Women at the Bottom of the World

They go to Antarctica with dreams of studying the unknown. What they discover there is the stuff of nightmares.

- By David Kushner with Meghan Herbst. Photographs by Helynn Ospina and Adam Gibson

The trouble in Antarctica started in Boston. It was August 1999, and Stanford geologist Jane Willenbring was then a 22-year-old self-described "country bumpkin." She had just arrived to start her master's in earth science at Boston University. As an undergrad with an oboe scholarship at North Dakota State University, she'd studied beetle fossils found in Antarctica and learned how, millions of years ago, the now-frozen continent once pooled with freshwater lakes. "That's not so different from the conditions we might expect in the future," she says. She wanted to explore this critical science. "It seemed really important for future global climate change," she says.

Of all the geologists, few were more renowned than the one Willenbring had gone to Boston to study under: 37-year-old David Marchant. Marchant, a scruffy professor at BU, was a rock star of rock study. He was part of a research group that rewrote Antarctic history by discovering evidence of volcanic ash, which showed that Antarctica had been stable for millions of years and was not as prone to cycles of warming and cooling as many thought. To honor his achievements, the US Board on Geographic Names approved the naming of a glacier southwest of McMurdo Station, the main research base on Antarctica, after him.