Scientific progress didn’t go ‘boink’ this time
*Crunch*
*Crunch*
*Thud*
“There we go. Finally something solid for once. Hey, Brit! Get over here!”
Brit, my grad student, had the body of an angel. And by ‘angel’ I mean like a biblical angel, all weird and incomprehensible. She was not a looker. Her appearance is also not germane to the story. So let’s move on.
Brit came walking over. We’d been working on this study for five years now, and already had enough data for four lifetimes’ worth of theses.
But with the ice having melted this much over the past century, we were closer than ever to discovering what had really happened to the dinosaurs.
The meteorite theory had merit, but there will still too many holes in it. Meanwhile, the competing idea that every volcano on Earth had erupted over the span of 10,000 years, spewing rocks and ash into the sky and bringing about a prolonged ice age, also was problematic.
We knew there had to be a different reason. We couldn’t see the dinosaurs’ extinction as having a natural or extraterrestrial cause. It didn’t add up. There had to be an artificial reason why a planet would suddenly—in the cosmic timescale—become devoid of its largest lifeforms.
“What is it, Todd?” Brit asked. “Did you find it?”
Had I found it? In my excitement, I realized I didn’t know what I had found, only that I had found something that wasn’t ice.
“I don’t know, but I hit something that didn’t crack under my shovel,” I replied. “At this point, anything is better than nothing.”
A wry smile crossed Brit’s face. She knew I was right. We hadn’t hit on the final solution yet, nor did we know if we ever would. As long as we kept at it, however, we’d find it. Or die trying.
I got her to grab a shovel and start digging around the thing I hit. It was black, and as we dug around it we were amazed at how large it was. My first thought was it was a briefcase, but as we went, it appeared like the ‘briefcase’ was the top of a larger mound.
“What in the crap is this?” Brit exclaimed. “It keeps going on and on. How thick is the ice sheet here?”
“Seismic readings indicate the ice is two, maybe three kilometres thick. Enough to hide a lot of things,” I replied.
“We’ve been at this for two hours and this thing keeps getting bigger and bigger. It’s like a mound or a dome,” Brit said. “Could there be a whole building hidden under the ice?”
I was starting to think so. Surely a whole building couldn’t have been buried under snow and ice. This ice is tens of thousands of years old – no civilization was advanced enough to build something like this that long ago, right? Are we about to score the biggest anthropological and paleontological finds ever?
We kept digging. An hour later, we’d uncovered a notch on one side and decided to focus our efforts in that spot. Maybe we’d find a door after not much more work.
That more work would have to come the next day. It was getting dark and we needed to get back inside to weather the overnight lows. Climate change might have seriously sped up Antarctica’s melting, but it still got desperately cold overnight.
The next morning we awoke and got back at it.
“How long do you think it’s going to take to uncover something more than this dome, Todd? I get that scientific progress can be slow and unglamorous, but a payoff would be nice sooner or later.”
I couldn’t disagree with Brit. I was hoping we’d see something more exciting than a dome, but we couldn’t call the dome ‘nothing,’ either. A buried building, and possibly a city, under the Antarctic ice? It’s the scientific coup of the millennia.
Knowing the only way to get an answer was to break out the elbow grease, Brit and I got back at it. Focusing our attention on the notch, the going was slow but the snow and ice were not unyielding.
By noon, we’d managed to uncover the top of what appeared to be a doorframe. By 2 p.m., we’d cleared another two feet of ice and snow and started to see what actually appeared to be a door.
“This is it!” I shouted. “It’s a door! We’ve finally found a way in!”
Brit, usually a chatterbox, was stunningly silent.
Seeing the entrance re-energized us. We redoubled our efforts and inside an hour we’d managed to uncover enough of the door that we could fit through it. But more importantly, we’d found a handle.
“Do you think it’s locked?” Brit said. “It still looks so pristine, it could be. Everything we’ve dug up as looked like it was just abandoned yesterday, ignoring it’s all buried in ice.”
“It’s weird,” I replied. “You’d expect to see some damage from all this snow and ice. But nothing. Hopefully the answers are inside.”
Despite being tired and cold, we were too excited to stop now.
“I’ll try the handle,” I said.
In the series of unexpected events over the past 24 hours, the door being unlocked wasn’t that high up. Still, I was surprised. It wasn’t just that it was unlocked – it’s that it was like it had just been oiled. It opened as smooth as a baby’s bottom.
I shimmied my way in and called for Brit to follow me. It was when she landed beside me we realized that in our haste we hadn’t brought flashlights. Not wanting to wait a second longer to explore, we agreed we’d look around where we’d landed as our eyes adjusted before getting out and preparing a proper examination for tomorrow.
As our eyes adjusted, however, we knew we couldn’t wait until tomorrow.
I bet you thought I was going to go all “She breasted boobily” on y’all when I described Brit as having the body of an angel. You thought it would all ‘alabaster skin’ this and ‘sashayed over towards me with her décolletage hanging out’ that. Nope.
You’ll also notice there is no resolution. This is a trademark of mine, I’ve discovered. That and the story got away from me and I needed to simply stop writing.
From YYZ to YEG 