TROLL RESEARCH STATION, Antarctica
On the 27th day of their trek, a dozen "black specks" of humanity crawling across Antarctica's vast white silence, Lou Albershardt heard a sound she'd never heard in two decades on the ice.
The cable powering her drill, a $100,000 piece of equipment cutting through ice 302 feet (92 meters) below, snapped without warning and vanished down the dark, frigid borehole.
"I felt my whole body drop," she said. "I couldn't believe it."
Her U.S.-Norwegian scientific team was 500 miles (800 kilometers) from the South Pole, their starting point, and 900 miles (1,500 kilometers) short of Troll Research Station, their destination. They sat atop the 2-mile-high (3-kilometer-high) East Antarctica plateau, amid "diamond dust" clouds of ice crystals, with temperatures dropping below zero Fahrenheit (minus 20 Celsius), the wind biting, and their most vital research tool, their deep-coring drill, lost – locked in an instant icy grip far beneath their feet.
The expedition faced a wrenching failure. Albershardt knew no one ever retrieved a drill from so deep a hole. "No way."
It was Jan. 18 and the Norwegian-American Scientific Traverse of East Antarctica was already one of the longest research treks ever undertaken in one of the least-explored parts of the southernmost continent.
An ambitious effort to probe the planet's oldest, thickest ice sheet for clues to past climate, it was the first major scientific expedition across the Queen Maud Land region in a half-century. Its goal was to help science better understand how Antarctica and future climate might interact in an age of global warming, how much ice might melt into the sea, how high the oceans might rise.
The first leg was a two-month journey to the South Pole in the Southern Hemisphere summer of 2007-2008 from this Norwegian outpost in East Antarctica, 150 miles (235 kilometers) inland from the southern ocean.
This summer, the 12-member crew, half veterans of the first leg, left the U.S. South Pole station on Dec. 23 for the return trip, following a more westerly route back north, creeping along, in their cherry-red snow tractors, at the speed of a lawn mower.
The new, Swedish-built tracked vehicles may have been slow, but the transport was "fabulous," said expedition leader Tom Neumann.
A century after explorers first reached the South Pole on skis and dogsleds, these 21st-century scientists were crossing the forbidding icescape while working at laptops, linking to the Internet via satellite, eating three daily meals in one big, boxy, heated module, and sleeping in stacked bunks in another, all pulled along atop outsized skis.
"The whole concept was that we spend as little time as necessary on surviving and as much time as possible to do science," said Neumann, 35, a NASA geophysicist.
He had the team to do it – five Ph.D.s in glaciology and related fields, including Ted Scambos, 53, a leading U.S. ice expert and member of nine previous Antarctic expeditions.
Their dedication, spending four months away from home, was self-evident. Dartmouth College's Zoe Courville, 31, Eskimo-like in her knowledge of ice, had been married for less than a month when she packed up and headed south last October.