Basically, the sea level rise problem gets solved. Beaches still in existence.
So, someone asked tonight in the mess tent, is what we’re doing down here geoengineering? Who the hell knows! What’s in a word? Call it Glacier Elevation Operations, Based on Estimates of Godawfulness Gobsmacking Interested Nations’ Goodness: GEO-BEGGING. Call it whatever you want, but don’t immediately clutch your pearls and declare we can’t predict the unintended consequences, we are sure to create backlash effects so bad they overthrow the good we intended, etc. There are some things man was not meant to know— my ass! We are meant to know everything we can find out. So get over that whole wimpy line of objection. And I’ll tell you what the unintended side effects of slowing down the glaciers of Antarctica will be: nothing. Nada. No side effects whatsoever, and the beaches and coastal cities of the world will stay out of the drink.
So if this works, and it looks like it will, I think we’ll be doing it. Our team is relatively small. The project is expensive but not that expensive. Like drilling a few wells anywhere else, pumping water anywhere else, plus keeping everything warm. And getting the stuff and people here in the first place. That will be expensive, yes, and dangerous, but a quick calculation of the cost of this operation of ours multiplied by something like a hundred, or even a thousand— that gets us to ten billion dollars. Well, probably it will be more expensive than that, everything is when you actually get into it. But whatever— call it fifty billion dollars. This is such a bargain!
So, I’ve been waking up every morning excited to get out there. Actually this is always true for me in Antarctica. Jamesways, mobile homes, tents, Mactown; get up and try to stay warm through breakfast and prep, gear up, out the door and bang— freezing sunny cold air, like a wallop of vodka and a slap to the face. Eyes streaming from the double whammy. Give a hoot and head to the line of snowmobiles. Get one of them started, off on the track leading to whichever hole I’m working on. The snowmobile roads are flagged, and the flags tell me what the wind is up to that day. If it’s windy then it’s going to be cold, that’s the law in Antarctica. That’s why they’re always saying, it’s not the cold, it’s the wind! Although when it’s windless, it’s still cold. But with a wind you are going to freeze your butt. The wind just ransacks you, no clothing is enough. You’d have to be in a spacesuit to be shut of it, and even then you’d be cold.
Today I made the rounds and found that every hole was working. Pumps pumping, heating elements keeping the water liquid. The lines from each pump feed into a bigger pipeline, like a piece of the Alaska pipeline lying right on the ice, with repeater heaters every kilometer, and joints where you can get into the line and run a pig if you need to melt an ice clog. The pipeline is running slightly uphill, which I think is an interesting decision, as you could actually just let it run downhill into the ocean, the addition to sea level rise would be so trivial, well below detection level. But people like to be neat.
It’s a funny place to describe, Antarctica. You can’t really get it across to people, what it looks like and what it feels like. I think the clean dry air makes for some optical illusions that add to the feeling that things don’t look quite real. Often it’s just snow and sky. That is very common. A sky clean of clouds. Around the coast there are clouds sometimes, more often than on the polar plateau, but still: blue sky, white snow under it. Sometimes smooth snow, sometimes sastrugi. Sastrugi and even completely flat snow look different when you’re looking toward the sun and when you’re looking away from it. When looking toward it, there’s a glare off icy snow, a blaze off snowy snow. Then when looking away from it, the white goes somehow dark— which is a strange thing, maybe due to the polarization of your sunglasses, but very noticeable when you turn around and look sunward again. The contrasts are more than the eye can deal with. If there are clouds, like the fleets of low marine puffballs that float above the ice near the coast, then their shadows on the snow appear black; a flat snow expanse can suddenly look hilly or peppered with black mesas. More contrast than the mind can handle, now why is this beautiful? I can’t say. Maybe a lot of people wouldn’t say it is. But I like it.
Looks like tomorrow we’ll be able to run the final tests and declare the job done. Then in about a year we should be able to tell how it’s working in terms of slowing this beast down. Maybe five years to be safe. Although people will be in