Ice and the Sky Page #5

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when we wanted a little heat.

Every day wore us down

a little more.

Whenever we set to cooking...

...the condensation drenched

our clothes and sleeping bags.

When we tired of being dirty,

we made a little water...

...for a perfunctory wash.

Any respite was an opportunity

to take the air.

Minus 25C with no wind

felt like a heatwave.

I was fascinated by our capacity

to bear the unbearable.

The crevasse detectors

were totally ineffective.

Even hand probes were unreliable.

We crawled along.

To hang in one more day,

to venture just a little farther...

...describe, understand,

describe, understand...

The quest for knowledge

kept us sane.

We had been gone 100 days.

We frantically sought a way

through the edges...

...of the trans-Antarctic

mountains barring our way to...

...the sea where

a ship awaited us.

Where we were,

the map said only "uncharted zone".

I and three companions scouted from

atop one of the surrounding peaks.

The climb did me good.

Like kids, we gave names

to the mountains.

Thus on maps of the Antarctic

there now appears a Mount Lorius.

Geographers, it seems,

took our game seriously.

Is it not the privilege

of explorers?

We went no further.

Both men and materials

were in such a state...

...that the US authorities

decided to repatriate us.

There was only one flight.

I forwent all my

personal possessions...

...in favor of my precious samples.

Paris, five months later.

The snows of Victoria Land speak.

The spectrometer plunges me

for the first time...

...into the invisible

world of atoms.

Snow contains two different

forms of hydrogen...

...heavy and light.

Snow that falls during

cold weather...

...contains a lot of

light hydrogen.

During warmer spells,

mostly the heavier form is found.

I discover that the ratio

between the two...

...precisely follows

temperature graduation.

The isotopic thermometer was born:

an amazing discovery.

Thereafter a spectrometric

analysis of a sample...

...of snow or ice would be enough

to obtain a precise reading...

...of the ambient temperature

the day the snow fell...

...even if it occurred

thousands of years ago.

The doors of past

weather were open.

I now had to find the deepest

and thus the oldest ice.

I wanted to know what

temperature it was formed at...

...in my quest to describe

how climate has evolved.

In 1962,

age 30 and finishing my thesis...

...I joined a small research team.

Ice is like a book...

...in which each new snowfall

adds another page to the story.

The earliest pages...

...are the deepest...

...and therefore the

most inaccessible.

Plunging into history

became an obsession.

I was determined to find a way

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