Christy Esmahan: The Laptev Virus

Although Angela had not visited with Oscar in several years, their friendship went back to their college days. They had lived in the same dorm, albeit on separate floors, and their roommates had dated. They had since kept in touch, through their mutual friends, and had both ended up in Houston. Oscar had married, divorced, and married again. Angela did not know his second wife, but she had maintained her connection to him through occasional phone calls, and now she felt comfortable sitting in his large office and telling her story as it ought to be told.

“After we take the ice core samples, we dig exploratory wells to see if there is any oil there, then we examine its quality and measure how extensive the oil field seems to be. Sometimes the oil is embedded in rocks. It’s as if the rocks were giant sponges and the oil was trapped in all the spaces in between. In order to get the rocks to release the oil, we have to resort to different techniques such as using dynamite to get it to pool and then flow into the well bore… but, all of that’s beside the point for this discussion. What’s important here is that our team was only beginning to assess the area and make initial estimates of where and how deep to drill.”

Oscar nodded and took a sip of his coffee, and as he did so, Angela’s eyes were drawn to his thin lips. It was almost as if he didn’t have lips at all, like a Muppet. And then there was his unibrow. She had to avert her eyes to keep from smiling as she remembered how all those years ago he had reminded her of Bert from Sesame Street. He had a long, thin face, already balding in his early twenties. Fortunately, in his older age he had gained a little weight and grown a goatee, both of which certainly helped attenuate the resemblance.

Angela forced herself to think about something else. She was here on pressing business. And Oscar was a busy man, after all. He was president of the Houston branch of the University of Texas, and she appreciated the fact that he was not rushing her.

“As I’m sure you can imagine, much of the Arctic has been portioned or claimed by different countries and companies. So we were in an area that our company owns, up in the Laptev Bay area. We had a small group of workers there, maybe fifteen people. All of them were experienced, mind you. There was a barracks that we built for the team. This part of the world is basically inaccessible for nine months of the year, so we get our teams out there as soon as we possibly can in late May, and they work for three solid months, living in the barracks, weathering any storms that may spring up. At the end of August we pull them out.”

Oscar pulled at his chin with its ring of mostly gray hair, thinking. He reached for the map of the Arctic that Angela had brought to the meeting and searched. “So they were right about here,” he said, now pointing with his finger. It was on the northern border of Siberia. “I don’t know much about oil and gas exploration, but of course everyone knows that Siberia has a lot of these natural resources.”

“That’s right. And like I said, Riesigoil is only one of many players up there. A few days ago the team, a small group of men, apparently went out to take some ice core samples of an area we were looking into. Routine stuff. Now, when ice core samples are taken, there is a fairly strict procedure that must be adhered to. We share the data with major research organizations that are investigating climate change and in general trying to decipher how the world looked millions of years ago. In order to preserve the ice core samples, they are wrapped carefully as soon as they emerge, and maintained at a temperature of -15°C. It’s all standard procedure, you understand.”

“Yes,” said Oscar, pressing his flat lips together.

“The samples are then transported back to the barracks where there are labs set up for analysis. Samples are normally kept hermetically sealed, isolated from human contact or from contact with the atmosphere because the investigative teams want to also be able to study environmental and atmospheric conditions that were present on earth when these ice layers were first formed, and these parameters cannot be assessed if the samples get contaminated.”

“That’s right. I remember studying that a long time ago,” said Oscar with a wink. They often joked about how long ago college had been.

“It was something about how ice layers formed as the snow fell, year after year, accumulating and trapping small bubbles of air and anything that was present in the air at the time.”

“Yes,” said Angela. “And besides the actual chemical makeup of the air, including how much carbon dioxide, methane and other gasses it had, scientists can also discover what else was floating around in the atmosphere, including ash, pollen and even microorganisms. After thousands of years of continually adding blanket upon blanket of snow and ice, these layers became more and more compact, sinking deeper and deeper. This sample these men took that day, though, was from the permafrost, which is a thick layer of soil that has not thawed in thousands of years. It was from deep down, so we know it’s old, but it wasn’t just ice, which is pretty much sterile.”

“And something went wrong?” asked Oscar.

Angela nodded gravely and crossed her legs. Something had gone terribly wrong. Pandemonium had struck that remote little corner of the world and lives had been lost. That is what had brought her to this precipitous visit with her old friend.

“Bingo. As a safety precaution, Riesigoil, and pretty much every exploration company that I know of, employs a bear hazer—a sharpshooter with a modified shotgun that holds tranquilizer darts—to protect the team, just in case there is unwelcome company you know. Polar bears aren’t exactly the friendliest creatures around,” she said with a wry smile. “This particular team was just four men, and they had come by helicopter to the site. Of course, helicopter pilots always check the weather carefully before making a flight, and according to the log books we found, the forecast had been acceptable. They knew that there was a storm on the way, but they felt certain that they could get back to base camp before it arrived. And they did manage to do just that. But they experienced a series of unfortunate events.”

Angela consulted her notes, wanting to be sure that she did not omit any details. It was important to her company to secure Oscar’s promise to help immediately, and she needed to impress upon him the seriousness and precariousness of the situation.

“First, not one, but two bears showed up. Usually polar bears, especially the males, are solitary creatures and you rarely, if ever, see two at a time. Maybe it was the fact that it was the beginning of summer and so the ice was melting. Maybe the bears were hungrier after the winter—I don’t know. The fact is that while the bear hazer was dealing with the first one, the second one got too close to the group and managed to scare the men before the hazer got both bears tranquilized. According to the pilot’s notes, a guy named Evan Shapiro, the bear hazer had ample opportunity and should have taken the bears out before they got that close to the team. The hazer, a guy by the name of Max Maldonado, obviously disagrees with Shapiro’s report. Max is a big hunter and did not think that there was any risk, but in any case, I would say this was their first mistake.”

“Wow, you never really hear of polar bear attacks. That’s pretty scary.”

“Yes, well, I can’t even imagine. Anyway, the reason this is important is because since the team came under a perceived and immediate threat, they lost focus of what they were doing with the ice core sample that they were just removing from the well, and before they could get it properly wrapped, they dropped it and it shattered on the ice. This turned out to be the second mistake.”