people were unaware of the stupendous catastrophe approaching. The calm before the storm. But there is nothing like consensus here.
Of course attempts are always made to divide the past into periods. This is always an act of imagination, which fixes on matters geological (ice ages and extinction events, etc.), technological (the stone age, the bronze age, the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution), dynastic (the imperial sequences in China and India, the various rulers in Europe and elsewhere), hegemonic (the Roman empire, the Arab expansion, European colonialism, the post-colonial, the neo-colonial), economic (feudalism, capitalism), ideational (the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Modernism), and so on. These are only a few of the periodizing schemes applied to the flux of recorded events. They are dubiously illuminative, perhaps, but as someone once wrote, “we cannot not periodize,” and as this appears to be true, the hunt is on to find out how we can best put this urge to use. Perhaps periodization makes it easier to remember that no matter how massively entrenched the order of things seems in your time, there is no chance at all that they are going to be the same as they are now after a century has passed, or even ten years. And if on the other hand things feel chaotic to the point of dissolution, it is also impossible that some kind of new order will not emerge eventually, and probably sooner rather than later.
“If things feel” like this or that: these feelings too are linked to periodization, because our feelings are not just biological, but also social and cultural and therefore historical. Raymond Williams called this cultural shaping a “structure of feeling,” and this is a very useful concept for trying to comprehend differences in cultures
