The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014 (20 page)

On his way back from the pole, Wilson catalogued the ambient temperatures, which remain to this day among the coldest ever recorded on the South Polar Plateau. So cold that a glass of water thrown into the air would freeze before it hit the ground. A few days later the expedition unearthed a stored cache of supplies at Middle Barrier Depot only to discover that the canisters of fuel had evaporated. It was early March 1912, just a couple of weeks before their death. They needed fuel to melt drinking water and dry out their clothes. Without it, they slowly became encased in a mantle of frozen fabric. There was nothing to treat their frostbitten toes. No heat to draw them from their reindeer-skin sleeping bags in the morning. No warmth to help their shivering bodies to sleep at night. It was a major turning point in the expedition and, as it turns out, the evaporation of the fuel can be attributed to something very small. The O-rings, the flexing gaskets that acted to seal the fuel inside the canisters, turned brittle and cracked in the extreme cold.

As a space scientist, I know something about O-rings. In 1986, seventy-four years after Scott's party met its end, Caltech professor Richard Feynman sat before an investigative panel and dropped an O-ring into a glass of ice water to demonstrate how circles of rubber lose their pliability in freezing conditions. Afterward, he placed the O-ring down on the wooden podium, looked solemnly ahead, and said, “I believe this has some significance for our problem.” And indeed it did; he was part of the committee of scientists reviewing the
Challenger
shuttle disaster.

I was six years old when the
Challenger
exploded, but I remember it well. Christa McAuliffe was going to be the first schoolteacher in space, and, like schoolchildren around the United States, I was peering up at a television watching the liftoff live. After a few moments, Mrs. Schrader walked to the front of the room, her face white, and clicked off the power. It's one of my earliest memories, and yet it didn't alter my desire to become an astronaut. Even now, even with two shuttles down and NASA's human space-flight program in disarray, I still think about soaring off in a rocket.

A hundred years have passed since Scott's expedition, and the frontier is now the void of outer space. Like many other young scientists, I have levied my striving upon this great unknown, but I sometimes worry that my convictions about exploration are inaccurate. What if the actuality of this enterprise is horribly different from my romantic ideas?

Inside the Terra Nova hut, I lingered by the bunk of Captain L. E. G. Oates. He was the second person to die on the way back from the South Pole, and his small space remains, to this day, cluttered with cavalry equipment. In the McMurdo library, I couldn't stop looking at the pictures of Oates taken by the expedition's photographer. In one of them, Oates is standing in the stables, now empty and stained with seal blood. The light falls gently on his right shoulder, and from beneath a thick wool hat, he looks intently at the camera.

Oates developed a savage case of frostbite on the return journey. With the winter cold and darkness descending, Scott described how Oates stepped from his tent into a minus-40-degree blizzard, simply remarking to the others, “I am just going outside and may be some time.” Scott's description of the young captain disappearing into the whiteness, sock-footed and alone, offering up his life to save his comrades, echoed throughout Britain. After the world learned of the tragedy, the
Evening News
called for the story to be read to children across the nation.

Scott's account, however, is in marked contrast to Wilson's blunt and matter-of-fact telling of the grim narrative. Wilson writes on November 2, 1911, “Efforts were absurd . . . ,” on December 18, “Our hunger is very excessive . . .” And when he writes about Oates, there is nothing to suggest that he died in a whirl of gallantry. In a letter Wilson wrote to Oates's mother describing the death of her son there's no mention of any heroic last acts. In fact, that story is only found in Scott's journal entry some days later. It appears, in fact, that Oates did nothing to mark the occasion. Captain Oates, Captain L. E. G. Oates, his cankered legs rotting, just stumbled outside, and no one tried to stop him. He wasn't a man preciously composed in his suffering, inviolable as he faced oblivion. In all likelihood, he was a desperate ghost, seething with anger toward Scott, cut loose by pain, and on the verge of insanity.

The account of what happened to the crew of the
Challenger
has similar discrepancies. The spacecraft was launched on a cloudless day from Cape Canaveral in January 1986. Liftoff time was 11:38
A.M.
Shortly after, a brittle O-ring turned the shuttle into an inferno of flaming liquid oxygen. The
New York Times
headline the next day reported: “Challenger Shuttle Explodes Seventy-Four Seconds Into Launch: Seven Astronauts Killed Instantly.”

But in late February, divers located the crew module, which had barreled into the sea floor. An NBC report indicates that as cables pulled the wreckage onto the deck of a ship, a blue protrusion slipped out, bobbed along, and then disappeared back into the sea. It was the waterlogged body of astronaut Gregory Jarvis, and it was another five weeks before divers relocated his corpse.

Slowly, the true story was pieced together from images, debris, and the recovered wreckage. It was determined that just over a minute after liftoff, the booster stack of the shuttle had exploded, some 48,000 feet above the earth. The forward fuselage, the small tip of the shuttle harboring the crew module, separated from the tanks. Chillingly, it did not explode. Propelled by its own momentum, it rose away from the fireball, carrying its seven passengers. It streaked across the sky along a ballistic trajectory, arcing in the tender thread of a parabola. What the astronauts would have noticed in the moments after the explosion was actually the quietness, the roar of the engines ceasing as the fuel tanks ripped apart and the fuselage broke away.

In the hush, the crew module continued to rise above the smoke, which blossomed like a white geranium. Twenty-five seconds after the O-ring gave way, the crew module crested at 65,000 feet, and then it began to fall. It fell for two minutes and forty-five seconds before impacting into the ocean. To the experts who sifted through the pixelated images, nothing suggested that it was erratically pitching or yawing. Among the most haunting pieces of wreckage discovered were four personal egress air packs designed to provide breathable air in the event of emergencies. Three of them had been activated, and the official report determined that they had been activated manually, not as part of the impact. For how many of those two minutes and forty-five seconds did the seven astronauts remain conscious? On the investigation committee, some scientists and fellow astronauts thought they were conscious for all of it, but we'll never really know.

That “we'll never really know” was the overriding message of the official report as it was released. Much of the hardware was mangled beyond recognition, and many pieces were not found. The section of the report dealing with what happened to the astronauts seems nebulous, buried in the middle, as the reader's attention is swept off to the fact of brittle rubber. The bobbing, waterlogged corpse of Gregory Jarvis is never discussed, nor are those two minutes and forty-five seconds and what they might have been like. They are seldom mentioned, out of what I take to be respect and reverence at the heart of our collective American narrative about what it was to lose the
Challenger.

I have spent a lot of time trying not to think about those last couple of minutes. I'm not sure I want to know that Mike Smith saw the flames ripple over his window, or what he imagined in his last two minutes and forty-five seconds of thought. I think of all of the things I can think of in that amount of time. I don't want to dwell on that sudden, serene silence or let myself envision Judy Resnik frantically searching for her accessory oxygen tank. I don't want to know that Captain Oates died in a state of psychosis either. I try to reason with myself that the details of these particular narratives are in the end inconsequential. They died: that is the sad fact of it, let it be.

But somehow I can't stop wondering about them. Five people perished on their way back from the pole, and another seven on their way to orbit; they fell against the terrifying whiteness of the ice and the burning sky. All twelve of those lives ended in blackened flesh, horror, and numbness, and all because of the tiny, tragic fact of a brittle O-ring.

 

That summer when I was twenty-six, I was in Antarctica long enough to notice changes in the light. By the end of my field season, the midnight sun was beginning to dip down lower and lower toward the horizon, glowing with a faint, creamy incandescence. Before I boarded the cargo flight home, I was determined to hike out and see the view from Castle Rock, a distant volcanic outcrop jutting through a glacier.

Early one morning, I stopped by the firehouse at McMurdo Station to pick up a radio, file a foot plan, and check out with the responder on duty. I stuck close to the wind-frayed flags planted every 20 feet along the route. The day was staggeringly bright and, like everywhere in Antarctica, devoid of smell. There were snowfields in every direction, and I could hear my boots with each step, pressing into snow so cold and dry it squeaked like Styrofoam. When I reached the end of the ice, I began climbing, pulling myself up along the twisted preset ropes. My boots gripped the cold igneous rock below me, once lava in the vent of an ancient volcano. As I ascended onto the peak, I fell on my knees, exhausted and sweating inside my big red coat. I gazed across the Ross Ice Shelf toward the South Pole. Behind me towered Mount Erebus and Mount Terror. In front soared the Royal Society Range, and to the east, the open sea, riddled with tabular icebergs.

The whole of the sprawling base—the labs, the dorms, the helicopter pads—had disappeared into a bewildering sea of white. I thought of the photograph of Earth taken by
Voyager I
from the edge of the solar system. From 3.7 billion miles away, the whole of our world—everything human—was less than a pixel across. After a while, I spotted the trail leading back to McMurdo Station, just a faint strand tracking toward the horizon. The same year as the
Challenger
accident, two Americans fell into a fissure of ice 75 feet below. A search and rescue team tried frantically to pulley them to the surface, but they were wedged in too tightly to budge. The team heard them crying as the hours passed, then wailing and screaming until their voices finally stopped.

What is it that drives us to places like these—to the nothingness of the poles, the vast void of outer space? At the edge our world recedes, but we can't escape the brittle cold, the throbbing legs, the grating of mechanical parts, the absurdity of those O-rings. But perhaps this is why we strive. Perhaps, in the midst of such immensity, when we are faced with the irreducible fact of us, the firmities of reason and rationality give way. In the muscle of this great paradox, even a scientist is capable of believing in bigger things. The stronger the contradiction, the tauter the bow, the farther we can shoot.

Standing in the piercing air, I began to feel incredibly cold. My skin was damp, and snow had found its way into the crevices of my wrists. On top of Castle Rock, with my breath tumbling down the peak, I took one last look at the vast expanse that surrounded me. There was total stillness except for the faint whirr of a distant helicopter. The Terra Nova and Discovery huts were out there somewhere, frozen and timeless, holding steady against the winds. I took hold of the fraying rope at my feet and began my descent.

FROM
Scientific American

 

O
N A RESEARCH VESSEL
in the waters off Greece's Amvrakikos Gulf, Joan Gonzalvo watched a female bottlenose dolphin in obvious distress. Over and over again, the dolphin pushed a newborn calf, almost certainly her own, away from the observers' boat and against the current with her snout and pectoral fins. It was as if she wanted to nudge her baby into motion—but to no avail. The baby was dead. Floating under direct sunlight on a hot day, its body quickly began to decay; occasionally the mother removed pieces of dead skin and loose tissue from the corpse.

When the female dolphin continued to behave in this way into a second day, Gonzalvo and his colleagues on the boat grew concerned: in addition to fussing with the calf, she was not eating normally, behavior that could be risky for her health, given dolphins' high metabolism. Three other dolphins from the Amvrakikos population of about 150 approached the pair, but none disrupted the mother's behavior or followed suit.

As he watched the event unfold in 2007, Gonzalvo, a marine biologist at the Tethys Research Institute in Milan, Italy, decided he would not collect the infant's body to perform a necropsy, as he would usually have done for research purposes. “What prompted me not to interfere was respect,” he told me earlier this year. “We were privileged to be able to witness such clear evidence of the mother-calf bond in bottlenose dolphins, a species that I have been studying for over a decade. I was more interested in observing that natural behavior than interrupting it by abruptly interfering and disturbing a mother who was already in obvious distress. I would define what I saw as mourning.”

Was the dolphin mother truly grieving for her dead calf? A decade ago I would have said no. As a biological anthropologist who studies animal cognition and emotion, I would have recognized the poignancy of the mother's behavior but resisted interpreting it as mourning. Like most animal behaviorists, I was trained to describe such reactions in neutral terms such as “altered behavior in response to another's death.” After all, the mother might have become agitated only because the strange, inert status of her calf puzzled her. Tradition dictates that it is softhearted and unscientific to project human emotions such as grief onto other animals.