03.25.2006

The Collapse of the Perito Moreno

It was pandemonium this month at the Perito Moreno glacier. The Perito Moreno is a giant mess of ice that flows out of the mountains in the southern Argentine province of Santa Cruz, near El Calafate, looking for trouble. In a world of sissy nature that requires protection, handholding, wilderness reserves, careful study and constant medical attention, the Perito Moreno glacier is a refreshing throwback. This glacier wants you dead. It wants to come out and crush you under billions of tons of ice, carve its name into your face, and maraud out into the plains of Patagonia until it reaches the sea. You don't have to go into the mountains looking for the Perito Moreno - it's coming out of the mountains to look for you. It wants to come over there and mess you up good.

Twelve times in the last century, the glacier has tried to take the fight to the Man by crossing the narrow strait that separates it from a series of wooden viewing platforms set up on a mountainside across the lake. And each time, after making it across, the glacier has had its bottom swept out from under it by rising water from the part of the lake dammed by the glacier's advance. This process, "La Ruptura", is spectacular but unpredictable. In some years, the collapse of the weaker bottom of the ice dam leaves behind a natural arch of ice above, which sheds pieces of itself for a few days until collapsing in a glorious Wagnerian finale. This had last happened in 2004, and in early March the waters had broken through the bottom of the dam, creating an ice arch again. A nation whose top news story had involved disputes about an Uruguayan paper mill suddenly found itself watching archival footage of very big ice chunks exploding into water. Anyone who could got in a car and drove straight down to Parque Nacional Los Glaciares.

You may be shocked to learn that Argentines take a rather nationalistic pride in their glaciers. The Perito Moreno is certainly the proudest achievement of Argentine glaciology; they call it the eight wonder of the world here. Authorities will tell you that the Moreno is the only advancing glacier in South America, but this is not actually true: the Perito Moreno has spent most of the past century in a state of dynamic equilibrium, losing two meters of face a day and advancing just far enough to stay in place, with the occasional foray across the lake. A much more remote glacier on the Chilean side, meanwhile, the Pio XI, has turned in in a respectable two thousand meter advance over the last century. But Argentine maps of the Patagonian Ice Field treat Chile a lot like the MTA subway map treats New Jersey - by pretending it doesn't exist - and it is true that the Perito Moreno is unusual in holding its ground. It has scores to settle. It really, really wants to cross that lake.

From a distance, the Perito Moreno looks like a handsome, valley-sized meringue dusted with cocoa powder (crumbled rock). Up close, the ice looks uncannily like bluish marble, with veins of sediment running through it. The front face of the glacier has the crumbly texture of a highly magnified piece of fudge, except that each little flake and bump the size of a large house. There is a radioactive, chemical blue color to much of the ice that I had only seen before in popsicles and bottles of Windex, and had always assumed was an artifact of glacier photography (someone unscrupulous and on deadline in the National Geographic photo lab), but this turns out to be very real. Tiny air bubbles trapped in the ice scatter light and make shadowy parts of the glacier deep blue. Some of the ice is a sky-blue color all through; other areas are completely white. The ice pours down from the mountains in a long series of parallel stripes; and there is a vantage from where you can see most of the seventeen kilometers of the glacier, sloping down so steeply that the valley looks like it has been tipped forward. The glacier ends abruptly at a sheer blue face, as if cut with a cleaver. This is the part that tries to kill you.

A pair of ships plies the waters in the larger lake by the Perito Moreno, sailing back and forth along the glacier's north face with great views of the ice arch and calving front. Twelve dollars buys an hour-long ride about three hundred meters from the ice face, which seems a little far until a larger section calves off and the waves nearly make you spill your drink, a generous two-dollar glass of Old Smuggler served on fresh glacier ice. One of the many mysteries of glacier ice is how it can make Old Smuggler (a.k.a 'wisky nacional', one of the world's more challenging non-single-malts) actually taste good. The effect, however, is undeniable, particularly when you take the heavy-bottomed glass out on deck to sip while looking at the ice show.

From the water, the ice tunnel looks commodious and permanent, making me wonder for a moment if we might actually sail through it. Then a large section of the roof detaches and falls into the water, obliterating everything in a cloud of spray and noise. Small pieces of ejected ice describe elegant parabolas above the top of the glacier, causing residual booms when they hit the water minutes later. The tunnel is a death trap, but what a way to go.

The boat is a terrific way to see the glacier, but after an hour you are booted off and taken in a bus to the viewing area. This is a modest affair of wooden platforms and walkways in a low forest across from the glacier. It is designed to comfortably accomodate several dozen people at a time; the estimated head count on the day of my visit is over six thousand. No one wants to miss the finale. The platforms aren't sloped forward and there is nothing to stand on, so the only way to see anything to find a spot somewhere at the railing. The scene is everhwhere the same - backs of people's heads, families standing in mud, dogs barking, children crying, endless thermoses of hot water for maté and more and more vans and busses arriving with spectators every minute. You can try to stand in the second row to wait someone out, but no one will move, even after it rains for hours. Someone has inevitably hung up a "LAS MALVINAS SON ARGENTINAS" banner on the side of the hill, but this just seems to provoke the glacier further.

I have seen nothing like this in my life. The only glaciers I had encountered before were retreating (or "retiring", as the lovely translations here put it), and had all of the beauty of a mountain of plowed snow in a supermarket parking lot. Both Glacier National Park in Montana and the Glacier Martial in Ushuaia featured glaciers that looked like patches of dirty snow high up on a mountainside, which is exactly what they were. The Perito Moreno, on the other hand, was an handsome and active piece of ice that made me understand what the fuss was about. It was filled with energy and ambition and had no intention of retiring. It was also clearly getting frustrated with having to dam the same lake over and over again, rather than advancing further down the valley to crush the viewing stands and everyone in them.

The glacier had a marvelous grasp of human psychology. It knew exactly how to manipulate the crowd through intermittent reward. Many minutes would pass without anything happening; then, without warning, a piece ranging in size from a Volkswagen to an apartment building would slough off and fall into the water. The enormous size of the fragments made them appear to be falling in slow motion. A few seconds after one hit, there would be an enormous BOOM like that of a nearby thunderstorm, and tall waves would spread through the rapidly flowing meltwater, sloshing the Old Smuggler against the sides of your glass. Sometimes a chain reaction might take down an entire sector of the glacier's face, sending a cloud of cold mist towards us and causing complete chaos in the water and the viewing stands. "Vamo, vamo!" the crowd would yell, as everyone pressed forward and the wooden viewing platforms creaked ominously. At other times, the glacier would sit quietly for an hour or more, in a test of wills, taunting us.

A glacier forms when more snow falls on it than can melt in a given year. This implies the existence of a point (let us call it point A) where so much snow is falling that it can make up for the spectacular daily losses at the glacier's face (point B). There is also a third point, point C, where it is warm and dry and you can sit at an outdoor table drinking beer in the sun. However, the physics of glacier formation ensure that points A and B are very close together, and point C, if it exists at all, is very far away, most likely in El Calafate, eighty kilometers to the east. The same dip in the mountains that allows the Patagonian ice field to form also lets moist Pacific air through to the Argentine side, where it turns to fog and penetrating drizzle.

In the old days (twenty years or so ago), it was quite difficult to reach the Moreno glacier. The trip involved a long drive over dirt roads from distant places like Rio Gallegos or Punto Arenas. Now, however, there is a brand new airport in El Calafate with multiple daily connections to Buenos Aires, Ushuaia and Chile, so that tourists can fly in directly. It takes a certain amount of marketing deftness to advertise non-stop direct flights to a place whose main draw is its legendary inaccessibility, but Patagonian tourist bureaus are up to the challenge. "Wheelchair-accessible Everest" is my own mental shorthand for this process, and I don't really know what to do about it, nor whether I have any right to find it so dispiriting. Someday soon the roads in Santa Cruz, Chubut and Chilean Patagonia will all be paved, and I'm sure I will enjoy the smooth ride, bu something important will be gone. The people in El Calafaté probably see it all a different way; the glacier and airport have made the place a boom town.

The ice arch collapsed on Monday night, the day after my visit. It happened shortly before eleven o'clock under thick overcast, and no one was able to see it or film the collapse, although the tremendous noise it made could be heard twenty kilometers away. A camera boom been trained on the glacier around the clock, but there was no way, yet, to illuminate something so big in a place so remote.

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03.07.2006

Ruling Antarctica

On first coming to Argentina, I was amused to find that every map of the country included a little pie-slice of Antarctica. Whether it was the bus map, the television weather forecast, or the Aerolineas Argentinas in-flight magazine, no map of Argentina was complete without the two dots of the Falklands Islas Malvinas and a little inset in the corner showing a blank wedge of Antarctica, much in the way American maps will sometimes show Alaska. And the very large avenue at the foot of my local park was called Antártida Argentina. I figured something must be up.

It turns out that everybody wants a piece of Antarctica. If you picture the continent sliced through the pole like a pizza, Argentina, Chile and the United Kindgom are all fighting over the slice nearest the South American continent. Norway and New Zealand each claim a slice of their own. Australia extravagantly cuts itself a third of the continent, minus a tiny sliver for France. And a quarter of Antarctica goes unclaimed by anyone (the only part of the world with this status). The latest entrant in the fun is Brazil, which despite being on the equator and having no history of Antarctic exploration whatsoever has declared an area of interest in the continent, and promotes a complicated plan in which South American countries get partial shares in proportion to how much of their coastline faces the south pole. Guess who has the most frontage.

There is something about frozen wastelands and high latitudes that makes even meek nations go all loopy. Consider Denmark and Canada, two powers who are not normally known for saber-rattling, yet who have recently indulged in flagsmanship over a little piece of rock called Hans Island, north of Greenland. The battle began in 1984, when the Danish Minister for Greenland threw down the gauntlet by chartering a helicopter to the island and leaving a bottle of cognac in a cairn along with a note reading "Welcome to a Danish island". Subsequent Danish expeditionary forces visited the island to set up a flag, each time arriving to find it gone, although they came to believe this had more to do with with wind then Canadian perfidy. The Canadians retaliated by going in with a flag of their own, and deploying a secret weapon - the Canadian Minister of Defence, who visited the large rock in person. The Danish response was pure genius: they politely asked Canadian permission to send a warship to Hans Island. Since the Canadian Navy didn't actually have an ice-hardened warship that could reach Hans Island itself, it had to grant the Danes permission or risk looking impotent. The confrontation is now on hold until the Canadians can figure out a way to reach this integral part of their homeland and, in the memorable phrase, "assert Canadian sovereignty".

This display pales next to the stunts that have been pulled in Antarctica. In 1978, Argentina sent a military officer and his pregnant wife over so that the first child born in Antarctica would be an Argentine. They also sent a super-secret military expedition to the South Pole in the 1960's, to demonstrate their pole-reaching capability. A baffled American radar operator at the pole saw the emaciated soldiers arrive in their red outfits and assumed they were Russian; when they identified themselves, he brought them in for their first decent meal in weeks. In 1973, the entire Argentine cabinet met on Antarctic territory. Not to be outdone, Chile sent Augusto Pinochet down for a week-long tour of their southernmost province. More recently, they have set up a full-fledged village, the Villa Las Estrellas, complete with children, post office, and a bank.

All of this fuss might lead you to assume that there is something to be gained by asserting ownership in Antarctica. After all, the silliness between Canada and Denmark in the Arctic had serious geopolitics behind it. The Northwest Passage will soon beocme navigable as a result of global warming, and Canada wants to bolster its argument that the passage runs through Canadian territorial waters. There may also be oil lurking near Hans Island, giving both countries a further incentive to be stubborn.

None of this holds true for the Antarctic. Even if it became a tropical island paradise, the continent would remain one of the most inaccessible places on Earth, not particularly useful for shipping unless there were a truly enormous spike in trade between Australia and, say, Uruguay. And the only natural resources worth exploiting in Antarctica are the strictly old-school kind - seals, whales and bird poop - that saw their heyday in the late 19th century, back during the first rush of Antarctic exploration. Even assuming you found oil in massive quantities right off the Antarctic coast, it's not at all clear how it could be profitably exploited. Giant icebergs circle the continent, after all, and an average-sized iceberg will shear off an oil platform like a razor takes off a piece of stubble. No matter how you do it, it would cost less to extract hard-to-reach oil from existing fields than it would to exploit even the biggest virgin field in the Antarctic. What is going on now boils down to that most annoying and pedestrian of reasons, small-country nationalism.

We've been conditioned by National Geographic and the Discovery channel to speak of Antarctica in hushed superlatives and treat it as an awesome spectacle of God's Creation. But it is worth pointing out that Antarctica is an armpit. By any objective standard, the place is cold, sterile, windy, dry, and has no night life to speak of. The nearest land mass is remote and windy Tierra del Fuego, which nevertheless comes out looking like Las Vegas by comparison. The only people genuinely excited about Antarctica are climatologists, who inevitably go there just to make dire discoveries that bring everybody else down, and astronomers, who resent human settlement and the atmosphere and are overjoyed to find a place with very little of either. Exobiologists get very excited about Antarctica as a laboratory for what life might look like in more exotic environments, like Mars or the moons of Jupiter, but this just serves as a useful reminder that life on earth has decided to take a pass on Antarctica. In a world where entire species of ants specialize in X-treme environments like 130 degree Nubian sands, the largest land species to choose Antarctica is a midge. This is not prime real estate, no matter how nice that wedge looks on the map.

The reason you won't soon see Norwegian ice-tanks crushing the bones of New Zealand infantry under their spiked treads is the Antarctic Treaty System, a set of agreements that keeps things from getting out of hand on the Antarctic continent. It freezes all territorial claims to the continent (no one can resist making this pun) and prohibits new claims from being made. Everyone is allowed to do scientific research, no one is allowed to mine anything, and in the treaty's most inspired article, nothing anyone does can affect their existing claims to sovereignty. This means that the Chileans can build a giant research station next to an existing British one without forcing the Foreign Office to send a telegram of protest, let alone launch a task force from Southampton. The treaty has its origins in the Cold War, when the United States was predictably concerned about a Red Antarctica (the Russians have a defensible claim to discovering the continent) and the rest of the Antarctic claimants were concerned that they would have to go through the colossal bother of stationing soldiers there. After a successful experiment in coordinated scientific exploration during the International Geophysical Year (itself modelled on earlier International Polar Years), all parties decided it would be better to set the Antarctic aside, and the Antarctic treaty was duly signed in 1959. Since then it has been expanded numerous times.

Some of the claims to Antarctica are by now vestigial. The Norwegian slice dates to immediately before the Second World War, when Germans were intensively scouting the Antarctic coast (landing and air-dropping swastika all over what was to become New Swabia). The Norwegians thought they could pre-empt the Germans by claiming the territory for themselves, a problem the Germans solved by attacking Norway. The Australians inherited their claim from the United Kingdom, back in the heady days of Empire when the British would annex anything they could land a boat on, and have been down-playing it ever since in favor of multinational stewardship. The United Kingdom and France are notorious for collecting overseas dependencies to sustain their faded self-image, but even they have the good sense to leave the white triangle off their maps. The South Americans, on the other hand, have made ownership of Antarctica an issue of of national pride.

The Chilean desire for Antarctica is at least understandable. Antarctica offers Chile a vital natural resource it sorely lacks - width. But the Argentine preoccupation with the Antarctic is hard not to ridicule. Argentina already has a giant, unpopulated, cold wedge-shaped expanse of barren southerly nothingness, called Patagonia. There is no shortage of space there and it is comes conveniently ice-free and already attached to the rest of the country. The only reason for Argentina to cling to its Antarctic dreams is to sustain a certain delusion of grandeur, fed by rancor over the Falkland Islands war. Maps here often mark the South Atlantic Ocean as the Argentine Sea, after all. A presence in Antarctica is a key part of some nebulous notion of national destiny.

This stuff would be harmless if it weren't so distracting. New Zealand, after all, has a grand old time asserting ownership of the Ross ice shelf without hurting anyone. But Chile and Argentina are not New Zealand; operating vanity bases on an ice sheet wastes resources that could be put to much better use back home. It also undermines the very idea of nationhood these countries are so gung-ho about - there's nothing quite like long straight lines on a blank map to remind you that this business is arbitrary. It's like believing that everyone has to support a certain sports team: this barren archipelago belongs to the Orioles, this sweep of tundra goes to the Cubs. The fact that we can get so worked up about flags in ice (or the Cubs, for that matter) suggests that we are not going to be ridding ourselves of tribalism anytime soon.

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