4. Shades of ice

How many tones can I find in frozen water?

First off, an apology. This post is long overdue. I have been deep into the novel and I also just wrapped up a fascinating flash-fiction writing workshop.

Here is the next installment of the Antarctica posts. I have a few more things in mind. It will not be a month-plus between these posts, I promise. Thanks for sticking around.

One other note.

I will not just be posting about Antarctica here. The ongoing writer’s strike out here in Los Angeles is an excellent reminder that writers control the media, not the other way around. All the content begins with someone like me, at a keyboard, terrified and vulnerable and putting words together to make characters come alive.

One major advantage of Substack — the main reason I am on here at all — is that it is a home for writers to control the publication of their own work as well as the potential monetization of that work. I think we are well into the total collapse of Twitter (here’s to hoping) and the birth of something far more exciting, something invigorating and real here on this platform. This is a long way of saying I intend to use this site for a lot more than just my Antarctica trip.

Stay tuned.

#WGAStrong

And now: on to the main event:

The scale of the ice down there is nearly impossible to explain, but I have to try because I will never forget it. It is entirely common to see 50,000 pounds or 100,000 pounds of ice bobbing around the coastal waters of the Antarctic Peninsula. These are small. These are ordinary. These are unremarkable. The biggest ice fields are comparable to small countries; they weigh hundreds of millions of tons, at least.

What you see in my pictures, bobbing up and down in the water, are so small, and yet to sail among them is to be dwarfed by ice-structures. In these pictures, you’re seeing maybe 10 or 20 percent of the whole structure. A hundred feet in height? That’s nine hundred feet submerged. These are small skyscrapers drifting through open waters — and it’s all just frozen water.

I remember approaching one of these things and feeling like: I do not know what I mean when I say I don’t believe in God. If this work isn’t a sign of holiness, if it is not god-like in scope and power and authority, I don’t know what would be.

It occurred to me in writing this piece that by writing about ice, I would be writing about something frozen or static. Writers use words like frigid or icy or icily to describe a hostility, an absence of life. Putting something “on ice” means it is stopped. “Icing” someone is crime-fic shorthand for murder.

I would offer a different view.

These bits of splintered glacier were neither entirely frozen nor were they remotely static, and they were so far from dead. They were full of energy — not roiling, like a volcano. But our guides were constantly on-guard because these ice-giants are constantly turning over in the water . Small rubber boats and kayaks would have a very, very limited window to get out from underneath one of these huge masses in the first place. When tens of thousands of tons of ice moves, it displaces a huge amount of water. In other words, a cleaving or flipping iceberg also creates a tremendous wave.

The water is both glassy and “frigid” in the typical sense, but conditions are constantly shifting, and it absolutely can be dangerous to an arrogant or careless explorer.

This ice is thousands of years old, at least. For researchers, it is a treasure chest. Trapped inside this water are all sorts of indicators about chemical composition, about environmental conditions — the ice is very much a living thing and it is a repository of priceless information about how Earth used to be.

Look at the fractal patterns. Each divot, each stripe, each bend tells a story about how the ice was formed and how old it is and the mineral content in the water at the time it froze.

More often than not, I found myself trying to think like a painter, not a writer. What kind of palette would I use? How would I begin trying to replicate this much blue? How many whites would I need? How many different whites could I make? Because it felt like there were a dozen different whites that I might need.

Sometimes, the absence of contrast was startling, even disturbing. Beyond these frozen hills are endless plains of frozen water. Endless, endless, endless.

And then the zodiac would slow, and the tempo would shift, from seeing an entire continent at once, to seeing one block of ice, one thousand-year-old fragment at a time.

So many different patterns of breaking and reformation, of decay and regrowth. The textures are astonishing, as variable as they are repetitive. Intricate movements of the Earth at its most extreme, finally show themselves to human eyes in little, quiet beats of floating water…

Drifting quietly through liquid that is barely above freezing… seeing the seals asleep, watching penguins everywhere cutting through the water, taking refuge on the ice, keeping safe from those same seals. In this picture, two birds, most likely Antarctic petrels, rest on an ice-cliff. There would be strange red patterns on the ice; algae grows there, too.

We traveled through these vast fields and just watched things for hours at a time. Watching is kind of a dying art. Instagram is not watching. Instagram is voyeurism. TikTok is very literally calculated eye-ball grabbing. To be lost in Antarctic ice-fields is watching. It is an ego-negative thing; there is no sense of I or me or even want. There’s nothing to do. There’s no click-thru. There’s no metric. There’s just millions of pounds of solid-state water having locked itself into some extraordinary geometries, and the fact that you happen to witness some of these configurations on that particular day. And the thing about The Place is that one day’s ice will not like the same the next day. It is live theater in that way; each act of watching is bearing witness to a site-specific performance that will never be exactly the same thing again.