Not going to happen, no way in the world. We had firmly established a trifecta of impossibilities: not enough energy, not enough pipe, not enough land.
So the straight-up seawater pumping solution wasn’t going to work. It was a fantasy solution. The beaches of the world were fucked.
A lot of us didn’t want the beaches of the world to be fucked. As we sat in our little habitats, like mobile homes half filled with insulation, we would gather around the table looking at maps and talking it over. World maps, I mean.
The endorheic basins of the world, meaning basins where water does not drain to the sea, were many in number. And many of them in the northern hemisphere were dry playas, where water had existed at the end of the last ice age but dried out since, partially or all the way. The Caspian Sea had been helped to dry down to its current level by people, the Aral Sea even more so. The Tarim Basin was completely dry all on its own, Utah’s Great Salt Lake was the remnant of a much bigger lake from the past— on and on it went, mostly in Asia and North America, and the Sahara. Of course there were people living in some of these places, but not many of them, given the problems of desertification, or disasterated shorelines in the case of the Caspian and Aral. If you added up their volume of empty available space, it was considerable. A lot of seawater could be relocated there, in theory. We ran the numbers; well, it would do for a meter or two of sea level rise. But then all those basins would be full, and you’d be back to the unworkabilities of Antarctica.
No. We needed to go back to the plan to pump water out from under the big glaciers, to drop them back on rock beds to slow them down. Slawek had been right all along. It was the only thing that was going to work. We had been following the money, taking it where we could get it and doing what they asked us to do with it. The billionaires and oil companies and Russia even the NSF had said, Pump seawater back onto Antarctica, cool idea! Do it! But we were the glaciologists, so we had to guide the process if it was going to have any chance of success. Give expert advice, guide the money where it needed to go.
So, the next Antarctic season we were back. We went every year anyway, of course, but for once this was a really good reason to go. Mostly we just like it down there and are looking for excuses. Science! Is the ice on Antarctica five million years old or fifty million years old, huge argument! That kind of thing. Pure science. This was much more applied. It felt good.
This time we went to the Pine Island Glacier above the WAIS, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Pine was running narrow and fast into the sea, right next to Pine Island. It had been a study site for many years, so NSF had the logistics in place for getting a camp installed there.
Although in fact they weren’t experienced in getting as much stuff there as we needed. We needed almost as much as McMurdo itself, not really, but NSF had decided that if we were going to give this idea another test we had better make it a good test, or we wouldn’t know what our results meant. Our first try long ago was now worthless as data, because no one had ever followed up on it to find out why that hole had cut off and gone dry.
So we borrowed the ships that resupplied McMurdo at the end of every summer, and a couple of Russian icebreakers, us having been so stupid as to neglect icebreakers for decades and then build only a couple of wimpy ones, really suitable only for the Arctic, where there’s practically no ice left anyway. But the Russians love icebreakers, and they sent a couple of their monstrous beasts south to help us bash an open-water lane to Pine Island, where we could land stuff and drag it over and up onto the glacier, using the same snow tractors that had been dragging fuel and gear from Mactown to Pole for many years. Without too much in the way of fuck-ups we were established on the Pine Island Glacier outlet about a month after Winfly had opened Mactown for the season. A very impressive logistical effort.
This was my twenty-fifth visit to the Ice, and while on Pine Island I was going to break the six-year mark for living on glaciers, which was not the craziest of icehead records, but respectable. My wife has never been happy about this, but I like glaciers. And here I was again, out on Pine Island, which is really just a bump in the ice, entirely submerged by it, white sastrugi to the horizon in all directions. It has to be admitted that all Antarctic glaciers look much the same. The Dry Valleys are fantastic, but 98 percent of the continent is not like them. It’s ice on ice, for as far as the eye can see.
So, we deployed the equipment to our first borehole site and got to work. It was like dragging a village over the ice, some kind of Baba Yaga thing, the monster tractors pulling trains of four or five huts in a row behind them from spot to spot. We started between the Hudson Mountains and Pine Island itself; this was a perfect pinch point in the glacier’s fall, a place where if we could thump it back down on its bedrock, it would slow for sure. So we circled the wagons and got to work.
It’s cold in Antarctica, yeah. You forget that back in your university office in Louisiana or Pennsylvania or California or Ohio, or wherever you winter over. Even when
