Antarctic Dreams: Learning What You’re Made of at the Bottom of the Earth

Lake Whillans, Antarctica, 2013.

On a late day in January 2013, toward the end of the Antarctic summer on a remote stretch of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, Dennis Duling and his six crewmates were busy crawling and climbing over a series of shipping containers lined up on the snow. They were performing last-minute repairs on their machine, a custom-built monstrosity called a hot-water drill, which they had transported here to provide a much sought-after service: to melt a hole—two feet wide and half a mile deep—into the West Antarctic Ice Sheet so scientists could get their first-ever direct view of the world beneath the ice. If this effort succeeded, it would mark a milestone of scientific exploration, on par with landing a probe for the first time on Mars.

Two dozen or so scientists had gathered at the field camp where the drilling would take place, eagerly awaiting the narrow portal to be opened into this subglacial underworld. Directly below them lay Lake Whillans, a sunless body of water that had not seen daylight in at least 100,000 years. The scientists were hoping for insights into the physics of the overlying ice sheet, and about what kind of life might exist beneath it—the same kind of life that might, by extension, lurk inside the ice-covered moons of Jupiter and Saturn. The success or failure of the $10 million project, funded by the National Science Foundation, rested on the shoulders of Duling’s team of seven ice drillers.

He and his crew spent two years building the drill back in Lincoln, Nebraska, on a shoestring budget—stitching it together from a menagerie of farm, factory, and other equipment never meant to commingle in a single entity. All told, it weighed half a million pounds. Its various components filled five massive shipping containers and three gigantic sleds, lined up and connected end to end by electric cables and hoses: a metallic, segmented beast sprawling across an acre of snow.

Duling, who has a bushy white beard, somber blue eyes, and thick hands calloused from decades of labor, hails from a family corn farm in central Nebraska. He led me on a tour of the drill—up and through and under, like walking through the belly of a carnival ride, pointing here and there to give a kind of genealogy of its parts. “That’s a dairy storage tank,” he said as he pointed toward a truck-sized cylinder overhead. “A stirring tank, like out of a cheese factory. I bought it used from Ullmer’s Dairy in Pulaski, Wisconsin.”

Duling, sixty-one, spent much of his life in Nebraska dynamiting old buildings and bridges, digging graves, salvaging railroad track, and repairing everything from harvest combines to Army howitzers. He wore a red mukluk with flaps over his ears, mirrored sunglasses, and an overall jacket with a strip of silver tape running down the back, slightly off-center—a practical modification that allowed him to grab the right jacket when it was lost in a pile.

We walked across the scalloped, wind-sculpted snow and up several steps to the door of one of his shipping containers mounted on four massive metal skis, each ski larger than a canoe. The container held several shiny metal boxes resembling propane grills: power-washers normally used to clean semis, repurposed here to heat water for the drill. Inside another container, outfitted with massive motors for lowering the drill nozzle into the hole, he showed off a chest freezer the size of a washing machine, which was being used as a snow-proof case for circuit boards. “We got it out of the dump,” he said, proud of his thriftiness. “It beats building one.” Overhead, he gestured to a row of electric boxes that drove various pumps and motors, adding: “A Kellogg’s cereal factory would use a lot of the same stuff.”

On the day that drilling began, a brisk breeze blew through camp...