Читать книгу The Quest for Mars: NASA scientists and Their Search for Life Beyond Earth - Laurence Bergreen, Laurence Bergreen - Страница 7

Subject: ICELAND

Date: Thu, 16 Jul 1998 00:48

From: Laurence Bergreen <bergreen@NYCnet.net>

To: Jim Garvin <jgarvin@nasa.gov>

Hi Jim,

It’s late Wednesday night, and I am back home from Houston. With time growing short, what can you tell me about Iceland? Last I heard, there was a strong chance of postponement till October. Looking forward to hearing from you as soon as possible. Thanks.

Larry

Subject: Re: ICELAND

Date: Thu, 16 Jul 1998 09:25:53

From: Jim Garvin <jgarvin@nasa.gov>

To: Laurence Bergreen <bergreen@NYCnet.net>

Larry,

We’re GO for Iceland. As of now, we are booked to arrive in Iceland early on the 20th, and quickly pick up a helicopter ride to Surtsey for a 6-hour working visit.

I am trying to be sure we can catch the Iceland Coast Guard helicopter, as we land between 6 and 6:30 AM and must get thru customs and get the rental Jeep.

Get set for Mars on Earth.

Jim

It’s 6:15 in the morning when Jim Garvin, a planetary geologist who works for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, meets me at Iceland’s Keflavik Airport. As arranged, he’s flown in from Baltimore, and I’ve come from New York. Jim is forty-one, talks in torrents, and is plainly Type A, endowed with the passion and restlessness of an old-fashioned genius. Although he has two small children, he puts in eighty-hour work weeks. He is intense. There is no such thing as a short conversation with Garvin. His replies to simple questions have a way of digressing into hour-long ruminations on the nature and origins of the universe, but he gets away with it mostly because he is unfailingly polite. Once he launches into a monologue, he gestures emphatically, as if visualizing and touching everything he describes. He is fit and compact, with black hair, handsome Irish features, and a perpetually worried voice. He looks clean-cut, at least compared to other scientists, and his skin is slightly irritated in patches, as though he’s been vigorously applying after-shave lotion. A friend once told me it is often hard to get Jim Garvin’s attention, but once you do, it can be overwhelming. Now I have his attention.

After we retrieve our bags, Jim sets out to find Oscar, the pilot of the plane we’ve hired to take us from Keflavik to the island of Heimaey, off the southern coast of Iceland, where we are to rendezvous with the Iceland Coast Guard, weather permitting. Oscar, when we catch up with him, looks too young to drive a car, let alone pilot a plane. We cram ourselves into his single-engine Aerospatiale, a lightweight aircraft of French design. The co-pilot’s seat I occupy is so cramped that my knees interfere with the controls. We are battling fatigue, Jim and I. We have been up all night, and the inside of my mouth tastes like kerosene from the Aerospatiale’s tank.

We have come all this way because geologists studying Mars have designated Iceland a Mars analogue. In 1976, when the Viking Lander returned color images of the Red Planet, scientists realized that Mars bears a striking resemblance to the landscape sliding below Oscar’s little airplane. Iceland is, in many places, an arctic desert devoid of vegetation and untouched by humanity. These days, NASA-supported scientists regularly visit to study this volcano-ridden island to compare it to its distant relative, Mars. The theory is that by studying Iceland, scientists can better understand the workings of the Red Planet. Iceland is only twenty million years old, a geological babe, and thus relatively unweathered, a primeval landscape. The absence of trees on the Icelandic landscape is a blessing, revealing the island’s geological makeup. Mars is similarly bare. Iceland festers with active and dormant volcanoes – just as Mars does. The resemblance makes it possible to work out significant aspects of the geologic history of both places by comparing the two.

Mars is so reminiscent of Earth that it is considered “semi-habitable.” The atmosphere is only one percent as dense as ours, but breathable air could be extracted from it. The Martian day, or “sol,” lasts about as long as a day on Earth; a Martian year consists of 687 Earth days. Like Earth, Mars has its seasons, but they last twice as long. And Martian weather conditions are anything but monotonous or predictable. In 1997, when Pathfinder landed on Mars, its tiny weather station gathered data on the local Martian weather, which NASA posted on the Internet. The reports showed that temperatures range from 60° F at noon to –100° F at night. Travelers’ advisory: because of the much lower atmospheric pressure on Mars, surface temperatures differ drastically from air temperatures. If you were standing on the surface in midday, your feet would be warm and snug, but the fluids in your head would freeze. Mars’ atmosphere has fog, wind, and red dust, lending pink tints to a sky accented by two small, misshapen moons, Phobos (“fear”) and Deimos (“terror”).

Mars resembles Earth in other ways. Its polar ice caps wax and wane seasonally. There are clouds. There is ample geologic evidence that rivers once flowed freely on its surface. The stage has long been set for life to appear there. Yet the Earth teems with life, while Mars appears barren, at least on the surface. Why? No one really knows, yet the answers may lurk in the perplexing differences between the two planets.

The Earth’s surface consists of overlapping, often ill-fitting plates covering its molten interior. They form a crust like an eggshell, thin and brittle. They bump and grind against each other; occasionally they pull apart, as they are doing now in Iceland, giving rise to earthquakes and volcanoes and mountain ridges lurking beneath the oceans. Iceland sits right on the spine of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a segment of the Mid-Ocean Ridge, which is the longest mountain range on Earth, extending 40,000 miles, or one-and-a-half times around the planet. Iceland’s unique placement means that half of it belongs, in a geological sense, to the European continent, and half to the American. And the two halves are pulling apart at the rate of one centimeter a year. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but when this movement occurs over the course of ten or twelve million years, it eventually becomes a very big deal. Iceland could break apart and be absorbed by other, larger land masses. Or if it surges in volcanic activity, it could enlarge itself, adding enough real estate to accommodate many more hardy souls. For now, a seam runs right through Iceland, clearly marked in some places by a narrow chasm and in others by small streams and little cracks. If you jump across one of the cracks, you jump from one continent to another.

At this moment, no one knows for certain if Mars has or had plates similar to Earth’s, or, if the Red Planet did have them, how they operated. If Mars never had crustal plates, their absence poses interesting questions about how it developed without them. And if it did, we see no direct evidence of them – not yet, at any rate. The geologic processes associated with crustal plates would have affected the way life did, or did not, develop on Mars.

“Nothing you see here is more than ten thousand years old,” Jim shouts over the whine of the engine, as we pass over the Reykjanes Peninsula region of southwest Iceland, “and some of it is only five thousand years old, or less.” Jim lives by the geological clock, which extends billions of years, all the way back to the formation of the universe. The universe is an old, old place, perhaps 15 billion years old, possibly more, and the planets of our Solar System are old, too, something on the order of 4.7 billion years. When you measure time in billions of years, you dismiss a million years as a hiccup. A span of five or ten thousand years is insignificant. The concept of a year, the time it takes for the Earth to complete a revolution around the Sun, scarcely seems an adequate yardstick for measuring the development of the universe and the planets. Iceland’s arriviste status in the geological scheme of things is rare and intriguing; the place teems with clues about the formation of Earth, of Mars, and of the entire Solar System. To understand the Red Planet, even partially, is to understand something about the nature of the universe, to catch glimpses of our distant past and our future, to extend perception to a scale much larger than ordinary human comprehension, to harness the imagination to the intellect, and the intellect to the stars.

These days, planetary scientists like Jim regard the geology of Mars as crucial for understanding Earth and the other rocky planets in the Solar System – Venus and Mercury (and the moon, as well). Jim reminded me that the geologic prizes on Mars are rich. Although it is forty percent smaller than Earth, Mars’ peaks and valleys are far more extreme. The continental United States could fit nicely into one of its canyons. Its volcanoes are awesome. The largest, Olympus Mons, is more than 90,000 feet high. It would tower over Mt. Everest, and it’s large enough to occupy the state of Arizona. It is one hundred times larger than the biggest volcano on Earth; in fact, Olympus Mons is the largest mountain in the entire Solar System. Mars is a planet of geological superlatives.

Oscar levels off the Aerospatiale at 2,000 feet. Beneath us, the primeval landscape – gray and brown and black, rocky and dusty and nearly treeless – extends toward the horizon. Is this what it would be like to fly over the scarred surface of Mars? Eventually, we cross a beach, and the island of Heimaey, our stopover point, lies ahead, gradually gathering substance in the blue mist. It is a remarkably tranquil day, so calm that a limp windsock on the ground barely swivels as we veer toward the island’s tiny runway, a strip of asphalt running uphill between two volcanic peaks. Ever since leaving New York, I’ve been placing my life in the hands of complete strangers, and now, sitting beside Oscar as he casually maneuvers his small aircraft, I wonder if I’ve finally gone too far.

“Move your legs! Please!”

Oscar orders me to contract so he can freely guide us to a safe landing. The plane taxis to a standstill. We are almost there.

Jim hasn’t managed to coax NASA into funding this leg of the journey – which comes to about $300. As we slap down our plastic to pay the bill, Jim cites NASA’s “faster, better, cheaper” way of doing business to explain why we must pay the airfare to conduct scientific research. Dan Goldin, NASA’s mercurial Administrator, instituted the policy when he took over the agency in 1992. NASA, like any federal bureaucracy, has indulged in its share of waste and redundancy, and Goldin, coming out of private industry, wanted to trim the bureaucratic flab and refocus NASA. Essentially, he wanted to do more with less. He increased the number of planetary missions under the “faster-cheaper-better” regimen; instead of one expensive mission, the agency would send two, or even four cheap ones, and the returns would be correspondingly greater. And they were! But planetary exploration at any price is an exceedingly risky business, and more missions has also meant more failures. In the grip of “faster-better-cheaper,” NASA didn’t realize that the American public would fasten onto the failures of its recent missions to the Red Planet – Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander – and forget the successful ones. The notion that NASA was exploring the planets on the cheap and occasionally bungled the job alarmed the media, and it alarmed Congress – how could this have happened? – yet it was Congress who, year by year, imposed the budget cuts on NASA that led the agency to adopt “faster-cheaper-better.” The result is NASA Lite.

The cuts have been playing havoc with Jim’s work life. For weeks, the Iceland expedition has been in doubt because of the fragile health of the reconnaissance plane, a modified P-3. This is a large four-engine turbo-prop originally meant to fly low over the ocean to detect submarines lurking below the surface. NASA adapted this aircraft for remote sensing: measuring geological, oceanographic, and atmospheric features with instruments used in conjunction with satellites. But NASA’s P-3 is a thirty-year-old rust bucket, and it has seen hard use. Jim has reminisced about the crew’s Technicolor yawns as the plane followed the rolling terrain at a low altitude, like an airborne roller coaster. He has described the spider-web cracks that developed in the windshield during an Iceland mission in May 1996. The windshield threatened to crack wide open, jeopardizing the mission. One pilot gave an order to don emergency gear, but the other pilot disagreed, and besides, they had no emergency gear or crash helmets or parachutes. To make matters worse, they were carrying too much fuel to land, and the Icelandic government prohibits dumping fuel into the Atlantic. They had to fly for hours at slow speed, burning fuel, until they could land safely and legally. More recently, the plane developed a chronic fuel leak and lost an engine in flight over Greenland. The accumulated weight of these stories worried me. Even Jim, who does this kind of thing for a living, was anxious. I checked out the P-3 with my friend Peter, a commercial pilot who has flown all over the world in dicey equipment. Peter explained that, worst case scenario, if an engine or two quit, the plane could coast more or less gently to the ground, unlike a helicopter, which would drop from the sky. I was not completely reassured.

NASA keeps the rust bucket aloft, despite everything, “to facilitate cost-effective essential remote sensing that has inexorably been rewriting textbooks associated with atmospheric science, climate change, and the lay of the land,” as Jim puts it. In other words, this rust bucket is changing the way scientists think about how our planet works.

Despite the significance of its science missions and the public dismay when they go wrong, relentless budget cutting continues to afflict NASA. The agency now receives less than 14 billion dollars a year, less than one percent of the overall federal budget, and each year its budget shrinks a little more. The unkindest cuts of all affect people, not hardware. Dan Goldin earns about $150,000 a year, and scientists like Jim Garvin, who hold one or more advanced degrees and are often among the leading figures in their fields, earn less, something equivalent to a college professor’s salary. Unlike academics, they work six or seven days a week, year round, without sabbaticals. And NASA has stringent rules governing outside income from consulting or lecturing, so moonlighting is out of the question, even if the NASA scientists had time for such activities, which they don’t. Willingly or not, Jim and his colleagues must emulate the example of Louis Agassiz, the famous naturalist, who stated, “I cannot afford to waste my time making money.”

Why do they do it? Why do these driven scientists, who could be earning several times more than their current salaries in private industry, stick with stingy old NASA? Why do they remain oblivious to imploring spouses and former colleagues who have gone to seek their fortunes in private industry? The most these NASA scientists can reasonably hope for is recognition from their peers, if they make a major discovery. They’ll have an easier time getting grants, lots of impressive plaques to hang on the wall, and that’s about it. Despite the influence of their ideas on the course of science and exploration, obscurity is often their lot. Who can name the members of the team that in 1996 announced possible evidence of fossilized life in a Martian meteorite – a discovery that, if correct, will stand as one of the most significant breakthroughs of all time? Who can name any NASA-supported scientist, for that matter, with the possible exception of Carl Sagan? And who, outside of the scientific community, is aware of Sagan’s actual role in NASA’s exploration of space?

Sagan’s success as a popularizer of the Cosmos obscures his real achievements as a scientist, thinker, and writer. A productive scientist and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, he frequently appeared on The Tonight Show; he didn’t fit into neat categories. He was cursed with charisma. An astronomer by training, he gave a convincing impression of being at home with a number of disciplines ranging from mathematics to history. His fascination with space offered reassurance rather than terror of the unknown. He developed a benign, Jeffersonian vision of the universe as the last frontier, the ultimate, infinite West, where humanity would be able to seek refuge after fouling this planet and possibly destroying itself in the process. Sagan’s outer space, like Thomas Jefferson’s West, offered sufficient scope to alleviate humanity’s ills. He was pessimistic about the future of mankind if we were confined to Earth for too long. It seemed to him a near certainty that, sooner or later, we would blow ourselves up. The only escape from his Malthusian nihilism was the vastness of space and the promise of distant planets, where humankind could start anew. This vision of space as the new frontier influenced NASA from its inception, imparting a sense of purpose, and it inspired younger scientists by giving them a larger context for their research. In the midst of bureaucratic setbacks and budget battles, Sagan knew what was at stake in the exploration of space: over the short term, enlightenment, over the long term, the survival of humanity.

Throughout his career, he cultivated a special fascination with Mars. For him, it was a touchstone of all heavenly bodies and possibly the salvation of humanity. He wrote about it for scientists and for general readers, artfully mixing speculation and scientific fact. He prodded NASA to explore. And he held out hope for life on Mars. As early as 1966, when the conventional wisdom in the scientific community, chastened by the barren photographs resulting from the Mariner missions, held the chance of life on Mars to be zero, Sagan, almost alone among prominent scientists, speculated that such a phenomenon might still be possible.

Sagan influenced a generation of younger scientists, who have their hands on the levers of the future and who fervently believe that now is their time to change scientific thinking about the nature of the universe and our place in it. They stick with their work for many reasons: because they can’t do without it; because NASA gives them the means to do what they’ve yearned for since they were children growing up in the heyday of the space race, watching John Glenn go into orbit; because NASA will let them send something of their own design – a part of them – into space; because NASA has the rockets and the launch facilities and the infrastructure to get it done; because NASA will validate their work in the eyes of the scientific community and the world. Because, when it comes to planetary exploration, NASA is the only game in town.

The little airport on Heimaey is deserted; the Iceland Coast Guard helicopter has yet to arrive. Oscar sits at a table in an empty café, smoking a cigarette. Jim, wired, munches on a Mars bar (“It’s my planet, Larry. I may as well”) and reminds me that twenty-five years ago, this quaint little island (“Heimaey” means “Home Island”) had to be evacuated when that volcano – over there – erupted, and lava poured down its slopes into the village. When the eruption ended, Eldfell, as the volcano is known, had transformed the island. It was fifteen percent larger and contained thirty million additional tons of lava, which the local populace later used for roads and buildings. Nor was that eruption unusual for Iceland. Every five years, Iceland witnesses a major volcanic eruption, some capable of sending enough ash into the atmosphere to darken the hemisphere’s skies and lower global temperatures. In 1783, the largest volcanic eruption observed in modern times occurred in Iceland. It lasted for months and disgorged over two hundred square miles of lava. The explosion hurled sulfur dioxide particles into the lower atmosphere; they in turn caused acid rain that polluted the ground, poisoned cattle, starved a quarter of Iceland’s population, and darkened the skies over Europe. (A natural catastrophe of that magnitude has undoubtedly occurred on Mars.) Iceland is overdue for another eruption, Jim remarks casually, and an active volcano dominates the island where we will spend the day. The island’s name is Surtsey.

The newest place on Earth, Surtsey is even more Mars-like than the rest of Iceland. It was formed in a mammoth undersea volcanic eruption that lasted from 1963 until 1967 and, during its early phases, lit up the night skies for miles around. It was named for Surtur, the fire-bearing giant of Norse mythology. The island is younger than Jim, who was seven years old when it erupted into being. At the time, his family was living in Beirut, where his father worked for IBM. Jim’s maternal grandmother, who was living with them, became fascinated by the eruption. She collected all the newspaper clippings about it she could find and showed them to her grandson, giving an unexpected direction to his life. Jim has remained in Surtsey’s thrall ever since. The vanity plates on his ten-year-old Jeep announce, “SURTSEY.”

Only a couple of hundred people have ever set foot on the island. Access is extremely difficult. The North Atlantic currents surrounding it are too rough for most boats to negotiate; swells around the island are frequently twenty feet; waves have been said to reach eighty feet. The island is off limits to everyone but a few heavily credentialed scientists who have obtained permission from the Icelandic government to conduct research there on a “non-biologically interfering basis.” In practice, this restriction has made Surtsey into one of the largest and most carefully studied natural laboratories on the face of the Earth, of interest to geologists because of its recent, well-documented formation; to botanists and biologists, who track the development of life; and to Marsists like Jim Garvin who regard a visit to Surtsey as the closest they’ll ever come to the Red Planet.

The only practical way to reach the island is by helicopter, weather permitting. “There are no guarantees, as helicopters only go out that far once a month,” Jim alerted me several weeks earlier, when we were starting to get serious about the field trip. “Please note there are NO insurance provisions. ANYONE going to Surtsey does so at his or her own risk, and there is some, as the island is still HOT and there are hydrothermal systems with 120° C water just beneath the ground. Also, the weather can change, and people have been stranded. I was urged to remind you of this. Also, what I must do out there will require vigorous hiking over lava and volcanic ash. Anyway, there is a chance we will get there for a day that I do believe you will thoroughly enjoy.”

Jim once mentioned to me that his colleagues considered him a bit eccentric. After pondering his disclaimers and warnings concerning Surtsey, I recalled a strange story I’d heard about him. In the heyday of the Apollo program, NASA was thinking seriously about sending people to Mars, yet the agency hesitated. Guiding a robotic spacecraft to the Red Planet is an intricate, ambitious, and unpredictable undertaking; a human mission would be far more risky and complex. NASA was stymied by the problem of getting its astronauts home. Jim came up with a unique solution: he offered to go to Mars on a one-way basis.

When I asked Jim about this story, he was mildly abashed. “I’m not proud of this now, but when I was younger, before I married and had kids, I volunteered to go.”

“One way?”

“Well, yes. The only way you could get a man there was one way. It would be too costly to get him back to Earth. So I would go there, have enough life support to explore and survive for two years, and then …”

“And then?”

“That would be all. And it would have been worth it, the scientific returns would have been spectacular, but that was before I had kids. Now I have other responsibilities I didn’t have then.”

The thin tin walls of the Heimaey airport terminal start to vibrate. There’s a sound almost below the threshold of hearing. We feel it in our guts as it gets louder and more intense. Thwacka-thwacka-thwacka … Rotors whirring, the Iceland Coast Guard helicopter, an impressively large and sturdy Bell Jet Ranger, descends into view. It is a noisy piece of equipment, manned by a crew outfitted with Day-Glo orange flight suits. These are the men of the Iceland Coast Guard, and they swarm around us like giant orange insects. A small group of Icelandic botanists has joined us, and our little group approaches the helicopter, deafened by the whine of the motor and the thumping of the rotor. A crew member, smiling crazily, hands each of us a life vest and a helmet equipped with a microphone. I place the helmet snugly over my head, and the unbearable thwacka-thwacka-thwacka subsides to a distant drumbeat. We strap ourselves into the seats, and the helicopter slowly rises from tarmac to a height of about six feet. We delicately revolve until the nose suddenly pitches forward, and we take off like a shot. This is flying. We swoop over the ocean at an altitude of about 500 feet, until we reach the island of Surtsey, fifty miles from nowhere. From the air, the place looks so barren and primitive and devoid of anything recognizable that even Heimaey, by comparison, seems civilized. The jagged gray lava formations of Surtsey rise to greet us. The helicopter sets down lightly on a concrete landing pad considerably smaller than my living room.

Less than twelve hours before, I was sitting in the back of a taxi cab in New York City, and Jim was fighting traffic on the way to Baltimore-Washington International Airport. It is now 10:30 AM local time on a rare, beautiful morning on sub-arctic Surtsey. Our coordinates are 63° 13” North, 20° 31” West.

The rotors slow almost to a stop. We emerge from the helicopter and wave merrily to the crew. The helicopter begins to whine, the rotors fling gritty volcanic ash into the air, and the machine lifts off.

It tilts toward the mainland and disappears, leaving a therapeutic silence.

We are alone on the newest place on Earth.

The temperature is in the high fifties, about as warm as it gets on the surface of Mars. True, the atmosphere here is saturated with oxygen and the gravity is approximately two-and-a-half times greater than the Red Planet’s, but as far as Jim is concerned, he’s on Mars.

Jim believes this is a particularly auspicious day to begin his mission, since July 20 is “Space Exploration Day,” also known as “Moon and Mars Day.” On this date in 1969, the Apollo 11 astronauts stepped onto the lunar surface. Seven years later to the day, the Viking 1 lander transmitted the first images of the plains of Chryse to Earth. Quite a date, when it comes to planetary exploration. Some day, he believes, July 20 will be designated a national holiday for space exploration.

The botanists disperse ahead of us. Although he is exhausted from a sleepless night, Jim heads out with a bundle of topographic maps under one arm and a pair of bright orange Swarovski laser binoculars around his neck. “They are good to three-tenths of a centimeter. I have about fifteen different programs I can set it on, and if I want, I can connect it to my laptop,” he says. He wears hiking shoes designed for walking across lava, an olive drab NASA flight jacket, and a white baseball cap bearing the legend “Mars Observer,” a reference to the billion-dollar NASA spacecraft that vanished in 1993. No trace of it has ever been found, nor has a wholly satisfactory explanation been offered for its disappearance. Jim refers to the incident as an “act of God,” and wears this cap as a casual memorial to the lost mission.

As he sets out on this glorious Surtsey morning, he experiences an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. The last time he was here was 1991, and now he suddenly feels as though he’s home again, and he wipes his eyes. There’s a spiritual dimension to his scientific exploration that he can’t quite put into words. It’s an epiphany – a scientific epiphany, if there can be such a thing. “I felt as if I were back at a good place for learning and experiencing how life gains a foothold on a previously unborn, sterile world,” he later told me, when he was better able to verbalize, but now, at the moment he sets out, it’s the adrenalin rush he’s feeling, the intoxicating sense that the world, or this little volcanic part of it, anyway, belongs to him for the time being. There’s so much going on in his mind – calculations, memories, nascent hypotheses – that I think of Garvin as a highly emotional computer.

He allows the nostalgia to wash over him, and goes to work. Although Surtsey looks stonily barren from the air, close inspection yields different results. “Observing change is the central theme of Earth and planetary science,” Jim tells me. “What is changing? What has changed? Has life on the Red Planet – if it’s there, that is – changed or been changed by Martian conditions over time? Have environments on Mars eradicated the footholds of life that may have been established at one or more times in Martian history? With Surtsey, I am struck by the incredible pace of biological change in only seven years. What appeared as a nearly sterile, Mars-like vista in 1991 is now an alien landscape complete with kitchen-table-sized mounds of flourishing higher-order plants, dunes covered by grasses.” Jim mentions that ecological succession has changed the face of Surtsey at a rate ten, or even a hundred, times faster than typical terrestrial landscapes, and perhaps a million times faster than change on Mars. Thanks to the action of wind and water, Surtsey is destined to vanish beneath the surface of the ocean almost as quickly as it arose. “I’m going to have an equation by October that will contain the predictive lifetime for Surtsey,” he says. “We’ll have the first landscape volume erosion rate for an isolated volcanic island.” If the present erosion rates hold, Jim predicts Surtsey will vanish beneath the waters of the North Atlantic by 2045, and his subsequent calculations confirm this date. Think of this process as geological time-lapse photography. A world arises and vanishes before your eyes.

Ahead lies an impossibly steep curving wall of solid rock, 460 feet high; to the left, a craggy, broken crater – a tephra ring about fifty yards across. A tephra ring is a partial crater formed as exploding volcanic ash falls to the ground in a semicircle, usually molded by the prevailing winds, which on Surtsey can be fierce. Geology-speak is a Babel of languages. Tephra is Greek for ash. Lava is Hawaiian. Many other terms are Icelandic, which is among the oldest continuously spoken languages in the West, the language of the Sagas, and, at times, the language of geology.

Lava, in Icelandic, is hraun. “It’s the oldest word for lava there is,” Jim says. There are several subsets of hraun: apalhraun, which is rough lava, and helluhraun, which is smooth. A small volcano in Icelandic is a dyngja. Hlaup means “flood,” and jökull means “glacier.” If you put those two words together – jökulhlaup – you get something for which there is no exact equivalent in English: a catastrophic outburst flood caused by water trapped under a glacier, which cracks open the ice and violently disgorges.

This catastrophic event occurred in 1993 on an Icelandic flood plain called the Skeidararsandur. Blocks of ice as large as houses tumbled for miles across the flooded black primeval landscape in an orgy of geologic violence. A similar geological disaster also occurred on Mars in the distant past. The scale was immense. It is estimated that the Martian jökulhlaup released as much as 100,000 cubic meters of water per second, more than the entire flow of the Amazon river.

At the moment, we are standing on hraun, or, more precisely, helluhraun, with a little apalhraun scattered here and there. Looking into the tephra ring, Jim says he’s stunned “to observe the development of erosional canyons massive enough to drive a Hummer through.” He didn’t see anything like this on his last trip to Surtsey. The erosional scars remind him of features shown in the latest images from Mars Orbiter Camera, now circling the Red Planet.

“These mini-canyons, technically erosional gullies, expose the underbelly of Surtsey, the volcano. They give clues about its future and the processes that formed it. The sheer beauty of these signs of geologic aging and their abundance are remarkable!” He takes a closer look at the black windblown tephra. “See how it’s sorted? See how the small rocks have risen to the top? That sorting is common. Some of them are rounded.” Those smooth contours, he tells me, are diagnostic of wind and water, and he looks for similar shapes on Mars. “So far, we haven’t found a lot of really rounded ones on Mars,” he admits. But he keeps looking because evidence of water is essential to the detection of life beyond Earth. In fact, water has assumed such importance that the question of extraterrestrial life has been reframed; where scientists once inquired, “Is there life elsewhere in the universe?” they now ask, “Is there liquid water elsewhere in the universe?”

Many planetary geologists, Garvin included, now see convincing evidence that Mars once had lots of water, and may still have a tremendous amount of water even now. Their goal is to follow the water because they hope it will lead them to life. So they seek distinctive water signatures. They look for evidence of dried-up rivers and oceans and shorelines; they theorize about subsurface water, and they measure glaciers – anything associated with water.

Stepping lightly on tephra, Jim makes his way across the eastern side of the island, squinting and kneeling, taking measurements, orienting and reorienting himself, studying the landscape, observing the reverse sorting of the soil, in which “coarser fragments the size of popcorn nubs rise to the top of the soil horizon, leaving the finer, claylike fraction below.” He notes the fragmentation of large blocks of volcanic rocks. On the right, Jim confronts a landscape studded with pitted blocks ranging in size from softballs to basketballs. Those pits grab his attention. He spent a good deal of his graduate career at Brown in the mid-1970s studying patterns of pits and surface textures on terrestrial rocks and on Martian boulders photographed by the two Viking landers, trying, as he put it, “to unravel the geologic secrets of Mars.” Here is a banquet of strikingly similar boulders, on which he is ready to feast. He notes unpitted gray rocks with angular shapes – so-called “country rocks” – as well as pitted rocks, whose morphology speaks to him, telling of displacement from a lava flow.

Jim explains how this local landscape came to be: “Once the sea water was kept out of where the lava was bubbling up, a carapace of lava formed. And that lava is very important, because it protects the vent. The vent is where the hot rock comes up. That is the reason this island survives today.” He displays what looks to me like an ordinary rock, but to Jim, it’s a geologic sonnet. “This is tephra that tumbled downhill. See how it’s made up of bits of other stuff? It’s actually a breccia. A breccia is stuff made of other stuff, little welded bits as strong as concrete.” As I hold the raw geological material in my hand, Jim reminds me that this is what the rocks on Mars look like; the main difference is that they’re coated with a brown dust. He feels around the edges. “It’s a smooth little rock,” he says. “That means it’s been worn by erosive agents, so we look at the rounding of the corners to get an indication of what’s going on.” I carefully replace the rock so as not to disturb the course of Surtsey’s geological evolution.

The hraun we traverse feels like soft beach sand. Jim tells me that on Mars, the soil is ten times finer than what we’re walking on now. “It would be more like walking on talcum powder.”

We press on, and the terrain subtly shifts. “Now we have coarse stuff lying on the surface,” Jim remarks, as he tries to read the landscape. “Here’s a little piece of basaltic pumice. That’s a good one,” he says, slipping it into his pocket, which is, perhaps, not quite kosher. “That’s one for the spectrometer,” he explains. There’s an honor system in force here. You’re not supposed to disturb anything. You try not to leave footprints in this haven for scientists if you can possibly avoid it. “Now, this looks like – aha! This –” he announces, “is a little lava bomb.”

“What?”

“A lava bomb is something that flew through the air and went splat! And then it started to break. Already, it’s weathering away. See how it’s crumbling. Again, this is what we looked for at the Pathfinder landing site.” He calls my attention to smooth rocks inside smooth rocks, and he begins to interpret. “You can piece together the history of this rock,” he says. “These rocks were always smooth; they got pasted together at the time of the eruption.”

He sees some similarities between the geology underfoot and the Pathfinder landing site on Mars. NASA sent Pathfinder to a location on Mars where it was believed that a great outpouring of water once occurred. “Some people think the rocks in Pathfinder’s vicinity came to rest there as the result of one big flood, but that’s ludicrous. It’s a mixed population of rocks around Pathfinder,” which suggests, to him, at any rate, that the geological history of the area has been fairly complex. Water might have come and gone around the Pathfinder site more than once over the eons. I look around; if you photographed a replica of Pathfinder here on Surtsey, you could persuade a fair number of people that the spacecraft was actually on Mars. The more Jim talks, the more I feel a geological kinship between the two planets; Mars seems so Earth-like, or is it more accurate to say that Earth is so Mars-like?

Garvin kneels to inspect a delicate lava formation. “See the thin carapace of lava? This black stuff?”

“It’s very soft.”

“Right, very soft underneath.”

“It’s falling apart.”

“Not all of it. And that’s important, because that’s the action of a process that tears down rocks and makes clays. We take clays for granted. On Mars, there’s likely to be a lot of clay.”

“And water is necessary for clay.”

“Yes. You have to break rocks. Look at this.” He points to where the hillside is collapsing. “What you see is little mudflows. And look at this. Here is a beautiful little lava rock! Very angular. This is a classic, coated with fine-grain stuff. It’s almost a pentagon.”

Jim points to the volcano’s peak looming overhead and recollects the last time he climbed it. “The wind was blowing at forty-five miles per hour the whole time, and it was very hard even to talk.” That windspeed was moderate, by Surtsey standards; the island endures 200 days of gale-force winds a year. “When we were here in ’91, this area was a desert, but plants are taking over now.” Now, the main plant in evidence is the lowly sandwort, a simple succulent that has proliferated on Surtsey with astonishing speed; small, dense, and tenacious, it can boldly go where other vegetation can’t. Even mosses can’t get a grip on Surtsey; the wind rips them out of the ground and flings them away.

“Look! There is a gorgeous breccia. Notice it’s in a little hollow, okay? That’s called an apron. We look for those kinds of things on Mars. Outside, you can see there’s a layering to it that’s caving in. See the carapace of lava up there? It’s starting to break off. In a big storm, that could fall.” It looks like the burned crust of a pie at the edge of a pan. “Now, see how these rocks are perched? Notice the pits. That’s where Mars comes in.” You see something similar in images from Pathfinder, Garvin says – pits left by primary gas bubbles in the lava. He snaps a picture of the pitted rocks on Surtsey as he continues. “Look at these pitting textures! All different. It’s exquisite.”

He zeroes in on a block of lava that speaks to him in a private language. Crouching, he declares, “Now, this is not primary lava. It’s softer, and it’s been coated with a bright alteration stain caused by chemical weathering. It’s allochthonous. That means it’s out of place, been moved away.” I step back to take in the scene, and I realize the site looks like the Grand Canyon in miniature. “This could be the beginnings of a little Martian canyon system,” Garvin exults. “It’s gorgeous. Oh, God, wouldn’t I love to measure that with a laser!”

We’ve been picking our way around the base of the volcano, and now we turn away from it and face the ocean. Before long, Jim again shouts. “Look at that.” He points to a slight discoloration on a mound of stones, in which he sees vast implications. “That’s the high water mark from a wave, where the fine dust coated the rocks. Now that is the kind of shoreline we are looking for on Mars.” The subject of ancient shorelines on Mars carries the charge of controversy and borderline heresy. Several scientists have tried mapping the shorelines of ancient Martian oceans that vanished a billion or more years ago, but their work has yet to gain widespread acceptance. I try to imagine Mars as a wet place, covered with oceans, teeming with possibilities, but this is like trying to visualize oceans in the Sahara, for Mars is red and dry and cold.

A large empty plastic bottle catches my eye, disturbing my reverie. The object seems as incongruous here as it would on the surface of Mars. We notice pieces of plastic, and buoys, and rope, and blocks of wood studded with rusty nails. “The garbage of humanity,” as Jim calls it, has drifted out here, fifty miles from nowhere, a mocking reminder of home. All day long, he has been scrupulous about not disturbing plants or lava or rocks, to the point of walking in old footprints. Avoiding the detritus, we cross a hard, crusty portion of the beach. “Hard pan clays,” he remarks. “See how they crack? They’re desiccated. We look for things like that on Mars. More indirect evidence of water. Here on Surtsey, we have a microcosm. We have a scale where it’s easier to see things. One of the things about Mars to remember is that it’s a big planet, about forty percent as large as Earth. If we land in three or four places on Mars, we’ll learn about them, but we won’t get the big picture of Mars that way, so we study sites on Earth that we believe operate in a similar way.”

We approach the water’s edge, but a formidable barrier repels us: a giant collection of round, basketball-sized rocks. “If we ever saw a field of dense, interconnecting rocks like this on Mars, we’d know the action of water was responsible. But, we haven’t seen this, yet.” As a geologist, Jim looks for patterns, distributions, colors, textures, and shapes. He is the detective, and they are his fingerprints. If he successfully unravels the geological mysteries of Surtsey with them, he will also know more about the development of the Red Planet.

Turning away from the beach, Jim and I finally begin the ascent to the volcano’s summit. I’ve been trying to put off this chore, but here it is, the thing we must do. Jim reminds me that we are climbing an active volcano, and there’s always a chance that it could blow without warning. I recall Iceland’s uninterrupted pattern of volcanic outbursts every five years for the last 1,100 years, and I remind myself that it’s due for another eruption. I feel as though we’re crawling up the side of a giant, overstressed pressure cooker. Jim tells me that a series of sensitive seismometers has been placed on the volcano; in fact, all the volcanoes in Iceland are similarly equipped, and the seismometers are so sensitive that they can detect microseizures involving magma, or molten rock. I’m somewhat relieved to hear about this detection system, but in the event of a warning, I wonder how anyone would be able to convey the news to us. Six months after our visit, a big volcano finally did erupt beneath Iceland’s largest glacier, Vatnajökull, located on the southeast coast, home to most of the country’s population.

The gray lava and rounded rocks give way to a smooth, steep incline. Jim estimates it’s twenty degrees, but it feels more like thirty to me, very steep, indeed. We zig-zag our way across, and look down on the larger of Surtsey’s craters, a craggy rusty red configuration filled with volcanic ash that from this height resembles a soft, inviting mattress. The wind picks up, and we crouch to avoid being flung down the slippery side of the mountain. Wind, incidentally, figures prominently in the Martian environment. On the surface, dust devils are everywhere. In the upper atmosphere, winds can reach 350 miles per hour, and wind storms occasionally engulf the entire planet, obscuring the surface for days.

Jim reaches a seep, a place where the ground comes apart, as if it were fabric that has been rent. A faint plume of steam rises from the wound, and the smell of sulfur permeates the air. Kneeling beside this smoldering, malodorous seep, I begin to think of Hell as a realistic notion, based on observable geology. Jim asks me to place my hand on the soil near the edge, and it feels like hot clay. A fine white crust along the rim contains bacteria that thrive in the heat and sulfur. This is the most primitive type of life on Earth, Jim reminds me. Life may have begun in volcanic seeps similar to the one at our feet, and it might have started the same way on Mars, on other planets, and on countless moons and asteroids – if it ever did.

These bacteria are examples of extremophile life, primitive life forms that have recently been discovered in places where biologists once assumed life could not survive because the conditions were too hostile – too hot, too cold, too dark, too salty, too deep. In recent years, many of the assumptions about the requirements for life on Earth – and, by implication, the possibility of life on Mars and other celestial bodies – have been overturned.

“We are finding out about the tenacity of life,” Jim said before the trip, “and it’s startling. We’re finding creatures that live at five times atmospheric pressure two miles deep in the ocean in places where the water would boil if there weren’t tons of pressure on top of it. We’re finding giant simple worms that look like garden hoses that live under those conditions. They don’t need any light, they scavenge the sulfur produced in volcanic eruptions deep in the ocean. They live off sulfur; they eat bacteria that grow in the sulfur, and that sustains them. Is there sulfur on Mars? Likely.” Life flourishes just about anywhere, it turns out, no matter how extreme the conditions. “Can you stick life a mile down in rocks and have it survive and bloom? Yes. Can you put it two miles deep in the ocean where there is no light of day, ever? Yes. Stick it on the coldest place on the planet and it will at least remain dormant there? Yes! Now, if you can form niches of life on Earth in such horrid environments, with pressure that would crush a human being to pulp and temperatures that would boil our skin – if you have life forms under those conditions, then it gets quite interesting. In fact, the question now in biology is: can you even produce a sterile environment?”

The question got me thinking about the famous Miller-Urey experiment designed to illuminate the origins of life. In 1953, two scientists at the University of Chicago, Stanley L. Miller and Harold Urey, put gaseous methane, ammonia, water vapor, and liquid water – ingredients thought to simulate a primitive Earth atmosphere – into a closed system, and sent an electrical discharge spark through the mixture. The gases interacted, and a gummy residue formed; analysis showed it contained organic molecules, including many amino acids, which are the building blocks of life. It had been previously thought that the prerequisites for life were rather special and demanding and occurred only on Earth, but the experiment suggested that all you needed to produce life were a few simple, readily available chemicals and an energy source. These things could be found on other planets, on some asteroids, and most probably on Mars. You don’t need oxygen for life to develop, and you don’t even need the Sun; the heat source could be volcanic or subterranean. I asked Jim, “If you put together all the necessary ingredients, does life inevitably develop?” Because if it did, it could be developing on Mars and throughout the universe, wherever those things are found.

“Larry,” he said, “you’ve just asked the Genesis Question. We don’t know the answer. Some people believe it could, some believe it couldn’t. A few billion years ago in the history of this planet, and in the history of Mars, and possibly in the history of other places, there may have been very sporadic conditions that might have been able to sustain life. But that was at the time when the planets were being constantly bombarded by junk leftover from when the Solar System formed. There was a lot of leftover crap, and it eventually smashed into the planets. We think all the planets formed about four point seven billion years ago in a relatively commonplace little spinning nebula of dust that collapsed to produce them and also spun off stuff that didn’t quite make it, like the materials in the asteroid belt that occasionally crash into us.” And then he said: “There was even an idea that life sprang forth on those objects, and there was a great so-called ‘panspermia’ wherein life spread from one place to another from some unknown source. Not us. We weren’t the source, according to panspermia theory. We were just one of the places where it landed and survived.”

I casually remarked that panspermia sounded like the answer to the question of life in the universe.

“Be careful,” Jim said. “The idea is very controversial, and often misunderstood. A lot depends on whom you talk to.” Although there is no consensus about life on Mars now, he told me, many scientists have come to believe that it’s very hard to imagine that Mars didn’t have a failed attempt at life forms at some point in its history. “The question is: where did it go? Seeing the existence of life on Mars would be like finding the Rosetta Stone. We may be alone now, but not in the past.” Jim thinks of Mars as the mother of all control experiments. “The theory goes like this: the Earth is a very messy, complicated, intersecting set of systems, but we also need a sandbox to play in, and the best sandbox we have is Mars. It’s a natural control experiment for things we want to understand about our own planet, if we were able to strip away and isolate some of the variables. For instance, Mars is colder and drier. Water exists there as ice or as a gas in the atmosphere. When it did exist as a liquid, it probably did so only briefly. There is no biosphere altering the planet, as we have on Earth. If it ever started, it failed.”

It’s possible that we could end up like Mars, as the Sun fades. Jim tells me that if all the water on Earth froze and then evaporated, we could very well have conditions that would suck the oxygen out of our atmosphere without renewing it.

I begin to think of Mars as Earth reduced to the essentials. For purposes of scientific research, it’s more promising than the moon, even though it is much harder to reach. “Back in the days of Apollo, we could use military-class technology to zip up to the moon and fly around and be very clever because we had unlimited funds and a national commitment from our president to put human beings there. We don’t have that commitment for Mars,” Jim reminds me, making the idea of regular transits to Mars suddenly sound sensible. “People argue that NASA will never have carte blanche like that again. Nowadays, you have to keep the price way down. It means that when you go to Mars you can’t carry enough fuel to go into the orbit you want. You have to use the gravity and atmosphere of Mars itself to get you there.”

Jim takes heart from historical precedents for these difficulties. “Think of them in terms of the exploration of our own planet,” he says. “Think of the early sailors willing to risk their lives sailing from Greece to Crete, an island about a day away, if the wind blows right. They might be willing to do that because, what the heck? That’s analogous to going to the moon, which we can reach in a matter of a few days. Now imagine sailing not from Greece to Crete but from Greece to North America. That’s the scale of difference we’re talking about when we send spacecraft out to Mars.” At that scale, the celestial sailors will have to learn to improvise in order to survive, just their maritime forebears did.

While we linger at the seep, Jim reminds me that only thirty-five years ago, there was nothing here but the Atlantic Ocean and fresh air. And now we are standing on rock containing copious evidence of bacteria. Could life have spread as quickly on a Martian volcano? Well, why not? No one knows. Questions like these form the basis for “astrobiology,” the search for extraterrestrial life – generally in the form of primitive bacteria invisible to the naked eye. Although the questions posed by astrobiology – or, as it is sometimes called, exobiology – have concerned NASA scientists for over twenty years, the field has suddenly entered a period of rapid expansion, as it moves from the realm of the purely speculative to the potentially demonstrable.

Biologists are coming around to the idea that Earth, while complex and idiosyncratic, is hardly unique. Our planet does not necessarily contain a divine, magical, or fluke recipe for life. On the contrary, life emerged here when our planet was less than a billion years old, as the outcome of geologic and chemical processes. It might have been the inevitable outcome; if so, it could easily appear throughout the Solar System and the universe.

In that case, why has extraterrestrial life been so hard to find? One thing is now clear to many scientists. As the song goes, they’ve been looking for life in all the wrong places – mainly in moderate, sunlit, moist environments. As biologists develop a greater understanding of all the unlikely, remote places where life exists on Earth, it has become apparent that there is much greater latitude. Life forms can be so hardy and unpredictable that they will find a way to exist just about anywhere. And at the microbial level, life can be so simple it seems barely alive at all. Still, to qualify as life, the stuff has to satisfy at least two widely accepted conditions. It must be able to replicate, and it must be able to mutate and evolve. Darwin’s principles of natural selection apply at all levels of life, and if life is discovered on Mars, or anywhere else in the universe, natural selection will apply there, as well.

We make our way along shallow erosional gullies, which provide a foothold on the volcano’s sheer upper reaches, until we arrive at the summit of Surtsey, a precarious location high above the surface of the North Atlantic. Jim, who’s lighter and more agile, is a lot better adapted to climbing than I. The jet lag and lack of sleep are taking their toll; my heart thumps wildly, and the wind pushes me off balance. I look up, trying to orient myself. Heimaey, so solid and inviting by comparison, floats in the distance, and beyond, Iceland itself. After a brief rest, we head down the steep slope.

By mid-afternoon, we reach a small research hut at the base of the volcano, where the Icelandic botanists who flew in with us have gathered. A pot of water comes to a boil on a little propane stove, a welcome sight, a bit of Earth on Mars. Over a mug of instant coffee, I converse with a botanist, Sturla Fridricksson, who, Jim explains, is considered the grand old man of Surtsey research. Sturla’s face has been seamed and cured to a leathery perfection by the Northern sun. He looks as though he’s served time on the Kon-Tiki. Just as he launches into a complete geological history of Surtsey, a saga in itself, the Icelandic Coast Guard returns to rescue us. Their helicopter touches down with a great throbbing racket; the rotors feel like they’re sucking the air right out of my nostrils. Silent and overwhelmed with impressions from our day’s exploration, Jim and I begin the journey back to the mainland, as though returning to Earth.

When he’s not climbing active volcanoes, Jim Garvin often roams the hallways at his place of work, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. That was where we met, exactly one year earlier, when I was visiting a friend who also works there. Jim was standing in a busy corridor, holding forth on the subject of Mars, and within minutes, the sound of his voice attracted a crowd of curious scientists, who drifted away from whatever they were doing to listen. Somebody ought to be getting this down, I thought, and started to take notes as fast as I could. When we began to talk, he identified himself as a co-investigator for the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS), a state-of-the-art spacecraft designed to orbit Mars and conduct a number of pioneering experiments, including mapping the surface of the Red Planet in more detail than is available for Earth.

His special area of interest, he explained, is an instrument on MGS known as a laser altimeter – a laser designed to fire impulses at the surface of Mars. Minute fluctuations in the time it takes for the impulses to return create a three-dimensional picture of the surface, accurate to within a few meters. This is an incredibly intricate engineering feat – akin to extending a tape measure all the way from New York City to Washington, D.C., to determine the surface variations on the dome of the Capitol, while recording the results in a moving car back in New York.

At that first encounter, Jim invited me – as he does everyone he meets – to share his obsession with Mars. He is a rigorous scientist, but underneath the rigor lurks a romantic explorer. Mars is not just a planet to him; it holds, potentially, the answers to the riddles of the universe. At the time of this meeting, in July 1997, the Pathfinder spacecraft had just landed on the Red Planet, and its tiny rover, Sojourner Truth, had captured the imagination of the scientific community and people around the world, who were able to follow the extraterrestrial proceedings closely on the Internet. As I talked with Jim about the development of Mars exploration, it occurred to me that Pathfinder belonged to a much larger story – mankind’s exploration of Mars – and that the exploration was itself part of an even larger story: the search for the origins of life on Earth and throughout the universe.

Despite the sophistication of the new missions to Mars, Jim waxes nostalgic about the Viking program of the mid-70s – “the Cadillac of missions,” he says. “They actually had better equipment then.” Of course, it cost the American taxpayer about ten times as much as the current hardware does. He became involved with the Viking missions when he was still an undergraduate at Brown; a geology major, he helped to analyze images from the Viking 2 lander spacecraft, and he got hooked on the study of Mars. (Planetary spacecraft come in three basic varieties – flybys, landers, and orbiters. The flybys whiz past a planet on their way to somewhere else. An orbiter circles a planet. And a lander touches down on the surface.)

Just when he thought he’d found his vocation, the Viking missions ended, and NASA closed the book on Mars exploration. The missions, Jim often says, were the victims of their own success. They sent back thousands of stunning color images, and provided enough data to keep scientists occupied for two decades. They accomplished so much it seemed there was nothing left to do except send people to Mars, and there wasn’t enough money in the budget for that.

After graduation, Jim went to Stanford for an advanced degree in computer science. The life of a geek was not his style. So what if he could de-bug his colleagues’ programs and make them run faster? The work was too routine, too solitary, too stationary. He returned to Brown for his Ph.D. in geology, where he studied under Tim Mutch and Jim Head, who also taught a popular undergraduate course known as “Rocks for Jocks.” One day, Mutch said to Head, “You know, there are no fundamental problems left on Earth.” Mutch turned his attention to the planets and published an important – one is tempted to call it groundbreaking – book, The Geology of Mars, in 1976. This was a revolutionary idea, to study the geology of the Red Planet in a scientific manner. Geology claimed a gigantic new turf: the Solar System, and, by extension, planets and asteroids everywhere. All at once, geology became an integral part of the exploration of space, and Mutch was leading the way, training a new generation of planetary geologists, including Jim Garvin.

“At first glance,” Jim says, “Tim Mutch might have been perceived as a Jimmy Stewart type of character: tall, thin, amiable, and always above-board, almost self-deprecating. Deeper inside the man was his passion and resolve.” Occasionally, he’d remark to Jim, in an offhand way, “You’re a Mars person. Did you know that?” And at a party, he buttonholed his fast-talking young graduate student and said, “Jim, you and a few others are the future of Mars exploration, so it is yours to make it happen.” That was, he says, “heavy stuff” for a twenty-one-year-old grad student to hear.

As it happened, Brown played a role in analyzing data from the two Viking landers, so Jim had access to the latest developments in Mars research and analysis. He still revels in the memory as if it were his first love. It was his first love. In defiance of conventional geological practice, Mutch concentrated on the enigmatic landforms of Mars. “This was revolutionary thinking to me, as most geologists argue that studying typical landforms is the best way to learn how a surface was formed,” Jim says. “But Tim argued that finding those enigmatic landscapes might be more pivotal in the workings of Mars than background normal landscapes.”

In 1980, Tim Mutch led an expedition to the Himalayas. He made a successful ascent accompanied by two graduate students, but the weather turned foul during their descent. One of his crampons broke, and it was impossible for him to continue. The students wanted to carry him down, but he told them, “No way. Strap me in here. Go back to base camp and get help and come back for me.” By then, he might have been delirious from lack of oxygen. The students went down to base camp, and he probably thought they’d return in an hour to rescue him, but they had a rough time getting through the storm, and by the time they made it back, eight hours had passed, and there was no sign of Tim. His body was never found. The best guess is that the storm blew him off the mountain.

About a year later, Tim’s widow, Madeline, held a memorial gathering to which Jim was invited. She showed slides taken during her husband’s fatal descent. It was unbearably moving, especially for Jim, who had been Tim Mutch’s last graduate student. In an obscure but deeply felt way, Jim believed that as Mutch’s disciple, he was supposed to carry the torch – but where? He didn’t know, and even today, he still doesn’t know where, exactly, but he always hears Mutch’s voice in his ear, pointing the way to the Red Planet. And NASA was the only way to get there.

During Jim’s early career at the agency, an unofficial Mars Underground developed within NASA’s bureaucracy. This was a loosely-knit affiliation of scientists and engineers who maintained a keen interest in Mars, despite the agency’s lack of Mars programs, and who also maintained a fervent desire to return to the Red Planet, first with robotic spacecraft, and later, with people, if the money and the motivation could somehow be found. The Mars Underground published papers, held symposia, and tended the flame through difficult times.

These were not easy years for Jim. An instrument he’d proposed, a radar altimeter, was initially selected for a Mars mission, but later deselected, or dropped. Soon after, in January 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster threw the agency into crisis. A period of soul-searching ensued within NASA. He worked for Sally Ride, the astronaut, on a project designed to renew the agency. Out of copious discussions, the Ride committee produced a grand new vision for NASA: the United States must return to the moon, and, beyond that, establish a permanent lunar base. Their recommendations were never acted on. After the group disbanded, Jim’s laser altimeter was selected for the Mars Observer mission, which ended in catastrophe in September 1993.

Finally, in 1996, Mars’s time came round again. First, there was NASA’s announcement of the discovery of nano-fossils in a meteorite from Mars. Suddenly, as one scientist put it, NASA was bitten by the life-on-Mars bug. The discovery, by a team of NASA scientists, gave the agency a focus it had been lacking since the Challenger disaster a decade earlier. The following year, the Pathfinder spacecraft settled on Mars on the Fourth of July, and its miniature rover rolled down a ramp and inched across the surface of the Red Planet, acting as a robotic geologist. “We can now get to the Red Planet for the price of a big-budget Hollywood movie,” NASA claimed. Jim puts it even more simply: “Mars is back.” It’s his mantra.

The Keflavik Naval Air Station, where Jim and I are billeted in Iceland, is a sprawling NATO base that once served as an essential Cold War outpost. These days, it’s mostly a stopover for young European pilots who bring their planes in from France or Italy; they drink a lot, sleep a little, and depart at first light. Although Jim is a civil servant, his quasi-military status becomes evident the moment he enters the base. He salutes everybody, and they salute back – at least, some do. “My civil service status grade is equivalent to a Colonel’s,” he says, “but no one here is aware of that.”

We’re assigned to the Bachelor Officers Quarters, cement barracks strongly reminiscent of college dormitories. The penetrating odor of burned pizza crust wafts through the halls; the walls reverberate with blasts of heavy metal music. Occasionally, you hear squeals and shouts from girls who may or may not belong here. When you look out the window, you see a landscape so flat and featureless it could be Nebraska. There are schools, playgrounds, pickup trucks, a movie theater, a bowling alley, and a Wendy’s where they play “God Bless America,” country-style, over the PA system. The unofficial motto of the base might be: “Keflavik, a Nice Place to Raise a Family.”

In July, it’s light all the time, and the only way you can tell it’s late in Keflavik is that it gets very quiet. For a few hours, there are no cars zipping around the roads, no fighter jets streaking overhead. Around midnight, there’s a sort of dusk, a suggestion of darkness like a shadow across the sky, but it soon passes, and brightness returns by 2 AM or so.

A few days after our Surtsey expedition, Jim goes forth in search of glaciers to measure. We head out in a Land Rover Discovery across the treeless, craggy, doom-laden landscape, in which people, or, for that matter, all life forms, even grass, seem out of place. Mars on Earth. “You have to remember, Iceland, except in the highlands, looks like the ocean floor,” Jim says. “Now, what if I were Spock in ‘Star Trek,’ looking at the Earth from the Starship Enterprise? Captain Kirk says, ‘Spock, what do you see? Put the scanners on.’ I’d say, ‘I see a watery planet. It’s a planet dominated by oceans.’ The land is an insignificant fraction of what makes up this planet. If we could peel away the water and look at the Earth from space, planetary scientists would say, ‘I see what the Earth does. It has a large system of very thin crustal blocks that are moving and being eaten up in some places and being regenerated in others.’”

Jim catches his breath and swerves to avoid a small herd of scrawny Icelandic sheep. “Now we are starting to add a tapestry of new measurements from Mars Global Surveyor, as we try to understand all these different surface units on Mars. Scientists want to find hot pits, if there are any, just like the ones you saw on Surtsey. Now, how big were they on Surtsey?”

Just a few inches wide, I remind him, and he points out that it would be very difficult to see such tiny formations from space, even at high resolution. “You would need an extremely sensitive thermal scanner in orbit.” Such a device actually exists, but it would not, on its own, be able to detect alien life. Scientists also look for biomarkers, that is, distinctive signatures of life. And they seek signs of an energy or nutrient system capable of sustaining life. “On Mars, we want to find playas, dried up sea-beds, where there might have been standing bodies of water. We see playas on Earth, in the dried lake beds of the western United States, the dry lakes of Australia. On Mars, these playas may be even bigger. The topography measured by the laser going around Mars can find those areas for us.” So playas may hold clues to life on Mars, and volcanoes may also lead scientists to Martian gardens of Eden. It may just be Garvin’s bias, because he is crater expert, but he thinks volcanoes are an important component in the design for living – another reason that Iceland appeals to him. “Iceland has volcanoes that are active, with ice, certainly something that happened on Mars. We have volcanoes interacting with ground water, very important, because there may be ground water on Mars. We don’t know. And we have volcanoes here producing new lava at great rates. Some of the volcanoes on Mars have sustained high eruption rates for hundreds or even thousands of years. That’s what it takes to make an Olympus Mons” – and Olympus Mons is so big that it couldn’t exist on Earth. “There’s too much gravity here, and anything aspiring to Olympus Mons-like grandeur would collapse under its own weight.” He likens its shape to the much smaller lava shield volcanoes of Iceland. The term is meant to suggest a Viking shield turned on its side; a lava shield volcano slopes very gently. “It’s the most common landform made by volcanism in the Solar System. Mother Nature does not know how to do it any simpler.”

Later, we coast past an immense, dry lake bed studded with pebbles. We get out and walk across its dusty surface. It would not be surprising to see a pterodactyl soar overhead, or a spacecraft descend from the skies. This is Nature’s rough draft, a land of possibilities. It’s not as polished as later versions, but the crude landscape yields its secrets and intentions to geologists. “When the water dries up, it leaves behind a lag deposit of rocks,” Jim remarks. The rocks range in size from small cobbles up to large boulders. “And anything bigger,” he announces, “is called a real big boulder! The bright stuff you see here is a layer of desiccated, cemented dust made of clay. That is what comes out of suspension when water evaporates. We expect to see signatures of that kind of stuff on Mars.” He points to a fissure in the soil. “See this desiccation crack? This is what we hope to see on Mars.”

We head north until we reach an enormous glacier: Langjökull. On the other side, its summit obscured by cloud cover, is the great volcano known as Ok. The stony, dusty ground, reddish brown, contrasts with the huge wall of ice. I slowly become aware of the landscape’s resemblance to images of the Martian icecaps, those vast dull white fields rising out of the reddish Martian desert. The more we look, the more striking the resemblance to the northern latitudes of Mars. Our isolation feels complete. No birds or cars disturb the pure silence. No airplanes streak by overhead; the atmosphere is untarnished by plumes of smoke. The spectral glacier rises impressively from the dark red rock, its façade reaching into the clouds and mist, massive, gloomy, impersonal, hypnotic. Nearly everything looks alien and supremely indifferent to the two tiny human figures in the midst of this vast, primeval sanctuary. Take all the measurements you want of Mars, but walking through this strange and unnerving place suggests, as nothing else can, what it would be like to traverse the surface of the Red Planet.

Suddenly a pair of bicyclists disturbs us, a man and a woman, en route to a distant town or campsite. It’s a relief to share the oppressively majestic Martian landscape with others, even briefly. And then they’re gone, gliding into the distance on their bicycles, and we’re alone again. For once, Jim is speechless. We return to the car in silence.

When we reach Keflavik, Jim drives us over to the tarmac, saluting smartly whenever he passes a military guard. At last, the afflicted P-3 aircraft is here. It looks all right from a distance, but a closer inspection reveals oil leaking from the nose, creating an embarrassing, 125-foot long stain on the ground, beginning directly beneath the aircraft. There’s talk that the Keflavik Naval Air Station may insist the P-3 leave immediately so that it does not foul the runway.

Jim trots to the base’s weather station, where the latest satellite data are available. The weather station glitters with state-of-the art equipment; the place is so big and solid it looks like the bridge on an aircraft carrier. Although it’s sunny here in Keflavik today, the instruments reveal there is a weather front moving in, and steel gray clouds are visible on the horizon. It’s now about 3:30 in the afternoon, and sometime after 5:00, the plane is supposed to be in the air, on a six-hour mapping mission. Right away Jim sees it will likely be too cloudy to take data over Surtsey, so instead they’ll survey a floodplain known as the Sandur, located in the Eastern portion of Iceland. Given the weather and mechanical constraints, this will likely be the only day they will be able to take measurements.

Jim sits at a computer terminal in the Weather Station and begins composing a report to the base commander about his activities here in Iceland; at the same time, he chatters with me and an affable young naval attaché. He types rapidly, never making a mistake – “…As part of NASA’s continuing research interests in Iceland as a microcosm for global Earth environmental change and as a natural analogy for landscapes on Mars, an aircraft remote sensing campaign was conducted during the period from 20 July to 26 July, 1998. A NASA P-3 aircraft, outfitted with two scanning airborne laser altimeters, an ice penetrating radar, a nadir-viewing digital video imaging system, and multiple GPS receivers, was deployed to Iceland …” – and when he’s done, he rips his report from the typewriter, drops it off at the base commander’s office, and trots back to the P-3.

He bounds up the ladder to the cabin, which looks like the inside of an Eyewitness News van, crammed with television monitors and wires, strewn with Styrofoam coffee cups, and devoid of creature comforts. Within this funky hi-tech cave, he confers with the navigator, Jon Sonntag, and the two pilots. They plot coordinates. They discuss backup plans. They propose flight paths. “Here’s the game plan,” Jim says, tracing the route on the map with his finger. “Take off, come around … here … and then straight to the Sandur. Surtsey looks really good. Now come over here and do this middle line. That’s the number one priority. If that looks good, see if we can do the north line. At that point, we call the option for doing the south line. If it looks like there are no clouds over this icecap, we might be able to sneak up and come around. In the past we always went way up here and came down. I’m afraid that, unless we can throw a real sharp turn, we can’t do it. We fly at eighteen hundred feet.”

All they need is a working airplane. José’ is the mechanic responsible for maintaining the leaky P-3. He stands about five foot three or maybe four, stocky, with a scruffy, uncertain beard, and a good-natured grin. Jose’, who’s American, likes his wine, and he likes his beer. In the evenings, he’s the first to hit the strip bars of Reykjavik, such as they are. The fate of the P-3 now rests in his hands. Even as they tell me stories of his wild doings, everyone about to fly on this plane expresses confidence in him. (Frankly, I wouldn’t let him near my car.) He works slowly and methodically on the plane, and when he’s done, declares it good to go. The engines roar to life.

The white P-3, with Jim inside, taxis far out onto the tarmac and ascends to the skies over Iceland. While they’re in the air, the pilots do most of the work, for they have to maintain alignment not only with the surface of the planet below but with the Global Positioning System satellite above. This means the plane can’t wander more than six feet off course. They map the Sandur, and, weather predictions to the contrary, they do Surtsey, as well. They do their mapping with reference not to the Earth’s surface, which is always shifting, but to Earth’s center, which is about as close to an absolute, fixed point as you can get.

Mission accomplished, the P-3 returns to Keflavik after midnight. To everyone’s surprise, the aircraft has performed flawlessly that evening, laying down precise tracks over Surtsey and a glacier to the north. “We laid down fourteen lines!” Jim announces. “It was fantastic. Staggered just the way we wanted them. And the weather was great. It was sunny and clear on the island. I’ve got digital video, nose cone video. We’re going to have the best map of Surtsey ever made, no question. The flight was as tranquil as bath water. Even the leak stopped by the time we landed.”

To celebrate, Jim and Jon Sonntag and I go out for a beer. After a long day’s work in the field, no self-respecting NASA scientist thinks of anything but a beer. The drinking etiquette is to avoid brand names and even recognizable microbreweries in favor of obscure local product. Eventually, we find a little place overlooking the large bay, where they serve frosted glass tankards of Viking, an Icelandic beer. We sit in front of a picture window overlooking the steel gray expanse of Keflavik Bay. A few lights flicker across the water, but not many.

Having just spent the last five hours in geological nirvana, Jim talks on and on about what a great mission it’s been, while Jon brings up a slightly different subject: the kind of woman he’d like to meet and settle down with. He’s from Houston, but he wants to meet a different kind of girl from the ones he’s known in Texas. Maybe here, in Iceland. Maybe even in New York City. He asks me about the women in New York, where I live, and I tell him the best thing to do is visit and see for himself. He pauses and smiles shyly, contemplating the prospect. He just might do that.

This type of talk makes Jim uncomfortable. Throughout our time in Iceland, a lot of stray remarks have escaped his lips about power tools, about the power washer he was using just the other day with his son Zack (“That thing was so powerful,” he said with genuine conviction, “that it could take the paint right off a car”), about the Ford F-150 pickup truck he’d like to own, and about a Hummer (“How much do those things cost?”), but nothing about women. Which doesn’t mean that women don’t look at him. They do, indeed. His handsome dark Irish looks, his snappy NASA flight jacket, and his politeness combined with an occasional air of confusion tend to attract women.

He met his wife Cindy by accident in 1990 when she was working at NASA for a contractor. It seems there was another J.B. Garvin with whom she was doing business, and Jim kept getting e-mails intended for the other one. So he got in touch with her to clear up the confusion. He found himself talking on the phone with her, and she coaxed him gently into asking her on a date. “I often get too focused on my work. I wished I didn’t, but that’s the way it is,” he confides. Cindy was determined to change all that.

When they came face to face, Cindy already knew what he looked like; to this day, Jim is not sure how she knew. They went to a hockey game, and not long after that, moved in together. Cindy recognized that his interests were a little unusual. Here’s a Phi Beta Kappa from Brown, a Ph.D., who says his most valuable possession in the world is a complete set of Jim Bunning baseball cards. He owns practically every Bunning card ever issued, tracing his pitching career from 1954 through the 1980s. Cindy liked shopping, dining out, and other normal activities. That was fine with Jim, he wanted to be with someone normal, someone who would keep him in touch with daily life. They married in 1992. We sit drinking and talking until the sky begins to brighten almost to daytime intensity, and we return to base a little after two in the morning.

The next day, while packing to leave, Jim ponders what to do with the data he’s collected during the week in Iceland. He must get it out – in the new NASA, nothing is secret – so he will post it on various Internet sites, for starters. He will write multiple papers, some of which will appear in scientific journals. He will give lectures. He will share the information with Icelandic scientists. “It’s my job as a research scientist at NASA to publish the results in Science, Nature, and other journals. That’s my job, to disseminate.” He will have plenty to discuss, for a crowded schedule of Mars exploration lies ahead. “We’re launching again in December and sending a small probe to the south polar ice cap on Mars, which we think is all frozen carbon dioxide. It’s so cold, one hundred to two hundred and fifty degrees centigrade below zero. We’re also asking other, very fundamental questions: Did life start on Mars? If it did, is it dormant, frozen, fossilized? Is it still there? Is it all microbial? What can it tell us about extremophile life on Earth?” Jim asks, savoring each question.

“I think the potential for Mars is totally untapped, and that’s something of a surprise,” he continues. “When we first got there in the sixties with the Mariner spacecraft, we thought, ‘Oh, my God, there are going to be Martians, canals, it’s going to be great.’ But when we got there, it looked like the moon. Mars puzzled us. We returned with Viking in the mid-seventies, looking for life, and instead we found the great arctic desert of Mars. We saw frost form in the winter, and we saw snow. We saw rocks and pits that reminded us of gas bubbles in the volcanic rocks you see here in Iceland, but we didn’t see the obvious signatures of life. We’ve got to go back. We’ve got to understand this place. We’ll have a series of robotic voyages to set the stage for bringing back samples of Mars to Earth to investigate the chemistry and – maybe – signs of life. And then someday we’ll put human beings there, God and the great American economy willing.”

The taxi cab heading home from JFK Airport feels as cramped as Oscar’s co-pilot seat. I’m probably in more danger barreling along the Grand Central Parkway than I was aloft in Oscar’s little Aerospatiale. Night falls for the first time in a week; how strange the darkness seems. After experiencing Iceland’s white nights and thinking intensely about what it’s like to walk across the surface of Mars, I find that nothing on Earth looks quite the same. The initiation is over, and back home, I reflect on a whimsical passage from Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi novel, The Martian Chronicles, published in 1950:

The ship came down from space. It came from the stars and the black velocities, and the shining movements, and the silent gulfs of space. It was a new ship; it had fire in its body and men in its metal cells, and it moved with a clean silence, fiery and warm. In it were seventeen men, including a captain … Now it was decelerating with metal efficiency in the upper Martian atmospheres. It was still a thing of beauty and strength. It had moved in the midnight waters of space like a pale sea leviathan; it had passed the ancient moon and thrown itself onward into one nothingness following another. The men within had been battered, thrown about, sickened, made well again, each in his turn. One man had died, but now the remaining sixteen, with their eyes clear in their heads and their faces pressed to the thick glass ports, watched Mars swing up under them.

“Mars!” cried Navigator Lustig.

“Good old Mars!” said Samuel Hinkston, archeologist.

According to Bradbury, this landing, the third human expedition to Mars, was supposed to occur in April 2000. NASA is running a little behind schedule, but sends spacecraft to Mars as often as budgets and planetary orbits allow. For now, they are robotic missions; in time, they will bring people to the Red Planet.

Welcome to the new Martian chronicles.