Plot summary
Meteorite hunter Nestor Masangkay arrives on Isla Desolación, an island near Cape Horn in Chile, tracking a possible meteorite. Using a tomographic scanner, Masangkay confirms that not only is there a meteorite present under the ground, but that it is incredibly massive. Excited, Masangkay digs down to unearth a small portion of the meteorite and is subsequently killed in a flash of light.
Some months later, Masangkay's equipment is recovered by a Yaghan native and eventually makes its way to New York billionaire Palmer Lloyd, a collector of rare and exotic archaeological artifacts. Wanting the meteorite for his soon-to-be-opened museum, Lloyd hires Masangkay's former partner, Sam McFarlane, to confirm the meteorite's existence and assist in its recovery. He also hires Effective Engineering Solutions, Inc., a high-priced "problem solving" firm, to design a plan for the unprecedented task of recovering and transporting what has been confirmed by McFarlane to be the largest meteorite ever discovered.
Eli Glinn, the president of EES, puts together a comprehensive plan to effect the recovery, accounting for literally every complication he deems possible. To effect this plan he composes a team to augment Lloyd's personnel, notably including Rachel Amira, EES's brilliant yet grating mathematics expert, and Sally Britton, an out-of-work supertanker captain whose last ship crashed while she was drunk and on duty. Despite Britton's public image as a dangerous alcoholic, analysis by EES has led Glinn to peg her as professional, talented, and motivated never to fail again. After meeting her in person, Glinn finds himself becoming attracted to her.
Glinn's expedition sets off for Cape Horn in a brand new oil supertanker, the Rolvaag, retrofitted with various high tech equipment but disguised to appear as worn down, barely functional ship, traveling under the guise of a failing mining company searching for iron ore. Despite possessing a legitimate mining agreement to this effect, Glinn is forced to bribe local Chilean officials for access to Isla Desolación, falsely confessing that they are searching for gold in order to allay any further suspicions. Both of these actions are witnessed by Commandante Vallenar, a locally stationed Chilean Navy officer, who objects angrily but is powerless to stop the bribes from being accepted.
Once on Isla Desolación, operations start almost immediately. The body of Masangkay is recovered and analyzed by the expedition's doctor, who concludes that he was killed by a lightning strike; McFarlane attributes this to the meteorite acting as a lightning rod. Once properly examined, the meteorite is shown to be much smaller — and denser — than initially expected. However, when Glinn's crew attempts to lift the meteorite using hydraulic jacks the units fail, killing two members of the expedition. Tests McFarlane run on a sample of the meteorite reveal that the exterior of the meteorite is a single element, not an alloy, and has an approximate atomic number of 177. Though this explains why the jacks failed — the weight of the meteorite is somewhere in the area of 25,000 tons, more than double what was expected — it is also staggering scientific discovery: no known element has an atomic number anywhere near 177. McFarlane speculates that this element is part of the undiscovered elemental "island of stability", and further states that the meteorite could only have come from outside the solar system. During this time, McFarlane also becomes romantically involved with Amira.
Now properly accounting for its weight, Glinn's crew is able to load the meteorite onto a massive cart which will move the meteorite to the Rolvaag. That evening, Commandante Vallenar sends a member of his crew, Timmers, to investigate Glinn's excavation. Timmers infiltrates the dig site, kills a guard, and enters the area housing the meteorite. Surprised by what he discovers, Timmers reaches out to touch the meteorite and is fatally electrocuted. Though confused at first, the expedition eventually is able to piece together what happened, concluding that the meteorite discharges electricity on contact. Plans to move the meteorite continue, albeit much more carefully. At the same time, Commandante Vallenar positions himself off the coast of Isla Desolación to prevent the Rolvaag from leaving. Glinn meets with the Commandante in an attempt to secure safe passage, admitting that the expedition is there to recover a meteorite, but is rebuffed by Vallenar.
The next evening Glinn and his crew load the meteorite onto the ship under cover of fog, leaving lights and running equipment on Isla Desolación to serve as a distraction, then break for the open sea. When Commandante Vallenar fires on the Rolvaag and gives chase Glinn detonates two explosive devices surreptitiously placed on the Commandante's propellers during his visit, disabling the Chilean ship. This proves to be a temporary solution, as Vallenar's crew is able to replace one of the damaged propellers. By this time the Rolvaag is well on its way to international waters, and Glinn predicts that Vallenar will not pass the Chilean border (however, the doctrine of hot pursuit appears to allow this). When the Commandante continues pursuing them, Glinn belatedly realizes that Timmers must have been Vallenar's son; Vallenar has realized that Timmers is dead and intends to kill them out of vengeance. Captain Britton also notes that Vallenar's course has now cut them off from any chance of help. With no other choice, Glinn orders the ship to proceed south towards the Ice Limit, the border of Antarctic waters, where icebergs and even ice islands are common.
During the Rolvaag's flight the meteorite discharges again, though this time without anyone touching its surface. Eventually McFarlane and Amira figure out what causes the electrical discharges: contact with salt-containing liquids such as human sweat or ocean water. Meanwhile, Vallenar's ship closes on the Rolvaag over the course of several hours, getting into firing range just as the ship enters an area of icebergs. Though Captain Britton is able to avoid destruction by feigning the ship being in distress, eventually Vallenar inflicts enough damage to disable the ship completely. As his vessel closes between two ice islands to destroy the Rolvaag, a team of Glinn's men detonate explosives on one of the towering icebergs, shearing off a massive chunk of ice which capsizes and sinks the Commandante's ship.
Though no longer pursued by the Chilean Commandante, the Rolvaag is now dead in the water, and the nearest rescue vessel is unable to approach for several hours due to a storm in the area. The continuing rough seas begin to take their toll on the ship; eventually Captain Britton realizes that the meteorite is severely unbalancing the ship, and must be jettisoned to prevent the Rolvaag from being snapped in half. At first both Palmer Lloyd and Sam McFarlane object vehemently to the idea, but after some argument admit that it may be the only way to save the ship and themselves. Glinn prepares to activate the jettisoning system, but abruptly stops, declaring that he is certain the ship will survive. Attempts to convince him otherwise fail, and as he is the only person with access to the system the crew has no choice but to abandon ship. Glinn moves to the meteorite holding area, attempting to secure the meteorite, only to discover that most of the securing devices have failed. Undaunted, he continues his efforts until he is interrupted by Captain Britton, who begs him to leave the ship with her in a lifeboat, confessing, "I could love you, Eli." Moments later the meteorite makes contact with the ocean, discharging a massive amount of electricity.
McFarlane, Amira, Lloyd, and the rest of the crew watch from the lifeboats as the Rolvaag snaps in half and sinks. The lifeboats are ill-prepared for the harsh Antarctic waters, and many of the crew start to suffer from hypothermia immediately. The survivors take refuge on an ice island, where they start to slowly succumb to the extreme conditions. Amira attempts to tell McFarlane something she concluded about the meteorite, giving him a CD containing the test data they collected, but before she can finish she dies. McFarlane begins to slip away as well, but before he can the crew is rescued by a helicopter.
Three days later, Palmer Lloyd and the handful of survivors are recovering inside a British Antarctic science station. Sam McFarlane arrives in Lloyd's room and begins to tell him about Amira's attempts to tell him about her discovery. Though Lloyd refuses to engage him, McFarlane continues speaking, describing a series of small ocean floor earthquakes recorded at a specific Antarctic location, and then revealing that the Rolvaag sank at the same location. He finishes by saying that he has figured out what Amira wanted to say: that what they recovered was not a meteorite, it was a seed, and that it is now sprouting.
Transport in Antarctica has transformed from explorers crossing the isolated remote area of Antarctica by foot to a more open era due to human technologies enabling more convenient and faster transport, predominantly by air and water, but also by land as well. Transportation technologies on a remote area like Antarctica need to be able to deal with extremely low temperatures and continuous winds to ensure the travelers' safety. Due to the fragility of the Antarctic environment, only a limited amount of transport movements can take place and sustainable transportation technologies have to be used to reduce the ecological footprint. The infrastructure of land, water and air transport needs to be safe and sustainable. Currently thousands of tourists and hundreds of scientists a year depend on the Antarctic transportation system.
The history of Antarctica emerges from early Western theories of a vast continent, known as Terra Australis, believed to exist in the far south of the globe. The term Antarctic, referring to the opposite of the Arctic Circle, was coined by Marinus of Tyre in the 2nd century AD.
Elephant Island is an ice-covered, mountainous island off the coast of Antarctica in the outer reaches of the South Shetland Islands, in the Southern Ocean. The island is situated 245 kilometres north-northeast of the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, 1,253 kilometres west-southwest of South Georgia, 935 kilometres south of the Falkland Islands, and 885 kilometres southeast of Cape Horn. It is within the Antarctic claims of Argentina, Chile and the United Kingdom.
Nimrod was a wooden-hulled, three-masted sailing ship with auxiliary steam engine that was built in Scotland in 1867 as a whaler. She was the ship with which Ernest Shackleton made his Nimrod Expedition to Antarctica in 1908–09. After the expedition she returned to commercial service, and in 1919 she was wrecked in the North Sea with the loss of ten members of her crew.
The Belgian Antarctic Expedition of 1897–1899 was the first expedition to winter in the Antarctic region. Led by Adrien de Gerlache de Gomery aboard the RV Belgica, it was the first Belgian Antarctic expedition and is considered the first expedition of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. Among its members were Frederick Cook and Roald Amundsen, explorers who would later attempt the respective conquests of the North and South Poles.
The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914–1917 is considered to be the last major expedition of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. Conceived by Sir Ernest Shackleton, the expedition was an attempt to make the first land crossing of the Antarctic continent. After Roald Amundsen's South Pole expedition in 1911, this crossing remained, in Shackleton's words, the "one great main object of Antarctic journeyings". Shackleton's expedition failed to accomplish this objective, but became recognized instead as an epic feat of endurance.
Endurance was the three-masted barquentine in which Sir Ernest Shackleton and a crew of 27 men sailed for the Antarctic on the 1914–1917 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. The ship, originally named Polaris, was built at Framnæs shipyard and launched in 1912 from Sandefjord in Norway. When one of her her commissioners, the Belgian Gerlache, went bankrupt, the remaining one sold the ship for less than the shipyard had charged - but as Lars Christensen was the owner of Framnæs, there was no hardship involved., the ship was bought by Shackleton in January 1914 for the expedition, which would be her first voyage. A year later, she became trapped in pack ice and finally sank in the Weddell Sea off Antarctica on 21 November 1915. All of the crew survived her sinking and were eventually rescued in 1916 after using the ship's boats to travel to Elephant Island and Shackleton, the ship's captain Frank Worsley, and four others made a voyage to seek help.
SS Southern Cross was a steam-powered sealing vessel that operated primarily in Norway and Newfoundland and Labrador.
SY Aurora was a 580-ton barque-rigged steam yacht built by Alexander Stephen and Sons Ltd. in Dundee, Scotland, in 1876, for the Dundee Seal and Whale Fishing Company. It was 165 feet (50 m) long with a 30-foot (9.1 m) beam. The hull was made of oak, sheathed with greenheart and lined with fir. The bow was a mass of solid wood reinforced with steel-plate armour. The heavy side frames were braced by two levels of horizontal oak beams. Its primary use was whaling in the northern seas, and it was built sturdily enough to withstand the heavy weather and ice that would be encountered there. That strength proved useful for Antarctic exploration as well and between 1911 and 1917 it made five trips to the continent, both for exploration and rescue missions.
The DiscoveryExpedition of 1901–1904, known officially as the British National Antarctic Expedition, was the first official British exploration of the Antarctic regions since the voyage of James Clark Ross sixty years earlier (1839–1843). Organized on a large scale under a joint committee of the Royal Society and the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), the new expedition carried out scientific research and geographical exploration in what was then largely an untouched continent. It launched the Antarctic careers of many who would become leading figures in the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, including Robert Falcon Scott who led the expedition, Ernest Shackleton, Edward Wilson, Frank Wild, Tom Crean and William Lashly.
The NimrodExpedition of 1907–1909, otherwise known as the British Antarctic Expedition, was the first of three successful expeditions to the Antarctic led by Ernest Shackleton and his second expedition to the Antarctic. Its main target, among a range of geographical and scientific objectives, was to be first to the South Pole. This was not attained, but the expedition's southern march reached a Farthest South latitude of 88° 23' S, just 97.5 nautical miles from the pole. This was by far the longest southern polar journey to that date and a record convergence on either Pole. A separate group led by Welsh Australian geology professor Edgeworth David reached the estimated location of the South Magnetic Pole, and the expedition also achieved the first ascent of Mount Erebus, Antarctica's second highest volcano.
Nils Otto Gustaf Nordenskjöld was a Fenno-Swedish geologist, geographer, and polar explorer.
Luis Alberto Pardo Villalón was a Chilean Navy officer who, in August 1916, commanded the steam tug Yelcho to rescue the 22 stranded crewmen of Sir Ernest Shackleton's ship, Endurance, part of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. The crewmen were stranded on Elephant Island, an ice-covered mountainous island off the coast of Antarctica in the outer reaches of the South Shetland Islands, in the Southern Ocean.
Desolación Island is an island at the western end of the Strait of Magellan in the Magallanes y la Antártica Chilena Region, Chile.
Farthest South refers to the most southerly latitude reached by explorers before the first successful expedition to the South Pole in 1911.
The Southern CrossExpedition, otherwise known as the British Antarctic Expedition, 1898–1900, was the first British venture of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, and the forerunner of the more celebrated journeys of Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton. The brainchild of the Anglo-Norwegian explorer Carsten Borchgrevink, it was the first expedition to over-winter on the Antarctic mainland, the first to visit the Great Ice Barrier—later known as the Ross Ice Shelf—since Sir James Clark Ross's groundbreaking expedition of 1839 to 1843, and the first to effect a landing on the Barrier's surface. It also pioneered the use of dogs and sledges in Antarctic travel.
The islands of Chile encompass the various islands that the government of Chile has sovereignty over. By far the majority of these are the islands in the south of the country. Chile has one of the world's longest coastlines, and one of the most dangerous for boats; it is more than 4,000 kilometres (2,500 mi) long and has at least 43,471 islands.
Belgica was a barque-rigged steamship that was built in 1884 by Christian Brinch Jørgensen at Svelvik, Norway as the whaler Patria. In 1896, she was purchased by Adrien de Gerlache for conversion to a research ship, taking part in the Belgian Antarctic Expedition of 1897–1901, becoming the first ship to overwinter in the Antarctic. In 1902, she was sold to Philippe, Duke of Orléans and used on expeditions to the Arctic in 1905 and from 1907 to 1909.
The Ross expedition was a voyage of scientific exploration of the Antarctic in 1839 to 1843, led by James Clark Ross, with two unusually strong warships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. It explored what is now called the Ross Sea and discovered the Ross Ice Shelf. On the expedition, Ross discovered the Transantarctic Mountains and the volcanoes Mount Erebus and Mount Terror, named after each ship. The young botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker made his name on the expedition.
Beyond The Ice Limit is a techno-thriller novel by American authors Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. The book is a sequel to their 2000 book The Ice Limit and was published on May 17, 2016 by Grand Central Publishing. It is the fourth book in Preston and Child's Gideon Crew series.
