Maybe, we said. Although the truth is that solar power from space is not likely to work very well. Capture, transmission, reception, all problematic.
Even if a sufficient power supply was found, people would still be required at the upper ends of the pipelines to oversee the water getting poured out up there. So this season we tried that part too, and it was a weird sight to see. Typical polar plateau scene, Ice Planet Zero, a sastrugied white plane to every horizon, domed by a dark blue sky very low overhead, stupendously awesome, you feel like the Little Prince and have to pinch yourself from time to time, also do some Pete Townshends to keep your hands warm, it’s fucking cold that goes without saying— and then there’s this pipeline like some bad dream from Alaska, their oil pipeline I mean, a nightmare. But there it is.
When the water pours out of the end of this pipe, it steams madly in the dry polar air and then sploshes down onto the ice and runs away, just as we had planned it, having aimed the nozzle down a slight hill. But the tilt of this so-called hill was about two meters in every kilometer, as good as we could get in the region. So we got surprised by how fast the water froze. Maybe we shouldn’t have been, most of us had tried the old Antarctic trick of taking a pot of boiling water outside and tossing it into the air to watch it steam and crackle and freeze to ice bits before it hits the ground— it’s an experiment that never ceases to amaze. Always good for a laugh. But pouring it out in quantity, as from a fire hose or a sewer outflow, we thought it would take longer.
Not so. In fact, newly frozen ice stacked just a few meters from the end of our pipe, creating a low dam that checked the water’s progress, making downhill no longer down, so that the unfrozen water began to flow back toward the pipe outlet, and then past it in the other direction. Oh no!
We hustled down to the little ice dam and started trying to break it, which worked about as well as you might expect. In the midst of our fuss, as we yelled directions at each other, not desperate but maybe a little panicked, Jordi shouted, Hey I’m stuck! Help!
He was standing in what had been ankle deep water near the outlet, which was now ice that had him stuck in place, with more water flowing over his boots all the while. Help!
We laughed, we cursed, we tried to cut him out, nothing worked. He was not in imminent danger, but on the other hand we couldn’t free him. And in the race between rising ice and the newly emerged water sliding slickly over it, the ice was winning. It actually takes quite a bit of thermal energy for water to turn into ice, the process actually warms things a little, weird though that seems, but at 30 degrees below zero that warming is a hard thing to detect, or rather it has little to no effect on anything. The frost steaming up from the mess fell on us like Christmas tree flocking, and it began to look like we couldn’t get Jordi out without chopping his feet off, which gave me an idea. Pull him out of his fucking boots, I said. Leave his boots.
This was easier said than done, but luckily he was wearing NSF’s white rubber bunny boots, rather than the more tightly fitted mountaineering boots that most of us had on, so we were able to stand by him and give him something to hold on to while we all pulled him up and out of the boots, him cursing as he got his feet up and out in the ridiculously cold air, after which we had to half-carry him to the heated dining hut. Someone had shut off the water quite a bit before, I don’t know who, I have to admit it hadn’t occurred to me, we were in the midst of an experiment, I don’t like to cut those short. Anyway, Jordi’s boots are still stuck out there, NSF will not be pleased, they will ding us for it.
So Jordi was saved, but the problem remained— water was going to freeze fast enough to create a problem in getting it to flow across the surface of the ice. The pipe outlet would have to be whipping back and forth like a hose on the driveway with too much pressure in it— which maybe could be arranged, but yikes, how to control that, it’s kind of non-linear. A sharper gradient would help too, although on the polar plateau those are not easy to find.
So we closed down for a week, and rebuilt one outlet to emerge under pressure and snake back and forth like a windshield wiper, see how that went. And when we tried it again, water came out of the pipe and flowed downhill and froze along the way, and finally pooled pretty well away from the outlet, where it mounded and the new water shifted and flowed around it and slid down yet again. And we got better and better at mapping where it might ultimately pool, and staying out of those pools while it happened.
The estimate we came away with was that we could deposit about a meter of water per year on any part of the polar plateau and still have it freeze successfully. More than that and we would be exceeding the capacity of the air and ice in combination to chill the water. So we would need a wide spreading zone; at a meter thick, that would be about a third
