At a remote boundary, three-hundred miles distant, the broad expanse of the Greenland Ice Sheet comes to an end. There, on mountainous coastal margins, in steep-walled fjords, and in tremendous glacial valleys, ice cedes to ocean and rock.  The powerful dynamism of this ice landscape is apparent in the rugged interface of calving fronts, crevasse zones, ice falls and steep termini. Yet the ice in those distant coastal glaciers, millennia past, fell lightly as snow here on the high plateau. Its ten-thousand foot descent to the coast, realized over time scales spanning civilizations, would transport the ice between two landscapes so different as to be unrecognizable.

Creatures of land, we find that the edges of the ice sheet are the easiest to approach. These are the places to which trails lead. At these margins, the ice adopts sloping, fractured, tumbled forms. Though representing a tiny periphery of the great ice body, this dramatic interface is the outward face of the ice sheet: the foaming waves crashing against an ocean cliff, remembered long after we return home. But on the high plateau of the ice sheet, on the great ocean-like expanse of the interior, the ice surface is a world transformed. Here, at the very top of the ice sheet dome, a smooth, level sweep extends in every direction. To the limits of human perception, this landscape is perfectly flat, a level plane, the platonic form. Stepping across the snow, under the burden of heavy gear, a human can raise their eyes into the wind and witness a geometric perfection broken only by the ripples of sastrugi. 

Our small cluster of structures floats on this expanse of ice. Like snow fences on a mountain pass, these structures disrupt the flow of blowing snow, and accumulate snow drifts in their vicinity. Wandering amid the buildings in the December darkness, pondering deeply on the flatness of the landscape, you’re likely to step off an unexpected drop or stumble headfirst into a drift. Particularly just against the structures, the drifting can be extreme, with big sheer drops that are discussed around the breakfast table and flagged off against a disoriented mistake. The drifts are steepest near the buildings, but distinct tendrils of snow reach for hundreds of feet. Like wind-cast shadows, these long, sometimes eerie traces of the buildings are subtly rearranged with each shift in wind direction. Hard-packed underfoot, the low but extensive drifts offer easy-traveling pathways across the landscape. 

Steadily, inexorably, all structures are engulfed by drifts. In this land without a thaw, drifts don’t diminish in the summer, and within a few years, the tide of snow covers windows, doors, even roof hatches. Elevating the buildings, a periodic imperative as they become inaccessible, requires the major effort of hydraulically lifting buildings up on their pilings or dragging them to higher ground using a bulldozer. But here a problem has been created: the raised buildings, which had grown low to the surface and had almost ceased to cause drifting, are now fully exposed to the wind and soon began generating substantial new drifts. For the last 20+ years, human structures at this site have undergone this drift-raise cycle, and after these years, our buildings now sit on a shallow hill. It’s very slight–imperceptible from most angles. But in a landscape with scarce relief, the sudden perception of a slope is striking.

Leaving the buildings behind, and heading out into the expanse, the plateau reassumes its blank expression. A kilometer out, camp is plainly visible across a small wedge of the horizon, and a few lines of weathered bamboo flags, snapping in the wind, trace out travel routes and science boundaries. At this distance, the snow surface has become completely wild, and the vast openness starts to tug at one’s attention. Moving seven kilometers out, most buildings are lost to sight, and the feeling of space and exposure is plain. The Big House, high on stilts, and bearing its unmistakable antenna dome, is still visible in the distance. And somewhere around 25 kilometers out, all signs of human presence are lost, save for one’s companions and one’s own footprints. A weathered skier, pulling a sledge across the ice sheet, might pass at this distance without detecting camp, without suspecting the presence of hot showers and fried steaks. 

When an occasional contrail marks the sky, the temporal context snaps into focus: those are planes, this is a modern landscape. But when the sky clears, this frozen plateau becomes indistinguishable from parallel landscapes across billion of years of Earth’s history, and perhaps even indistinguishable from the frozen surface of an alien world.