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

by Carl Safina

  The bears and seals we’re watching are playing their old game of chess on exactly the kind of habitat that is melting around the Arctic. The U.S. Geological Survey says, “Projected changes in future sea ice conditions, if realized, will result in loss of approximately two-thirds of the world’s current polar bear population by the mid-twenty-first century.” That prompted the Anchorage Daily News to observe, “Today’s young bears may be part of the last generation in Alaska.”

  I’d like to think there’s another way this all could go.

  * * *

  Julian joins us at the ship’s rail. I ask him to read the region’s fortune. “Just twenty years ago,” he offers, “sea ice made it very difficult to get east of Svalbard, but last year there was no ice at all.” Summer sea ice now covers about half the area it covered in 1970. Vast areas of bright, reflective ice have been replaced with dark water that absorbs more of the sun’s warmth, accelerating the ice melting. Adds Julian, “That’s why the Arctic is changing more rapidly than anywhere in the world.” As I write, the world’s average ocean temperature is the warmest ever measured, and Arctic water temperatures are up to ten degrees above average. This year, summer sea ice covers the second-smallest area ever recorded; last year it reached the lowest ever, so far.

  On my map, Svalbard’s north coast is marked with the words “Area of Permanent Ice.” Satellites show that it now has open water. I guess the new meaning of “permanent” is: until it goes away.

  * * *

  A little farther down the coast, part of the ice cap meets the sea as a wall of white ice cliffs that run for more than 110 kilometers (70 miles), the longest ice cliffs in the Arctic outside Greenland. Julian says that the ice right here is about 100 meters (over 300 feet) thick, but much of it is underwater, resting on a gouge in the sea floor. At its thickest, the cap is 550 meters, a vertical third of a mile of ice. This ice cap, the biggest in the Eurasian Arctic, has a name: Austfonna. Covering 8,000 square kilometers (3,000 square miles), it’s larger than Long Island and Rhode Island combined, roughly the size of Wales.

  Water jets are spraying like firehoses through melt holes in the middle of the ice face. Waterfalls have cut grooves through the rim. Almost everywhere globally—Antarctica, the Arctic, Patagonia, the Himalayas, the Andes, and the mountains of Alaska—researchers and residents are seeing melting.

  Twenty thousand years ago when the ice age froze an enormous quantity of Earth’s water, the sea level was nearly 120 meters (400 feet) lower than it is today. Vast areas that are now seafloor were plains grazed by herds of animals. There’s still enough land ice worldwide to raise the sea level another 73 meters (240 feet) if it melts.

  The Greenland ice sheet is up to 3,200 meters (two miles) thick and a little smaller than Mexico. Melted, it would raise the global sea level by over 6 meters (20 feet). That would take centuries. But since 2000, some of Greenland’s major glaciers—each draining enormous areas and already among the fastest-moving glaciers on Earth—have doubled their speed. Greenland’s rate of ice loss tripled between 2001 and 2006, to about 200 cubic kilometers (50 cubic miles) a year. (The city of Los Angeles uses about 1 cubic kilometer of water per year.) It continues accelerating. Julian says Austfonna is also shrinking, losing an area about half the size of Manhattan and up to a cubic mile of volume annually.

  Stefan Rahmstorf says, “The current change is extremely fast compared to past global change.”

  “The acceleration of the melting isn’t factored into most models designed to predict sea level rise,” Julian adds. “Our minimum prediction for sea level is a half-meter rise over the next hundred years,” he says, “but many glaciologists think it will rise much higher than currently predicted in this century, at least a meter, maybe even a meter and a half.”

  One meter (three feet) of sea level rise would do little damage—on a calm day. But storm surges are a different story. In December 1992, when a nor’easter briefly raised the water surrounding New York City eight and a half feet above normal, saltwater poured into underground rail tunnels, causing the entire subway system to lose electrical power. Hundreds of passengers on stranded trains required rescue. Battery Tunnel held six feet of water. Parts of the system didn’t work for a week and a half. If the sea level rises one meter, that kind of “once a century” flooding would be expected about once every three years.

  Rahmstorf mentions implications for the Gulf Stream. Ironically, the Gulf Stream depends partly on seawater freezing in the Greenland and Norwegian Seas. As seawater turns to ice, it ejects salts. The nearby hypersalty frigid water, about the densest water anywhere on the planet, sinks thousands of feet to the seafloor. Warm surface water from the south flows in to fill the hole made by this sinking water. That’s a big part of what drives the Gulf Stream. The less sea ice forms, the less salty and dense the waters of the Arctic will be. Accelerated land-ice melting makes sea surface waters even fresher and even less dense. Less sinking water would mean less warm water flowing up from the south. The Gulf Stream could weaken.

  Scientists recently decided that the chances of the Gulf Stream slowing significantly in this century are low, under 10 percent. But they could not confidently say the risk was under 5 percent. Says Rahmstorf, “About risking breakdown in a major ocean system and very severe consequences, a ten percent chance is, I think, not very reassuring. Ten percent, to me, that’s too high.”

  AUGUST

  Blue Crabs are in the bays, and my friend Pete has been among them in the moonlight, scooping up the beautiful swimmers, who soon find themselves conveyed from bucket to pot to the sauce of garden tomatoes and sweet basil, thence to their ultimate resting place between a mound of linguine and a round of baked clams. The aroma arouses Kenzie’s interest, but she shows pretty good patience while she waits for dish scraps.

  The first cool, dry winds—at the height of August—are autumn’s way of whispering in our ear. The young Ospreys are all flying. They’ve had a year of good food and good luck. In some years, when food is low, winds high, or rains heavy, many chicks don’t last this long. For the first time, the nests are empty in the midafternoon. And the sight of those empty nests foreshadows the loss and longing that will come as cooler winds prevail and so much life drains south like time running out. But for now this year’s flying chicks and their parents still convene at their nests in the evenings, and the parents are still providing food. Their hunger will sharpen to daggers once they leave the nest site and the most dangerous period of their young lives breaks the idyll of being so lavishly cared for.

  Monarch butterflies are already flitting down the beaches, along the bay shores, across the water, and over the ocean. Does anything look so frail and vulnerable as a migrating butterfly over open water, miles from shore? Headed from Canada to Mexico, they’re easy to notice, and always difficult to believe. For beauty and the awesome mystery of evolution on our coast, nothing exceeds the epic complexity of the migrations of these big-winged bugs. Theirs is no simple north-south. It’s a bizarre, multigenerational migration. Three generations go only north: one generation goes from Mexico to the southern United States; the next generation goes from the southern to the northern United States; the third generation hatches in the northern United States and finally reaches Canada. Only the fourth generation goes south, but it goes all the way from Canada to mass-wintering sites in central Mexico. (On the West Coast, some Monarchs winter in sites in California.) Northbound migrants live only about two months. Those making the southbound trip survive about nine months.

  This raises questions much bigger than the butterflies themselves: How do they “know” what generation they’re from and what they are supposed to do? And if their hatching latitude somehow determines their directional tendencies, we still have the question of how one generation is programmed to live so much longer. Scientists first realized the extent of their southerly migration in 1975, when tagged butterflies were discovered in a small number of sites in the mountains of Mexico. Those few sites har
bored millions of butterflies.

  These Monarchs passing our local dunes must travel up to twenty-five hundred miles in about a month, to a place none of them has ever been, and that their parents and grandparents never saw. Migrating Monarchs experimentally moved hundreds of miles off course can reorient using Earth’s magnetic field, change their heading—and go to the right place. Each Monarch weighs one-fifth of one ounce. What they know is what they need to know.

  What they don’t know is that their Mexican destination is in danger. Logging is shrinking their winter sanctuaries. And the numbers of Monarchs are dwindling. Without their sheltering forest, they can die in cold weather. In one storm, 80 percent of the butterflies in one of their Mexican wintering sites died.

  * * *

  Egrets are moving—many one day, none the next. Cormorants are already pouring in from the north, heading south in large flocks, just the vanguard of months of travelers. And just to be contrary, or as a joke, Laughing Gulls are moving north, coming here from the south after breeding, as every year; they’ll stay through the fall bonanza, when the Point becomes a two-month riot of migrant birds and fishes. For humans, August is high summer, vacation time. By contrast, my hardworking nonhuman neighbors always seem to be thinking and acting one step ahead.

  * * *

  One hot day I was at the marina putting new line on some fishing reels, replacing rusted shackles on my boat’s anchor chain, and doing a few other things I’d been putting off. Late in the afternoon, the sky gathered into a dark knot of brooding anger. A wind came up and the clouds thickened so dramatically that everyone left their boats and walked to the top of the dock. The bar emptied, too. Weather is the subject of incessant commentary at marinas, but this time most folks, many with drinks in hand, just stared. We all just stood there, looking north as the sky charged down toward us.

  Late-day thunderstorms aren’t unusual in August. They’re often dramatic, usually brief, and they cool the air nicely for sleeping. But this one looked truly fierce. Everyone scattered before the first wave of rain hit, running for their cars and houses. Except me. After so hot a day, I savored the first cooling drops, the exhilaration of the lightning, and the thumping thunder. But not for long. The big drops struck with a hail-like sting. The rain gathered such vengeance that I, too, soon sprinted across a parking lot sheeted with water. When I got into my car, I was already drenched.

  The thick opaqueness of the sky and the sheer volume of falling water cast everything in a deep shadow, like premature night. When I started the ignition and the wipers began beating the windshield, my headlights illuminated a shimmering bead curtain of raindrops dense enough to veil the nearby boats. I slowly drove toward the inlet to watch the storm sweep across the Sound. But halfway there, I had to pull off the road. I couldn’t see well enough to drive. In fact, I couldn’t see through the rain at all. That had never happened before. I did eventually get there, and watched clouds carpet-bomb our harbor with rain.

  After a few minutes it eased up. I got on the main road, headed home. Soon another wave of rain came on, like someone pouring buckets of nails on the car’s roof. When I pulled off this time, I had plenty of company. The road’s shoulder looked train-wrecked with blinded drivers. I sat there, my windshield wipers rapidly pacing the confines of vision, wiping away what began to seem like uncontrolled sobbing.

  When I later approached home, less than seven miles away, I expected to see the marsh swollen over the roadway and my skylights weeping puddles onto my floor. Instead, the streets were dry. My neighbors the Badkins had worked their way through the same downpour. They’ve lived here for seven decades, and we agreed on two things: we were astonished that the storm had such a sharp edge to it that it could smite one town with a biblical downpour and leave the next town’s roses thirsty after such a hot day. And: none of us had ever in our lives seen such rain.

  I left it at that. But then I started hearing the same from other people—from other states; they talked about seeing rain so blinding that they’d had to pull off the road. A couple of months later, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change noted, “The frequency of heavy precipitation events has increased over most land areas, consistent with warming and observed increases of atmospheric water vapor.” The heat sends the sea into the sky, and the sky doth weep.

  * * *

  August used to mean a lot of time spent far offshore. Who needed air-conditioning when you had the whole Atlantic? I believed that during summer you wasted a day if you untied a boat and planned to be back at the dock in under fifteen hours. And I did a lot of shark fishing.

  In the mid-1990s, during a short spell of fine weather, I had the urge to go offshore but couldn’t locate anyone who could join me on a weekday. I left the harbor in the dark, and the sun rose to find First Light already on the ocean, running southeast. About twelve miles offshore I noticed a change in the water color. Its greenish tint yielded suddenly to a clearer blue. The water temperature jumped several degrees in half a mile. This was a pretty distinct edge. The terns I’d seen inshore were now replaced by several shearwaters. The floating weeds were different here, too; drifting rockweed and eelgrass from the bays were replaced by a yellowish weed called sargassum that originates far offshore. I had crossed into new water. This drifting oceanic border was a reasonable place to look for sharks.

  I cut the engine and set up, putting a perforated bucket full of ground-up fish over the side. Hoping for a mako, I baited a hook with a whole mackerel, attached a float, and drifted it out about 150 feet, letting the float bob in the blue swells. Then for a few hours I worked pleasurably on edits to a manuscript, drifting and dreaming.

  * * *

  During late morning I heard a splash, saw a swirl, and watched the line come tight and my rod lunge downward. I got to my feet as the line began slipping under the tight drag, and I struggled to wrestle the rod from its holder, snap my back harness to the reel, and follow the fish around the boat’s stern.

  Virtually no one goes shark fishing alone. A shark-fishing crew usually has three people: one for the rod, one to eventually grab and hold the leader, and one to gaff or release the shark. I had a plan to be all three: if I worked a fish to the boat, I’d put the rod in a holder, grab the leader with one hand, and deal with the fish with the other hand.

  This plan might work well with sharks like medium-sized summer Blue Sharks, which always stay submerged and roll slowly, if at all, at boatside. But it could be trickier if this was a mako. Makos can be fast, erratic, liable to high-jump unpredictably (hooked makos have leapt into boats), and prone to rapid spinning at boatside. A wildly thrashing shark can throw a loop of leader wire around your hand—it’s happened to me—and might pull you over. Things can happen out in big water with big fish. I would have preferred company.

  Now I had company: on the other end of the line hissing through the surface.

  The shark came up and thrashed. And I saw that cobalt back and those steely flanks; I saw the bullet snout and a stiff, strong tail and glimpsed a black pit of an eye. Mako.

  To my mind the shark of all sharks, the Short-finned Mako is a sleek streak of sapphire, a gemstone cut from the sea itself. To say it is fearless and cunning seems like cheap anthropomorphism, so let’s just say I have known excellent fishermen who consider the Short-finned Mako demonically clever. Even among sharks, it is big (the largest females exceed half a ton), unusually fast, and exceptionally aerial when hunting or hooked. It is the only known predator of adult Swordfish. It is warm-blooded. Also unusually among sharks, its flesh tastes delicious.

  I always released all the sharks I caught, except that in those days I’d sometimes—once every two or three years—keep a mako for the grill. It had been seven years since I’d killed my first good-sized mako, a shark just over two hundred pounds. That was the last time I’d felt thoroughly excited about a big fish, but even then I’d felt remorse afterward. That surge of buck fever, that trembling adrenaline thrill I’d so often felt as a teenager a
nd even well into my twenties, was replaced with conflicting thoughts. These big, dangerous animals had come to seem too vulnerable. In the intervening years I’d caught and released a lot of sharks. I’d seen the Smooth Hammerheads and Sandbar Sharks and Duskies and Tigers virtually disappear, and even the formerly abundant Blue Sharks decline, killed mainly by commercial long-liners for their fins. I’d watched the makos grow scarce, killed by both sport and commercial fishermen for meat. Each time a happy crew in a victory mood hoisted a big mako or thresher onto the marina’s scales, I felt a sort of sadness.

  But now, alone and with this shark hooked, I knew one thing: I wanted this mako.

  Finding a mako is difficult enough. Tempting it to bite isn’t always easy. Subduing and securing one is tricky even for experienced crews. Most people wouldn’t consider trying it alone, and can’t imagine how it could be managed. I knew that if I did all these things solo, there would be congratulations and status at the marina. I would be respected as a skilled fisherman. My ego was captaining this trip.

  Understand, please, that I was the product of two cultures. I had fished since I was three years old. Fishing had its rules and community values. Anyone can understand why an athlete is thrilled to win, and millions of sports spectators share that tense thrill of competition and the honor and prestige that follow victory. Fishing is much more personal, but one facet is competitive, and prestige still accompanies big fish. As a kid, I thought there could be no better compliment than for someone to gesture with their chin and whisper, “He’s a good fisherman.”

  Now youth’s wolf was howling me back to the pack. I was back to wanting to prove something. I didn’t ask why or intellectualize. This connection to the shark was direct and immediate. Adrenaline was returning me to my emotional roots—indeed, back to the emotional roots of humanity, locked in battle with a large, dangerous beast. No witnesses or referee presided, no photos could record a skilled release. I wanted this animal for meat, and I wanted status as a skilled hunter. I wanted to drag it into my village and have the other hunters dance around it.