Water, Ice & Stone. Bill Green
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yet in a way this little is so much. The whole biosphere, the whole tangle and undergrowth of life—the profligate lignins and cellulose of plants, the matlike hemes and porphyrins, the helical proteins winding and unwinding—comes from this, this drifting reservoir of the unjoined and disunited. Our breathing binds us to this air, and thus to each other, to everything living, in a common breath, a common exchange of oxygen, from lung to limb and back again, transformed. The sun’s energy, burning on the equator, is sped poleward in giant cells and lariats of air that never weary or cease, that warm the farthest ice-laden sea. This atmosphere connects all with all; with alacrity, it dispatches dew and dust alike. How disastrous it would be if this were not so, if over the great forests oxygen hung in reactive clouds, undispersed and lethal, inviting fire and ruin; or over the cities the vapors settled dark and heavy as rain. But the atmosphere, sweeping, mixing, transferring, never storing very long, will not allow it.
The lower atmosphere, this troposphere, literally the “sphere of turning,” is a wild and errant place, a place raging with storms, the fickle, unpredictable weather of our world. Even on a calm day the plane protests, seems to bend and creak. In the troposphere the power of destruction abides, the hurricanes moving massive waters toward the dark shore, the tornadoes capable of razing whole towns: Xenia, Ohio, obliterated, reduced to cornfield rubble in an instant.
But more than this, the troposphere is motion, and transit and life. Imagine a cabin on a winter’s day, motes of carbon and steam curling from its chimney. The smoke trails off but never just lies in luxuriant streaks above the Earth. It billows and stretches, dips groundward, rises again and drifts into cloud. The troposphere is an engine of turbulence and change, powered by the fusion furnace of a distant sun. From the heated Earth, warm air rises and on rising cools, then descends again. It is thus that the green kite slips away on the April breeze; the fly ball, helped by an updraft, carries beyond the hapless fielder’s leap; the lilies, the grasses, bend on the spring air; the firefly in the folds of the summer yard eludes the child with the jar; the gem of Venus is pushed aside by cloud. In the troposphere we hear the wet trees slap against the attic roof, bearing us far into sleep; and the maple seed glides like a wooden blade in whispers from the parent tree.
Gaining altitude now, we have left all this. We are in the calm near the stratosphere. Here you can see the plane’s contrail. The white exhaust hangs, begins to bead like islands, an island chain stretched across blue. Below, rivers and lakes flare like metal and glass, signal mirrors in the brown suede of landscape. Over the Grand Canyon, the pilot dips left and then right, exclaiming on the color of the stone—the reds and reddish browns that iron and oxygen together make. Descending beyond the San Bernardino Mountains, a prairie of housing tracts begins to grow out of sere grass, and blue sky gives way to whiskey, the photochemical hue of Los Angeles, with its aldehydes and ozone, its nitrogen dioxide taint.
On the ground at Los Angeles, before the flight to Hawaii, we drive to the beach, ride strong November waves, toss a football at the surf’s lacing edge, stretch ourselves before the long confinement. Near sunset we are back at Los Angeles International Airport. Blue runway lights stretch through dusk to the sea. The silvery planes launch outward on their westward climb over the Pacific, roll in the last pink of the evening sky, like large slow fish, then disappear.
No sooner are we aloft than the continent of cliffs and lights drops into black water and begins to fade. I sip bourbon from among the melting ice, feel the warmth flow from my fingers into the cool glass. Through the gentle haze of ethanol and plain weariness, I am wondering how 1 came to be here, in this 747, above this sea, gazing out on the shifting veils of the evening, heading toward Antarctica.
I cannot exactly trace the path that leads here. Perhaps there is no path, only matted brush, a few indecipherable tracks. Things get lost and memory is always part fiction. But I can say that at some point I found geochemistry and without much plan or forethought it began to occupy much of my time. In geochemistry the chemical elements were not mere symbols on a chart, beautiful as those symbols were—hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, singing out almost as I spoke their names. They were voyagers among rivers and mountains, visitors to the atmosphere, dwellers in the abyss. In geochemistry the elements came to life, propelled by the forces of wind and water and sunlight, constrained and animated by the laws of physics and chemistry. I began to think of them as immortals roaming the planet, tiny gods whose adventures would make a mythologist blush. In geochemistry I heard the biblical voice from long ago:
The wind goeth toward the south,
and turneth about unto the north;
it whirleth about continually,
and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.
All the rivers run into the sea;
yet the sea is not full;
unto the place from whence the rivers come,
thither they return again.
And with the wind and with the rivers go the elements, moving, holding their own counsel, forever reshuffled, enduring, locked into this assemblage a moment, then into that. Never very long anywhere. Yet their intersecting journeys make the world, make it build and fall apart.
I could not work on even the smallest geochemical problem without placing myself in the space of the atoms, as they moved in time, as they traced the great cycles. What would it be like to be an atom of manganese, I wondered. To be iron or copper? To be calcium or lead or carbon? To have time open up to you all at once, like a landscape seen through the opening doors of a country church? How do these destinies, so different from our own, unfold?
With these questions, thoughts of the Antarctic lakes came to me. The lakes were tiny, inconsequential in any global sense. And yet like Blake’s grain of sand, they held a world. If you could write the biography of manganese in Lake Vanda, for example, if you could record its history from the time that water first pried it from rock or set it aswirl in the milky dissolving of carbonates, from the slow collapse of ferromanganese minerals, to the time that it came to rest in the prison of lake sediment, then perhaps you could say something, suggest something, about manganese on a grander scale. Perhaps you could say something about its magellenic trek through the world oceans, or its capture in the brown disk of a manganese nodule. Maybe. More than anything else, as I remembered them from those days with Hatcher and Benoit, the Antarctic lakes were tractable; they were geochemical microcosms. They opened onto something larger than themselves.
Hatcher and Benoit. Names that go back nearly twenty years. In some way the journey might have begun then, with them. It was quite by accident that I was living then in a small trailer on the outskirts of town. Sharing it with Hatcher and Hall. My dissertation research on the solubility of gases in molten salts was nearly complete, all except for the writing and I think I was looking for an excuse to postpone that. So when Hatcher told me Benoit was thinking about doing some chemistry in the lakes of the Antarctic Dry Valleys—“Maybe dissolved oxygen, ammonia, sulfide,” he said, “things of biological interest. He’ll need a chemist. How would you like to go?”—I said, “Sure, I could use a break from the lab, the dissertation. When do we leave?”
We left in August of that year, in the Antarctic spring. The LC-130 Hercules cutting with all its strength into the polar night out beyond the watery, unmarked “point of safe return.” We carried enough fuel in a huge bladder so that the plane could circle back, return to New Zealand, if the weather proved too severe for landing. Sometimes in August, you couldn’t tell the white mountains of Antarctica from the sky.
There was nothing much at McMurdo then: the building where we slept, a piece of corrugated sheet metal curled over the volcanic ash of the island; the ship’s store; the mess, the garage smelling of diesel, the machine shop, and the hangar for the helicopters. Jamesway huts hunkered low to the ground, rounded against the wind, separated far enough so that fire couldn’t spread easily. But there were reminders everywhere of Scott: the rambling hut on the peninsula where he had spent part of the winter of 1911. Just walking by I could taste the acrid seal blubber burned in stoves nearly a century ago. Had they been gone only hours, I wondered. Could they still be