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Автор Мэтью Рейли

ICE STATION

Matt Reilly

St. Martin's Paperbacks

FOR NATALIE

First published in Australia by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited.

ICE STATION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to Natalie Freer?the most genuine and giving person I know. To Stephen Reilly, my brother and my good friend and my loyal supporter, even from thousands of miles away. To Mum for her comments on the text and to Dad for his woeful title suggestions and to both of them for their love and support. And, last, thanks to everyone at Pan and Thomas Dunne Books (in particular, my editors, Cate Paterson, Pete Wolverton, and Madonna Duffy, first, for "discovering" me and, second, for enduring all of my crazy ideas). To all of you, never underestimate the power of your encouragement.

SOUTHEASTERN ANTARCTICA

THE ANTARCTIC ICE SHELF

INTRODUCTION

From: Kendrick, Jonathan

The Cambridge Lectures: Antarctica?

The Living Continent

(Lecture delivered at Trinity College,

17 March, 1995)

Imagine, if you can, a continent that for one-quarter of the year doubles in size. A continent in a constant state of motion, motion that is undetectable to the human eye, but that is devastating nonetheless.

Imagine if you were to look down from the heavens at this vast, snow-covered mass.

You would see the signatures of motion: the sweeping waves of the glaciers, bending in curves around mountains, falling down slopes like cascading waterfalls captured on film.

This is the 'awesome inertia' that Eugene Linden spoke of. And if we, like Linden, imagine that we are looking at that picture through time-lapse photography, taken over thousands of years, then we will see that motion.

Thirty centimeters of movement every year doesn't look like much in real time, but in time-lapse glaciers become flowing rivers of ice, ice that moves with free-flowing grace and awesome, unstoppable power.

Awesome? I hear you scoff. Thirty centimeters a year? What possible harm could that do?

A lot of harm to your tax dollars, I would say. Did you know that the British government has had to replace Halley Station on four separate occasions? You see, like many other Antarctic research stations, Halley station is built underground, buried in the ice?but a mere thirty centimeters of shift every year cracks its walls and drastically skews its ceilings.

The point here is that the walls of Halley Station are under a lot of pressure, a lot of pressure. All of that ice, moving outward from the pole, moving inexorably toward the sea, it wants to get to the sea?to see the world, you might say, as an iceberg?and it isn't going to let something as insignificant as a research station get in its way!

But then again, comparatively speaking, Britain has come off rather well when it comes to dramatic ice movement.

Consider when, in 1986, the Filchner Ice Shelf calved an iceberg the size of Luxembourg into the Weddell Sea. Thirteen thousand square kilometers of ice broke free of the mainland ... taking with it the abandoned Argentine base station, Belgrano I, and the Soviet summer station, Druzhnaya. The Soviets, it seems, had planned to use Druzhnaya that summer. As it turned out, they spent the next three months searching for their missing base among the three massive icebergs that had formed out of the original ice movement! And they found it. Eventually.