Download From the Washington Post, 10-12-09

Association of Energy Engineers
New York Chapter
www.aeeny.org
October 2009 Newsletter Part 2
A Bid to Cut Emissions Looks Away From Coal
By Matthew L. Wald, NYTimes, Nov 1 09
Kevin Riddell for The New York Times
The nation's first project for capturing and separating carbon dioxide from a coal plant began Oct. 1 at American
Electric Power's coal-fired plant in West Virginia.
WASHINGTON — As Congress debates legislation to slow global warming by limiting emissions, engineers are
tinkering with ways to capture and store carbon dioxide, the leading heat-trapping gas.
But coal-fired power plants, commonly identified as the nation’s biggest emissions villain, may not be
the best focus.
Rather, engineers and policymakers say, it may be easier and less costly to capture the carbon dioxide at
oil refineries, chemical plants, cement factories and ethanol plants, which emit a far purer stream of it than a
coal smokestack does.
Carbon dioxide typically makes up only 10 percent to 12 percent of a coal plant’s emissions, they note,
and the gas is so mixed with pollutants that it is difficult to separate.
Cheaper strategies for sequestering carbon dioxide could prove especially important if Congress passes a
law setting up a so-called cap-and-trade system. That would set a national ceiling for overall emissions and allot
pollution allowances to utilities, manufacturers and other emitters, which could then trade them among
themselves.
Companies that exceed their carbon dioxide emission allowances could buy credits from those that
pollute less. Under such a system, a coal plant that had exceeded its allotment might pay a chemical plant that
could separate a ton of carbon dioxide more cheaply.
“If we have a cap-and-trade scheme, it will happen wherever it is the most cost-effective,” said Jeffrey
R. Holmstead, a lawyer and former assistant administrator for air and radiation at the Environmental Protection
Agency.
Lending momentum to this thinking, a Texas company, Denbury Resources, is building a 320-mile
pipeline for carbon dioxide that will run from Louisiana to Houston.
Initially the pipeline will take natural underground deposits of carbon dioxide in Mississippi to the aging
oil fields of east Texas, where it can be used to force more oil to the surface.
But as the pipeline threads its way through more and more refineries and plants — the chemical
heartland of the United States — manmade carbon dioxide captured at those sites could also be added and
stored.
Sequestering a ton of carbon dioxide from a chemical plant would have the same effect on the Earth’s
atmosphere as storing a ton from a coal plant, scientists and industry executives emphasize.
“Sequestration is not a coal technology — it is a greenhouse gas abatement strategy,” said S. Julio
Friedmann, leader of the carbon management program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Last month, the Energy Department announced $44 million in grants to develop the technology, known
generally as carbon capture.
Among them was $1.72 million for Praxair, a chemical company based in Connecticut that operates two
plants near Houston that make hydrogen for use in oil refineries.
The money will go toward developing engineering studies on how to capture carbon dioxide from the
hydrogen production and deliver it to Denbury.
Carbon dioxide makes up 20 percent of the gas resulting from hydrogen production, twice the
concentration found in a gas stream from a typical coal plant. Recovering it from this stream rather than a coal
plant smokestack would therefore be cheaper and simpler.
In the oil industry, drillers have for years tapped underground reservoirs of carbon dioxide, brought it to
the surface and moved it by pipeline to oil fields. Then they inject it into the fields to help force oil to the
surface in a process called “enhanced oil recovery.”
If the oil industry left the natural carbon dioxide where it was, and drew on carbon dioxide from
industrial plants instead, far less manmade carbon dioxide would enter the atmosphere, experts say.
What oil drillers pay for carbon dioxide depends on the value of the oil it will help produce. When oil is
at $70 a barrel, carbon dioxide goes for $10 or $11 a ton, said Tracy Evans, the chief executive of Denbury, the
Texas company building the carbon dioxide pipeline.
Should the Congressional legislation mandate a cap-and-trade system, that modest price could be very
important. “Wherever you can go to store a ton of carbon the most cheaply, you will go,” said Mr. Holmstead,
the former E.P.A. administrator for air.
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Another likely source of pure streams of carbon dioxide are plants that refine natural gas. The natural
gas usually comes out of the ground mixed with carbon dioxide, which natural gas sellers routinely remove so
the natural gas can be considered “pipeline quality.” That carbon dioxide is sometimes reinjected into the
ground, but sometimes vented.
Then there are cement kilns, which produce a nearly pure stream of carbon dioxide.
For now, no one is sure what it will cost to capture and sequester carbon dioxide from coal plants
because the first such project in the nation, at American Electric Power’s coal-fired plant in New Haven, W.Va.,
got under way only last month. At the moment, the process consumes 30 percent of the coal plant’s energy, but
engineers are working to cut that in half.
Even so, experts expect the price to run to $60 a ton or more. But pure streams could be captured for the
cost of drilling a natural gas well and compressing the gas into liquid form — perhaps $10 to $15 a ton, Dr.
Friedmann of the Livermore laboratory said.
Bruce Nilles, director of the National Coal Campaign at the Sierra Club, also cites natural gas plants as a
promising avenue for carbon capture. Natural gas has only half as much carbon dioxide in it as coal does. So the
equipment needed to separate and sequester the carbon dioxide at a gas plant would be half as big as the
machinery at a coal plant of the same size, and would cost less to build and operate.
Mr. Nilles and others say that biomass fuels, derived from wood, waste and alcohol, could offer an even
better opportunity for carbon capture. If an electric plant burns wood chips or other plant material in place of
coal, it produces a stream of smoke from which carbon dioxide can be taken and then injected deep into the
earth.
The advantage is that if a tree is cut down and burned in a boiler, a new tree can grow in its place, and
absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That makes the process “carbon negative;” for each ton burned, the
amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will decline.
Eventually, Mr. Evans of Denbury said, most of the carbon sequestration will come from the power
sector, because it is a far larger emitter than the chemical or refining sectors.
But for the moment, he said, for companies like his, which use carbon dioxide to drill for oil, there is
something of a shortage. His company is still drilling for natural deposits of carbon dioxide, he said, and “we
don’t have any to sell to others.”
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
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The Book That Contains All Books
The globally available Kindle could mark as big a shift for reading as the printing press and the codex
By Stephen Marche, Wall Street Journal, Oct 17 09
ON MONDAY, THE KINDLE 2 will become the first e-reader available globally. The only other events as
important to the history of the book are the birth of print and the shift from the scroll to bound pages. The ereader, now widely available, will likely change our thinking and our being as profoundly as the two previous
pre-digital manifestations of text. The question is how. And the answer can be found in the history of earlier
book forms.
Most literate people are familiar with at least some of the consequences of the print revolution of the
15th century, but far fewer are as aware of the much more profound change that occurred when rolls were
replaced by codices—pages bound between covers—in the late Roman period. Think of the scattered, tattered
remainders of the Dead Sea Scrolls—each text is isolated and vulnerable. Codices were originally minilibraries, much more useful and easy than storing masses of loose individual texts.
In "Christianity and the Transformation of the Book" (2007), Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams
argue that the codex was one of the keys to the nascent power of Christianity in the late Roman period: "The
rise of the codex, with its compact proportions, greatly intensified the physical—as well as the symbolic—
concentration of cultural power that a sizable library embodied." The Gospels became both a single object and a
small library. The simple act of binding involved the bringing together of voices and interests, a move from
having the Lamentations of Jeremiah and histories of the Kings of Israel and the laws of Moses to having the
Bible which contains them all.
The development of the codex was a shift from thinking of literature as a unique object, like a painting,
to seeing it as an institutional object. Conversely, as the codex came to dominate as a means of intellectual
transmission, the scroll began to take on the status of a holy object, which is why synagogues keep the Torah in
scrolls.
The introduction of the printing press brought a similarly enormous change to the nature of reading. One
of the most interesting figures in that transformation is the great Benedictine scholar Trithemius. He lived in
Sponheim in the 15th century and managed to amass a library fully half the size of the Vatican library, an
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incredible achievement. He was also the author of "In Praise of Scribes," the foremost defense of scribal
practice, in favor of writing things out and against printing them.
Amazon
The Kindle, which will be available internationally next week.
He reminds me particularly of Nicholson Baker, who disapproves highly of Kindle 2. I mean the
comparison absolutely as a compliment to Mr. Baker, who recently published a diatribe against Kindle with the
subtitle "Centuries of Evolved Beauty Rinsed Away." His argument boils down to how much he likes the feel of
paper. Trithemius had stronger arguments against the newfangled technology of the press: Printed books could
never match the beauty and uniqueness of a copied text; copying produced a state of contemplation which was
spiritually beneficial; and copying was a way of reducing error, which indeed it was at first.
His central claim was that hand-produced books were inherently holy. His leading anecdote is the story
of a scribe who died after decades of copying texts. When they disinterred him, the three fingers of his right
hand, his writing hand, had not decomposed. Anyone who has held a handmade medieval missal—or even a
handwritten letter—knows what Trithemius is talking about: the sense that someone is communicating
something to you personally.
But "In Praise of Scribes" is a good object lesson in the impossibility of avoiding technological change.
Trithemius didn't have his book copied. Too few people could have read it that way. It went straight to the
printing press (just as Nicholson Baker's polemic against Kindle 2 is available online). Trithemius was the first
in a line of would-be Luddites who couldn't resist the power of the new.
My paper library consists of 2,000 volumes, making it both much too big and much too small. I consider
a working library to have about 5,000 volumes, but a mere 2,000 has been sufficient to be one of the most
continuous problems of my life. Moving it around is a nightmare. A hundred boxes of books is a terrible burden
in the 21st century. Yet I know that I will never get rid of them. I'm too attached now. Just as the ancients
respected the scroll more after the development of the book, just as the hand-written manuscript became sacred
after the invention of print, the printed book is now beginning to glow with its own obsolescence.
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Scala/Art Resource
"The Trial of Christ; The Death of Judas' from the Codex Purpureus Rossanensis, early 6th century.
But I am immensely excited for the new phase of the book. So far the new technology has been called
the "e-reader," a term obviously picked by engineers, not poets. In literary terms it's a transbook, by which I
mean that it is the book which can contain all books. Why are so many writers so afraid of this staggeringly
wonderful possibility? A book is a singular object that can contain many voices, but the transbook has the
potential to be a singular object containing all voices. It is not just another kind of media; it is the dream of
ultimate text.
We are still in early days, but it is obvious where the transbook is headed: It will eventually provide
access to all text that is non-copyright, and to the purchase of every book in or out of "print." Kindle 2's boast of
being able to hold 1,500 titles will eventually sound as ludicrous as those early ads for floppy disks boasting
that they could hold up to 64k of data. We will want everything and we will get it. Possibly there will eventually
develop a subscription service, which provides access to all books for a monthly fee. At any rate, a single object
will contain the contents of all the world's libraries. It's just a matter of when that will happen. And who will
profit.
Kindle 2 isn't really about what we may or may not want as readers and writers. It's about what the book
wants to be. And the book wants to be itself and everything. It wants to be a vast abridgment of the universe that
you can hold in your hand. It wants to be the transbook.
—Stephen Marche is the pop culture columnist at Esquire magazine. His most recent book,
"Shining at the Bottom of the Sea," is a literary anthology of an invented country.
Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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Associated Press
The Dead Sea Scrolls.
Women In India Refusing To Wed Men Without Toilets
From the Washington Post, 10-12-09
In rural parts of India, an increasing number of potential brides are refusing to wed a man who cannot
provide them with indoor plumbing and a toilet. About 665 million people in India -- about half the population - lack access to a toilet and are forced to use public restrooms or an open field. "No loo? No 'I do,'" says Vimlas
Sasva, 18, parroting a radio slogan popularized by a "No Toilet, No Bride" campaign that kicked off two years
ago.
Sure, I Can Teach That ...
By Gene C. Fant Jr., The Chronicle of Higher Education, Oct 19 09
ONE OF MY FRESHMAN-COMPOSITION STUDENTS plopped noisily in a seat next to my desk. "I failed my
art appreciation paper. I don't understand this. How can I fail an art paper?" I scanned the essay and asked him
what grade I might have assigned the paper.
He looked over it for a bit: "I guess you would have failed it too. I see several misspellings and some
incomplete sentences. But it's an art paper, not an English paper! It's not the same thing."
I smiled at his naïve comment, even as I disabused him of its false premise. I see teaching writing as
foundational for other subjects, as I employ my professional training to eradicate weaknesses in student work. I
build this foundation carefully through well-thought-out assignments and one-on-one conferences. Even
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students who enter the university with strong skills have poor habits that I can address. When they move onto
their other subjects, they need to carry with them the skills that I have imparted and they have refined. I mention
this because of a burgeoning development in general education: the replacement of disciplinary courses with
student-learning outcomes embedded in a wide variety of courses. In the latter view, professors in almost any
course can document student achievements in areas as diverse as public speaking, computation, research, basic
science, and, of course, writing.
Certainly we need to embed these skills throughout the curriculum, but the problem that arises is what
has been called "Polymath Syndrome," the belief held by many professors that they can teach almost any
subject or skill. In such a configuration, a biology professor, for example, requires an oral presentation in a
freshman-level course and submits a formal evaluation of the skill to a central records-keeping office to
document the learning outcome. That professor might very well be able to recognize good skills or poor skills,
but that professor is not likely equipped to remediate deficiencies. As I have heard some professors in the
department that specializes in the skill lament, "That professor in [another discipline] is telling me that he
knows how to do what I do, including all of the trouble-shooting that I have learned in six years of graduate
school and a dozen years of teaching. I'm sorry, but that's more than a little insulting."
The turf issues attached to such models are massive: If English, communication arts, math, and other
departments no longer hold exclusive courses in general education but are reduced to trouble-shooting roles,
their positions will disappear, replaced by yeomen remediators who work in academic labs and not classrooms.
It's a significant challenge.
Are such laments regarding Polymath Syndrome legitimate or are they just blustering over shrinking
influence related to general-education courses?
War Games Start to Include Climate Change
A recently published document (August 09) shows that US military and
intelligence officials now understand global climate destabilizations
as a key factor in future planning.
(Thank you John Nettleton for submitting this.)
"THE STRATEGIC STUDIES INSTITUTE of
the U.S. Army War College publishes national security and
strategic research and analysis which serves to influence policy debate and bridge the gap between Military and
Academia." This is from a public document, cleared for release from the Strategic Studies Institute United
States Army War College
http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/display.cfm?pubID=932
Synopsis:
Climate change, in which man-made global warming is a major factor, will likely have dramatic, long
lasting consequences with profound security implications, making it a challenge the United States must urgently
take up. The security implications will be most pronounced in places where the effects of climate change are
greatest, particularly affecting weak states already especially vulnerable to environmental destabilization. Two
things are vitally important: stemming the tide of climate change and adapting to its far-reaching consequences.
This project examines the destabilizing effects of climate change and how the military could be used to mitigate
global warming and to assist at-risk peoples and states to adapt to climate change, thereby promoting stability
and sustainable security. Recommendations are made on the importance of U.S. leadership on the critical issue
of global warming, on defining and dealing with the strategic dimensions of climate change, and, as a case in
point, on how Sino-American
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cooperation in Africa would not only benefit areas where climate change effects are already pronounced, but
also strengthen a crucial bilateral relationship.
....What is new is that climate change poses security threats unmatched among environmental
phenomena.
Climate change is a multifaceted threat to America’s well-being, and the world’s. The life-sustaining
capacity of our planet may be in jeopardy. Fears are growing that climate change, that which is already
occurring and the even more dire consequences that may lie ahead, will
generate instability and lead to conflict. The most violent conflict is foreseen in and near areas that become
uninhabitable, for example, due to desertification or sea-level rise. The nature, underlying uncertainty, growing
prevalence, and possible intractability of climate change exacerbate its tensions, risks, and threats....
(1) projected climate change is a serious threat to America’s national security;
(2) climate change will make some of the most volatile regions of the world even more unstable;
(3) projected climate change will increase tensions even in stable regions of the world; and
(4) climate change, national security, and energy dependence are related, global challenges.
Based on these findings, the panel had five recommendations:
(1) the security implications of climate change should be fully incorporated into national security and
national defense strategies;
(2) the United States should play a stronger role, nationally and internationally, in the mitigation of
climate change;
(3) the United States should build partnerships that help less-developed nations adapt to climate change;
(4) the Department of Defense (DoD) should enhance its operational capability through more energy
efficient combat power; and
(5) DoD should assess the impact on U.S. military installations worldwide of rising sea levels, extreme
weather events, and other projected climate change impacts over the next 30 to 40 years. The panel’s findings
and recommendations are compelling...
Conclusions and Recommendations
From a national security perspective, too much and too little can be made of climate change. Thus far,
too little has been made. Conversely, the Obama administration must avoid making too much of climate change,
lest its response be perceived as yet another pretext for American hegemony. The security challenge of climate
change must be taken up, however, and soon, while options are more numerous, the prospects for success are
greater, and the likelihood of major conflict is far less.
Climate change will have dramatic, accelerating, and long lasting consequences with profound security
implications. Adapting to and mitigating climate change and its destabilizing effects are vital efforts the United
States must undertake earnestly and remain committed to indefinitely. The security implications will be most
pronounced in places where the effects of climate change are greatest, particularly weak states already
vulnerable to environmental destabilization. Two things are paramount: stemming the tide of climate change
and promoting
stability.
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Prof. Michal’s Solo Show Focuses On Brooklyn’s Industrial Past, Toxic Present
(From NYC College of Technology News and Events)
Citizens Manufactured Gas Plant operated on 5th & Smith Streets to the Gowanus Canal from about 1860 until
1960. Today, the resulting contamination reaches down into the soil more than 120 feet.
THE LEGACY OF BROOKLYN’S INDUSTRIAL past and the spectrum of pollution in which we live are
captured in City Tech Assistant Professor Robin Michals’ photography exhibition, “Toxi City: Brooklyn’s
Brownfields,” at the Brooklyn Lyceum, 227 4th Avenue, Park Slope, Brooklyn, from Sunday, October 25,
through Sunday, November 8. The exhibit hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily. The public is invited free of charge.
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An artist’s reception will be held Sunday, Oct. 25, 3 to 6 p.m. For more information: visit www.e-arcades.com,
e-mail [email protected] or call 917.509.9516.
The exhibition features 30 photographs of sites in Coney Island, DUMBO, East New York, East
Williamsburg, Gowanus, Greenpoint, Red Hook, Sunset Park and Williamsburg where historic uses have
saturated the soils and groundwater with a lasting toxicity.
To select the sites she photographed, Michals, a Park Slope resident who teaches in City Tech’s
advertising design and graphic arts department, used the New York State Department of Environmental
Conservation’s Brownfield Remediation list as a starting point to determine what qualified as a brownfield or
toxic site.
In addition, she consulted old maps at the Brooklyn Historical Society. “The alphabet soup of DNAPLs,
NAPLs, BTEXs, PAHs, SVOCs, VOCs, TCE, PCE, and PCBs that have been left behind at these sites can
never be entirely removed; their dangers can only be better managed,” Michals says. “As we careen towards the
greater impacts of climate change, brownfields remind us of the damage we are willing to inflict on the
environment for the benefits of industrialism.”
Underscoring that the dichotomy of pristine and polluted is no longer a useful way of thinking, the
exhibit will include photographs of sites in all phases of the clean-up process. Photographs of several completed
remediation projects such as Pfizer and Lowe’s will be included as well as photographs of several sites
undergoing remediation such as the Coney Island and Williamsburg Works manufactured gas plant sites.
In addition, the show will feature photographs of as-yet unremediated sites that once housed gas plants,
electrical powerhouses, petroleum facilities and manufacturing operations or were tainted by landfill or
dumping. Because Brooklyn is a dense, crowded, place, many of these sites are in use in some form today
despite their toxicity.
Michals’ work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Rome Arts in Williamsburg (Brooklyn) Buffalo
Arts Studio (Buffalo, NY) and UVM in Burlington, VT, as well as in a two-person show at Venetia Kapernekas
Fine Arts in Chelsea (NYC). She has participated in group shows at the New York Hall of Science (Queens),
Gigantic Artspace (NYC) and The Front Room, (Williamsburg), among others.
This event is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York
City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by the Brooklyn Arts Council, Inc. (BAC), and by grants
from the Puffin Foundation and the Professional Staff Congress-City University of New York Research Award
Program.
The Brooklyn Lyceum, known formerly as NYC Public Bath No. 7, is a performing arts and cultural
center in Park Slope. Reopened in 1994 as the Brooklyn Lyceum, the old bathhouse now plays host to a range
of performance events, festivals and cultural activities.
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Archive
Picture This
Antartica 2041: My Quest to Save the Earth’s Last Wilderness
By Robert Swan
ADVENTURER TURNED ENVIRONMENTALIST Robert Swan illuminates the perils facing the planet come
2041—the year when the international treaty protecting Antarctica is up for review—and the many steps that
can be taken to avoid environmental calamity.
In 1985, when Robert Swan walked across Antarctica, the fragile polar environment was not high in his
mind. But upon his return, the earth’s perilous state became personal: Robert’s ice-blue eyes were singed a pale
gray, a result of being exposed to the sun’s rays passing unfiltered through the depleted ozone layer. At this
moment, his commitment to preserving the environment was born.
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In Antarctica 2041 Swan details his journey to awareness, and his firm belief that humans can reverse
the harm done to the planet thus far, and secure its future for generations to come.
Despite the dire warnings Swan raises in Antarctica 2041—exponentially high greenhouse-gas levels;
rising seas; massive species extinction—he says there is much we can do to avert looming disaster. Ultimately
an upbeat call to action, his book provides the information people need to understand the world’s crisis, and the
tools they need to combat it, ultimately showing us all that saving Antarctica amounts to saving ourselves.
Robert Swan is the first person to have walked to both the North and South Poles. An active lecturer, he
regularly leads Antarctic expeditions. He divides time between London, New York, and Antarctica.
EXCERPT
The Beardmore
In the Antarctic summer of 1985 I found myself standing at the inland margin of the Ross
Ice Shelf, a crevasse-riven, glacier-fed formation about the size of France. A France without
baguettes and cathedrals. A totally Paris-less France.
The ice beneath me ran down a thousand feet. Underneath that, the Bible-black darkness
of a cold, unexplored sea.
There were reasons why the Ross Sea remained unexplored. A New Zealand fishing boat
once pulled from its waters a colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, to distinguish
the species from its smaller cousin, the merely giant squid) more than thirty feet long and
weighing over a thousand pounds. That's what they had down there, that and God knows
what other creatures. Perhaps only Captain Nemo could have handled it.
To report my location on the Ross Ice Shelf above the Ross Sea, in other words, is another
way of saying that I was in the middle of frozen nowhere, perched on the brink of an
enormous nothingness. "A silence deep with a breath like sleep" is how one man who died
there put it.
Early Antarctic explorers called the ice shelf "the Great Ice Barrier," in honor of the
hundred-foot-high vertical wall where it meets the sea. But for those early explorers, and
for me, the barrier acted more as a road, an immense, human-dwarfing, windswept road,
but nevertheless a well-recognized path into the interior of the continent.
We followed "In the Footsteps of Scott," as our expedition was called, tracing the trek to the
South Pole of the great British explorer Captain Robert F. Scott.
As I stood at the edge of the barrier, the question I pondered was pretty basic. Why in
heaven's name would anyone want to enter the interior of Antarctica? Why would anyone
freely choose to experience the most inhuman landscape available to us? It's a boogeyman
of a place, good for scaring the wits out of homebodies.
"The highest, driest, windiest, coldest place on earth"—that's a formulation that seems by
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law to appear in every single piece of writing about Antarctica (the most memorable
example: a book coauthored by Leonardo DiCaprio and Mikhail Gorbachev).
No one had even laid eyes on the place until 1820. No one wintered over for a full year until
1898.
Why was I there?
With my thoughts jangled and my inner clock going haywire since the midnight sun
rendered night into day, I realized I had no answer to that basic question. No answer at all.
I was twenty-nine years old. With two other team members, Roger Mear and Gareth Wood, I
had just spent four weeks walking— trudging, struggling, sledging all our supplies
ourselves—across the Ross Ice Shelf. We were ants on an ice cube the size of France.
Our ultimate goal, that of reaching the South Pole, now appeared a vain hope. By our
calculations we were fifty-eight days away from 90 degrees south. Our food supply—
biscuits, sausage, soup dosed with vegetable oil for added calories—was good for another
fifty-five days.
We were already starving. Since we hauled our own provisions for the journey, we had
calculated our supply down to the gram: 5,200 calories per day per man. It was not
enough. As we labored over the ice cube, our bodies were eating themselves. My weight
plummeted: the "South Polar diet," we called it.
Controlled lab research has demonstrated not only physiological but also psychological
effects of semi-starvation: a tendency on the part of the hungry toward the so-called
"neurotic triad"—hypochondria, depression, and hysteria. The triad hit me hard. I imagined
symptoms, felt listless and low, and experienced periodic spikes of panic over our situation.
We gave off the characteristic ketone odor of the starving vertebrate. I could smell it on
myself as I wandered a short distance from the camp, late on that bright-as-day evening on
the barrier.
South of us, barring our way to the pole, towered the twelve- thousand-foot peaks of the
Queen Alexandra mountains. The range braced the mighty Beardmore Glacier, over a
hundred miles long, the second-largest glacier in the world. To get to the pole, we would
have to climb the Beardmore's immense "ladders of smashed glass," as it was described by
Ernest Shackleton, the man who discovered it.
In the gross emptiness of the ice shelf, our camp appeared puny and insignificant, a tent
with three ice sledges dumped over next to it. Robert F. Scott called this place, where he
was nailed by a ten-day blizzard, "the Slough of Despond." "Miserable, utterly miserable,"
he wrote in his journal. "Slough" refers to an allegorical place of despair in The Pilgrim's
Progress. The name joins other colorful waypoints on the path to the pole, such as
Shambles Camp, Devil's Ballroom, and Butcher's Shop.
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Our expedition had broken down. Harsh conditions, personality clashes, and, in my case,
devastating self-doubt left us marooned in the most inhospitable environment on the
planet. I knew by now that Roger Mear and Gareth Wood, my expedition mates, were hardly
speaking to each other. The only thing they seemed to agree on was that they didn't much
like me.
A half decade of planning, raising funds, and untangling problems of supply and transport
had come down to this—three squabbling humans just a couple of arguments away from
freezing to death. There was no hope of rescue. We had no radios. We were unaware of any
human presence within four hundred miles of us. At that moment I was absolutely,
positively convinced that my life had ended. More distressing still—if that's possible—my
dream had ended.
I had scratched and clawed my way to this point. I had buttonholed famous mentors and
explorer-scions such as Sir Peter Scott, Lord Edward Shackleton, Sir Vivian Fuchs, Lord
Hunt, the Royal Geographic Society, and Jacques Cousteau. I had borrowed enormous
sums on the basis of no more than my smile (my smile was in debt to the tune of $1.2
million). Then I slogged on ice-numbed feet to this forlorn point in front of the Beardmore,
all in an effort to honor Scott and Shackleton, my boyhood heroes, by walking to the South
Pole.
Why? For what purpose? To fail? To die?
Roger Mear was one of the world's foremost mountaineers. Gareth Wood, also an
accomplished mountaineer, was a meticulous organizer and logistics whiz. What was I? I
was a novice. I wasn't a mountaineer or even an outdoorsman. And I was a foolhardy
novice. I had mounted an expedition to the South Pole without ever having really been
camping before.
Standing out there in the frozen nowhere, we somehow had to find within ourselves the
skills to sort out our difficulties and make the dream real again. We had to trek the
remaining five hundred miles to our goal—tantamount to walking from the east coast of
America to the Mississippi River, but on fissured, hillocky, dangerous ice.
We followed in the footsteps of Scott and his polar party. That meant we were following in
the footsteps of death, since the whole party died on their return from the pole. On our trek
we had already passed the spot where Scott himself and two of his mates perished, and the
place where Captain Lawrence "Titus" Oates walked out into a blizzard in an act of selfsacrifice. Up ahead, at the foot of the Beardmore, was the death site of Taff Evans, the
strongest of the group of five, and paradoxically the first to go.
Antarctica itself had it in mind to murder us. Antarctica the inhuman, Antarctica the
hostile, Antarctica that cares not a whit whether humans live or die but obviously prefers
them dead.
If we had dared to inhale an uncovered breath in some of the insane temperatures we
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encountered during the previous winter, our teeth could have possibly cracked and
exploded like so many tiny artillery shells. In the depths of the sunless months, at a
temperature of 280 degrees F, toss a pan of boiling water into the air, and it freezes with an
odd crinkling sound before it hits the ground.
Bitter, lethally cold in winter. The lowest temperature recorded in Antarctica (2128.6
degrees F at Vostok in 1983) was 39 degrees colder than the lowest recorded temperature
on any other continent.
The place had its warmer and fuzzier side, too. It's the only continent that has never hosted
a shooting war. Antarctica has no verified homicides, no prisons, beyond petty theft no
crime at all—an absence that, as far as I was concerned, merely rendered it all the more
strange and inhuman.
It was relatively warm during our summer trek—we would hit a high one day of almost 40
degrees F—but still utterly alien to human life. Journeying to the continent was the closest
anyone could get to leaving earth without actually resorting to space travel. Great beauty
alternated with sheer terror. False suns hung in the sky, and false moons, too.
I had stared at only ice and snow for so long that I hallucinated shapes in the landscape
wherever I looked: a Sioux chief in full feather headdress, the profile of Queen Victoria. In
Antarctica, I often got the sensation that I was gazing at the most beautiful person on
earth, right at the moment when the mask was pulled off to reveal a frightening monster.
I knew what kind of monster. This was the face of God. Not a kindly, patriarchal graybeard,
either, but Spinoza's god, the cold, abstract, impersonal force of nature—not He but It, not
Who but That, an ur-god churning out magic tricks, turning midnight into day or lighting
up the heavens with the multicolored streamers of the aurora.
So I tried to make a deal. I begged. Isn't that one of the stages of the human experience of
death? You deny, you rage, you weep, you try to bargain.
"Just don't kill us," I whispered. The winds that poured off the Beardmore took my words
and whipped them instantly away. It was as though I was pleading with the whole
continent. "Just don't kill us," I prayed to the monster. "Just don't kill us, and I promise I
will somehow do whatever I can do to protect you."
Excerpted from Antarctica 2041 by Robert Swan with Gil Reavill Copyright © 2009 by Robert Swan. Excerpted by
permission of Broadway, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced
or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Editor’s Note: Do these issues of the newsletter add anything useful to your professional life?
I would really appreciate notes from readers. Good, bad or indifferent!
Dick Koral
[email protected]
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