“My Imagination Felt Powerless Before Such Immensity”

National Geographic has published a series of articles (December 27, 2007; February 16, 2007; April 19, 2006; November 1, 2004; November 15, 2004), covering a subject I’ve been trying to wrap my head around for months. John Priscu, the lead scientist I’ll work with in the Dry Valleys, is an expert on life in extreme environments and is quoted in the articles.

Here are the basics: Antarctica was once part of Gondwana, Earth’s southern supercontinent. When the other continents shoved off, a continuous ocean current surrounded Antarctica, cooled it way down, and formed glaciers. Today Antarctica (one and a half times the size of the U.S.) is covered by one massive ice sheet. In places this sheet of ice is over two and a half miles thick. Since the late 1990’s scientists have scanned through the ice sheet with radio waves. To everyone’s surprise, the scans revealed hundreds of bodies of water–rivers and lakes kept in a liquid state by geothermal heat trapped beneath the blanket of ice.

Rivers like the Amazon, lakes like Ontario (Lake Vostok is 140 miles long and 30 miles wide), and tidal basins like the Mississippi, ebb and flow beneath two miles of ice, isolated from the atmosphere of Earth for millions of years. Scientists have determined life exists in these completely dark subglacial wetlands. Further, these extreme watery environments are potentially analogous to Jupiter’s moon Europa, which seems to consist of an ice-covered liquid ocean, and is a leading candidate for extraterrestrial life in our solar system.

I was reading these articles and basically pondering these things when I remembered Professor Lidenbrock, his nephew, and Hans the Icelandic guide, who descended into Iceland’s Sneffels volcano 140 years ago and actually confronted such a scene in person . . .

But at last I heard the sound of footsteps in the depths of the abyss. Hans was coming up again. A flickering light began to glimmer on the walls, and then came round the nearest bend in the corridor. Hans appeared.
He went up to my uncle, put his hand on his shoulder, and gently woke him. My uncle got up.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘Vatten,’ replied the guide.
It would seem that intense suffering can turn anybody into a polygot. I did not know a single word of Danish, yet I instinctively understood the word our guide had uttered.
‘Water! Water!’ I cried, clapping my hands and gesticulating like a madman.
‘Water!’ repeated my uncle. ‘Hvar?’ he asked the Icelander.
‘Nedat,’ replied Hans.
Where? Down below! I could understand everything. …

A vast sheet of water, the beginning of a lake or an ocean, stretched away out of sight. …It was a real sea, with the capricious contour of earthly shores, but utterly deserted and horribly wild in appearance. …The general effect was supremely melancholy and sad. Instead of a sky shining with stars, I could feel above those clouds there was a granite vault which oppressed me with its weight … As for its height, it must have been miles. The eye could not see where this ceiling rested on its granite buttresses, but there were clouds hanging in the atmosphere, at a height which I put at 12,000 feet, a greater altitude than that of the terrestrial clouds, and doubtless due to the great density of air.
Obviously the word ‘cavern’ cannot give any idea of the vast dimensions of this huge space. But human words are totally inadequate for anyone who ventures into the abysses of the earth. …
…My imagination felt powerless before such immensity. I gazed at these marvels in silence, unable to find words to express my feelings. I felt as if I were on some distant planet, Uranus or Neptune, witnessing phenomena quite foreign to my ‘terrestrial’ nature. New words were required for such new sensations, and my imagination failed to supply them. I gazed, I thought, I admired, with a stupefaction not unmixed with fear.

Verne, Jules. Journey to the Center of the Earth. Great Britain: Penguin Popular Classics, 1994. (First published 1864)