“Quite good,” Misha judged. “No doubt there were beech forests here when the Sirius group was laid down.”
“Parts of the Sirius group,” Michelson qualified. “It could easily be that the Sirius group is fossil till from several different glacial periods.”
“And so the stabilists were convinced, and they recanted,” Wade said, to more hoots of laughter.
“Of course not,” Misha said, grinning and refilling their mugs with Drambuie. “That isn’t how it works, of course. No one is ever convinced of anything.”
“So how do new ideas take hold?”
“The old scientists die,” Misha said, kicking Michelson as an example.
The corners of the moustache lifted. “That’s the point,” he said to Wade. “It’s careers, you see. Whole careers have been given over to the stabilist position. Grad students are getting Ph.D.s, assistant professors are getting tenure, all on the strength of papers advocating the stabilist position. They can’t just admit they were wrong all along. But biostratification is a very solid dating method. So the diatoms are a problem for them. Not to mention the beetles and moss and beech trees.”
“But what do they say about those?” Wade asked.
“They say the beech forests are older than fourteen million years, perhaps even Cretaceous. They say the diatoms blew in from elsewhere. They ignore the beetles entirely.”
“The beetles flew in too,” Misha suggested. “Flew down from Lemuria.”
Michelson chortled, then raised a finger. “Mostly they ignore us now,” he said. “They concentrate on finding areas that have been dry or covered with ice for more than three million years, which is certainly possible. Even at its warmest there would certainly have been glaciers down here. All we’re saying when we call it warm is that there was liquid water possible for a minimum of five months of the year, which is all that Nothofagus need to survive.”
“And you’re also saying that the eastern ice cap was gone,” Wade added.
“Yes, but there would certainly have been glaciers in the higher or more southerly places, probably big glaciers. But the diatoms are sea-bottom diatoms, so there must have been seas. The cap was melted in the Pliocene! It’s the only explanation that works for all the evidence we have. Glaciers in the mountains, and in the permanent shade, sure. And sea ice in the winters, of course. But water, nevertheless, over much of this area. Fjords filling the big glacier basins.”
“They have kind of a hard case to prove,” Val noted. “They have to try to show that it stayed iced over everywhere.”
“Very true,” Michelson said. “And a hard thing to do.”
“They could find climate data showing it stayed cold throughout,” Val said.
“Yes, and the oxygen isotope ratio in the offshore sediments even seems to support them in that idea, I must admit. But there is a lot of other climate data from the north that show that the early Pliocene was quite warm. It was a high CO2 era, just like today.”
“Can’t you date the ice cap outright?” Wade asked. “Drill right to the bottom and count layers of ice, like I counted the layers today?”
“There are no layers below a certain level. They get crushed together. After that the ice has certain chemical signatures revealing a bit about the atmosphere that the snow fell out of, but it isn’t useful for precise dating.”
“Ah.” Wade thought about it. “So if the Pliocene climate was CO2 high, like today, and Antarctica was an open sea with islands and some glaciers, then why isn’t it like that today?”
“Well,” Michelson said, “maybe it’s on its way. The ice shelves are going, the ice streams are speeding up, the grounding line under the west sheet is receding fast. The east sheet is higher and thicker, so it will take longer. But it could happen.”
“How quickly could it go?”
“Very quickly indeed!”
“Meaning …”
“A few hundred years, perhaps.”
Wade and Val laughed, but Michelson waved a finger at them: “No, that’s very fast. A blink of the eye!”
“I’ll tell Senator Chase that,” Wade said.
“No no,” Michelson protested, “what you have to tell him is that nobody knows. No one can say. The Laurentian ice sheets went in just such a short time, a few thousand years perhaps, and they didn’t have humans around pumping CO2 into the air. There’s some powerful positive feedback loops involved. Things can change rapidly. These methane hydrate deposits on the sea bottom are likely to stay put at first, because that’s a matter of water pressure holding them in. But if the methane hydrates under the ice caps are substantial and that methane is released, then the greenhouse effect will be pushed even harder.”
They sipped Drambuie as Misha washed and Val dried the dishes. It was steamy warm in the tent. Wade’s neck was killing him. The Drambuie was salty.
“There must be people who don’t want to believe your scenario,” Wade said. “I mean people besides the stabilists.”
“Oh yes. The same people who found Professor Warren, eh? You can always find a potted professor to back your claim.”
“So the stabilists are like Professor Warren then.”
“Oh no. Not at all. Warren is saying there is no human effect on global warming, when the entire scientific community outside of conservative think tanks believes the evidence is obvious that there is. Warren is a charlatan, or delusional. The stabilists on the other hand are serious scientists. They are trying to prove a hypothesis, they are down here gathering data every season, they’re publishing results in peer-reviewed journals. They’re wrong, I think, but they are still scientists. Many scientists are wrong, perhaps most. They end up serving as devil’s advocates for the ones lucky enough to be right. Even we may be wrong.”
“No!” the others cried.
“No,” Michelson agreed. “Those are Pliocene diatoms, and they grew here.” He raised a mug to toast them. “Here in this cold frozen hell.”
The conversation shifted to the day’s work in the field, and a long discussion of what they would do the following day. Wade and Val would be hiking out in the afternoon, to make their rendezvous with a helicopter on the edge of the no-fly zone. The scientists would hike downvalley partway with them. Harry said, “We’ll either find some Sirius above Lake Vashka, or else just have a day of shits and giggles.”
“Shits and giggles?” Wade said.
“Recreation,” Misha explained.
“I hate that expression,” Val announced firmly. “As if if you’re not doing science you’re not doing anything. It’s offensive.”
“Sorry,” Harry said, looking surprised. “It’s something the grad students say.”
“I know.”
“The grad students who never get to leave their one research site,” Michelson added. “It’s no doubt compensatory.”
“No doubt.”
The Coleman stove roared airily in the awkward silence.
“I suppose there are people in Washington who think that all activities down here are nothing but shits and giggles,” Wade said. “Science as much as anything.”
Val gave him a grateful look, but the awkward silence persisted.
“So that eastern ice sheet,” Wade went on. “If it wasn’t here three million years ago, then it grew back pretty fast, didn’t it?”
Michelson raised an eyebrow. “The three sounds small, but you have to remember the millions. Snow accumulation at the South Pole was ten centimeters a year before these so-called superstorms became a regular thing, and at that rate you get the three kilometers of the ice sheet in three hundred thousand years.”
“Compaction,” Forbes pointed out.
“Yes, but it’s already almost firn, so the compaction rate may not be as great as with snow. Even if it is, a centimeter of ice for every ten of snow, that’s what …”