Ethan peered up into the glacier’s depths and saw a thin line running through the ice parallel to the horizon.
‘That’s a sedimentary layer,’ Chandler explained. ‘If we went up there and excavated it we’d find soil, twigs and leaves embedded within it, all of them three to five millions of years old. The ice here is a relatively recent geological event — prior to this, Antarctica was a tropical rainforest.’
‘You’re telling me that Antarctica was like Brazil?’ Hannah uttered in amazement.
‘Scientists routinely excavate petrified logs from the depths of glaciers just like this one that must have come from extremely large trees. We’re even able to slice into the fossil trees and count the rings demarking their growth. The most amazing thing about that is the requirement for many of those species to have coped with the Antarctic winter, during which it’s dark for six months of the year.’
‘Trees grow through photosynthesis don’t they?’ Ethan said. ‘Wouldn’t they die?’
‘Experiments at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom showed that planets like the Ginkgo, an ancient species considered a “living fossil” by science, could survive in simulated Antarctic conditions quite well. Although they used up food stores in the winter, they more than made up for this by their ability to photosynthesise twenty four hours a day in the summer.’
Saunders ducked under the tree and moved on, Ethan following as Hannah spoke to Chandler behind him.
‘So if Antarctica was a normal land mass before the ice, then wouldn’t it have had animals living on it?’
‘Many,’ Chandler confirmed, ‘and as we’re talking about a period from one hundred million years ago, then there would have been dinosaurs roaming this continent just like any other.’
‘Dinosaurs?’ Hannah echoed. ‘Seriously?’
‘Absolutely,’ Chandler said. ‘Researchers at the Victoria Museum in Australia have found many dinosaur fossils in southern Australia at a location that was once positioned just off the east coast of Antarctica. Their work has shown that not only did dinosaurs live on Antarctica, but that they did so year-round. Specimens of the species Leaellynasaura showed adaptions of the skull which indicate that the animal had enlarged optic lobes, designed to offer acute night vision well suited to the prolonged winter darkness.’
Hannah smiled nervously.
‘Let’s hope that none of them are left wandering about down here then, shall we?’
Saunders chuckled.
‘The species died out tens of millions of years ago, and was a plant eater no bigger than a kangaroo,’ he said. ‘You’d have had nothing to fear from it.’
Ahead of them, Lieutenant Riggs slowed as he looked down at a scanner he held in his hand.
‘Well, something’s ahead of us,’ he said. ‘I’m getting a much stronger signal now. We’re close.’
XXI
The ice channel’s water glistened in the glare from the team’s mounted flashlights as Ethan followed Saunders over a series of rugged, icy boulders blocking their path, likely deposited by the fast moving waters that had forged the tunnel.
Ethan could see that the water itself was still icy cold, possessed of a faint blue hue that betrayed its frigid depths as not much above freezing.
‘This water,’ he said, glancing back at Saunders, ‘how come it’s warmer than the rest? Something must be heating it?’
Ethan found it tough to believe that rainforests haunted by small dinosaurs once flourished where the thick ice sheets now existed, but he knew that the evidence of science never lied.
‘The geological record provides irrefutable evidence of dramatic climate fluctuations that have occurred throughout our planet’s history,’ Chandler replied, scrambling over a rocky boulder. ‘In the past fifty years the Antarctic Peninsula has warmed by nearly three degrees Centigrade, faster than any other part of the world. These ice channels may now be common beneath the ice sheets but normally we just can’t see them, and so we can’t tell if they’re flowing in from the oceans around Antarctica somehow, or are coming from within it and spilling into the oceans around the continent instead.’
Ethan surveyed the depths of the tunnel ahead thoughtfully.
‘Water doesn’t typically flow into continents from outside, it falls as rain or snow.’
‘Correct,’ Chandler replied, ‘and that leaves only one possible cause of the warming we’re seeing here: volcanism.’
‘There are volcanoes here too?’ Hannah uttered. ‘You’re really selling the place.’
‘Mount Erebus is currently the most active volcano in Antarctica and is the current eruptive zone of the Erebus hotspot. The summit contains a persistent convecting phonolitic lava lake, one of only five long-lasting lava lakes on the planet. Scientific study of the volcano is also facilitated by its proximity to McMurdo Station. Mount Erebus is classified as a polygenetic stratovolcano — that is that the bottom half of the volcano is a shield and the top half is a stratocone like most volcanoes. The whole system has been active for some time.’
Ethan tried not to consider what that meant for the expedition, currently some two hundred feet beneath the ice of an unstable glacier being weakened by volcanically warmed water rushing by just feet from where they walked. He was about to change the subject when Saunders called out.
‘Hey, you guys see that?’
Ethan looked up ahead, and in the gloom he saw something shimmering against the ice. The team stopped and stared ahead in silence at the glistening light, as though a star had fallen through the ice and was sparkling where it had become trapped. Ethan squinted, tried not to look directly at the glow but to one side of it where his eyes could detect it more easily.
‘Is it a reflection of some kind, from our lights?’ Hannah asked.
Lieutenant Riggs called out. ‘Everybody shut off your lights.’
Ethan obeyed instantly, turning his LED light off as did everybody else in the team. The tunnel was plunged into an absolute darkness so deep that Ethan was forced to put a gloved hand onto the ice wall alongside him to keep his balance. He peered into the distance as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, and saw the soft blue glow spread across the tunnel far ahead of them.
‘What’s causing that?’
Hannah’s voice sounded disembodied in the blackness, echoing back and forth within the confines of the chamber as Ethan noticed the glow getting brighter, his eyes adjusting quickly to the gloom.
Then Saunders’ voice echoed from somewhere ahead.
‘It’s getting brighter, and it’s coming closer.’
Ethan’s eyes widened as he realized that the light was closing in on them, illuminating the tunnel around it in a blue halo of light. Lieutenant Riggs reacted instantly.
‘Everybody down, stand by!’
Ethan crouched down, one gloved hand resting on the 9mm pistol holstered on his belt as he watched the light growing in intensity before them. Like the hazy halo of a blue sunrise it reflected off the ice of the tunnel and seemed to sparkle as though alive, shimmering through the glassy ice. Ethan’s first fear that it was some kind of man-made light attached to a craft on the water began to dissolve as he realized that the light had no natural proximal source.