Dry Ice

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In the most remote location on the most remote continent on earth, the eerie landscape lay shadowless under a moonless sky as dark and vast as eternity. The high, empty, frozen plains of snow and ice cast up a feeble, hungry glow. The only light came from stars that glittered intermittently through the heavy cloud cover.

It was mid-March in central East Antarctica, and late in the evening of just another workday at the Terrestrial Energy Southern Land Array — TESLA — installation. The only sound to be heard, inside or out, was that of the wind, screaming at more than one hundred miles per hour across the empty, miles-thick ice sheet. The torrent of air slammed into the state-of-the-art research station and blasted across the large fields of radomes covering the many antennae that comprised the station’s sole purpose and reason it existed.

The people of TESLA, twenty scientists and software developers and fourteen support staff, were the only island of humanity in this part of the earth’s coldest, highest desert. Their nearest neighbor on that high-altitude plateau was the aging Soviet-era Vostok Base. Located as it was near the Pole of Inaccessibility — the most isolated outpost on earth — Vostok sat tantalizingly close to the South Geomagnetic Pole, the best place on the planet to study, monitor, and alter nature’s electromagnetism.

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