Tales of the Incredible Hoke Robertson
I had a little interesting experience recently...
The year was 1962 and I was spending the winter at the US Antarctic Program station of Amundsen-Scott at the South Pole. I was called in after their ground penetrating radar testing had produced some odd data. Given that I had just finished my thesis entitled The Peculiarities of Electromagnetic Radiation Reflecting Off Water and Ice they thought I might be able to help interpret the data.
After landing at the McMurdo Station from the fight from Christ Church, New Zealand aboard the US Navy P3 Orion, we took the hop to Amundsen-Scott Station and then got settled in. During the helo flight, I noticed the pilot was having problems with his radio and so I took it apart and replaced the vacuum tube contacts with the wrapper off the Beamon’s gum I was chewing. It worked like a charm and the pilot gave me one of those “who the heck is this guy” kinda looks.
With hardly any welcome or time to rest, the Colonel in charge hustled me into the small conference room full of bearded scientists and military men who constituted the small core of personnel wintering over at the station.
The data was very odd to say the least. Some of it indicated a significant gap between the ice sheet and the underlying ground while other was just plain unintelligible to the normal person. Based on my recent research, I concluded the data suggested a significantly warm area at the ice sheet/ground interface. Recalling my college geology, I suggested that the area was close to a very old tectonic plate division which existed at the time Gondwanaland separated from Laurasia when Pangea, the super continent broke apart. I speculated that such an old fault might be associated with a “hot spot” where the earth’s mantle had access to the surface, like the one that created Hawaii or underlies the Nukus caldera and geysers of Uzbekistan, just south of the Aral Sea.
If so, they there could be hot springs on the “surface” of the Antarctic landscape which would explain the temperature anomalies of the readings and perhaps the gap between the ice sheet and the land.
The scientists were positively giddy at this theory and eager to somehow investigate and resolve the mystery. Drilling in this harsh environment, especially to that depth was of course impossible. However another option presented itself to me. After the nuclear bomb surface testing of the ‘40’s and ‘50’s, some of the radioactive materials left over from the bombs had been gathered up for disposal. At the time, the dangers of this material were not generally understood and one short-lived Army program had dumped some of the lethal stuff out of the back of a C-130 onto the ice sheet as it was considered the most remote and “safest” region of the world. The Army Air Corps at the time being what it was missed the target and most of it fell on Mount Fridtjof Nansen here in the Antarctic and not too far from our base.
If we could gather this material and keep it together, the heat from the radioactive decay would be sufficient and of sufficiently long duration (few hundred years given the half-life) to melt through the ice all the way to the land surface; at this point just over 2 and a half miles down. Sort of like a small but helpful “China Syndrome.” I suggested that we could easily construct a hot air balloon to go up and down this melted shaft and explore the area to see if my theory was correct. The Colonel gave me one of those “I was thinking that very same thing” kinda false looks and everyone was excited and supported the plan.
To avoid any health risks, we asked the neighboring Norwegian contingent if they would gather the radioactive material for us. As everyone knows, since Norway is so much closer to the sun than is North America, the population has a built up tolerance to radioactivity. Still, the always skeptical Norge were very hesitant and their leader looked at me like his Viking ancestor listening to a Saxon peasant pleading for mercy. Eventually a deal was struck when we agreed to turn over our complete supply of Frosted Flakes. That tasty breakfast treat is nearly unobtainable in Norway and much desired.
Off the Norwegians went on their dog sleds, Geiger counters in hand like, as it turned out later, cattle trotting into the abattoir. While they sought the nasty stuff, we gathered up the materials we would need. Luckily the base had an unused spool of titanium/graphite cabling. Its presence here was another testament to the military’s narrow, bureaucratic focus. The precious material had been misrouted by the Quartermaster Corps and instead of arriving at Lockheed to be used in the production of SR-71 planes, it had ended up here at the end of the world. Without the proper forms, it could not be returned and so here it stayed.
We used the titanium/graphite cabling to make a “mesh bag” to hold the radioactive materials as its resistance to heat is well known. When the Norwegians returned, we had them put the materials in the bag and place it on the spot we thought would be directly above the warm anomaly in about 50 days, given that the ice sheet is slowly moving. Once all the radioactive materials were put in contact, the heat they generated fed upon itself and the temperature of the bag would rise by about 2.78% every 24 hours. Based on my calculations, I figured it would take about 47 days for the ever-increasing heat of the materials to melt their way down to ground level.
We watched the progress everyday as the unhealthy horde burned its way deeper and deeper. As I anticipated, the heat created steam out of the ice. As the huge steam clouds rose to the surface the extreme temperatures quickly froze them resulting in what are known as “ice puffs” which are balls of incredibly light, re-frozen water. Many of you know that Icelandic children “create” these ice-puffs near their thermal geysers and play with them during their long, cold winters. This childhood game is the forerunner of today’s beach volleyball, though with more appropriate clothing. Here however, these balls simply piled up higher and higher into one huge mass. As the radioactive material got deeper and deeper, the soft glow from its heat slowly faded into the abyss at just the rate I had predicted.
While monitoring the decent of the decaying debris, we hurried to construct the balloon which would take us down where few would dare to go. We “borrowed” a large tarp that provided the walls for the Japanese Station hot tub in order to make the balloon. For glue to hold the seams we needed look no further than our own trash pile with the thousands of empty Spam cans. The chemicals in and preserving Spam could not freeze, but did become extremely sticky at low temperatures like those here at the South Pole which by the way goes a long way to explain the prevalent gastro-intestinal problems at the station. Thus we had more than enough glue to construct our balloon.
For the basket, we removed the cab structure from the Norwegians Sno-Cat, or Fllorin-Kooty in Norse. After they had retrieved the old nuclear materials, we had not seen much of them around. With some ropes and cables we had our balloon. To add hot air, we decided to simply use what Mother Nature provided in such a rich supply. As everyone knows, a small electrical charge in water will cause the water to separate into hydrogen and oxygen, each of which will burn quite nicely. By lightly pressing a small wheel against the walls of the ice shaft during our decent we could generate an electrical impulse sufficient enough to separate water molecules into their constituent components which we could in turn burn to fill the balloon with hot air. As there would be an inexhaustible supply of water vapor in the ice shaft, we had everything we needed. By the way, since burning the oxygen and hydrogen created water as a byproduct, the system was actually a perpetual motion machine; one of the very few instances of that phenomena in physics.
When my calculations indicated the radioactive materials were nearing the surface of the continent, I cautioned everyone to stay away from the ice hole. At the predicted moment we heard a loud “boom” and 90 seconds later a huge rush of wind and ice chards shot out of the hole. As I had anticipated, the years of melting ice had created a significant pressure differential. That portion of the melting ice near the ground surface which went to vapor would naturally expand creating a high pressure zone which would be seeking anyway to equalize with lower pressure areas. For some strange reason the long gust from deep below left a strong odor something like Jasmine laced with worm poop.
We loaded up the balloon and four of us climbed in and began our decent. With me were two scientists, Ragnar Lodbrok from Sweden and William “Peepers” McGillacuddy from Wichita, Kansas. The nickname “Peepers” was a result of him having the thickest eyeglasses one had ever seen. The fourth crewman was Col. B.A. Broadsword, the commander of the outpost and a pretty darn good scientist in his own right. Everything went smoothly at first and we were amazed and in awe as we passed not just down in altitude but also back in time as the layers of ice were a record of the last 34 million years on Earth. At one point we stopped to examine what seemed to be the remains of some birdlike creature which must have been blown far of course and deposited here in the middle of nowhere. Since we had neither the time nor equipment to carefully remove the rare find, I quickly sketched as much detail as I could for later review.
If you thought it was dark at the South Pole during the winter, you should see how you could see nothing a mile deep under the ice cap! We had however anticipated this problem. The ice at this depth was under such tremendous pressure from the billions of tons of overlying layers that it naturally was always seeking a way to release some of that energy. With this narrow opening, some of that energy was able to be discharged, in this case in the form of visible light. Thus, the deeper we went the brighter the blue glow from the surrounding ice. This is the same principle that makes lava from deep in the earth bright yellow-orange when it reaches the surface.
We regulated our descent to avoid getting decompression sickness, or “the bends” but were all a bit queasy when we finally made it to the bottom after about 36 hours. The bad news was that when we “landed” our balloon finally gave out. The constant warm temperature from the hot air had affected our Spam adhesive and had returned the spam residue to the nearly edible state it had originally been in rather than the sticky glue we needed. The good news was what we found. It was something right out of science fiction! Although in later years oceanographers and biologists would discover complete ecosystems at the bottom of the oceans based on heat vents and not the Sun, we were the first to actually see such an environment!
Here, just like in the later-to-be-discovered deep ocean heat vents, bacteria were the foundation of the food chain. Rather than the tube worms, crabs and shrimp of the deep sea ocean vents, here the bacteria was harvested by large numbers of small but plump insects that appeared to be ancient ancestors to modern day wasps and dragon flies. These insects were in turn being harvested by some small furry, lizard-like animals which went about on their hind legs. We quickly concluded we were in the middle of a perfectly preserved slice of Earth history somewhere between the Cretaceous and Tertiary Periods.
Luckily the radioactive “bag” of materials had landed on one of the guessed at thermal geysers and was apparently making its way towards the center of the Earth, thus removing any danger to us or this newly discovered ecosystem.
We began to explore this fantastic environment. At each turn something new presented itself. The first thing we noticed was that the ground was littered with various crystals and gems. Without a jewelers loop, I could not tell if they were worthless or of fantastic wealth so we all picked up some for later examination. One curiosity was a number of small unidentifiable creatures that looked like soap bubbles floating around uncontrollably. I surmised that once we had let the pressure of the area escape, these small creatures had expanded so much they actually became inflated. It’s the same principle as when you bring the deep sea vampire octopus to the surface and it expands to 300 feet across and floats away on the wind. This by the way is the real explanation for the famous Roswell UFO incident.
Another odd observation was that the wasp- and dragonfly-like insects had a strong preference for biting Swedes, which of course made life very difficult for Ragnar but made the rest of us quite comfortable during our stay. At some point we heard a deep rumble in the distance, first assuming that it must be the sound of the ice cap slowly moving or perhaps some tectonic activity associated with the vents. However we quickly noticed that the sound resulted in all of the animal life disappearing. This was quite disconcerting to say the least.
After another deep rumble we espied in the distant blue haze something moving. The closer it got the more it resembled something we did not want to get to know. It appeared to be some sort of huge worm-like thing that had numerous tentacles with which it slowly pulled itself forward. To give you a better mental picture of the beast, picture the Elder God Cthulhu after a long night of carousing. It movements were erratic and uneven and I surmised it too was suffering from the effects of the rapid pressure decrease caused by our radioactive “drilling.”We could see that after it passed over a vent it left nothing behind, seemingly consuming everything over which it crawled. We concluded of course we were in a bind. The Colonel gave me one of those “this was your stupid idea” kinda looks, but Ragnar grinned from ear to ear at the excitement.
Not knowing the extent of this sub-ice sheet area we decided we shouldn’t try to out run the leviathan. I had to think quickly as my co-explorers were starting to get nervous.
Looking at my watch and doing some quick calculations, I realized that in about 10 minutes the sun would be perfectly aligned with the slanting hole we had melted from the surface. A plan quickly came together in my mind. We rushed to our now-balloonless “basket” and tied ourselves to it using some of our rope. At my direction, Ragnar and the Colonel then lifted it back into the shaft down which we had come. I quickly explained to Peepers my plan after reminding him of my recent paper on the Potential Propagation of Coherent Light for which he had been a peer reviewer. We found a red crystal on the ground and used his very thick eyeglass lens to focus the sun’s rays into the end of the crystal. Sure enough as I had theorized we created a small beam of coherent light, which would later be known as a “laser.” With the creature very close now we concentrated the laser on the area just below his gapping maw and waited. As we were about to meet our Maker the laser did its job and the over-inflated monster exploded as the gasses in it ignited from the focused beam!
The explosion flung the basket back up the shaft with the power of a hurricane and we were swept along with it shooting all the way back to the surface. The ride up was just a blur and eventually we popped out and were flung into the air. As fate would have it we landed on the large pile of ice-puffs which cushioned our fall. Everyone was a bit shaken but with no serious injuries.
When we reported our experience all hell broke loose in the government. Oddly, the Army was mostly upset that we had lost such a large amount of titanium/graphite and seemed ambivalent about our zoological and ecosystem finds. We later heard that some Charitable Foundation drew up plans to revisit the site with the hopes of creating a small scientific colony there. A few decades later I had the opportunity to follow up on this rumor, but that is another story altogether.
Unfortunately, the entire Norwegian contingent had to be medivac'd out due to severe radiation sickness. Our small team felt a little guilty about the poor Norwegians’ condition, but thankfully the gems we’d found turned out to be quit valuable and were thus more than enough to pay for their medical treatments. I did keep a few of the gems for myself and loaned one to Theodore H. Maiman at the Hughes Research Laboratories. Using my thesis and this gem he created the world’s second laser. HOKE ROBERTSON
