Black Ice by Matt Dickinson Read Free Book Online Page B

million male fantasies had been fuelled by the single scene on the spaceship when she strips down to her underwear.
    If she knew what I’m thinking right now, Sean mused, giving himself an internal rap on the knuckles, I’d never get the job. Then he saw the half-smile in Lauren’s eyes as she looked at him appraisingly and thought: Or maybe I would.
    â€˜Tell me about the expedition,’ Sean said with a cough as he reddened slightly. ‘Are you drilling a core like the Greenland team?’
    Lauren handed him the coffee.
    â€˜Drilling a core … with a twist,’ Lauren told him, wincing at her own pun. ‘At the far end of the core is a lake. I want to pull up a water sample, and it has to be completely sterile.’
    â€˜A lake? Beneath Antarctica? I thought the whole place was frozen.’
    â€˜So did scientists,’ she told him, ‘until the early 1970s. That’s when aircraft from various scientific missions began running airborne sounding radar over certain stretches of Antarctica. That type of radar can penetrate ice and find a reflection off the underlying rock or whatever’s beneath it.’
    â€˜I got you.’
    â€˜They found something pretty staggering in Eastern Antarctica—a fresh-water lake about the size of Lake Ontario, and twice as deep, was sitting four kilometres beneath the ice. They called it Lake Vostok after the Russian base situated above it. Some cynics doubted the data, but in 1996 the European Remote Sensing Satellite confirmed that it really was what we thought it was.’
    Sean leaned forward, his attention caught. ‘So why doesn’t it freeze?’
    â€˜We believe it’s because it’s sitting in a kind of tectonic rift, a valley—the type of fault that Lake Baikal and the Red Sea occupy. The heat from the earth’s interior is sufficient to melt down the lake, and there it is—perfectly locked away from the rest of the planet—a source of pristine water … and potentially a source of new life forms.’
    â€˜So you want to drill down and explore that lake?’
    â€˜Not Vostok. Vostok has too many problems, as I’ll demonstrate.’
    Lauren crossed to a flip chart. ‘This is a cross-section of the ice cap, right?’
    Sean nodded as he watched her draw two lines—the lower one representing the earth’s surface, a higher, wavy one representing the thickness of the ice above it.
    â€˜Lake Vostok is believed to be just below sea level. And the surface of the ice is at three thousand nine hundred metres. To reach it, those scientists will have to drill a colossal four kilometres or more through the ice.’
    â€˜Four kilometres!’ Sean was astounded. ‘But that’s just about impossible. Ice moves—it’s always moving. The risk of the drill core bending and breaking is too high. Up in Greenland we were pushing it to achieve five hundred metres.’
    Lauren flipped the chart to find a blank sheet.
    â€˜Exactly. And that’s why I’ve got a different proposal. About a thousand miles away from Vostok, there’s a volcano locked beneath the ice. We’re talking about a location just about as remote as it is possible to get.’
    Lauren drew the same lines as before, but this time she added a cone-shaped mountain jutting high into the mass of ice.
    â€˜How do you know that volcano is there?’
    â€˜It was discovered by British scientists back in 1956. They were working in Antarctica as part of the International Geophysical Year. But since there are plenty of under-ice volcanoes in Antarctica, no one paid this discovery much attention.’
    â€˜So how come you’re so interested in it?’
    â€˜Firstly because my father was one of the scientists who discovered it, and second because this volcano is the one closest to the surface. The crater is just two thousand feet beneath the ice. That’s about seven hundred