“Oh,” Carlos said, looking at him. As always with people outdoors in Antarctica, sunglasses kept him basically expressionless. “You have not heard? Ron was let go.”
“Let go?”
“Yes. We had to fire him. I don’t know how well you knew Ron, but, well …” He shrugged. “He had ideas about how things would work out here that were not right.”
“Hmph. Well … I can’t say I’m surprised.”
Ron, the emperor of Antarctica. He had been so pleased to be quitting ASL and coming out here, and no doubt he had thought he would be secret boss of the system here as in Mac Town. X had no doubt he had done things that justified firing him. Still, to actually do it … It was hard to believe that anyone had had the guts. ASL had been trying to ignore Ron’s abuses for years, simply to avoid the confrontation that these folks had taken on within weeks of hiring him. Which must have made Ron even angrier. He’d burnt his bridges behind him to make this move, and now he was fired and presumably back home in Florida somewhere, stewing with rum and resentment. It was a creepy thought.
X turned his attention to Carlos again, who was leading him to the derrick and the drilling rig underneath it. Everything in the camp constellated around this derrick, a tall spindly structure much like the classic configuration of oil derricks from the very beginning, although this one had a substantial gantry standing next to it, a tall heated chamber, Carlos said, where the coupling of drills and pipeline units was accomplished. The technology incorporated powerful new ice borers with oil extraction techniques learned in the North Sea. Much of the work was automated, of course. X would be learning a variety of the jobs that remained for humans to do; not because he was to be a general field assistant, Carlos was quick to add, but because everyone on station was a generalist, by necessity. “It’s the best way—there are a lot of jobs to be done, and not very many people to do them.” This looked right to X; the station was very small, the galley a single stove and a sink without running water, in an old blue beaker box that also served as meeting room and coms center. A Jamesway next door was the dorm, and for those who disliked the dry heat and noise of its Preway heater there were some tents staked out on the hard snow. Those, and a few heated and unheated warehouses, and a yellow bulldozer and a crane, and some forklifts in a shed, and a machine and carpentry shop, and a dozen big solar and piezoelectric panels in an array to the north—and that was it.
“This is just an exploratory station, you understand,” Carlos said. He took X into one of the heated sheds while they were talking, and opened a small freezer and took out a chunk of ice. He flicked on a cigarette lighter taken from one of his inner pockets, and applied the flame to the chunk of ice; after a moment blue flames flickered off the top of it.
“Whoa,” X said.
“This is methane hydrate. There is a lot of it under us, at the bottom of the ice cap. If we find there is enough of it, then they may decide to expand, and drill for extraction. We are also evaluating the possibility of oil, of course, but that is secondary. The methane hydrates are the thing.”
“And what are they, again?”
“They are single molecules of methane—natural gas, you know—trapped in crystalline ice cages. They only form under high pressure, but when they do form there is a lot of gas there, as much as thirty liters of gas per liter of sediment. Of course there is a great deal of natural gas in the world, but for the southern countries that have no oil, and are crippled by debts to the North, if they could find even gas supplies of their own it would be very helpful.”
“But can gas be transported by tankers?”
“It isn’t how they do it. But there are new pipelines now, flexible and unbreakably strong, designed to lie under the surface of the ocean. It’s possible to run pipelines directly from here to South America and southern Africa. The materials are fantastic, they’re made of meshes like Kevlar, and include plastics grown in soy plants. The pipes have laser pigs, insulation, everything. Fantastic pipe. And so deep underwater nothing will disturb them. So these new technologies make methane a more useful fuel. And burning these methane hydrates could actually help the global climate situation. You see, if the polar caps melt, like we see them starting to, then this methane below us will be released into the atmosphere, and kick off a greenhouse warming that makes the one we have now look like nothing. We think now that some of the great rapid climate warmings of the past were caused by the release of methane hydrate deposits. So it’s possible we can capture this gas, and burn it for our own power, and reduce greenhouse gases at the same time. It’s very elegant in that way.”
X nodded, wandering the shop and looking at equipment. “What about the sliding of the ice?” He pointed in the direction of the derrick. “It must be moving a little, anyway. How do you deal with that?”
“The movement is not so big here as to be a problem,” Carlos said. “Here it moves only five meters a year, and does not seem to be speeding up, like so many places on the cap are. So we can simply add length to the pipe, and by the time the methane here is extracted the station will only be a few hundred meters to the north.”
“What about ice surges?”
“Don’t say that word! No such thing as ice surges on the polar cap!”
But ever since the Ross Ice Shelf had detached, and Ice Stream C had come unstuck from the position it had been frozen in for the last few centuries, surges had been common all over the place. The possibility couldn’t be denied that ice anywhere in Antarctica might move with startling speed, as Carlos now admitted: “If it surges, we are done here. But the hole will be capped by the surge, so that there would be no spill, even if we were pumping oil. Maybe the top part of the pipe, but we clean that up, and, I don’t know—go home, probably. We are underfunded as it is, as you probably have noticed. It would be hard to recover from the loss of that much pipe, and if there is one surge, there might be more. No, there can be no surges! They are forbidden here! Come on, let’s go in and get warm. It’s Geraldo’s turn to cook supper, and he is very good.”
Inside the steamy fragrant beaker box the others were talking about glaciology, and Punta Arenas, and laughing a lot; and X felt another glow of happiness. Carlos and Geraldo explained what X’s first jobs would entail; the ongoing exploratory efforts were still pretty wide-ranging, and though they were sure enough of this deposit to start drilling, they had not yet established the size of the deposit, or the location of others suspected to be nearby. So they were taking trips out from the station on snowmobiles, to do what they called “three-D seismics,” which involved setting out a grid of geophones, to record the shocks from explosions set off in the ice, and in the rock of nunataks to the north. Geologists working for the group would then look for “bright spots” in the record, and map the rock and the stratigraphy of the subsurface. Their well was therefore an early “cost well,” and just one in a giant X pattern of them out on this sector of the cap. Down their well they would send tools to measure the gamma radiation, and take actual looks around with fiber optics, among other new detection methods. “We’re definitely on top of a big methane hydrate deposit,” Carlos said, “and under that is a seal rock, which is a lithologic seal over sedimentary rock that often contains oil. The drill is cutting through the seal rock now, which is a very hard old lava field.”
X nodded over and over again, happy to hear the confident beakerspeak; and feeling more and more pleased at the growing conviction that no matter what happened here, he would not be contributing to the despoliation of the pure Antarctic. The Man Without a Name, yes, The Man Without a Country, sure; but not The Man Without Environmental Ethics. Which meant he could face Val in his mind. And he would be working, he saw, with people who were sort of a mix of beaker and ASL—something seldom if ever seen in McMurdo, where the two roles were so strictly separated for the sake of “efficiency”—even though the setup here was obviously the way it should be, everyone doing part of the support work, everyone participating also in the science involved, and benefiting from both. No, this was great. He would never run into Val and have the rest of his day ruined; he would spend his season out here under the vast low dark blue sky, with real work to do, surrounded by Spanish and African voices and laughter, with a tent of his own to sleep in. It was a GFA’s paradise. It was X heaven.