The Ross Ice Shelf

The Ross Ice Shelf

November 23rd 2017


“These bastards in Washington think we’re chasing fucking polar bears down here! You know, one of them actually asked me if we have to carry rifles - he must be related to that clown George W. Never mind the Arctic and Ant-arctic, they don’t even know their bloody Ass from their Ant-ass! They send us down to this hell hole to stick thermometers up the asshole of the Antarctic and then they carry on burning coal like they’re defrosting the fucking ice box. I should have stayed on that oil well in Iraq!”

“You’re a cynical fucker - but at least the penguins here don’t carry suicide bombs!” Wayne laughed as he looked across at Bill who was sitting astride the other skidoo. Bill was letting off steam as usual.
“Everyone knows what’s going on. As long as these fat, oily cats keep raking it in they don’t give a damn if the rest of us are fucked!”
As usual, Wayne was excelling himself and nearly everyone else around him in the ‘expletive fucking deleted’ category.

The two men had pulled up after an easy half hour run from the Obama Scientific station which had been built just over on the landward side of the great Ross ice sheet. The base had been built three years ago to record climatic conditions and monitor changes in the ice shelf. Although they had reached the crevasses and ice ridges of the hinge zone Wayne checked his GPS to confirm that they had reached the point where the ice flowing from the heart of the continent now floated on water. The Ross Ice Shelf they were standing on was the size of France and in places seven hundred metres thick. It flowed at up to three meters a day out to the sea, the best part of a thousand kilometres away. There it ended in a vertical and crumbling wall of ice. Over the past twenty years increasingly large floes had been breaking away from the shelf, culminating in the infamous iceberg B-15 which had been the size of Belgium.
This was why the Obama base had been established - to find out what the hell was going on! The easy ‘flavour of the month’ answer was global warming but the two men knew that these easy sound bites don’t always make good science. Whether they suited the oil men of Alaska and Saudi was another matter altogether! They both knew that scientific fashion changed rapidly. Now it was hard to believe, but the fashionable thinking of a few decades further back had been the collective nightmare of an imminent ‘nuclear winter’.

Wayne wiped the sweat from his face and unzipped his parka.
“At this rate they’ll be issuing us with fucking tropical gear! Do you know what the temperature was this morning - plus three degrees Celcius!”
“Look, there’s the drilling rig behind that ice ridge.” Bill pointed over to their left. "We’ll get this job done quicktime and get our asses back to the base for a few beers.”
The two men parked their skidoos, called the base to confirm they had arrived and started organising the drill rig. They were continuing the year long project to measure what was happening at the crucial land-sea interface. The drill rig was used to take core samples and also record the ice temperature down to two hundred meters. The other piece of gear was a sonar transceiver which they were using to take vertical and horizontal scans of the ice shelf. Already their data was giving them unsettling evidence that sizeable cavities were appearing.
“Look at this! This is new.” Bill shouted across to Wayne, who was setting up the rig. Wayne joined him and they both peered into a sizeable sink hole which drained one of the ever growing numbers of surface streams which had been springing up during the last few Antarctic summer seasons. At first it had been just a case of a bit of melt water lying on the ice during the day as the temperature increasingly topped freezing. It would then refreeze at night and no-one was too concerned. Increasingly, however, the water had grown in extent and starting to exploit any changes in contour to form streams. This season, the emergence of sink holes was causing real alarm as everyone knew what had happened in Greenland. The trouble was that no-one really knew where the streams went and this was the point of the sonar experiments.

Wayne gazed into the blue depths of the hole.
“Did I tell you about my dream of last night? I’m sure it’s the heat in that base and that bloody air conditioning whining away all night. I can never get a decent sleep. Anyway, I dreamt I was diving into water and once I was under and the bubbles cleared I looked down and it was weird. You know in deep water how it gets darker and you can’t see too far, but in the dream I looked down and you could see for ever. It was like there was a light or a glow down below. And then I looked up and it was the same, no surface and the same glow. And I felt really weird, like I was walking in space.”
“Fuck! This place gets to you. I think you should get back to the desert.” Bill consoled him.
“What the f….. “ Bill’s expletive petered out in alarm as a bone shaking, deep, growling catastrophe shook the ice, tossing Wayne to his knees and felling Bill. Seconds later a high penetrating screeching rent the air, deafening the men, with their screams of pain completely drowned out by the wall of sound.
Then - silence!

The men picked themselves up and stood looking at each other, profoundly shocked at what had just happened, and both temporarily deafened. Wayne mouthed his usual, and in this case wholly apt, expletive, “fuck me!” which for once fell on literally deaf ears.
Then - it all started again. There was no need for ears to hear what had started - they could feel it in their very flesh and bones.
The silence had been a brief moment of hope for the men but now they looked at each other ashen faced - ‘dead men standing.’
This time a high and penetrating percussive blast like a pistol shot rang out and a crack opened behind the men. It snaked away quickly in both directions and the chasm rapidly widened. Another pistol shot and another crack opened between them. More growling and the ice started to vibrate again.

Bill stumbled and disappeared into the crevasse as if he had never existed. Wayne looked opened mouthed at where his colleague had disappeared, in utter disbelief. Another crack and yet another chasm grew at Wayne’s feet. The vibrations knocked him over onto his front where he lay in shock, knowing with chilling certainty that now there was no escape. The ice tilted and he started to slip. His left glove was pulled off as he desperately pawed the ice for purchase. As his fingers desperately dug into the ice, three fingernails were ripped off, leaving bloody trails as he felt his feet, knees and then thighs slip over the edge.

Then he was in, tumbling Jonah-like into the icy maw of the beast, with his final desperate attempt to grasp the edge breaking two fingers. As he fell, his head hit the ice opposite, ripped off his left ear and opened up a deep gash in his forehead. Another collision broke his right wrist and dislocated his shoulder. Wayne then tumbled down a short, vertical, icy slope leaving a bloody trail behind him before becoming wedged upside down in a narrowing of the icy slit.
He simpered in blind panic for a few seconds before the next stage of his ‘ice ride’ unfolded. The ice monster growled again but this time Wayne was inside the beast. For a few excruciating seconds the two jaws of ice holding him ground together but with just enough pressure to crush six ribs and puncture his left lung. To add to his woes his parka was all but ripped off by the fall. The ice walls then moved apart and released him to fall another forty feet onto the sloping floor of a narrow icy cavern.
Wayne’s collision with the floor fractured his pelvis and broke his left femur with the splintered bones penetrating the remains of his clothing.

Still alive, still conscious, but now nearly naked, he was losing blood rapidly but had a final moment of clarity as his dream of the dive into the water with the light glowing came back to him just before he mercifully lapsed into unconsciousness. His journey downwards continued in fits and starts as his battered body was in turn ripped apart and then ground down between the icy molars of the ice monster. All life snuffed out and now ripped into scraps of flesh and splinters of bone the ice monster eventually spat out the remains of Wayne to bloody the dark and freezing waters below.

Final as this journey had been for Wayne and Bill the catastrophic events taking place in Antarctica were about to trigger a chain of rather more far-reaching events in the wider world. The entire Ross Ice Shelf had broken away from the great continental ice flow and was now making its way out to sea. The continental ice flow which had effectively been ‘plugged’ by the Ross Ice Shelf was now released to move forward. Lubricated by the accelerating flow of melt-water it started to slip into the ocean at a staggering rate.

In just the first year the subsequent melting raised sea levels by a catastrophic two meters and many of the major cities in the world were partly deluged with enormous disruption and loss of life.
Back on Antarctica, the release of the enormous pressure of ice on the underlying land triggered catastrophic earthquakes and the subsequent landslips sent giant tsunamis racing outwards wreaking further devastation on the low lying cities to the north. The eastern side of New Zealand took the brunt, with huge loss of life, but great damage was also inflicted on a great swathe of eastern Australia, many of the Pacific islands, and as far afield as the west coast of South America.

Over a short five years, the trigger of all the ice shelf breakaways, along with the cumulated effect of global temperature rise, released and then gradually melted the other great Antarctic ice flows, resulting in sea level rises of around five or six meters a year. By the time all the ice had melted another ten years later, sea levels had risen by a catastrophic two hundred and fifty feet. Every seaboard city of the world disappeared under the waves with millions of immediate deaths.

Over three billion of the earth’s inhabitants became refugees and the economic, political and social fabric of every country rapidly broke down. Whole countries disappeared as the waters rose. First, some of the low lying islands in the Indian Ocean and Pacific. Much of Bangladesh followed suit when an enormous typhoon pushed water inland and the relentless rise in sea levels blocked the usual slow drain back to the sea. The sea defences in the Netherlands were breached fatally and much of the country had to be surrendered to the North Sea. Denmark was now nearly totally below water. Florida all but disappeared along with great coastal swathes of Louisiana and Texas. The same story was repeated in country after country all round the world.

Long before the waters had stopped rising the comfortable life that many of the world’s inhabitants had come to expect had gone for ever. It rapidly became obvious that the whole edifice of twentieth century civilisation had been a house of cards waiting to collapse. The economic and financial systems which relied on unbridled growth and baseless confidence fell apart. Banks failed, money became worthless and governments themselves became bankrupt. This time, however, it wasn’t just another greed-driven ‘credit crunch’ – the actual physical foundations of the world’s economy were being physically washed away. The whole infrastructure which had held society together was collapsing. Within a few years all the world’s ports and the majority of the world’s major airports disappeared under the waves making nearly all of international trade and travel virtually impossible. The world’s low-lying oil and gas fields, both onshore and offshore, became unusable. Fuel prices reached unimaginable heights, even allowing for the near impossibility of transporting what little was still being produced. As oil reserves were used up transport ground to a halt, with cars becoming a receding memory and the skies becoming largely empty. With many of the world’s power plants situated close to sea level electrical production dwindled leaving most of the population struggling along with a few hours supply each day. Most factories had to close with overall production falling to a minute level.

With the economic collapse and hyperinflation, many aspects of life that had been taken for granted faded away. Public TV and radio largely disappeared as much of infrastructure was damaged and employees deserted in their battle for survival. Other communications such as the internet, mobile phones and landlines also largely disappeared for the same reasons. Schools worked part time for a while and then closed altogether. Hospitals closed wards and limped along with drug shortages, staff shortages and power cuts.
For most people, life was reduced to a day to day battle to find the basic needs of life - food, clean water and fuel for heat. With the progressive loss of all the low lying farmland and the acceleration of global warming food production plummeted and mass starvation stalked every country - there were no ‘Feed the World’ concerts now however and no aid waiting to save the millions. The formerly affluent millions of the developed west were finally getting a taste of what most in the third world had taken for granted for many years. As the authority of governments faded life sunk to a grinding, brutal survival of the strongest. Only those with the strength and will to take what they needed by brute force prospered.

As always, the scourge of disease, which lies dormant in times of plenty shows its cruel face in times of trouble and disaster and this time there was nothing to stop it rampaging through the remaining populations and sparing few. Cholera, typhoid, malaria and the plague all took their toll as well as frightening and unnamed killers which burst out of their murky tropical hiding places.
It had taken a frighteningly short time for what had passed for civilised life to unravel and before long only a few remnant bands of survivors were left clinging precariously to existence.