Letters from the Ice

Day four. Dear Jonah, I promised to write properly, so here is the first letter. The satellite link at the station only allows short messages, which means these letters will probably reach you all at once, long after the events they describe. You once asked me what I actually do all day, and since my answer at the airport was vague, let me try again.

Imagine a white plain so flat that the horizon looks as if it had been drawn with a ruler, under a sun that never sets but circles the sky. Eight of us live in a cluster of tents around one heated hut, and beneath our boots lies ice so thick that our drill will not reach the bottom this season. Snow falls here all year and almost none of it melts; instead, it is buried by the snow that follows and slowly pressed into ice, trapping tiny bubbles of air as it goes. That ice is our library, and if we drill carefully, we can read the past layer by layer. Give my love to Sara, and tell her the baby must wait until I am home at the end of the summer.

Week three. Dear Jonah, the drill has settled into a rhythm, and so have we. The ice comes up in long cylinders, which we measure, photograph and pack into insulated boxes before the sun can do them any harm. On Monday we pulled up a section containing a thin gray band of volcanic ash from an eruption nobody ever recorded, and we passed it from hand to hand in silence, as if it were a letter from a stranger. That evening, someone dropped a scrap of ice too damaged to study into a glass of water, and we listened to it crackle as the ancient air escaped. I breathed in, of course; it seemed rude not to.

Then, on Thursday, the weather closed in. For two days the wind blew so hard that sky and ground were impossible to tell apart, and we went outside only in pairs, clipped to a rope between the tents. Stuck in the hut, I lost every card game and kept thinking about how small we are out here and how little the ice cares whether we come or go, which I found oddly comforting.

Week six. Dear Jonah, your message reached us this morning, all eleven words of it: "Ada arrived early. Both fine. Tiny, loud, perfect. Come home safe." I read it outside the hut in my socks, which I do not recommend, and then aloud to everyone at breakfast. So I am an aunt, and I am celebrating by holding ice instead of my niece, which seems a poor exchange. Tell Sara she is a hero.

There is other news, though it is harder to put into words. Near the surface we keep finding thin, glassy layers where the snow melted in the summer sun and froze again. In the older ice deeper down, such layers are rare, but up here they are becoming familiar. One season of measurements proves nothing on its own, and I have been trained to distrust anything that feels too much like a story. Still, it is unsettling to read the record of the past and find that the most recent pages are the ones that worry me most.

The last night. Dear Jonah, the plane comes tomorrow if the weather holds, and our boxes are packed and sealed, ready to be flown, still frozen, to a laboratory where the ice will be studied for years. This evening the sun slipped below the horizon for the first time since we arrived, only for a few minutes, and the whole camp came out to watch as if none of us had ever seen a sunset.

Now it is snowing, softly, for the first time in weeks. Every flake that settles here will eventually be buried and pressed into ice, and somewhere in that ice there will be a trace of this summer, the summer Ada was born. Perhaps, long after we are all gone, someone will drill down to it and hold it up to the light, the way we held up the ash. I hope what they read there makes them think kindly of us. Kiss her for me. I am coming home. Your sister, Elin.