The Future of Ice

by Gretel Ehrlich

  Latitude 74.5 degrees north. An island slowly comes into being, the same one Willem Barents sailed from before he died at sea. It is rimmed with ice, swathed by clouds, and ends in purple cliffs where seabirds nest and fledge. A line of ducks flies, a black line against a gold sky. Everything here is made of lines, all skewed, broken-arrowed, picking up bright lights and cool hues as they travel. A cloud in the northwest throws snow into the sea. As we approach the west side, sunlight breaks on cliffs. Strips of green lie curled between amphitheaters of rock. We swing around and start up the east side. Here the land slumps from a taut ridge. Lobes unfold, making giant steps down to the sea.

  Between the iceberg and the island a slow swell moves west, sinking under our weight, then lifting up again, carrying seagulls and evening light. Brash ice, jammed against the foot of the island, clinches it tight. A wide collar of ice extends far out to sea. We've come here to anchor for the night, but there's more ice than we had anticipated. Ted checks the depth finder to see if it's shallow enough to drop anchor. He shakes his head, no. That means another thirty hours of sailing in rough seas.

  For the time being we relish the calm. Seasickness ends. As we motor to the lee side of Bjornoya, a trance comes over us. Small swells lift and drop the mat of sea ice and our boat with it. There's a symphony playing: the sound of sloshing ice-chimes and sluicing meltwater. It's May. We're at latitude 74.5 degrees north.

  “Bear!” Maaike shouts. We look: a polar bear is running across the ice. He leaps from floe to floe, swims the crevasses, leaps again. Now he jumps down onto the beach and swats at an eider duck caught between two pieces of ice but misses. Looks all over for it. Gives up. Strides away. As he jumps from the beach onto the land, his movements are elastic and effortless. He stands and, nose up, catches our scent. What are we? The human perfume is too alluring; he slides into the water and swims toward the Noorderlicht.

  Are we dinner or trouble? Bears are no longer hunted here, so he's fearless. He sniffs and swims, sniffs again and moves closer, his nose a black seed drifting to us. Near the boat's stern he treads water and takes a good look at our mob hanging over the rail. The mixed scents of diesel, humans, and cooked food must be confusing. He turns in a small circle. We're inedible after all. He swims back to shore.

  Polar bears can get hurt on both ends of the climate spectrum because their main food is seals. Too much ice and they can't get at the seals; too little ice, same story. Seals have their own problems with declining ice. They give birth to their pups and nurse them on ice ledges just under the snow. If the ice thins too much, the ledges don't hold; as snow cover decreases, the pups are exposed to predation by birds as well as foxes and bears. If seal populations decline, bears starve; if the ice thins or melts altogether, seals die.

  As warming increases, freeze-up comes later in the fall. Bears starve simply waiting for the ice to come in, because they stalk their prey using ice as both a platform from which to see and a blind behind which to hide. Without ice, polar bears can't catch seals.

  The Noorderlicht jostles in ice. I think of Osip Mandelstam's marvelous title The Noise of Time. Up here, time is an undiffer-entiated, oozing mat of ice. There is no diurnal sequence, but all light, all night, all day, ticking away until September.

  I feel broken, full of dread: another thirty hours under way in rough seas, another night of seasickness. We motor slowly away. Mist warps the upper reaches of Bear Island. Snow falls.

  For a long time I glass the bear with binoculars. It's the middle of the night, and the air is cool. There's a sun, but instead of setting, it is suspended at half-mast and shines down on the edge of the world, pooling its light in water. The half-opened lid of a gray cloud is the sun's eye; the pupil is gold.

  The bear is gone. He wandered back into the white folds of the island. Where land ends, ice reaches a long arm out to us as if hanging on to the horizon's silver bar. Swells surge by pushing us west. We motor past a shaft of rock that sticks out of the water. Knife or feather? Wraparound clouds go, new snow falls, little auks fly, smooth-skinned water goes glassy, then breaks into a tornado of swirling gulls.

  If global warming persists, all this will be gone. With no ice, the Arctic ecosystem vanishes: bears, walrus, seals, seabirds, fish. I look back; the ice collar holds tight and keeps the island from following us. Deep in its interior, the bear is a vanilla speck. At a nod from the captain, the mainsail goes up and the schooner sails, jibs flying.

  A BARRIER OF ICE

  3:00 a.m. The Noorderlicht slaloms through splintered sea ice. Maaike stands on the bowsprit directing David, who is at the helm. He spins the wheel fast one way, then the other, his face red from exertion. Because the boat is so slow to respond, he has to anticipate which way to go a hundred yards ahead of actually turning. Icebergs, frazil ice, pancake ice, and curdled sea ice litter the water's surface. Ko is at the rail. “Isn't this beautiful?” he says, in a sea-song cadence that lifts and falls.

  Ted takes the wheel. “Ice starts in the east and melts in the west,” he says. We veer west, but no matter how far we go, the barrier of ice stays. Now we are heading straight for it and my heart sinks. Will this ice edge be impenetrable? Will we have to turn back and sail another five days in wild seas? Ted smiles, saying nothing. We creep forward on a collision course, then an opening appears. Ted spins the wheel hard to starboard. We slip through.

  Sun is out. Before us is a new world: a plain of open and relatively calm seas. Ted corrects our course and turns north, while Val and Sara, the two oceanographers from Southampton Oceanography Centre, take the temperature of the sea.

  One of the ironies of global warming is that it may cause some places to get colder. The Gulf Stream is tropical water that flows north from Africa past western Europe and the United Kingdom, keeping that part of the world much warmer than it should be, considering its latitude. The Gulf Stream is part of a closed loop called the global thermohaline circulation system, and on the map it looks like a lopsided figure eight— the same one the migrating arctic birds take from north to south, the same one I've been following in my recent travels.

  “This conveyor belt of warm water works like a swimmer doing laps between poles,” Val says. As soon as the warm water reaches the far north it is cooled as it mixes with the Polar Current. The water grows denser, bends under, sinks, does a flip, and begins flowing south, and around the loop goes. Now the warming climate is causing the Greenland Ice Sheet to melt, and billions of gallons of fresh water are pouring into the northern sea each year. The ice melt has increased by 16 percent since 1979, and in 2002 at least 264,400 square miles of ice was seen to be melting.

  The Noorderlicht hovers over the current line between the Gulf Stream and the Polar Current. Val and Sara lift the two cylinders of seawater and haul them over the rail. Carefully, they measure water temperature and salinity. Val looks up from her computations, puzzled. “Even small changes can affect how the ‘pump’ operates,” she says. “These water streams are not as clear-cut as the maps indicate. It's a bit of a jumble. We're getting a lot of cold temperatures where there should be warm. This could mean that the meltwater from Greenland has already diluted the tropical Gulf Stream. If that's so, we may be in for a big change. Sea level will rise and Europe will turn frigid. It happened during the last ice age. That's why the Norse colonies failed. It got too cold to raise crops and hay. And it could happen again, quickly: I'm not talking about hundreds of years, only a few—five or ten. The brakes just go on and the conveyor belt stops. And it could stay that way for several centuries. Getting hotter can mean getting colder. It's all so fragile. What happens up here has repercussions all over the world.”

  The day started in ice and ends in sun. The wind freshens, sails go back up, and we're under way again. The “way” is much smoother this time. These are rolling seas instead of ones that rock. “Rock and roll” must have been a sailor's term, a nautical bump and grind.

  Yesterday, in the rough water of the Barents Sea the Noorderlicht s
hivered, groaned, and banged. Now, with a following wind—a wind that is behind us—we sail at 8.6 knots in a soft forward rhythm as if paced to the human heartbeat. “Life is wind,” Ward says.

  More than half the incident sunlight is absorbed by the topmost foot of the sea. Ten meters down, all the colors in the visible spectrum are absorbed except for blue. Blue stays, after every other color drowns. The sea prefers blue. It drinks it down, then brings it back up when molecules backscatter light. Blue rises to the surface and dances, snakelike, then sneaks away, seeping into the atmosphere. Periwinkle everything, that's what I want. Or just blue. Why is sadness called the blues?

  The upper cabin is crowded and everyone is busy. Val and Sara log in data on computers. Gautier, Liam, Garry Doyland, and Suba, two geography teachers, play Monopoly. Albert and Phil, both immigrants from the Caribbean Basin, talk about lost cultures. Out the port window a line of ruffled water reels by. “There aren't any big waves now because the ice is near,” Ko says. “It is a wonderful force, the ice, is it not?”

  I love my middle-of-the-night watch. The night sun casts an eerie light across the sea. Under us, streams of tropical water dance with the Polar Current, making a thick blue-green broth. Halyards ping, thwack, and vibrate. As we go north, it gets colder and drier. At 3:00 a.m. it's 26 degrees Fahrenheit, and the blaze on the water stretches a long way.

  HORNSUND FJORD

  May 30. Where one day ended and another began I can't be sure. Much of the voyage has been sea-bardo, and I've been deeply lost in it. Sometime during my watch there was a solar eclipse, but no one could see it because there were clouds. “What's there to see?” Gary Hume asks tauntingly, and looks skyward. “Obscurity,” says David Hinton, a BBC film director, in his Oxford-trained, world-weary way. “You mean the dark side of ourselves,” Gary says, grinning catlike.

  Storm-battered, we pass the ravaged torso of an iceberg. Wind waves splash on it, making it rock. A ray of sun knifes down. It's impossible to be depressed in this light. But one can be confused.

  The compass needle swings giddily across the four cardinal points, unable to stop anywhere. The whole earth is a magnet. The electrical currents that simmer in the hot, liquid core vibrate up from magnetic rocks laid willy-nilly in the crust. The two are constantly interacting: the magnetic pole at both ends of the Earth drifts because the magnet reshapes the core's electric currents. These modify the electromagnet, which in turn modifies the currents, and around it goes. Every movement in nature evokes a response.

  Hanging over the rail, we peer at waves perishing. They pitch up like breasts on the port side of the boat; on the starboard side they are green wind-walls slit open—wider than a nipple— that release white foam. For a short time a polar storm wraps darkness around the tops of the masts and drops snow. Afterward, sun shines doggedly, as if by rote.

  The sea and the ear are connected. Each bump, tilt, and slide of the boat registers in the inner ear. Labyrinth is the word anatomists use: deep inside our heads are looping canals and a snail-like cochlea filled with a gelatinous mass, freckled with lime crystals, and lined with delicate hairs that give us hints about whether we 're walking on the walls or not. My inner ear is sick, all the hairs mown down. I fall, get dizzy, fall again.

  I think it's morning. The ocean's “sinister eternity” has been fumbling with the clock, so the alarm never goes off. Three hours of sleep a day isn't enough even with the extra serotonin spurting through our brains from all the light. I stand on deck. The flanks of gray sea inflate and collapse. So much breathing everywhere. Under full sail, we see ice ahead, and beyond, the coast of the southernmost island of the Spitsbergen archipelago.

  The Noorderlicht follows a coastline of mist-dripping peaks and snowy valleys. The friction of the boat's movement churns ice back into water. Val and Sarah scoop buckets of seawater and bring them on deck, then look at its plankton under a microscope. Deep in this sea broth live masses of plankton—macro-, micro-, nano-, and now, the smallest of them all, picoplankton, which ranges between 0.2 and 2.0 microns across. That's one fiftieth to one five-hundredth the diameter of a human hair. “They're reckless little things,” one of the oceanographers says. “They thrive on the kind of extreme that puts human endurance to shame.”

  Some Archea—the evolutionary branch of beings to which plankton belong—can live at temperatures of 235 degrees Fahrenheit. Some exist with no oxygen at all, while others like water that is five times saltier than any ocean. Their populations are diverse and robust at both poles. They reach concentrations of hundreds of thousands per milliliter of seawater and not only recycle organic matter back into plants but also absorb carbon and supply nutrients directly to larger organisms—a critical part of the microbial loop of which we are all a part, and a helpmate in arresting global warming. Perhaps only these beings will survive a superhot Earth.

  BLUE ICE AND BEARDED SEALS

  An ice belt—a long peninsula of ice—comes unfastened. We glide through. A glaucous gull eyes me, then swoops across the blank canvas of the wind-filled sail as if trying to write something there. A glacier expels a blue leaf. A Vof little auks leads us in.

  This is Hornsund Fjord, the first big inlet since leaving Norway four days and nights ago. Wind stops, water is calm. We drop the sails and, under power, glide in close. Here the mountains are fluted and their knife-blade peaks tilt back as if bent by too much cold. Ko comes on deck at midmorning. His face has collapsed. When I ask how he is, he takes a deep breath, then says, “Not so good. I just had a call on the satellite phone. My brother and his wife were killed last night in a car accident.”

  Everyone who hears goes silent. The ocean expands. Oxygen disappears. I look into his eyes. “Then we must get you to an airport so you can go home,” I say. He shakes his head. “I don't know yet. I don't know anything right now.”

  There's a story from the upper Yukon River in Alaska about early travelers called K'och'en or “cloud people.” They made journeys to another dimension of time and space where everything is white, where the only season is winter, and conventional reality was reversed, requiring people to learn anew how to behave. As we motor toward the snout of the Hornbrn Glacier at the head of this fjord, I begin to feel we have entered such a place.

  On either side of the boat there are wide sweeps of white. Earlier I watched seawater freeze and turn to ice in front of the boat. Now sun is a knotted fist and water burns, festering into a silver shield. A sliver of ice rams into a cove, stirs things up, and blows back to the icy body from which it came. In the distance, half domes of granite lord over narrow, snow-glutted valleys—high arctic versions of Yosemite. Ducks rest on open water. Rosy sandpipers chatter on a narrow gravel beach. It snows.

  We search for safe haven. Is there such a thing? Isbrun dashes excitedly around the deck. Yes, he says, there is. Nick paints a watercolor of a terminal moraine embracing a mountain peak. Two eider ducks, newly arrived, swim close together like newlyweds. Standing behind Ted at the helm, Maaike rests her hand tenderly on his shoulder.

  Ko hangs over the rail, sad and silent, his hands clasped; Isbrun slips between his legs with a joyful bark. He knows things before we do: a pod of beluga whales appears, their white backs flashing as they swim quickly away. The anchor is dropped. Calm water is the one thing I'll ask for.

  At Maaike's urging, Ted impersonates a bearded seal, then he blushes. “We'll see them here, and maybe hear them,” Maaike says. We putt-putt into the heart of the fjord. As the hull splits ice pans in half, the inlet opens wide: mountain, valley, mountain, glacier, valley, mountain, glacier—white, white, white, white.

  During the last ice age, these islands and waters were covered by glaciers and ice sheets that extended all the way to New York City. Now land is rebounding and a new landscape is coming into being.

  We go ashore by Zodiac. After so many days at sea the ground is reeling, but terra firma—hummocky moss and soft shale—makes a lovely bed. Purple saxifrage is coming into bloom. It has wintergree
n leaves that never wither. The arctic dryad's bowl-shaped flowers invite visiting bees. Inside the blossom the bees bask, eat, and get warm. Here and there bearded seals are hauled out on bits of ice. Their heads are rust-colored, their fur tarnished silver, their long whiskers frosted white. As a child I was cast in the role of the Littlest Mermaid in Hans Christian Andersen's play. My legs and feet were bound tightly together in a narrow, iridescent skirt that ended in flippers.

  The bearded seals’ front flippers look like hands; the ones in back are knotted together almost playfully. It doesn't take much to see how in the semistarved minds of Inuit hunters, the merging and marriage of seals and humans could occur.

  I'm curled up on a rock with water and ice lapping all around, while a snow bunting serenades me. Heard so often in my years in northern Greenland, it is utterly welcoming—a call home.

  Dinner. French wine is uncorked and beer is downed to go with a hearty Dutch stew. We relax into a conviviality that goes on until 4:00 a.m. After the dishes are done, Anna, the cook, climbs the stairs from the galley with a wicked grin on her face, as Albert and Phil let loose with Caribbean rhythms. Maaike holds Isbrun on her lap. Colin plays a traveler's guitar and sings; Anna plays at seduction. We shimmy, stomp, laugh, and slither, as if mocking the wild ride we just had on the Barents Sea. Sometime in the wee hours, utterly drunk, Gary Hume grabs the shy captain and leads him in a faltering rendition of a waltz.

  Out on deck, Max Eastley, a sound artist, drops a hydrophone over the rail and puts the headphones to my ears. Max is small and quiet, with soul-searching eyes and big ears. What I hear is astonishing. A fluttering whistle starts high and falls slowly down; it is the mating song of the male bearded seal, heard only in April and May. The whistles ululate. As one song ends, another begins—like a round—leaf upon leaf of sound.