The Entire Earth and Sky: Views on Antarctica

Six

Six A conviction of the fundamental soundness of the idea took root in my mind. —Alfred Wegener Wegener’s hypothesis in general is of the foot-loose type, in that it takes considerable liberty with our globe, and is less bound by restrictions or tied down by awkward, ugly facts than most of its rivals. Its appeal seems to lie in the fact that it plays a game in which there are few restrictive rules and no sharply drawn code of conduct. —R. T. Chamberlain, esteemed American geologist, University of Chicago . . . utter damned rot! —W. B. Scott, former president of the American Philosophical Society, expressing the prevalent American view of his day on the notion that continents could “drift” I slept curled in a rectangle of white light, watched by the bellbirds and gulls flying in a wide, clear Lyttelton sky. I had dozed off 180 million years ago, in the deep time of geologic stories, the rocks underfoot and towering above slipping in the idea that our minute-by-minute, day-by-day take on things was not entirely fair and accurate reporting. As I shook off sleep, the open text offered a photo of the German meteorologist and geophysicist Alfred Wegener. In 1912, while Scott and Amundsen raced to the South Pole, Wegener published his own discoveries: Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane, in English, The Origin of Continents and Oceans. Wegener’s “utter damned rot” ideas became the dominant geologic story by the mid-twentieth century. A tall, trim, gray-bearded Irishman named Bryan Storey, a geologist who directed Gateway Antarctica National Research Centre in Christchurch, was teaching all of this to me. Gateway hosted polar researchers from around the world; during my Fulbright tenure I was one of them. My colleagues included 138 * the entire earth and sky Alan Hemmings, a silver-haired English scientist and legal scholar engaged in research on environmental issues and the Antarctic Treaty; Gary Steele, a Canadian psychologist who studied how people dealt with extreme environments and capsule living; and Luke Copeland, a Cambridge-trained glaciologist who worked in both the Arctic and the Antarctic —he was studying the Ross Ice Shelf, placing sensors in the ice and monitoring it for early stresses associated with global warming. When I first met Luke he shook my hand, smiled, and said, “I am bipolar. I research ice in both the Antarctic and Arctic.” Across the hall, Michelle Finnemore, an American-born New Zealand transplant, managed all of Gateway’s programs, students, publications, and staff. Further down the hall, Paul Barr, the global positioning system technician, duplicated Antarctic maps from Gateway’s prodigious collection for research groups around the world; next door to him was an Australian mapmaker named Yvonne Cooke. A walk down the corridor—lined with blue and green watercolors created on the ice, as well as poster presentations from recent international meetings (taxonomy and ecology of Antarctic algae)—for coffee often invited wonderful, off-the-cuff reflections on Antarctican lives. All of us had lived in the Antarctic for months, some for years. During one of these chats, Alan offered me a most-gripping contemporary Antarctic story. From April to mid-June 1982, the Falklands conflict raged—Argentina launched a surprise invasion on the U.K.-controlled islands—the region’s only war. Alan managed the British Antarctic Survey’s remote Signy Island station (in the vicinity of the Falklands) during this time, and one afternoon he received a radio message from a Royal Navy ship with the order to relay it to the garrison of eighty Royal Marines stationed in the Falklands. The simple message directed: If attacked by the Argentines, the garrison six * 139 in the Falklands was to return fire. I wondered how the soldiers reacted, sitting at their remote camp, on a windswept island populated by about one thousand people, when he rang with that message. “No reaction, just an acknowledgment that they had received the order,” he said. I spent many days culling the scientific and political subtext of Antarctica, an essential piece of the landscape’s syntax , essential to understanding Antarctica. The continent evolved into a giant geopolitical experiment, effectively ruled by scientific agendas. It seemed that one interpretation of Wegener’s ideas could be...