Excerpts

9780767931755|excerpt Swan: Antarctica 2041 The Beardmore In the Antarctic summer of 1985 I found myself standing at the inland margin of the Ross Ice Shelf, a crevasse-riven, glacier-fed formation about the size of France. A France without baguettes and cathedrals. A totally Paris-less France. The ice beneath me ran down a thousand feet. Underneath that, the Bible-black darkness of a cold, unexplored sea. There were reasons why the Ross Sea remained unexplored. A New Zealand fishing boat once pulled from its waters a colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, to distinguish the species from its smaller cousin, the merely giant squid) more than thirty feet long and weighing over a thousand pounds. That's what they had down there, that and God knows what other creatures. Perhaps only Captain Nemo could have handled it. To report my location on the Ross Ice Shelf above the Ross Sea, in other words, is another way of saying that I was in the middle of frozen nowhere, perched on the brink of an enormous nothingness. "A silence deep with a breath like sleep" is how one man who died there put it. Early Antarctic explorers called the ice shelf "the Great Ice Barrier," in honor of the hundred-foot-high vertical wall where it meets the sea. But for those early explorers, and for me, the barrier acted more as a road, an immense, human-dwarfing, windswept road, but nevertheless a well-recognized path into the interior of the continent. We followed "In the Footsteps of Scott," as our expedition was called, tracing the trek to the South Pole of the great British explorer Captain Robert F. Scott. As I stood at the edge of the barrier, the question I pondered was pretty basic. Why in heaven's name would anyone want to enter the interior of Antarctica? Why would anyone freely choose to experience the most inhuman landscape available to us? It's a boogeyman of a place, good for scaring the wits out of homebodies. "The highest, driest, windiest, coldest place on earth"--that's a formulation that seems by law to appear in every single piece of writing about Antarctica (the most memorable example: a book coauthored by Leonardo DiCaprio and Mikhail Gorbachev). No one had even laid eyes on the place until 1820. No one wintered over for a full year until 1898. Why was I there? With my thoughts jangled and my inner clock going haywire since the midnight sun rendered night into day, I realized I had no answer to that basic question. No answer at all. I was twenty-nine years old. With two other team members, Roger Mear and Gareth Wood, I had just spent four weeks walking-- trudging, struggling, sledging all our supplies ourselves--across the Ross Ice Shelf. We were ants on an ice cube the size of France. Our ultimate goal, that of reaching the South Pole, now appeared a vain hope. By our calculations we were fifty-eight days away from 90 degrees south. Our food supply--biscuits, sausage, soup dosed with vegetable oil for added calories--was good for another fifty-five days. We were already starving. Since we hauled our own provisions for the journey, we had calculated our supply down to the gram: 5,200 calories per day per man. It was not enough. As we labored over the ice cube, our bodies were eating themselves. My weight plummeted: the "South Polar diet," we called it. Controlled lab research has demonstrated not only physiological but also psychological effects of semi-starvation: a tendency on the part of the hungry toward the so-called "neurotic triad"--hypochondria, depression, and hysteria. The triad hit me hard. I imagined symptoms, felt listless and low, and experienced periodic spikes of panic over our situation. We gave off the characteristic ketone odor of the starving vertebrate. I could smell it on myself as I wandered a short distance from the camp, late on that bright-as-day evening on the Excerpted from Antarctica 2041: My Quest to Save the Earth's Last Wilderness by Gil Reavill, Robert Swan All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.