The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World

by Carl Safina

  Svalbard means, in fact, “cold coast.” This is a hard-to-scale landscape. Along these many-fingered corridors of coastline, summit-cloaking clouds often obscure snow-frosted masses of bare land. Sea cliffs hundreds of feet high look small across distances difficult to judge. What appear like little piles of gravel on the shore are actually rock avalanches resting at the toes of buttes. Low clouds notwithstanding, the cold air seems dry and the view spans miles. Some valleys gleam in sun, some lie shrouded. The land rears back, imposing yet aloof, its head in those clouds, its shoulders arched up into the mists.

  * * *

  Unpeopled doesn’t mean untouched. Willem Barents first cast a human gaze upon the Svalbard archipelago in 1596. He died a terrifying death from scurvy after his ship got trapped in ice, but he left his name written on these waters. Even the ends of the earth aren’t too far to make a buck, and British and Dutch whalers were soon upon the place. Later, Arctic Foxes proved irresistible to Russian trappers. The whalers nearly exterminated their prey—primarily the Greenland Right, or Atlantic population of Bowhead Whales—by 1750. During the 1800s the wildlife further endured intense hunting and trapping. What the trappers weren’t killing for fur, such as geese, eiders, and ptarmigan, they ate.

  The economy no longer derives from blood. Now, 65 percent of Svalbard is officially protected for wildlife, and as much as 98 percent is de facto wilderness. But considering that the Arctic is warming about twice as fast as the rest of the globe, what place still really answers to the illusion of “untouched wilderness”?

  * * *

  A wall of ice two hundred feet high and about half a mile wide stands at the head of a place called Konowbreen Bay. Julian Dowdeswell, Stefan Rahmstorf, and I land on the adjacent gravel shore amid snow flurries. To gain perspective, we begin trudging toward the ridge, a steep seven hundred feet above us. From up there, we will have a grand view down upon the glacier-filled valley.

  After a heart-poundingly steep assault up about five hundred feet of elevation over gravel and loose scree, the ground suddenly changes. Below us, it’s 99 percent bare. Above, it’s 99 percent vegetated with lichens and tiny cushions of Arctic flowers like yellow Arctic Cinquefoil, Reindeer Rose, lavender Moss Campion, varied saxifrages, and Svalbard Poppy, whose subtle exuberance helps cloak the chilly ground.

  The sweeping view from up here shows that this abrupt transition from bare to vegetated forms an enormous bathtub ring along the bay’s slopes, and runs up the valley above the glacier’s edge.

  Julian explains that a mere century ago the glacier reached—and scoured—the slopes to this height. In just the last hundred years, it has lost well over four hundred feet of its thickness. That’s why the bathtub ring. The glacier’s icy face has also retreated half a mile. But this thinning is impressive. Barents wrote the first description of the ice realm here. We may be helping compile the last.

  Even with that crumbly face, what’s left of the glacier remains very substantial, mostly about 450 feet thick, according to Julian. He’s not guessing; it’s been measured with radar from satellites and aircraft. The upper part of the glacier disappears into the mist and flurries of its wide valley.

  Two Reindeer (same species as Caribou) stride jauntily over a rise, both carrying enormous racks swollen by their velvet growth sheaths. When they spot us, they immediately spook away.

  * * *

  Sea ice can melt all it wants to, but that won’t raise sea levels. Because sea ice is already in the ocean, it’s already displacing all the water its mass will ever displace. That’s why a drink with ice in it doesn’t overflow when the ice melts. Melting land ice, like this glacier, raises the sea. “That melted water,” Julian says, “is decanted into the global ocean. And the vast majority of glaciers, worldwide, are melting.” Sea level has risen about eight inches over the last hundred years. And the rate of rise is accelerating.

  Rahmstorf adds. “There has been nothing like this rate of sea level rise in the last thousand years. If there had been, Roman-built wharves would be four meters underwater—and they’re not.”

  Numerous icebergs calved from the glacier crowd this bay. While our sense of time makes the glacier appear fixed, its own inexorable movement, a few tens of yards annually, launches new armadas of ice daily.

  Gaining the ridge earns us a view of the breathtaking plunge into the next valley, where another gleaming, corrugated glacier runs in still frames to the sea. I look back at our ship, anchored amid the bay’s drifting bergs, shrunken by the ringing mountains, dwarfed by floating ice.

  * * *

  “Bear!”

  At seven A.M.—not morning exactly, since it hasn’t been dark in weeks—a fat Polar Bear stands on the beach. Facing us in sumo pose as we steam past, it looks like a yellowed patch of snow on high alert.

  In Stefan Lundgren’s Swedish accent, “Polar Bear” becomes an emphatic POElah beah. This planet’s biggest land carnivore, males frequently reach one thousand pounds. Not far from here, someone once shot a Polar Bear weighing 1,760 pounds. They can stand twelve feet. Unlike other bears, which often eat plants, berries, and fish, Isbjörn—that’s Norwegian for “ice bear”—eats big meat. Isbjörn specializes in hunting seals on sea ice. Bears forced ashore when the ice melts—like this one—can get hungry, dangerous.

  From the beach it stares, and from the rail, we just stare back. It seems a missed opportunity that we don’t have more to say, that the gulf between us is deeper than the fjord we’re traveling.

  To survive, Polar Bears need to get a good spring hunting season under their belts. Prime time is March, April, and May. Going into summer, fatter is healthier. In some places, the bears may have to live off that fat for months, losing hundreds of pounds. But with the ice now melting earlier, bears are coming ashore earlier, and with less fat.

  With its feet planted in tundra mosses, this bear we’re watching is, in fact, stranded far from the frozen ocean it needs for hunting. That’s common in summer. “The other mammals, the birds, insects—they all love the summer,” says Stefan. “No other animal in the Arctic hates summer like Polar Bears do.”

  Our bear walks about a hundred yards and lies down for a nap, looking bored. It must wait months to regain prime sea ice. Stefan says that anywhere we might choose to walk ashore, a sleeping Polar Bear can rise from a gully, suddenly reminded of its hunger. “If a Polar Bear stands up in front of you,” Stefan says, “think about your next life.”

  I’ll keep that in mind. Meanwhile, I imagine that the bear we’re watching will dream of the liberation that comes with water freezing. Fade to white.

  * * *

  The beach at Gåshamna is strewn with the debris of old whalers, and the bigger-than-dinosaur-bones remains of the great whales.

  We pick our footing carefully around the wood and iron, around the shacks. We must not damage the ruins. We walk around whale jawbones the size of building beams, skulls larger than people, improbable ribs, and vertebrae the size of hassocks. We examine in fine detail the weathering of the skeletons, and comment on how the pretty lichens and Arctic flowers grow more densely where the bones have leached their nutrients into the soil.

  But let’s not kid ourselves: it’s a garden of death. It is bleak poverty to pick through what others discarded centuries ago, when the now-silent bay should be full of whales.

  Imagine coming around a headland into a bay alive with leviathans. You can see that in the Baja bays where Gray Whales give birth and begin nursing their calves. And in Hawaii when Humpbacks are singing and being born. And in the waters of Alaska, and various places off California and New England, when the whales are in. Whales have begun recovering in some places, and the waters again carry the noise of their blows and their detonating breaches.

  Not here. Here, what Herman Melville in Moby-Dick called “so reckless a havoc” still resonates as mere silence and calm water. And, in fact, these abandoned shacks are more thoroughly “protected” than the remaining whales in Norway’s waters, sinc
e Norway is one of the few countries still hunting whales, in defiance of the global whaling ban. Further, Iceland has—after getting hit hard by the 2009 global recession—greatly expanded its commercial whaling, killing nearly 100 Fin Whales that year. Worldwide, whalers kill about 1,500 whales annually, with Japan’s whale-meat market providing most of the incentive. The numbers of most large whales worldwide remain depressed from earlier whaling. And there’s no humane way to kill a whale. Furthermore, with whale meat selling for roughly ten times the price of chicken, no one will starve if they can’t get it. But it is true that the whaling Japan, Norway, and Iceland report is, probably, sustainable. It is also true that whaling seems to entail a willingness to break rules and to lie about how many and which species whalers have killed. Between 1948 and 1973, four Soviet factory ships processed 48,477 Humpback Whales and reported only 2,710. (Humpbacks were supposedly protected by a global whaling ban begun in 1966.) In 1993, an air cargo handler in Oslo, Norway, uncovered 3.5 tons of whale meat—labeled as Norwegian shrimp—bound for South Korea. DNA tests have proved that packaged whale meat for sale in Japan often comes from species of whales and places in the ocean that are supposedly protected. The scientists who reported the DNA tests wrote, “These results demonstrate the inadequacy of the current system for verifying catch reports and trade records of commercial and scientific whaling.… Without an adequate system for monitoring and verifying catches … no species of whale can be considered safe.” That’s why the claims of sustainable whaling are always suspect. So can we kill whales sustainably? Apparently not. Then should we kill more whales? No.

  Most of these bones are from Bowheads, the whales most adapted to life in ice water. The Bowhead has the most highly developed blubber layer among whales (a foot thick) and a complex blood-circulation mechanism for conserving heat. It’s big, fifteen feet at birth, up to sixty-five feet at adulthood, weighing 200,000 pounds. Its huge head, which makes up one-third of the animal’s overall length, can smash through ice up to six feet thick. The fibrous filtering plates that hang in the mouth from the top jaw, called baleen, reach extreme lengths of twelve to fifteen feet. With these the whale strains enough krill and fraction-of-an-inch-long copepods from the seawater to keep it swimming.

  Bowheads ranged originally across most of the Canadian Arctic to Greenland, and from Greenland east across the Barents Sea to Novaya Zemlya, and off Alaska in the Bering, Chukchi, and Beaufort Seas, west to Russia and the Sea of Okhotsk.

  Whalers got into this region in the 1600s, when the slow-swimming Bowhead was called the Greenland Right Whale because it was the “right” one to find in these waters. Whalers killed something like 60,000 Northern Right Whales (a different species) farther south; the Bowhead was just the next “right” one as the whale hunters ventured into the high Arctic. Between 1630 and 1635—1,825 days—tens of thousands of Bowheads lost their lives to humans.

  Bowheads don’t breed until age twenty-five and may have the greatest longevity of any mammal; they’re known to live for two centuries. In 1993, two stone harpoon points were found inside an Alaskan Bowhead. It had been harpooned—probably in the 1800s—by hunters still living in the technological stone age. It was finally killed by industrial-age Inuit. In chemical analyses of several Alaskan Bowheads, the oldest whale was deemed 211 years old at the time of its death. That whale had been gliding through icy seas when Thomas Jefferson was president.

  But now there are likely more of these great skulls on this one beach than there are in the heads of living Atlantic Bowheads in the whole ocean. They’re all but extinct.

  * * *

  The first global oil wells were called whales, and the drills were called harpoons. People then thought only of themselves and the short term, and within a century they essentially ran out of oil and whale meat. Even in the places where whales are again common, they’re at a fraction of their former abundance. Whaling for oil has ended; good riddance. Every time we sever a dirty—or immoral—source of energy, humanity improves.

  The right and necessary things are not always decided solely on economic considerations. If ever energy came cheap, slavery was it. Slavery created jobs for slave catchers, a shipping industry built on the slave trade, and a plantation economy that could remain profitable only with slave labor. Slavery was necessary to “stay competitive.” It was the lynchpin of the southern plantation economy. But no normal person today would argue that slavery is good for the economy. We’ve made at least that much progress.

  Yet we hear—all the time—arguments defending dirty energy on economic grounds. Those arguments are as morally bankrupt as the ones defending slavery in its heyday. It isn’t moral to force coming generations to deal with the consequences of our fossil-fuel orgy. It isn’t moral to insist, in effect, on holding them captive to our present economy.

  With the whales gone from here, we find the whalers’ ruins and the bones interesting. We came all this way and encountered not waters roiled by spouts and blows, nor seas flagged by flukes. We got bones. They left us … bones.

  Among these ruins, I’d like to believe that we no longer think as the whalers did. They, after all, weren’t considering those of us who’d be here centuries later. They were simply after what they wanted, whatever the consequences.

  * * *

  Behind its cloudy veil, the sun never grazes the horizon, never alludes to night. Only a smudge of dusk marks the days. In the Arctic summer, one feels little need of sleep. So we sleep briefly. Before sleeping we rounded Sørkapp, the southern cape of Spitsbergen. We are south of the island of Edgeøya, in the Barents Sea, headed basically north.

  It’s a different realm, an ocean two-thirds ice. The rhythmic rocking and whoosh of water is replaced by the thud and grind of ice along the hull. The normal pattern of bright sky and dark water is inverted; under a pewter sky, we travel a sea bright with the reflective dazzle of broken pack ice stretching miles and miles.

  Even here, in the harshness of Dante’s ninth circle of hell, life abounds. A halo of kittiwakes and fulmars continue to seek some harvest from the furrow of our churning propellers. Guillemots, like ducks in tuxes, paddle between ice plates. An immaculate Ivory Gull comes floating into view, briefly ghosting by—and then is gone. One lone Walrus, a large male weighing perhaps three thousand pounds, is napping on a berg. His size and his astounding white daggers afford him peaceful sleep in the realm of the ice bear.

  * * *

  A crimson stain on distant ice. I raise my binoculars.

  Like binary stars gripped in each other’s gravity, two massive bears, burning white-hot in the vast freeze, attend their kill.

  One engorged bear continues pulling listlessly at the well-worked wrack of bloody bones and bits. The other has just plopped down in satiated stupor a few paces away. His face looks dipped in crimson paint. Three hundred yards away, a third bear, much smaller, much whiter, rests on a blocky floe. It may also have smelled the kill from afar and come for scraps, waiting for the bigger and more dangerous bears to take their fill and—I’m sure—to leave.

  The bear that has been pulling at the carcass decides to slip into the water and begins paddling away like an enormous white beaver. A small galaxy of orbiting Ivory and Glaucous Gulls waste not a moment squabbling onto the smear and frame that was a seal.

  About 200,000 years ago off Siberia or Alaska, advancing ice sheets forced Brown Bears to venture far onto sea ice. They found Ringed Seals, and no competition. Killing Ringed Seals on a frozen ocean was an extreme new niche. And here is the resulting extreme new bear: Ursus maritimus, the “sea bear,” in its true realm.

  A Polar Bear is designed for two constants: hunting and heating. Its translucent white camouflage is merely its most obvious adaptation. Beneath their shaggy, hollow guard hairs, Polar Bears are insulated by dense underwool. Under that fur, beneath their black skin, lies thick blubber. For pulling seals from ice holes, for swimming, and for stalking prey where there’s nowhere to hide, the whole bear is elongated. Lon
g neck. Flattened head. The big shoulder hump of other bears—gone. Their canine teeth are long, stabbing daggers, and their “molars” are sharpened for a diet that’s almost 100 percent meat. Polar Bears’ claws are sharply curved ice and seal hooks. Their large, hairy-soled feet afford nonskid ice walking.

  The ice moves, the seals move, and the bears wander with them. Bears tracked by satellites in the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska logged annual average movements of 2,100 miles (3,400 kilometers). One traveled 3,850 miles (6,200 kilometers) in one year.

  * * *

  Through my binoculars, I watch the yellow-white swimming beaver-bear, at home immersed in water a mere degree above freezing, its muzzle waving left to right, its dark nose reading air like fingers decoding Braille.

  Polar bears are astounding swimmers. Strong and slow, they just float while paddling their twelve-inch webbed paws. One Canadian bear, marked with the number 63 dyed into the fur on its back, swam seaward from shore, out across open water. Twenty-four hours later, the researcher studying it got a call from a colleague on a ship: “Do you know anything about a bear numbered 63? I’m watching it swimming.” He was sixty miles out at sea.

  The bear I’m watching moves so steadily that within minutes it has passed many slabs of ice. Following a dark channel between frozen plates of ocean, it’s soon far from where it first slipped into the frigid water.

  “I suspect a Polar Bear could swim two hundred miles in calm water,” Stefan tells me, “but in storms, with waves and high winds, they can get exhausted. They can die.” Since researchers began finding drowned Polar Bears in U.S. and Canadian waters, they’ve been increasingly worried about early ice breakup and receding sea ice forcing bears to swim long distances. In one day recently, researchers counting whales off Alaska’s northwest coast spotted nine Polar Bears swimming in open water in the Chukchi Sea, fifteen to sixty-five miles offshore. The bears likely came off a patch of sea ice that had broken up northwest of Alaska’s coast. Many were swimming north, away from land, apparently seeking pack ice. But satellite data showed that the main pack ice had receded to about four hundred miles offshore.