Luke headed the pack of young students with him to the glacier, looking for a good place to dig snow pits. He dug his size 10 boots softly into the snow — there wasn’t a lot of new accumulation and he needn’t expend too much energy. It was a beautiful day for the students to learn glaciology, he thought: a slightly overcast sky that was scattering the sun’s rays in all directions, and good visibility. They could see mountains in the far distance.
As an assistant professor at the University of Ottawa and director of the newly formed Cryospheric Research Lab, he got ample opportunities to study the glaciers in the Canadian High Arctic. His field work had taken him to the Karakoram Himalaya, the Andes, Antarctica and the European Alps — all major ice masses on the planet except Greenland.
Third in the file, Aman watched the slow and steady movements of his professor as he trudged along. During the beginning of the hike Luke had politely told them not to wander off — the risk of crevasses was real. Aman had seen enough television shows that tried re-enacting the horror of being stuck in a crevasse, the helplessness and terror of being held by tons of solid ice.
At the back of the queue in his beige windproof shell and a matching baseball cap, Jeff Kavanaugh looked ahead to Luke and swiftly nodded his head in a reassuring manner. Everything was fine. Jeff was a glaciologist, an assistant professor at the University of Alberta. His research focused primarily on studying the flow and dynamics of glaciers — in short, he was trying to understand what was happening at the bottom of the glacier and how it affected the movement of the combined mass. He faintly remembered the days spent at the McMurdo Dry Valleys near Ross Island. In spite of the summer, the weather had always been unforgiving and the tent would often crackle when he slept, the wind running wild and free through these parts of the world. Once out of his tent, there was not a scent of vegetation in the air or the presence of a mortal being to accompany him. Snow, ice, sun and wind were his only friends. Isolation was a thing that came with glaciology; he had known that for a long time.
After a short 15-minute hike, Luke pointed to a patch of snow which he considered good for digging. The students had been spending a lot of time on the ship, were brimming with unspent energy, and this lowly workout did not please them — a feeling limited to the male group, as the females looked quite content with their effort.
Aman put his backpack down on the snow and gazed at his surroundings panoramically. Each view was more unrealistic than he could ever imagine, and often while he took a picture he thought his camera might not capture it — it looked so virtual. Stamping his foot on the ground and touching the snow with his bare hands was such a pleasant feeling; he was reassured that his eyes did not deceive him. To his left he could hear the brief cacophony of a penguin rookery, cuddled along a bare and rocky patch in the mountain, their droppings turning the rocks white. Right in front of him was an expansive stretch of fabric-like water whose reach was cut off by mountains on three sides but wandered infinitely in the other direction. The purity of the air could be smelt and seen. There was no other land like this — pristine and charismatic. He was glad that the presence of Homo sapiens here was limited.
Antarctica was protected by the Antarctic Treaty System against mining, though it did not mean that past surveys for potential resources had not been done. Way back in 1972/73, ships had done analysis of the shore bed near the Ross Sea for possible fossil fuels, while some had even made detailed business plans for extracting precious minerals — especially platinum from the Trans-Antarctic Mountains. Antarctica was part of the major supercontinent Gondwana before it split some 150 million years ago. Based upon the minerals found in other countries that once constituted that massive land, it was postulated that Antarctica was also a mineral haven. Luckily it turned out that with present technology it would simply be too expensive to extract them — though that did not mean the future would be the same. After the mineral convention in Wellington in 1988, where even after 14 years of negotiations the Antarctic Treaty states did not reach a consensus on the future of mining, the fate of the continent was finally sealed for good in the 1991 Madrid Protocol, which banned mining until 2041 — after which it could be reviewed.
Amidst the ramble of thoughts Aman could not hear his friend Paul calling, who finally came over and tapped at his shoulder. “Aman, are you ready to dig some snow pits?”
“Absolutely,” he replied enthusiastically.
With orange aluminium spades, Paul and Aman began digging hastily as if searching for treasure. Another pit was dug up nearby and all members took turns to savour this new experience. Finally, as instructed by Luke and Jeff, a 4x2 feet pit was dug, just up to the depth where it was possible to dig by spade. Beneath that, the snow had turned to hard glacial ice. They were only interested in studying this unconsolidated stratum of the glacier. What followed was a series of measurements of the density of the snow at intervals, and temperature measured through yellow-coloured probes. The handheld Kestrel instrument read an air temperature of 2°C — and yet Aman was amazed that he was feeling comfortable in a t-shirt. He soon reasoned it out: the absence of wind, a major portion of the solar radiation being reflected off the snow, and his little workout were the cause.
Snow and cold were new for Aman. He belonged to the sub-tropical and semi-arid parts of the world where the sun was omnipresent. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t touched or seen snow before — but Antarctica was different. Very different.