ANTARCTICA

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Through blind physics, the Antarctic can confer on a dead seal the splendor of an Arthurian burial rite. A corpse will become frozen beneath some floating ice, then rise slowly to the top as ice forms below and evaporates above. Once on the surface, the body insulates the underlying ice from the sun, causing it to form a pedestal as the surrounding ice recedes. Eventually, the ice breaks up, and the seal, mummified by the dry, cold climate, drifts out to sea. As layers of warm and cold air bend light and play tricks on the eye, it can appear that the seal is standing as it sails off toward its Avalon.

Antarctica also plays tricks with time and space. The vast, treeless continent conveys the awesome inertia of a place where motion is noticeable only on a geological time scale, as though the extreme cold flowing out from the polar plateau has slowed the pulse of life itself. On the ice sheets, ice streams 50 miles wide--glaciers within a glacier, in effect--look like frozen rapids when seen from space. Only if time-lapse photography could collapse many hundreds of years would the continent look alive as the ice flowed and cracked, redistributing its mass according to the laws governing gravity and friction.

Entombed in the Antarctic are memories of ice ages, of volcanic eruptions, of epochal changes in winds and rains. These memories are encrypted in dust particles, rare molecules and the properties of the ice itself. The tales they contain of thousands of years of climate changes provide intimations, and warnings, of our fate. That is why people like glaciologist Kendrick Taylor of Nevada's Desert Research Institute are drawn here. By drilling to the base of the ice sheet and extracting a 3,300-ft.-long series of ice cores, he hopes to answer new and urgent questions about the nature of global climate change.

The poet Robert Frost asked whether the world would end in fire or ice. Four years ago, Taylor and other geophysicists found evidence that the answer may be both. The message, extracted from an ice core taken in Greenland, at the opposite end of the earth, was that climate can change dramatically over short periods of time. Roughly 11,500 years ago, Greenland suddenly chilled, and then 1,500 years later, it suddenly warmed. The speed of the last change--an 18[degree] warming in some places in as little as three years--was fast enough, a meteorologist wryly commented, to capture the attention of politicians. To put a change of this magnitude in perspective, a mere 2[degree] drop in global temperatures during the 13th century started the "Little Ice Age" that wiped out the Vikings' Greenland colony, spurred glaciers to crush villages in Europe and contributed to periodic episodes of starvation and mass migration.

A "flickering climate" (as it was dubbed by Taylor and his colleagues) would be a biblical disaster in today's crowded world. Droughts, heat waves, floods and plagues of pests would play havoc with crops, and rapid sea-level rise would inundate cities and destroy rich agricultural lands. "The Greenland finding was like a loud noise in the dark," says Taylor. Now he and dozens of other scientists have moved their search to Antarctica in an effort to follow up on this finding.