빙하 일기 — 사라지는 얼음의 계절

The Long Walk In

The helicopter left us on the gray moraine at dawn, and then the whole valley went silent. I stood among crates of drilling equipment and listened to meltwater ticking somewhere beneath the stones. My name is Hana Sohn, and I study glaciers for a living, which mostly means I study loss. For the next ninety days, this river of ancient ice would be my laboratory, my office, and my home.

The glacier is called Aster, and it has been flowing down this valley for at least seven thousand years. On the map it looks permanent, a white tongue pressed between two dark ridges of rock. But maps lie by standing still, and Aster has retreated nearly two kilometers since my professor first surveyed it. Our job this season was simple to state and hard to do: measure exactly how fast it is dying.

Our camp was three yellow tents anchored to bare rock, plus a weather station humming in the wind. Every evening I wrote the day's numbers into a waterproof notebook, then added a few honest sentences. The numbers were for the science, and the sentences were for me. That notebook became the diary that gives this story its name.