Read Online Blazing Ice by John H. Wright - Free Book Online Page B

surveyor’s back sights showed us which way to go.
    There were no more preparations to make. I focused on the enormous whiteness ahead and held back loving visions of my wife, son, and growing family. This was how I made our living for now.
There is no other job. This is the job
.
    We crossed the imaginary line at GAW and entered the Shear Zone for the first time. We went hunting for crevasses.

    One thinks of ice as a solid substance, not as a dynamic piece of real estate.
    But with masses of ice hundreds of feet thick, the ice at its base turns plastic under the sheer weight of the ice above it. The mass flows like a viscous fluid seeking its own level, impelled by gravity. Ice near the top of the mass does not flow like plastic. It remains brittle, breaking into cracks called “crevasses.”
    A belt of such crevasses stretches seventy-five miles from the tip of Minna Bluff to the tip of Cape Crozier. The belt forms where two floating masses of glacial ice come in contact. These masses are so large they go by the name “ice shelves”: the McMurdo Ice Shelf, the size of a small county, and the Ross Ice Shelf, as big as France. Both are covered by deep snow.
    The ice shelves meet twenty-three miles east of McMurdo. Where they meet, they flow at different speeds and in slightly different directions. As one shelf drags against the other, the ice along their contact shears into crevasses. That is the Shear Zone. And as the two ice shelves flow implacably north, out to sea, new crevasses constantly form in the zone and old ones close.
    The first 640 miles of our route to South Pole led over the Ross Ice Shelf. To get onto the Shelf from McMurdo we had to cross the Shear Zone. If we could cross it, we’d have done plenty this first year.
    The PistenBully crept past GAW. Eric Barnes sat shotgun operating the radar while I drove. Three hundred feet forward … nothing. Another three hundred feet … still nothing. Another, and another. Nothing. I stopped.
    â€œAre you sure?” I asked.
    â€œNothing but flat lines,” Eric confirmed. “Horizontal stratigraphy.”
    At thirty-ish, Eric was the youngest of us, cheerful and astute. He wore a goatee but kept a clean-shaved head. Evident even under his fleece jacket, knotted arm muscles signaled the rugged climber he was. We steadied our nerves, and tried again.
    Three hundred feet more. Nothing. Three hundred feet more. Nothing. Three hundred feet more. Nothing.
    â€œThis is getting ridiculous.”
    â€œSTOP! We got one!”
    We stopped exactly as we’d practiced. The radar screen showed a slender, vertical black image reaching from the bottom of the screen to nearly the top. Our first crevasse hid under the snow, somewhere between the end of the boom and the front of our vehicle.
    â€œWe have one here,” I radioed back to the others waiting at GAW. “Come forward with the ropes and probes. Follow our tracks.”
    Two snowmobiles pulled up behind us. Shaun and Eric roped up like a well-practiced team, tying off to our PistenBully. They probed along the length of the boom, poking their slender metal poles into the snow, looking for a void beneath them. The rest of us watched.
    Shaun shrugged. He was another compactly built mountaineer and, at sixty-ish, the oldest of our group. His weathered face sported a stubble of whiskers, and he too kept his topknot close cropped. Crevasses were nothing new to Shaun. “Could you have been wrong?” he asked.
    We could’ve been. We were not yet experts with the radar.
    Shaun walked back toward the three of us waiting behind the PistenBully. Just in front of the vehicle he tripped and fell forward. “There it is,” he said.
    Shaun’s boots had poked through a thin snow bridge. We looked into the hole and found a vertical crack, six inches wide. We exposed more of the thin crack with shovels, then a long tape measure plumbed it to seventy feet. With the radar we