Free The Ice Lovers by Jean McNeil

Australia, Greece. She saw that he was unconvinced. To him, she knew, her experiments were just senseless killing of animals that would die anyway. Not that they would die straightaway: they might live for an indeterminate amount of time. But it was already proven that the oceans around base were warming so quickly, it might be only another twenty years before they were all gone.
    Back in the lab, she removed the layers that kept her alive in the coldest waters in the world. She would not be able to swim for nearly two years. Although she would dive in the tar-black Antarctic waters, diving below the ice protected by layers of polyeurothane, rubber, steel; a choking rubber seal gripping her neck and hands, her prison suit of seams and zips and watertight seals. But she would not feel water slipping over her skin.
    Lately she has been having dreams of swimming in lakes in Canada, where her father took them to live for six years when she was a child. There were so many lakes, no one had bothered to name some of them. In the city where her father teaches at university is a famous oceanography institute. She does her undergraduate degree there, returning to the UK with an accent she will struggle to shake off. She attends a concrete early 1970s university, an eminent if not elite institution where she does a graduate degree, then begins a PhD.
    She has had to prod herself to be ambitious, to a degree, and acquire some specialist knowledge of the world which would guarantee herself a place in it. Her parents’ professional background are influences, but also she is a woman of her generation in that she refuses to leave anything to chance, fate, biology, never mind a man. She studies marine biology and oceanography, struggling through the maths and physics courses but excelling in biology and chemistry. It is the diving she loves. There, beneath the surface, she is unburdened from the world above and its greasy mechanics, her father’s long-term affair with a colleague – the real reason for their emigration to Canada, she will learn much later, was to follow his lover there – her mother’s unhappiness.
    In the Antarctic she dreams of the city they lived in for the first time in many years, its wide, eventless streets named after the billowing trees which cover them: Chestnut, Walnut, Larch, Tamarack. The city of trees, she called it, when they moved there. She asked her father why all the names in their new home were from animals, flowers, trees, and words in a language she had never known existed, with words that sounded like water running over stones in a brook. ‘Because there’s no history here,’ her father had said – this from a history professor – ‘because it’s such a new country. There haven’t been enough people. There hasn’t been enough time.’
    She dreams of the swarms of mayflies, strange locusts, mosquitoes, the pestering blackflies, the deerflies and horseflies that tormented her as she swam. She dreams of the roads the colour of faded denim. The giant boulders, slates of shale – she would learn the names for them in her geology class, gneiss, schist. The province was fissured with rocks, minerals, seams of coal. It was old, despite what her father said; the land was old, it had once been part of the Amazon basin.
    She becomes a diver, partly because of her profession, partly through fascination with the sunken, mysterious world underneath the surface of the oceans. She is driven toward depths rather than heights. Mountains confine her, she has no fascination for them. Strange then, that her life will become intertwined with the Antarctic peninsula, with its grandiose peaks, its sea so cold that she would not survive even a ten-minute unprotected immersion in its waters.
    In her dreams she is swimming in freshwater lakes, remnants of glaciers so recently passed, such is the startlingly intact trauma they have inflicted on the landscape: she can