The Ministry for the Future

93

Project Slowdown had been active for a decade, and the thirty largest glaciers on the planet, all of them in Antarctica and Greenland, had seen expeditions to their crux points where wells had been melted through their ice and the meltwater under them pumped to the surface and spread to refreeze as near the pumping wells as was convenient. Our team had been involved with the Weddell Sea area effort, which was particularly complicated, as a dispersed fan of glaciers and ice streams had fed into the Filchner Ice Shelf and the Ronne Ice Shelf in a way that was difficult to deal with. The landforms under the ice resembled a half bowl, not steep enough to easily identify the places upstream where glacial input was fastest. But we had done the best we could with that, and drilled 327 wells over a five-year period, focusing on the crux points we could find and hoping for the best.

It wouldn’t have been possible without the navies of the United States, Russia, and England. They let a little village of their aircraft carriers freeze into the sea ice and overwinter in the Weddell Sea, and from these carriers we were able to keep the work going year round, and supply the land bases that were set on the ice of the Ronne and Filchner. Fleets of helicopters kept these camps supplied, and helped to move camps from drill site to drill site. Something like ten billion dollars was spent on the effort just in our zone alone. Such a deal, as Pete Griffen used to say. A lot of us had worked with him back in the day, and he was often remembered.

All good. Only four deaths, including his, all from accidents, and three of those accidents resulting from stupid decisions, including his. The other death, weather. Pretty good. Because Antarctica will kill you fast. And none of the deaths were people on our team, although we never said that of course. But it was a comfort, given what had happened to Pete. No one in my group wanted anything like that to happen to us.

So; ten years in Antarctica, with good work to do, and no more grant applications either. Papers got written, science got done, but mostly it was engineering the drills and pumps and dispersion technologies. There were papers to be had there too, even if it wasn’t exactly what we had gone down there for. Actually the glaciologists were getting data like never before, especially structures of ice and flow histories, and most of all, bottom studies. For sure no one had ever had the kind of information about glacial ice/glacial bed interactions that we have now! If we had been doing that research only for its own sake, it would have taken centuries to learn what we’ve learned. But we had an ulterior motive, an overriding concern.

So, at the end of the season, we were flown into the middle of the Recovery Glacier, where we had drilled a double line of wells five years before. One of the lines was reporting that all its pumps had stopped.

Helo on up to a pretty dramatic campsite, on a flat section of the glacier between icefalls upstream and down, with the Shackleton Range bulking just to the north of us, forming the higher half of the glacier’s sidewalls. Lateral shear at the glacier’s margin was a shatter zone of turquoise seracs, so tall and violently sharded that it looked like a zone of broken glass skyscrapers. You never get used to helo rides in Antarctica. Not even the helo pilots get used to it.

Out on the flat we went to the wells that were reported as stopped. We had drilled these long before, back at the beginning, and now it was a familiar thing to check them out. Everything looked okay on the surface, and it wasn’t the monitoring system. Very quickly the problem noticed by the automatic monitoring was confirmed, pump by pump, just by looking in the exit pipes and seeing nothing there. The closer to the center of the glacier the holes were, the less water they were pumping. Most were pumping nothing at all.

We were moving around on skis, and roped together, just in case the crevasse-free route between the wells had cracked in the years since someone had been there. There were no crevasses, so we flagged the new route, then got on the snowmobiles and tested the route to be sure. No fooling around in our team.

The wells were in the usual line cross-glacier. Tall pole with transponder and meteorological box, tattered red flag on top. Under that a squat orange insulated plywood box covering the wellhead, a very small shed in effect, heated by solar panels set next to it. The pipeline was lime green, crusted with gray rime. It pumped the water south, up to a hill beyond the south bank of the glacier, joining a big pipeline there, which took a feed from all the pumps in the area.

We got the door to open, and went into the hut covering the wellhead. Nice and warm in there. Dark even with the lights on, after the glare outside. Wind keening around the sides of the thing. Nice and cozy; it had to be kept above freezing. Checked the gauges; no water coming up. We opened the hatch on the well cap, fed a snake camera down the hole. The snake’s reel was so big a snowmobile had had to haul it here on a sled of its own; two kilometers of snake on one big wheel.

Down went the camera. We stared at the screen. It was like doing a colonoscopy of an exceptionally simple colon. Or probably it’s more like the cameras that plumbers use to check out a sewer line. No water in the hole, even two hundred meters down; this was a sign something was wrong, because when a hole is open from the bottom of a glacier to its top, the weight of the ice pushes water up the hole most of the way. But here we were looking far down the hole, and no water.

Got to be blocked, someone said.

Yes but where?

Eventually we got to the bottom of the hole; no water at any point along the way.

Hey you know what? This glacier has bottomed out. There’s just no more water to pump!

So it will slow down now.

For sure.

How soon will we know?

Couple years. Although we should see it right away too. But we’ll need a few years to be sure it’s really happened.

Wow. So we did it.

Yep.

There would be maintenance drilling, of course. And the glaciers would still be sliding down into the sea under their own weight, at their old slower speed, so every decade or so they would have to be redrilled upstream a ways from the current holes. There were going to be lots of people working down here for the foreseeable future—maybe decades, maybe forever. A rather glorious prospect, we all agreed, after thawing out and getting into the dining hut, standing high on its big sled runners. Little windows on the south side of the hut gave a view of the Shackleton Range, oddly named, as he never got near this place. Possibly it was near where his proposed cross-Antarctic route would have gone, but when the Endurance got caught in the ice and crushed, all that plan had to be scrapped, and they had set about the very absorbing project of trying to survive. We toasted him that day, and promised his ghost we would try to do the same. Drop Plan A when the whole thing goes smash, enact Plan B, which was this: survive! You just do what you have to, in an ongoing improvisation, and survive if you can. We toasted his rugged black-cliffed mountains, rearing up into the low sky south of us. We were 650 meters above sea level, and ready for food and drink. Another great day in Antarctica, saving the world.