Antarctica Read Free

unconscious, while his skidoo crashed on down into the abyss. When he came to, he had managed to climb out using a chest harness and ropes that his companions had thrown to him. A chest harness with broken ribs? That must have been agony.
    It was after this that the others had set up the tent. But then the real disaster hit. The team’s second in command, an army officer named Jostein Helgestad, had decided to try to find a safe passage through the crevasses on foot. His companions had seen him disappear into the ice just a stone’s throw from the tent. And they had heard nothing from him since.
    Somebody had to look, so Steve secured a rope to one of the skidoos and went in. Sixty feet down, the crevasse was so narrow that he couldn’t turn his head for fear of knocking off his headlamp; the danger was now not falling so much as getting wedged in. His legs were splayed, his crampons snagging on the ice walls. He couldn’t control his own rope any more; his companions up on the surface were going to have to start lowering him. He yelled up instructions then pivoted vertically so that he was descending head first into the darkness. His headlamp picked out a sleeping bag that had been thrown down by the Norwegian team and had evidently been left untouched. Then he saw his man.
    The crack was now barely a foot wide. Jostein was wedged in sideways where he had fallen and where his body heat must have melted him further into the ice. Steve strained to touch him but couldn’t quite reach. Instead he probed down with his ice axe, snagged Jostein’s arm and gingerly raised it. The arm was frozen solid.
    No hope, then, of even retrieving the body, but there were still three people to save. Back on the surface, Steve gave more instructions. The Twin Otter was neither big enough nor fuelled enough to take a heavy load. The only way they could all get out was to abandon everything. They left tent, skidoos, clothes, harnesses, ropes, everything except the gear they needed to get to the plane. Steve found himself explaining the principles of roped glacier travel to a man who was still seeing double from concussion and two others who were dazed at the disaster that had befallen them.
    And then there was the long perilous slog back, a careful check for crevasses along an improvised runway, more gear ditched, more load lightening, and a take-off for which everybody held their collective breath before the plane finally rose into the air over Antarctica’s bright white hinterland.
    Nearly twenty years later, Jostein Helgestad is still there, his frozen body held fast by a continent that punished his boldness without hesitation or particular interest. The truth is that Antarctica has little time for humans. We have managed to colonise most of our planet, to get by in apparently hostile deserts, forests and mountains. Even at the North Polar ice cap, which is a frozen ocean surrounded by continents, the sea ice is just a thin skin and the animals that swim beneath have provided humans with food and fuel and clothing for thousands of years. But Antarctica is different. It is a vast, isolated stretch of rock, almost completely buried under thousands of feet of ice. This is the only continent on Earth where people have never lived. And until very recently in human history it was as mysterious to us as the Moon.
    Even today, the temporary bases that dot the continent are miniature life-support systems, human toeholds on the edge of a vast, alien landscape, for which everything you need to survive has to be brought in from the outside. Yet people still go there in their thousands every year, as scientists, explorers, adventurers and the incurably curious.
    But curiosity can also be perilous. And if you do find yourself in trouble, the phone will again be ringing at McMurdo Station, the biggest of all the bases, logistics hub, unofficial capital of Antarctica and gateway to the ice.

 
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