“Yours did that, too?”
“Oh, geez!” I gripped the seat as we plunged bow-first into the dark blue world, our weight distribution continuing our forward roll into a full somersault as we fell like a sinking dagger.
With a sickening crunch, the Lexan dome struck bottom. Naturally buoyant, the sub bounced upward, only to be spun and inhaled by a powerful current that grabbed our inverted vessel and propelled us along the bottom.
I saw ice and then I saw stars as the Barracuda plowed bow-first and upside-down into the narrow space between the molar-shaped underside of an iceberg and the silt-covered sea floor.
“Well done,” I said, the blood rushing to my face. “I hope this death trap has a reverse gear.”
“Sit tight, I got this.” Ben tapped the thrusters, attempting to torque us free, only to jam the inverted starboard fin in deeper.
“You’re a maniac. No wonder the Air Force gave you the boot.”
“Hey, you don’t know shit about it, so shut up. And this little setback, it’s all part of the learning process. Get the kinks out. We’ll be out of here in no time.”
“Maybe we can get a tow from a passing flock of penguins?”
“Stop talking and let me think.”
“See, that’s the trouble with you action-types, there’s always time to think after you get your big balls caught in a vice.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Butts are for crapping. Answer my question. Does this acrylic coffin have a reverse gear or not?”
“I was going to say you first have to manually reverse the drive shaft.”
“Which I’m guessing you don’t know how to do.”
“It was on the top of my to-do list. There’s a manual in the compartment by your right knee. Make yourself useful.”
I fished the thick booklet out, my head throbbing. “Oh good, it’s in Chinese. What’s Mandarin for dickhead?”
“Screw the reverse gear. I’m powering up the Valkyries.”
My pulse raced. “Have you ever done this before?”
“I haven’t done any of this before. Should I give it the old Ivy League try, or would you prefer to just sit here until our air runs out?”
“Okay, okay. But listen first. Don’t try to blast out the Holland tunnel. Just melt enough ice so that we have room to spin around in a tight circle and get out the way we came in.”
“Got it.”
“No, you don’t got it! Evaporate too much ice in these conditions and it will create a vacuum effect which could suck us in deeper beneath the iceberg.”
He paused as my words sank in. “Tap it and turn. Got it.”
“Not yet, you don’t. This has to be done simultaneously. One of us works the laser; the other jams one foot pedal down to the floor while turning the joystick hard to the same side. But only just enough to turn us 180 degrees, or we’ll spin right back where we started, only deeper.”
The berg groaned around us, sending the internal pod’s psi readings from green to orange.
“Okay, Zach, which one do you want to do?”
“Give me the laser.”
“I wanted to do the laser.”
“What are you, a five-year-old? We need you to steer the damn sub. Now show me how to use the Valkyrie.”
He pointed to an instrument panel on the center console. “The red light means the unit’s powering up. When it turns green, engage the lasers by pressing these two buttons. Press them again to stop the beams.”
I activated the fuel cells and waited, the blood rushing to my head, sweat dripping down my neck into my scalp. “Okay, it’s green. You ready?”
“Yeah. Wait, quick question. If we’re upside down and I want to turn us counterclockwise—”
“Tap your left foot on the throttle and follow it with your joystick.”
“Which is now on my right, right?”
“Right. I mean, yes.”
“Okay, we blast on three. One… two … ”
I stole a quick glance at the starboard Valkyrie, its business end glowing red.
“Three!”
I pressed both buttons. The sea boiled in a veil of orange bubbles as we spun hard seventy degrees counterclockwise and jammed, the wounded iceberg groaning above our feet. We continued firing and throttling until our field of vision yielded deep blue again.
The submersible leaped into the void. Ben executed a quick semi-barrel roll, which returned our world right-side up, then stabilized our yaw by extending the vessel’s pectoral fins.
For several moments we simply laid our heads back and breathed as the sub rose slowly in neutral.
We both jumped as the acrylic dome above our heads collided with a ceiling of sea ice.
“Want to teach me how to use the sonar now, or would you rather wait until you plow us into a wall of glacial ice?”
For the next forty minutes, Ben taught me how to distinguish objects in the sea using active and passive sonar, as well as how to comprehend the sub’s fuel gauge, battery range, and life-support system readings.
Finally feeling more like a copilot than a passenger, I called out obstacles on sonar while Ben steered us through a frozen labyrinth.
What was it like to dive the Antarctic sea in a submersible? In a word: breathtaking. The extreme cold was an exotic entity of nature that affected everything around us. As sea ice, it formed a seemingly endless ceiling that resembled an overcast December sky, its thicker patches dark and gray, its thinner veils streaked in bolts of neon-blue sunlight. Brine channels hung surreally from the frozen surface like hollow stalactites, their tubular openings bleeding liquid saline into the clear blue underworld.
Below us, bright pink starfish and clumps of anchor ice that resembled crystal tumbleweeds spotted a silt-brown bottom. Every so often a sea urchin or a rock would seem to defy gravity and rise from the sea floor, shanghaied to a glob of ice whose buoyancy would pin it to the ceiling.
Touching the inside surface of the acrylic pod, I could feel the penetrating cold held at bay by technology. Listening to the sea, we heard strange chirping sounds, the mating calls of Weddell seals mixed with the rumblings of grounded icebergs. In the coming weeks the sea ice would crack open and release these masses from a winter’s purgatory, and their roots would plow the bottom as they flowed out of Prydz Bay, ripping out long gashes that would create new havens for marine life.
Leaving the bay, we headed out to the open ocean. The sea ice dissipated, and our surroundings became liquid blue. Pinging the area, I detected something immense floating on the surface a mile to the east. It was a tabular berg, the largest type of iceberg. Formed when large portions of an ice shelf break off and drift free, these glacier-like ice sheets can span several square miles, their sheer white cliffs towering hundreds of feet above the surface and reaching a thousand feet below.
Ben surfaced the sub so that we could take a look. The berg was a plateau of ice as big as three aircraft carriers, its waterline ringed by a turquoise lagoon, an effect created by its submerged alabaster mass. A twenty-foot ledge, forged by lapping waves, hung over the surface.
The face of the berg was mesmerizing — a two-hundred-foot-high curl that resembled a tidal wave frozen in time. Dark blue ice rose from the sea to form its textured vortex, melding into glistening clear ice capped by its snow-covered lip.
Antarctic clear ice was the oldest ice on the continent, its presence on the tabular berg tracing back to the glacier that calved it into Prydz Bay. Over eons, tons of snowfall had accumulated and had been compressed on the glacier. Air bubbles trapped in the ice were squeezed out, rendering the ice as clear as crystal and as old as half a million years.
The blue ice was a phenomenon associated with melting and re-freezing, a process that forced out trapped air, allowing the blue color in the visible light spectrum to pass through while blocking the red color.