But the technical summaries of scientific research offer a portrait of the land that is rich and compelling and that sets a broad universal context for what has been learned and carried away from this remote place. For the valleys are treasure troves of information about ancient landscape processes and about the quality of life in extremis, where, somehow, living matter gains a foothold in rock and ice and adapts, flourishes even. To know that in seemingly lifeless soils there exists a community of nematodes that live among yeasts and bacteria and filamentous fungi in a frightening matrix of coarse stone and bitter cold is to be reminded of life’s tenacity, its elemental toughness.
In the technical scientific literature, a curiously poetic term has been used to capture the essential mix of elements that interacts and gives identity to the McMurdo Dry Valleys and that sets them apart from landscapes anywhere else on Earth. The word is mosaic, and it seems an appropriate one, for, in one of its senses, it means a pleasing picture or design made by arranging small bits of colored stone or glass in a matrix. When the term is applied to the Valleys, it refers to the inlaying of glaciers, ephemeral streams, permanently ice-covered lakes, exposed bedrock, sandy soils and richly patterned ground. And perhaps more insubstantially to the vast exposures of geologic time and to the ever-present wind, which works its way into the psyche of anyone who has ever spent a season in the mountains or on the surface of a lake. These are the figurative “bits of stone,” the “shards of glass,” the raw elements of place and identity. To enter this land is to become part of a mosaic that is at once unexpected and frightening, beautiful and sheltering, timeless and yet touched with the tracings of time. Like William Blake’s world in a grain of sand, it is possible from this remote vantage point to envision—in fact, to experience—the turning of the Earth’s great geochemical cycles.
In the years since the first printing of Water, Ice and Stone, the Dry Valleys have assumed a far greater scientific importance. They have become the setting for intensive investigations under the auspices of the National Science Foundation’s Long Term Ecological Research Program, and the biologist Edward O. Wilson begins his Future of Life with a description of the extremes of aridity and temperatures that challenge even the hardiest microscopic organisms in this setting. “On all of the Earth,” Wilson writes, “the McMurdo Dry Valleys most resemble the rubbled plains of Mars.” Moreover, the ice-covered lakes, which are pellucid and striking and so oddly out of place in this driest of deserts, serve as indicators of climate change, both in the thickness of their ice and in the structure of their salinity profiles. On timescales of decades to millennia, the lakes are unique ledgers of subtle or pronounced changes in the climate of the region. Understanding what they are telling us is more important now than ever.
While this book was not intended to be a study of climate change, it was meant to convey the many linkages that exist—through the cycles of water, carbon, calcium, oxygen, and many other elements—between ourselves and the Earth. In some ways it became a meditation on this very subject. The chapters “Science and the Shell,” “The Sea,” “The Flume,” The Cone of Erebus,” and “Cathedrals” all refer explicitly or implicitly to the great carbon cycle which links us and all of the creation to the solid Earth and to the sea and the atmosphere. It is the carbon cycle that we have so profoundly altered, and these alterations will be the concern of our own and of generations far into the future. We are only now beginning to recognize this.
In the chapter “The Moat,” the seasonal shape of the carbon dioxide curve—a subject explored in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth—is described in global terms:
All over the world, this shallow breath of the Earth is signed upon the air. The signature rises and falls through time, in a sinuous curve. You could not mistake it for anything else but the Earth’s breathing. It is the curve of carbon dioxide through modern time, its concentration in the atmosphere, plotted month after month—the Keeling Curve. From the slopes of Mauna Loa on the Big Island to the desolate wyomings of Pole Station—where the sleepless recorders work day and night inhaling the air, taking its measure—the patterns are the same: In the spring of the northern hemisphere, the carbon dioxide of the atmosphere declines as the trees unfold, as they imbibe water into their roots and carbon into their leaves, as the warming seas ripen with phytoplankton off Peru and California and Cape Cod. The sweet yearly inhalation and budding, fecundity and opulence and color everywhere spreading like a blush and holding. All through spring and summer the Keeling Curve falls. In autumn and winter it rises, when in fields and empty lots, in forests and swamps, and in the gray winter of the sea, carbon dioxide is returned to the air.
These are precisely the connections that have been drawn in recent years by those seeking to model the carbon cycle and to predict the influence of our dependence on fossil fuels.
The rising Keeling Curve is the signature of human activity written on air, and the scientific community no longer doubts the role of our industry, broadly construed, as the engine of atmospheric change. This change is certainly in evidence at the Poles and in receding glaciers across the globe and in migrating species on land and at sea. How much ice we are likely to melt and when—in Greenland, in West Antarctica, and on the huge East Antarctic Ice Sheet—is a subject of intense discussion. What actions our increasingly clear scientific knowledge should require is also a matter for debate. Between what we know and how we act falls the shadow, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot. And policy decisions in the wake of scientific evidence, regardless of how persuasive, have always been difficult to formulate. The phase-out of chlorofluorocarbons took some thirty years after the original work of Rowland and Molina; and carbon dioxide reductions, given the role of fossil fuels in every facet of our economy and in the economies of developing countries, will certainly be a far more vexing problem for the nations of the world to solve. Signals from Antarctica and from other frozen shores may well be the prime movers in a resolute global effort to arrest what has been a long assault on the Earth’s most fragile reservoir.
Reviewers of Water, Ice and Stone clearly saw the environmental concerns that it raised and the cycles that it highlighted. But they also saw more. Perhaps more than I had seen myself. Philip Zeigler, for example, in his remarks for the John Burroughs Association, commented on the idea of transformation that runs throughout the book:
Like all lakes, those of the Antarctic are fed by streams which bring to them the detritus of the surrounding land: nutrients, metals, organic and inorganic elements, which are somehow transformed in their passage through the lake. Because of their very isolation, their detachment from the often cataclysmic changes man is continually making in the physical world, they allow us to trace the way in which the elements of the Earth, dissolved from rock by the action of water, are reconstituted in new forms. They can provide clues about how bodies of water are formed, how they vanish over time, and what happens to their elements. The central process here is a chemical one, a process of transmutation of earth, water, ice, atmosphere in an endless cycle from one form to another.
While the science of Antarctica has assumed an ever greater significance, in light of human-induced changes to the atmosphere and in light of the virtual certainty of a warming planet, the value of the place as a center for contemplation and reflection remains as it was when I wrote the book. Questions about the nature of science and creativity, the choice of one’s profession, the connectedness of things in personal and geological time, the coexistence of beauty and death in the same mix, the distinction between solitude and loneliness, the hidden importance of the global cycles, especially those of water and carbon—these are enduring human concerns.
Water, Ice and Stone is a difficult book to classify. It is a travelogue, a scientific quest, a memoir, a hymn to the water molecule, and perhaps, as one reviewer noted, it is “a braided river” where all of these join as one. In one of his essays, John Burroughs said that “it is sympathy, appreciation, emotional experience, which refine and elevate and breathe into exact knowledge the breath of life.” In his own writings, he showed how the two—precise scientific knowledge and personal response—could be joined. It is in this tradition—what has