So an austral spring came when a fleet of private planes flew south from Cape Town, South Africa, where there’s a permanent gate at the airport that says ANTARCTICA (I love that) and we landed on the Ronne Ice Shelf, overlooking the frozen Weddell Sea. There we unloaded and set up a village of yurts, Jamesways, and tents, which looked small in the vast expanse of ice, because it was. Even the tourist villages at Pioneer Hills and under the Queen Astrid Range were larger. But this one served as the drop site for an ever-growing collection of specialized equipment, some of it lent to the operation by Transneft, the Russian state-owned oil pipeline corporation. The biggest piece of equipment was brought to the edge of the Ronne Ice Shelf by a massive Russian icebreaker, and unloaded in a tricky operation: a giant pump. Intake pipes were punched through the sea ice, and a transport pipeline was attached to the pump and run inland, across the Ronne Ice Shelf and up to the polar cap, past the South Pole to Dome Argus, the highest point on the Eastern Antarctic Ice Sheet. Because it was higher, this was felt to be the energy equivalent of the even more distant Gamburtsevs.
The power for the pumping, also the heating of the pipeline to keep the water liquid in the pipes, was provided by a nuclear submarine reactor donated for the occasion by the Russian navy. If it turned out to be feasible, the billionaire had explained to people back in Russia, this operation might turn into one of the biggest industries in the world. And save St. Petersburg from drowning. The fact that this supposed industry would require the power of about ten thousand nuclear subs was apparently left out of the discussion. But okay, an experiment in method, sure. Why not.
All the ice melting around the world was now raising sea level at a rate of some 5 millimeters a year, which did not sound too bad until one remembered that it had been 3 millimeters a year just twenty years before, and this rapid rate of increase was also itself speeding up. If the current rate doubled every year, then very quickly the sea would be rising so quickly that the coastlines of the world would be inundated, and that catastrophe would greatly complicate an already tricky ecological situation.
Many had pointed out that if sea level rise did increase in speed in any significant way, it would overwhelm any possible attempt to pump that water back up onto Antarctica or anywhere else. If it got as bad as even a centimeter a year, which could easily happen if things went south, ha ha, the amount of water in that rise would equal a cube roughly the size of the District of Columbia at its base, thus twice as tall as Everest. And moving that would take far more pipe than ever made in all history.
But since the rate of future sea level rise was unknown, it was felt by many, or at least by the billionaire in question, to be worth looking into. It would provide some real costs to check against the modeling exercises, and also would test what happens to seawater when released high on the polar cap. How far would it spread, how it would affect the ice already up there, and so on.
When we got the first line attached to the pump and started running it south, we took helos inland to get to the front edge of the operation. A longer flight every week. Looking down we could see the pipeline below us, like a black thread on white cloth.
It’s like sucking up the ocean in a drinking straw, I said, and spitting your mouthfuls onto shore.
It’s true, someone replied. But if you had ten million straws …
No, I said. It’s stupid, this notion. But it’s gotten us down here this year, and we might learn something useful from it.
So keep quiet about how stupid it is!
I will. My lips are sealed. I never said a thing. And if I did, I didn’t mean it.
Griffen, you are such a smartass.
Hey! I said. Another great day in Antarctica!
45
Mary flew to San Francisco, where the US Federal Reserve was hosting a meeting of some of the other big central banks. There was an annual meeting in Basel of all the central banks, convened by the Bank for International Settlements, but those were pro forma things; the real discussions usually happened elsewhere, and when the US Federal Reserve called for a consultation, the other central banks usually showed up. This meeting was one of those, and the head of the Fed had welcomed Mary and given her a slot on the program. So it was time to talk things over with them in person, make the pitch for a carbon coin.
Before that meeting began, she dropped in on the annual gathering of California Forward, having been invited to it by a young woman who had once interned for her. So a morning came when Mary walked with Esther over San Francisco’s urban hills to the Moscone Convention Center. It was a brisk morning, the air almost as cool as in Zurich, but oceanic and windy. This and something intangible, maybe the hills, or the light, gave the city a wild, open feel, very unlike staid old Zurich. Mary was very fond of Zurich, but this city overlooking its bay struck her in a different way as rather superb, basking under the windy Pacific sun and giving her with each block they walked new views in all directions.
The California Forward meeting was an annual summit gathering for several score organizations. California, if it had been a nation, would now constitute
