“You get used to it.”
“Nobody uses those black sleep goggles that people wear on planes?”
“I’ve never seen anyone do it. Not a bad idea, though. Especially if you’re on ice or snow. Then it’s a lot brighter than this.”
Her voice was drowsy. The idea of sharing a tent with a strange man was obviously not of concern to her. Done it a thousand times. Already asleep, it appeared.
And soon after that, so was he.
He woke and it was still light. He had no idea what time it was. He checked his watch: 7:04 A.M. Val was not in her bag; it lay pulled down toward the door, a suggestively Val-shaped hole still in it.
He took his boots from under his head and put them on; then, as he was quickly chilling, his parka. He rolled forward with a stiff groan, and crawled out into the brilliant frigid morning. The sun was standing over a different ridge, no doubt the east ridge; he had given up trying to orient himself in McMurdo, but out here it might be possible, if you stayed put long enough. He needed to use his pee bottle again, and there was a rock outhouse up the hill, away from the white surface of the lake. Yellow hair shone over its top rocks. He looked away, down at the lake. It was cold, but in his parka he felt comfortable. Hungry, however. Very hungry.
He joined the group, which had already reconvened in the Scott tent, and they ate oatmeal and crackers and chocolate bars hastily, as if oppressed by the very same crowded tent that twelve hours earlier had been such a comfy refuge. Then it was outside again, where they occupied themselves filling backpacks, and taking turns up at the rock outhouse.
“Can I carry anything?” Wade asked Professor Michelson.
“No, thank you. But bring your pack, and you can help carry samples on the way back.”
Val and Misha took off ahead of the scientists, who followed them up the valley. Distant red dots, bobbing in the rock rubble under the white mass of the glacier.
“Why are the Dry Valleys dry?” Wade asked Michelson as they hiked along.
“It’s not entirely understood. But people usually agree that the mountains at the heads of these valleys are so high that they choke off the ice sliding down from the polar cap. In places some ice spills over, but the winds ablate the ice faster than it pours through the passes, and so you have the hanging glaciers you see—” gesturing ahead “—steep-sided because of the ablation, and fairly static in position. At least they have been since their discovery. Now, however …”
“The global warming?”
“Well, yes. There’s no doubt the climate has warmed in the last century, because of carbon dioxide that we’ve put in the atmosphere.”
Wade nodded sharply, intending to say that this was a fact known even to Washington bureaucrats.
“Yes yes,” Michelson acknowledged, “you know about that. But the effects of this warming on Antarctica aren’t entirely clear. At first, you see, the warming increases precipitation down here, in the form of more snow, it not being so warm as to rain. And so the ice caps and the glaciers and the sea ice actually tend to grow. At least that is one force involved. So the Dry Valleys could be iced over again, as they have been before, if that were the only thing going on. In fact this snow you see on the ground here—this would have been very unusual at this time of year, thirty years ago. Now the valleys are snowy more often than they’re bare, and they’re never less than piebald, if you see what I mean. Which is no help at all to people trying to study them.”
“What about the big ice shelves breaking off?”
“Well, those turned out to be very sensitive to slight temperature increases. They’ve broken off because of their own dynamic with the ocean temperatures and currents, or so we think. Then as they detach and float off north, the ice coming down from the polar cap has nothing to slow it down, and so there are the immense ice tongues that we’re seeing, and very fast ice streams and glaciers, and even a slight sinking of the polar cap itself, if the Ohio State people’s results are correct. But with more snow up there as well, it’s hard to know what the upshot will be.”
Wade nodded again, more agreeably. Establishing the ground of understanding with experts who were explaining things to him was his responsibility; nod too often, and the expert was likely to give up entirely; but in the absence of any sign of response, some of them would begin to explain everything. Michelson appeared to have a tendency in the latter direction, so Wade said, “But if global warming takes things up to the point where it’s above freezing down here for periods every summer?”
“Well, then things start melting.”
“Uh huh …”
“And with the ice shelves already substantially gone, and the ice streams, which are like ice rivers within the West Antarctic ice sheet, speeding up—then the ice sheets themselves will begin to detach. The western Antarctic ice sheet is grounded on land that is well below sea level, so it comes off very quickly. The eastern sheet is much larger, and more of it is grounded above sea level, so it will hold longer, but still, the warmer it gets the faster it will go, more precipitation or not. And if the eastern sheet goes, then sea level will be some sixty to seventy meters higher than it is now.”
“You’d think that would be enough of a threat to get everyone’s attention.”
“Yes, but it’s so inconvenient. If we have to take global warming seriously, then everything changes. CO2 levels have to drop, industrial society can’t keep burning fossil fuels—we would have to live differently. It’s so much easier to find some scientist somewhere who would be ever so happy to appear before a Congressional committee and declare that there is no such thing as global warming, or if there is that it isn’t really a problem, or that burning fossil fuels has nothing to do with it. Then the problem can be declared nonexistent by law and everyone can go back to business as usual.”
“You mean Professor Warren?”
“Yes,” Michelson said, nodding in approval at Wade’s recognition.
In fact Professor Warren’s appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had caused quite a stir, as Wade well knew, having been put in charge of substantiating Phil Chase’s rebuttal to the professor. It was slightly possible Michelson was aware of Chase’s opposition to the renegade professor, rather than knowing only that the committee as a whole had endorsed Warren’s views enthusiastically, and used them to justify the blockage of the CO2 joint implementation treaty with China. But it was hard to tell; between beard, sunglasses, and black leather nose protector attached to the sunglasses, Michelson’s was a hard face to read. A face from a Breughel painting, really. Best to make no assumptions.
“Is this where we’re going?” Wade asked, pointing up a side valley where Graham Forbes was just in view.
“Yes. Follow Graham. Up into the Apocalypse Peaks,” he announced with some satisfaction.
Hiking uphill on the brown pebbly snow-crusted rubble was hard work, and Wade started to heat up. He unzipped his parka and let the cold air cool him a bit. Unfortunately no matter how hot his torso became, his ears and nose continued to freeze.
As they climbed higher they could see farther up the hanging valley. A glacier ran down its middle, reaching almost to the frozen lakes on the floor of Barwick Valley. Higher still and they could see the source of the glacier, a big tongue of ice pouring through the gap between two black rock ridges. Above and beyond that tongue the whole world was white. The edge of the polar cap, as Michelson confirmed; enough ice to cover the United States and Mexico. “These Dry Valleys are very unusual, you must remember that. It will be a shame if they get overrun by the ice.” Michelson ascended at a steady relaxed pace, and appeared neither too hot nor too cold. “That’s Shapeless Mountain. Beyond it is Mistake Peak. Over there, Mount Bastion and the Gibson Spur. These are all peaks of the Willett Range, and the ice cap is running up against their southern flanks, and through the passes between them, as here.”