Sarah Andrews - In Cold Pursuit

The ground dropped away. Contracted. Nat and Jeannie shrank into mice, and then gnats. The helicopter began to slide forward, tilting slightly toward its nose, still rising. The penguins went by, tiny dots of black and white on the splattered rock. The helicopter was over the frozen sea now, the Transantarctic Range spreading across the horizon to greet them.

They flew across trackless miles of ice, their world reduced to a tiny bubble that cast a vague shadow the size of a pinhead far below them. The edge of the continent slowly resolved from a thin line to a scrabble of rocks, and then they were over it, continuing onward, now cutting up a valley between two ranges of mountains, following a river of ice toward its source. The glacier filled the valley in a fractured cascade, frightening in its instability. “I wouldn’t want to walk on that,” she said to Paul through her tiny microphone.

“No, you would not. But beautiful, eh? In a terrifying sort of way? And look at this one.” He pointed to their right, to a lobe of ice that hung like a tongue from a high side valley. “Incredible, all the shapes. Before I came here, I thought ice was ice, but it’s a world unto itself, infinitely variable. This will be Clark Glacier up here to our right.” He lifted the controls, raising them up higher and higher, climbing like a mosquito up over an elephant’s hide, skimming up past dry, empty walls of rock until they came out over a notch in the mountains. “This is the Olympus Range,” said Paul. “Just one of many ranges that make up the Transantarctics here in the Dry Valleys. And here on this saddle sits Clark Glacier. Just a little thing, only two miles wide and how many long. A nice, quiet little glacier with no cracks in it for you to begin your studies.”

“I’ll take my ice as crevasse-free as I can get it,” said Valena. “Where’s the camp?”

“Just there,” said Paul. “Can’t you see it?”

Valena peered out across the smooth expanse of snow-covered ice looking for the line of tents she knew must be there. They had a drill rig going, so there would be at least one very large tent, but where was it?

Suddenly, she saw it: a minuscule group of pinpoint dots. The dots grew larger now, and larger yet, until they were a line of tents: two yellow Scotts, a few small domes, one large orange dome for the drill, and something that looked like a brightly colored pill bug. A tiny person was waving at them, pointing to a position in which he wanted them to land. No, she , Valena realized, as they descended low enough to make out the smiling face of a woman.

They settled onto the snow, and Paul shut down the engine, bringing the rotors to a stop. Valena unclipped her seat belt and shoulder restraints and hopped out. “Dr. Bosch?” she inquired.

“Please call me Naomi,” said the woman. She was in her late thirties or early forties and very fit, dressed in nicely fitted overalls and a thick fleece sweater. A bright red knit cap did not quite cover a head full of busy brown curls, and her alert brown eyes took in Valena in detail. Naomi was a smiler, and her welcome was clear and hearty.

“Thanks for having me to your camp,” said Valena.

“Glad to have an extra pair of hands. Let’s get these core boxes unloaded,” said Naomi. “Hey, boys! Hop to it!”

A flap on the side of the big drilling tent opened, and two young men stepped out and hurried to help Naomi with the core packing boxes. When they were done, one of them stood off to one side, eyeing Valena through his dark glasses.

Valena recognized him from brief sightings around DRI: here, at last, was Daniel Lindemann.

NAOMI REACHED INSIDE THE HELICOPTER, SELECTED A helmet, and put it on. “Climb back in,” she told Valena.

Valena gasped. “I’m not staying?”

“Oh, we’ll be back later,” said Naomi, “but first we’ve got to scout our next drilling location.” She gave Valena a wink. “Come on, I know it’s a lot to ask…”

“I’m in!” said Valena.

Naomi turned to the men. “Now, don’t look so hangdog. You’ll be living there in a few days.”

Dan Lindemann slunk back off to the drilling tent.

“Surly,” Paul whispered, so that only Valena could hear him. “Unfriendly. I saw him watching you.”

Valena gritted her teeth. “If I have any ‘accidents’ in the next day or so, you remember that, okay?”

Paul’s eyes widened, but he didn’t say anything.

They loaded up and lifted off, peeling away to the northwest toward the next valley. As they crossed over it, Valena saw why the Dry Valleys were thus named: this one had no ice in it at all. In fact, it was carpeted with sand dunes. The valley did not at first appear to be very large, but when they swung out to cross it, it seemed to expand and swallow them. Once again, the terrain had tricked her mind.

They flew along a great, dark cliff that stood in pillarlike columns. More volcanics , thought Valena, but, looking far to the left and right, she saw that this flow had not come out across the surface of the earth but had instead been injected between layers of rock. A sill , she thought, recalling the correct term from her geology classes. And it went on and on.

Never had she seen one so clearly exposed, nor so large, even in photographs.

Naomi’s voice came to her through her headphones. “That’s the Ferrar Dolerite,” she said. “Pretty impressive, eh? That cliff will be a couple hundred feet high, and you know how far it goes?”

“I can’t possibly guess,” replied Valena.

“Three thousand kilometers. The length of the Transantarctic Mountains. Imagine all that magma,” she said. “That’s one hell of a lot of liquid rock.”

“All at once ?”

“Exactly. Mind-bending. It marks the breakup of Gondwanaland. Tear Antarctica away from Africa, South America, Australia… and up comes the hot juice.” She indicated with her hands big plates of the earth’s surface ripping apart.

Valena’s jaw dropped. Throughout her undergraduate geology training, she had studied plate tectonics, the unifying theory of geology that described the movement of the earth’s crustal plates, and had understood it. Moreover, she had found the evidence for it compelling, convincing. It had become a cornerstone of her understanding of the world around her. It explained why the fossilized remains of dinosaurs and delicate ferns had been found on this continent, the remains of life that inhabited it when this land was farther north. Then the convection of heat within the earth’s mantle had ruptured the supercontinent of Gondwanaland into its current chunks two hundred million years ago and had moved Antarctica slowly south, then parked it here thirty million years ago.

The Ferrar Dolerite, one long, black cliff of evidence. Data like this was why scientists came to Antarctica, and this was why the nations that had called Antarctica their own had suspended their claims and set it aside, under the Antarctic Treaty, as a scientific and ecological preserve.

As they flew deeper into the continent, the mountains rose above them into minarets and castles. Mammoth tongues of glacial ice licked down wide valleys from the impossibly broad reaches of the Antarctic Plateau. Ice and rock, rock and ice rolled out all around them, a symphony of harsh beauty.

The brute strength and naked vulnerability of the land called Valena to its icy breast, claiming her forever as its own, speaking to her of her tinyness. The frenzied scurryings of civilization did not exist here.

She leaned her face against the cold Plexiglas of the helicopter window, sighing, falling irrevocably in love, grateful to the bottom of her soul that there existed this one place on earth that could not be tamed.