The Future of Ice

by Gretel Ehrlich

  Later, we debate the variables having to do with global warming. How much is part of the natural cycle? How much is provoked by human carelessness, idiocy, and greed? In another bay we make concentric circles around seals, reluctant to leave. There are stories of arctic hysteria in humans and animals, and there are also tales of beauty-induced trance. Surely the Sirens were seals. We glide by a branching glacier, its two arms holding a geological knot. Six terns perch on a piece of blue ice, exhausted from their long journey. Soon they'll go to their nest sites and incubate eggs. They have roughly 132 days to nest, hatch out chicks, fledge, and fly again. Now snow begins to fall and will not stop. Ko stands beside me on deck. He is crying. I hold him. I put the headphones with the seal songs to his ear.

  WALRUS

  Shhhhh … shhhhh … shhhh … The sound of ice hitting the hull. Then a thonk. We hit something big. I bolt out of my bunk and go on deck. David is at the helm, and Maaike is standing on the bowsprit looking for ice and signaling to David which way to turn. She gestures one way, then the other. The big wheel spins. Accuracy is necessary; one wrong turn and an iceberg could send us the way of the Titanic. I stand on the raised deck behind David. Ice lies on water as far as the eye can see: scattered rhinestones, spiral arms of ice, ice walls and icebergs, and bits of ice that have splintered off larger pieces whose translucent edges are shaped like miniature whales.

  On either side of the Noorderlicht ivory gulls are taking baths: dunking under the water, shooting up again, lifting their wings, grooming their chests with their beaks. We are headed for Ny-Alesund, an international research center committed to understanding climate change. There's a long night's passage in rough water; by morning we turn eastward into Kongsfjorden.

  At the Norwegian Polar Institute, we follow Jan to the roof of the building. To the north are snow-covered mountains; to the south, the slow-thawing fjord. “All nations are welcome here,” he says. “We have scientists from Norway, Sweden, Russia, Poland, Japan, Denmark, Germany, China, and the United Kingdom, and we're here to support their research. We provide housing, food, guns (for protection from polar bears), snow scooters, weather information, and all kinds of instrumentation and communication possibilities.”

  Snow falls gently as we stand amidst buzzing instruments. “Our main research now has to do with the changing climate. Here, we study the effects of solar radiation, stratospheric ozone concentrations, global radiation, short- and long-wave radiation, UV radiation, spectral UV, ozone, the long range transport of pollutants, sea ice, the penetration of solar light on ice, and the structure of the melting process and how it's connected to the water beneath.” As he talks we gaze at charts of glacial recession.

  “We study the concentration of pollutants in arctic animals and the reasons for high concentrations of PCBs in their systems. We're monitoring glacial advances and retreats. While most glaciers are retreating, there's one over here that is surging,” he says, pointing. “It advances three meters per day in the summer. But the general trend is a ten percent retreat since the 1960s. And by comparing the 450,000 years of climate history now available to us, we can identify how much anthropogenic influences affect the natural cycles in the ever-changing climate.”

  One Chinese geophysicist wants to follow a magnetic line from pole to pole; the history of the world could be written there. Another is studying the effect of solar storms on weather, and believes that solar radiation has much more to do with climate change than thought previously. Someone else is taking up the study of flame retardants, their chemical similarity to hormones and their effect on mammals. There's no end to the bad news.

  After a sauna in the research center's gym, we count seals hauled out on fjord ice. We're nearing the end of our time in Kongsfjorden. We would continue north if we could, but global warming or not, there's too much ice. We 're only seven hundred miles from the North Pole. “We were lucky to get in anywhere at all,” Ted confesses. Then with a grin, “We might have had to keep sailing for the rest of our lives.”

  Late at night two young scientists from the institute come aboard: a Norwegian named Kare, and Sebastian, a serious, dark-haired German geophysicist. “I'm here to study the properties of sea ice,” Sebastian says. “I look at it while it is freezing and also when it is thawing, and take samples of the water below to see how thawing or freezing affects things like salinity, density, temperature, nutrients, and sea life. In the 1990s, the climate really changed. It was the time to be here to see that change happen before our eyes. We're looking at climate archives in ice-core samples to see what happened with industrialization, how much human impact is affecting the ice. There is more work to do to fully understand the process. All the influences and natural variables need a lot more assessment to answer the questions.”

  We're joined by Andy, the grip from the film crew, and Anna, the cook. Both are drunk. They open beers and pass potato chips. Sebastian continues: “It's too easy to make a snap judgment, to find the sea ice getting thinner and say that it is all human-caused, or simply a part of nature. We are looking for the truth in the complexity. We go out onto the ice and take samples; then we compare what we are seeing with historical ice-data charts. I am looking now at the exact form of the ice edge and at the sediments on the sea floor. The signatures of the sediments are an indication of what has been happening in the world, things like wind carrying dust, smoke, and the extent of volcanic activity. We see how the depositions have been laid down and where they have been disturbed. These are clues to understanding the history of weather, and what is happening now in the way of warming and the possibility of another ice age.”

  More beers come to the table, and Sebastian leaves. But Kare stays, snuggling with young Sara. “I was a big disappointment to my father,” he says. “I dropped out of college. I farmed, I sold vacuum cleaners, I worked in shops, drove taxis, made sausages, sold TVs. Then, I went back to school. I finished my final university exam on a Saturday, and I went to work here on a Monday. I had one day free. It's what I wanted. I love it here; I smile when I go out onto the ice.”

  Andy and Anna are kissing. Her shirt comes undone, and her red bra strap falls from her shoulder. Kare says how hard it is to come to any conclusion about the weather because of all the new influences on it. “There are so many separate disciplines,” he says, “and none of us knows what the other one knows. It's hard for us to put it all together.”

  Anna looks at him and gives him a hug. “Yes, I'm all for getting together with everyone,” she says. Kare indulges her embrace. “I'm an atmospheric physicist,” he continues. “But the guy next to me might be a biologist, and someone else is a geologist. … I think some bad things are happening that will affect our daily lives. The rapid increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane, for example. Everything is pointing upward in terms of warmth. I have two children. Probably they will survive. But maybe diseases will kill all of us first. There are too many people doing things for their own good without thinking of anyone else.”

  Anna drops cigarette ashes on someone's computer and knocks the satellite phone out of its cradle. She looks at Kare bleary-eyed: “But I cook for everyone. Do you want to know my whale recipe?”

  Kare, ignoring her, continues: “We scientists are trying to put our heads together to know what's going on.”

  Anna continues: “First sauté the whale steaks, and after, make a sauce of olive oil, wine, and butter. That's the recipe we named after the Greenpeace guy … what's his name? Watson? Yeah … I feed it to him before he knows what it is.” Laughter, then Andy pulls her to him. “Darling,” she says.

  “You should go to bed,” Andy tells her. Kare opens another beer. Andy grabs Anna's hand and kisses it. “You look like Zsa Zsa Gabor,” he says to her.

  “Do I?” she asks dreamily, then smiles and slumps on the table.

  Kare continues: “Yeah, for it's hard to know if, just because things are getting hotter, they might not suddenly get cold again. For example, in 1997 we had nine fee
t of snow on April twenty-eighth in my hometown of Tromsö. But still the planet is warming and the climate is changing fast.”

  “The totality of life, known as the biosphere to scientists and creation to theologians, is a membrane of organisms wrapped around Earth so thinly it cannot be seen edgewise from a space shuttle, yet so internally complex that most species composing it remain undiscovered. The membrane is seamless. From Everest's peak to the floor of the Mariana Trench, creatures of one kind or another inhabit virtually every square inch of the planetary surface.” I'm reading from E. O. Wilson. It's evening. We're under way again but going south. The gray sky is sun-pierced. Glaciers kneel down at water's edge and let their legs break in slapping wind-waves. I don't know why I'm crying. We've become so hardened, and the sea is trying to break us open again. An arctic tern flicks her wings once and soars fast in the direction of an uninhabited island. I like to think that I know her. She was flying above the Beagle Channel at the bottom of the world, and now, since we've both just arrived at latitude 79 degrees north, I'm seeing her again.

  Belowdecks, we work at our various projects. Nick has trapped air, fjord water, and light in three separate vessels to take home to his child. David Hinton shoots film of ice-covered seawater, and Val takes the ocean's temperature. Clouds pull across gold mountains and hang motionless, sea ice crumbles, and bare spots on the land begin to show.

  Most of us are estranged from what is actually going on all around us. “Nature is the matrix in which the human mind evolved,” E. O. Wilson said. “Without it we devolve. Simple as that. We are devolving.”

  Cold. Cold enough for seawater to freeze. Ice covers our wake. Yet, just north of here, the Gakkel Ridge, a thousand-mile-long slit in the ocean floor, is belching out heat in a long line, what one scientist called “a simmering necklace of volcanoes and hot-water vents that may harbor unique life-forms.” While extinctions are occurring at a horrendous, galloping pace, new life-forms are being found, albeit tiny ones. Nevertheless, it might be constructive to ask what we want our world to look like in the future: do we want picoplankton to replace hippos, bears, and ourselves?

  We pass slowly out of Kongsfjorden, make a sharp turn south, and enter the strait between Prins Karls Forland and the coast of the main island. We've taken down the sails and proceed under power. The passage is so shallow we have only one meter to spare, and any wrong turn will put us aground. With Ted at the wheel, we inch along. Maaike and Ward concentrate on navigating. It's silent on deck. Then Maaike yells: “Walrus!”

  Our last rite of passage is this: we take the Zodiac to a spit of land where the walrus have hauled out. It's snowing hard and the sea is rough. The film crew are clutching their gear, lifting it up every time a wave crests over the side of the boat. We're wet and it's cold—somewhere around zero—and we have to bale water. Just before reaching shore, Ward spins the boat around and cuts the engine. We paddle backward to keep from getting swamped. Shore consists of six inches of gravel, then a ten-foot-high snowbank up which we have to climb. Waves crash against our legs. We're like lemmings racing to shore. Ted extends a hand down and pulls me up. I flop on the snow like a seal. The Zodiac speeds away.

  We walk the length of the spit in blinding snow. Ahead is a lump of something—a blubbery pile of male walruses sleeping at the edge of the sea. Each weighs one to two tons. They are gentle, nuzzling one another with their ivory tusks and scratching their heads with back flippers that look like huge hands. As we approach, they give us the shy, doubtful look of young children, but if we keep our distance, they ignore us altogether.

  Marine mammal biologists fear for walrus populations in the Chuckchee, Bering, North Atlantic, and Barents Seas. Retreating and thinning ice is threatening their lives. Walrus can't dive as deep as seals do. They live on benthic animals—mostly shellfish—found where the sea floor is soft and shallow. They need to be near drift ice, which they use as a platform for resting and breeding. But as the Arctic warms, thin floes collapse under them, and the distances between shallow substrates— continental and island shelves—that also have drift ice nearby grow too large.

  Females don't have pups until they are five or six, and male walruses don't reach sexual maturity until eight or nine. They need time and ice and food, but warming conditions are often leaving these needs unmet. As sea level rises, continental shelves become too deep for the shallow divers like walruses to use. They are in danger of having no place to feed at all.

  We move slowly down-channel through melting brash ice. Ahead, it's all white; there may be too much ice for the Noorderlicht to get through. If ice stops us, we'll have to turn around and take the outer route in rough water again. Low clouds obscure the coast. David asks Ted if we'll make it. Ted grins: “We have so far.” Sailors don't believe in the future, only in the water in front of them. There is silence on deck. We listen not just for ice, but for the sound of the hull hitting bottom. Five hours later we round the bend into Isfjorden.

  Eider ducks fly past, two by two, beating us into Longyear-byren; the fjord ice opens slowly. At EISCAT, a research center on top of a mountain above town, we hear about the fragility of the upper atmosphere, how sensitive it is to environmental changes, about the feedback effect, the million-degree solar corona, the plasma wind and the solar wind streaming from the surface of the sun where it is 6,000 degrees. We are told how coronal mass ejections shoot particles through Earth's magnetic field, about incoherent scatters, electron densities, ion temperature, and velocity; and how solar radiation affects climate change.

  Later I lie on the aft deck of the Noorderlicht wrapped in a Po-lartec jacket. In a few hours we'll be flying back to London. In the lower latitudes an unusually hot summer is having its way with cities, people, and crops, and what's left of alpine glaciers. How I dread going back to all that—to night and the domestic violence of green where ice falls down as sweat on foreheads, and loosened hair is rain.

  I think of the cool contraption of a glacier's snout breaking apart in the blasting, all-night light of Spitsbergen, of the ice streams coursing off the Greenland ice cap, of the surging Perito Moreno glacier in southern Patagonia. At both ends of the world, the persistent undulations of snowflakes, sands, gravels, gases, and waters are stories held inside ice—recent stories, and ones from long ago. To trace how each snowflake fell, collapsed, became ice, carrying with it the dust, pollens, and pollutions of the day, is in itself more than a life's work.

  It cheers me to think of the ice cores from Greenland and eastern Antarctica all stored together in a very cold library, on shelves made of ice, under an icicle-clad rotunda. The books of ice will be arranged spine out and have names like North Window, Icepanishad, Burning Ice, and a newspaper called The Daily Ice Chronicle. There will be picture books of early refrigerators lined in rabbit fur, and museums will exhibit “the coldest object in the universe,” which is some obscure particle that almost reaches absolute zero. Theories of absolute zero will dominate academia. Our planet will be called not Earth, but Sila, the Greenlandic word that means, simultaneously, “weather” and “consciousness.”

  Parallel worlds, both inner and outer, will be easily recognizable. The archives of consciousness and physical being will be laid out in dioramas displaying smooth and undulating depositions of ice, as well as sonic, seismic, and neurological brain waves. Books made of ice will fill the shelves. The power of climate with its drastic, surefire changes may someday cause our little speck of human life—our edifices, ideas, entanglements, and frailties—to vanish, and the records of what we have been will melt away.

  I go below and sleep in my bunk. Sadness melts. Snow returns. In Wyoming the canoe bangs onto the ice and severs the river. In California a canyon wren's song wakes me; her airy, descending notes flutter down to the watery ones of the bearded seal. Hot and cold rivulets of air waft over my head and into my nose and mouth: wrath, peace, wrath, peace. Eyes open. I see wide white nights, blazing snowfalls, tangled love sheets, coarse sand and fine, rising from d
eep in the water well.

  I have no god, no parents, no children. Some days I want to go to Sam's grave, dig him up, and hold him once again. But I don't. Beauty saves me. As for ceremony, it is all around us. It is everything that happens every day. I walk the sendero in circle after circle and tend the twig fire of love with no possession, no future, only today and today, one year becoming another. I try to remember the economic lessons of the glacier, the amorous ones of the bearded seal, the terns’ hope, the winter river's beauty, and the teachings of Sam.

  This world is all ours, belonging to each of us: swan, crane, walrus, wren, dog, muskrat, saxifrage, pine, polar bear, you, me. But too many of us have relinquished our hold on the natural world and turned toward power and the ownership of things. The circuit that binds air to ocean, river to mountain, snowdrift to glacier, ice to water, flows through each of us. We are the vessels that help carry sila. Beauty streams through us, inside and out, the way waves and skeins of radiant energy from the sun give us life.

  I go on deck. Picoplankton dance, white-cloud mountains fall at my feet. I slip into a harness and clip in. Under full sail and going south, we are slanted hard to starboard. Seawater streams across scuppers. Snow comes down. “It's not a storm, just winter weather lingering,” Ted says. Will winter disappear? Will we be deseasoned? Will we have unendurable heat and dwindling water? Will the Greenlanders make a new word out of summer that also means “a year”?