Underland

by Robert Macfarlane

  It’s low tide. On the foreshore of the village bay a man is leaning over something. He is straight-legged, bent at the waist. His sleeves are rolled up and his arms are red to the elbow. He wears a luminous yellow hi-vis jacket and hose-down clothes. The carcass of a porpoise lies slack across seaweedy rocks. He uses one hand to grip a flap of the black skin of the porpoise, then peels it back towards him, using the curved flensing knife in his other hand to cut away the meat as it comes. It looks like he is helping the porpoise out of a wetsuit.

  A hundred or so wooden houses, each perched on an ice-smoothed table of gneiss. This is Kulusuk: more aviary than a village. The houses have brightly coloured outer panels of red, blue and yellow, with white dabs of anti-rust paint marking the nail-heads on the panels. Most are lashed down with steel cables for when the big winter storms come. The piteraq – the katabatic wind that rushes down off the ice cap – can reach hurricane force here, stripping the earth down to bare rock, leaving snowdrifts many feet high on the lee side of buildings, and shattering the shoreline sea ice.

  There’s no wind today. The air is warm. Unprecedentedly warm. The berg sweats. The man flenses the porpoise. Down at the breakwater, stout pale objects float a foot or so down, swaying slightly in the swell, tethered by rope to the lower rungs of the iron ladder that’s bolted to the side of the breakwater. They’re the bodies of ringed seals, heads and front flippers cut off, tied up by their tails. The bodies have been there a while. They glow faint green. Guts trail amid the kelp. It’s been a poor month for the hunters of Kulusuk.

  On the east side of the bay, in the lee of a crag, a slew of white wooden crosses drops down almost to the tideline. They’re different sizes. Some have wonky crossbars. From a distance it looks like a snow patch or a tiny glacier, running off the steeper ground. It’s a cemetery: one of the few sites in the village where enough topsoil has accumulated to bury a body.

  The air is split by a high howl, and immediately thirty or forty other howls join it in chorus. The Kulusuk huskies are sitting and howling up at the sky, straight-backed, full-on wolf-howls. One is straining so hard the chain is taut as a bar, and the collar cuts at the howl, strangles it.

  Four children and a husky pup are on a big trampoline, bouncing together, the children’s feet stretching the net down almost to the rock on which the trampoline is set. The husky spreads out his legs, braces himself. When the howling starts, the pup howls too and then the children howl as well, bouncing and howling together.

  The berg sweats, the man flenses the porpoise, the children and the dogs bounce and howl.

  ~

  All through that hot summer of 2016, before I went to Greenland, ice around the world was yielding up long-held secrets. The cryosphere was melting, and as it melted things that would have better stayed buried were coming to the surface.

  On the Yamal peninsula, between the Kara Sea and the Gulf of Ob, 4,500 square miles of permafrost thawed. Cemeteries and animal burial grounds turned to slush. Reindeer corpses that had died of anthrax seventy years earlier were exposed to the air. Twenty-three people were infected, their skin blackened with lesions. One, a child, died. Russian veterinarians travelled the region dressed in white anti-contamination suits, vaccinating reindeer and their herders. Russian troops burned infected corpses in high-temperature pyres. Russian agriculturalists said that nothing would ever grow in the region again. Russian epidemiologists predicted other releases from Arctic burial sites and shallow graves: smallpox from victims who had perished in the late 1800s, giant viruses that had been long-dormant in the frozen bodies of mammoths.

  On the Siachen glacier in the Karakoram, where Indian and Pakistani troops have been fighting a forgotten war since 1984, the retreating ice was revealing spent shells, ice axes, bullets, abandoned uniforms, vehicle tyres, radio sets – and slaughtered human bodies.

  In north-west Greenland, a buried Cold War US military base and the toxic waste it contained began to rise. Camp Century was excavated by the US army engineering corps in 1959. They tunnelled into the ice cap and created a hidden town: a two-mile network of passageways housing laboratories, a shop, a hospital, a cinema, a chapel, and accommodation for 200 soldiers, all powered by the world’s first mobile nuclear generator. The base was abandoned in 1967. The departing soldiers took the reaction chamber of the nuclear generator with them. But they left the rest of the base’s infrastructure intact under the ice, including the biological, chemical and radioactive waste it contained, assuming – as the Pentagon closure reports declared – that it would be ‘preserved for eternity’ by the perpetual snowfalls of northern Greenland. It is all interred there still: some 200,000 litres of diesel fuel and unknown amounts of radioactive coolant and other pollutants, including PCBs. But as global temperatures have risen, so snowmelt is forecast to exceed snow accumulation in the region of Camp Century. In a dynamic I have seen so often in the underland that it has become a master trope, troublesome history thought long since entombed is emerging again.

  The heat in the Arctic that summer was record-breaking, and so was the melt. New lows were set for the extent of Arctic sea-ice coverage. In Nuuk, the Greenlandic capital, the temperature hit 24°C. Meteorologists in Denmark rechecked their measurements. No mistake. For the past decade, the ice cap had been losing mass at twice the rate of the previous century. That year it also began melting a month earlier than usual, and the flow rates on the meltwater rivers of the glaciers reached exceptional speeds. The glaciologists checked their models. No mistake.

  The meltwater ran hard from April onwards, pooling as blue and green lakes up on the ice cap, flowing as rivers on the glaciers. The increased amounts of meltwater on the ice cap helped shift the albedo: more sunshine was being absorbed, increasing the temperature, resulting in more melt, and therefore more absorption – a classic feedback loop which winter would only pause.

  The calving faces of Greenland’s glaciers thundered. Icebergs sweated in Greenland’s fjords. Polar scientists brought forwards their predictions of when the Arctic Ocean might be fully ice-free. The highest rates of ice loss were in the north-west and the south-east of the country, where I was heading.

  Uneasy stories circulated about disappearances in the ice. A Russian businessman had flown in on the east coast, wearing a camel-skin coat and carrying a briefcase, and never flown out again. A Japanese hiker had vanished in the west of the country, been missing for weeks. Local people spoke half-jokingly of the kisuwak, the wild creature that roamed the ice and snatched unwary travellers – an animate version of the glacial crevasse or the silky-thin sea ice.

  In that region, at this time of history, it felt as if there were many places where one might fall right through the world’s surface.

  ~

  ‘The year has been exceptional,’ says Matt. ‘The sea ice was gone from the fjords by June. The snowfall over the winter was minimal. No one’s ever seen a year like it. Normally now the channel would be full of ice. A bear was seen swimming off Kulusuk two weeks ago. He must have been desperate. No one shot him.’

  Matt has been in Kulusuk since he was nineteen. This is his sixteenth year. He and his partner Helen live in a blue-boarded house, just above the store and the school. They are both climbers, skiers and guides of formidable experience. They both carry themselves with the quiet competence of people whose abilities in wild country are exceptional, but who have no need to prove themselves unless circumstances demand it. Their commitment to the Greenlandic community they have joined is total, proved by the length of time Matt has lived in the village and by the profound friendships he has formed there.

  ‘Welcome to our home!’ Matt says when we arrive. The house is light and airy inside, with pale wood floors and white walls. A large-scale map of the region is framed on one wall. The coastline is coralline in its complexity. We sit and drink tea together. As well as Matt and Helen, there are three of us, all good friends: me; Bill Carslake, a composer and conductor, gentle and funny of manner, who I have known for tw
enty years; and another Helen, Helen Mort, who I have known for only a year or two but already regard as one of the most talented people of my acquaintance. Helen M, as we come to call her in the mountains, to distinguish her from the other Helen – is a rock climber, a runner, and a writer of rare abilities. She is modest to a fault, gifted to an alarming degree and consistently subtle in her engagement with people and with landscapes. Together we have come to climb the peaks of Greenland’s east coast, and to explore the underland of ice on this, the greatest glaciation outside Antarctica.

  I go to the westerly window. It looks across the bay. A group of mothers and children are walking along the path by the sea. They are all wearing black head-nets cinched tight around their necks. They resemble a funeral procession, or a bee-keepers’ outing.

  ‘That’s a new sight in Kulusuk,’ says Matt, joining me at the window. ‘Twenty years ago there were no mosquitoes; now, as things have warmed, mosquitoes and gnats have arrived. Some people here wear nets over their heads throughout the summer months.’

  Kulusuk is one of a handful of small settlements on the east coast of Greenland – fingernail-holds on the edges of this great island. Fewer than 3,000 people live on around 1,600 miles of coastline. Like many of the smaller Greenlandic settlements, Kulusuk is a society ruptured by transition – a previously part-nomadic subsistence-hunting culture, into which modernity has intruded in the forms of stasis and alcohol.

  Helen introduces me to Geo, a powerfully built Greenlander in his early sixties.

  ‘Geo is my father,’ says Matt, ‘and I don’t mean that sentimentally. He has become my father and I have become his son.’

  When Geo smiles, which he does often, the crease-lines around his eyes run almost from ear to ear. Geo is a very good hunter, renowned for his boat-handling and dog-handling skills, and legendary for his toughness.

  ‘Two winters ago, when a big storm blew in,’ says Matt, ‘the men were coming back from a hunting trip. The storm hit fast, and the snow was soon too thick for the dogs to pull the sleds. They had a high pass to get over to reach the village. People started to falter. It was a very serious situation. Geo went to the front of the team, put his head down, and broke trail for six hours. They got back safely.’

  Geo lies Roman-style on the sofa in the main room, propped up on one arm, listening to the story being retold, smiling quietly. He, Matt and Helen communicate in a mixture of broken English and broken Greenlandic. The lack of a fluent shared language is no barrier to intimacy. They are physically at ease with one another. When they sit together, they often do so with an arm around each other’s shoulders, or legs pressed together.

  As a boy, Geo was taken to Denmark for a year, part of the ill-conceived ‘Northern Danes’ project of the 1960s, which sought to assimilate Greenlanders to the Danish way of life by forcing Greenlandic children to live with Danish families.

  ‘Geo still shudders when you ask him about it,’ says Helen.

  He has visited England twice, as a guest of Matt and Helen – and on each occasion he has acquired a tattoo, one on each forearm. He rolls up his sleeves to show me: ‘This one, Glasgow,’ he says, pointing at a cross on his right forearm. ‘This one, Kendal,’ pointing at an anchor on his left.

  ‘I took Geo out for a night on the town in Glasgow,’ says Matt. ‘We ended up in some pretty rough bars. Geo was a non-standard presence. In Filthy McNasty’s I could see folk spotting Geo across the bar, thinking about coming over to take the piss – then having another look and thinking much the better of it. They had correctly assumed that Geo was hard beyond even the measure of Glasgow on a Friday night.’

  Geo picks up the guitar that stands in the corner of the room, and sings a quiet, melancholy East Greenlandic song.

  There is a knock on the door. It is Siggy, an Icelandic sailor with whom Matt once voyaged north up the coast. Siggy has a beautiful new-old boat, wooden-hulled, which he has sailed here from Reykjavik. He wears green moleskin trousers and speaks calmly.

  ‘This is the year of no ice,’ says Siggy. ‘We can get anywhere, have been able to explore freely. We’ve been wearing T-shirts on deck.’

  He shrugs.

  ‘The weather should not be like this, but life has been made more easy for us sailors.’

  I think of the Old English term unweder – ‘unweather’ – used to mean weather so extreme that it seems to have come from another climate or time altogether. Greenland is experiencing unweather.

  Geo stops playing, lays down the guitar, and speaks matter-of-factly. ‘In ten years, no snow, no ice, no hunting, no dogs.’

  The sea ice is thinning to a degree that makes sailing easy for incomers, but hunting impossible for the native Greenlanders. The intricate stages of hardening through which sea ice annually cycles – frazil, grease, nilas, grey – are no longer being fulfilled in many places, for the temperature of the seawater is spiking above the key freeze-point of 28.6°F. When the men cannot travel safely over the sea ice, hunting becomes difficult. Seals haul out further offshore. Bears die of starvation rather than bullets. Inlets and fjords are dangerous to cross. Snowmobiles run the risk of plunging through thin ice, carrying their drivers with them. Hunting – one of the few aspects of traditional Greenlandic life that survived settlement – is under threat of erasure, this time by global temperature change.

  Ice has a social life. Its changeability shapes the culture, language and stories of those who live near it. In Kulusuk, the consequences of recent changes are widely apparent. The inhabitants of this village are part of the precariat of a volatile, fast-warping planet. The melting of the ice, together with forced settlement and other factors, has had severe effects upon the mental and physical health of native Greenlanders, causing rates of depression, alcoholism, obesity and suicide to rise, especially in small communities. ‘The loss of that landscape of ice,’ writes Andrew Solomon, studying depression rates in Greenland, ‘is not merely an environmental catastrophe, but also a cultural one.’ The Inuktitut of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic have begun to use a word that refers at once to the changes in the weather, the changes in the ice, and the consequent changes in the people themselves. The word is uggianaqtuq – meaning ‘to behave strangely, unpredictably’. Yet if any population knows what it is like to live with the unpredictability of ice it is surely the Inuit, who have been adapting to its shifts for millennia.

  Later that day Helen introduces me to Frederick and Christina, two of the pillars of the Kulusuk community. Christina is Kulusuk born and bred, and she is the village’s schoolteacher. Frederick is from West Greenland, but moved to Kulusuk with Christina years previously. They are both deeply cultured and self-aware; disinclined to any kind of romanticism, with a strong sense of the fine margins of tolerance for life here, but also proud of the resilience proved by Kulusuk’s continued existence.

  ‘Climate change is felt in our lives here strongly,’ says Frederick. ‘New species have come here, old ones have gone. There is thunder and lightning sometimes in autumn. The sea ice used to be so deep always’ – he gestures from the floor to the ceiling of the house, a distance of eight or nine feet – ‘but each year it is thinner and this spring it was this thin’ – he places his hands a forearm’s length apart – ‘and too much danger for the dog-sledding. It is harder to hunt. We can travel less far.’

  He shrugs. ‘It is a change to our spirit, as well as our lives.’ Christina looks on, listens. She disappears into a side room, and emerges holding a gaudily painted wooden canoe, two feet or so long, in which stand in single file a zebra, a lion, a tiger and a giraffe.

  ‘Our son made this at school,’ says Christina. ‘He called it Noah’s Kayak, because it is saving the animals from the flood of global warming.’

  There are no humans on board the kayak.

  The melt is seen by some as an opportunity rather than a loss. Foreign investors have gathered as the ice has retreated, and access to Greenland’s fabulous mineral wealth has become easier. ‘There’
ll be a lot of billionaires made by what the melt reveals,’ a geologist told me before I came to Greenland. ‘Mining’s coming to Greenland soon, and big style – in a country that’s never before had anything much deeper than a quarry.’

  The last few years have seen the granting of more than fifty mining licences in Greenland, allowing exploratory mining for gold, rubies, diamonds, nickel and copper, among other minerals. And on the southern tip of Greenland, close to a small town with high unemployment called Narsaq, lies one of the world’s largest uranium deposits. Niels Bohr, the Nobel Prize-winning atomic physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, visited Narsaq in 1957, shortly after the discovery of the deposit. A joint Chinese-Australian mining project now proposes to establish an open-pit mine behind Narsaq, in order to acquire not only uranium but also the rare earth minerals used in wind turbines, mobile phones, hybrid cars and lasers.

  That evening in Kulusuk a lurid sunset brews above the village, lilac and orange backlighting a sawtooth ridge of peaks, with incandescent reefs of ribbed clouds. It is alpenglow of a kind – but of an incredible wattage.

  ‘It’s the ice cap that makes sunsets like this,’ Matt explains. ‘It’s probably the biggest mirror in the world: hundreds of thousands of square miles of ice reflecting up the sun as it dips towards the horizon.’

  We all walk together up a short switchback path to the top of the rock outcrop around which the village was built. I go to the western edge of the outcrop for a better view of the sunset in the fjord – and stop.

  The little bay beneath me is the village’s rubbish tip. Thousands of bin bags, a slew of plastic crates, cracked kayaks, melamine cupboards and white fridges have all been heaved over the cliff edge here to make the midden. It looks, in the dusk, like a tongue of ice flowing down towards the waterline: a glacier in advance, not retreat.

  ~

  Ice has a memory. It remembers in detail and it remembers for a million years or more.