Race to Plumb the Frigid Depths

摘要

By all appearances, Trine Dahl-Jensen and Ruth Jackson have transcended national boundaries in the name of science. Working for the geological surveys of Denmark and Canada, respectively, the geophysicists are mapping the structure of undersea rocks hundreds of kilometers north of Greenland and Canada's Ellesmere Island. In this forbidding region, habitual convergences of winds and currents force ice floes into solid jumbles 100 meters thick. Polar bears, whales, and even icebreakers are frozen out. Most knowledge of the depths comes from a few sounding tracks made by Cold War subs. To gather data, Dahl-Jensen and Jackson land by helicopter, set off explosives, collect echoes from the bottom, and then scramble back to the Canadian military base of Alert, humanity's northernmost toehold on land.