Many years later another ice age came: the Little Ice Age, a period between the 1300s and 1800s when more snow fell in the winters than melted in the summers. Much of Northern Europe cooled during that period. The canals in the Netherlands are famed to have frozen then, as did London’s River Thames, more than twenty times. In Dutch artist Abraham Hondius’s 1677 oil painting of the Thames, people are shown walking and skating across the frozen river under a clouded sky. “Frost fairs” were held on the ice; one time an elephant was led across the river. In France, when the ice threatened to take over the Arve Valley, exorcists were brought in to call off the spirit of the advancing glacier. A forty-meter-high wall of snow came anyway.
“Professors were molested in the streets,” Pauwels and Bergier write about the tactics of Hanns Hörbiger’s world ice proponents. “The directors of scientific institutes were bombarded with leaflets, ‘When we have won, you and your like will be begging in the gutter.’ Businessmen and heads of firms before engaging an employee made him or her sign a declaration saying, ‘I swear I believe in the theory of eternal ice.’” Other ice disciples were said to have shown up at traditional astronomy lectures shouting, “Out with astronomical orthodoxy! Give us Hörbiger!”
Hörbiger’s was a world that followed its own enticing logic. The movement created its own archives, its own genealogies, and even a newspaper, the Key to World Events; it was a metanarrative, Hörbiger believed, that could restart science on nonsectarian terms. And it was with no small sense of consolation that scientists, artists, and philosophers took up cosmic ice theory, not many years after the scientific revolution and not many years before much of the world would break out in a series of world wars over land and power and philosophical regimes.
“Modern Science seems to foster a desire for a final synthesis, a well-formed formula of the world that could eliminate the fragmentation of contemporary knowledge and its isolation within various academic disciplines,” German scientist and natural historian Max Benzen wrote in 1934. “This metaphysical desire is expressed in two scientific ventures of the time: Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and Hanns Hörbiger’s Theory of Cosmic Ice.”
Both in Norway and around the world, for some time, the ice seemed limitless. In the 1880s—the same years my great-great-grandparents lived on the other side of the glacier—ice was cut in chunks from the edge of the Jostedalsbreen to ship all over Scandinavia for cooling.
An American, Frederic Tudor of the Tudor Ice Company, was the first to imagine that ice might be shipped and sold. On a visit to the Caribbean, Tudor was surprised by the stifling heat and wished, as he did back home in Massachusetts, he might cut a piece of ice from his family pond to cool himself or even just a drink.
In 1806, at the age of twenty-three, Tudor hired a boat, the Favorite, loaded it with ice, and set off for the island of Martinique, two thousand miles from Massachusetts. Eventually Tudor sent ice to Charleston, Calcutta, Savannah, Havana, and a host of other southern cities. Workers cut this ice from Fresh Pond, Doleful Pond, Spy Pond, Sandy Pond, Horn Pond, Spot Pond, and, during the years when a young naturalist named Henry Thoreau was living in the woods, from a sixty-one-acre lake in Concord, Massachusetts, called Walden Pond.
A couple of hours into the trip, the wind picks up again. I hold my hat on with my hand. The views from the boat become even more impressive, though, as the ride goes along, and I don’t want to see it all through glass: the granite ridges rounding, then dropping straight off into the water’s edge, the long patches of snow, waterfalls and glacial-fed rivers, small villages, and then even glimpses of the ice.
The Norwegian ferries seem to mostly run weather notwithstanding. I’d ridden on one, only two weeks before, when the open sea was so volatile that bags and drinks were flying off tables and people throwing up in wastebaskets.
“Please move to the center of the boat,” the captain had finally announced on the loudspeaker in Norwegian and then English. At the next stop—a tiny village with little more than a few houses—half the passengers got off the ferry. I had stayed on for the whole ride.
This day, my friend goes inside, but despite the now steadily falling rain, Luke and I keep sitting outside. I pull my legs toward my chest and drape the plastic rain cover from my backpack over them. Just past the mountains, the clouds are low and thick, obscuring what’s behind them, darkening even the early afternoon sky, making the familiar route look distant and strange.
The rain hits the boat sideways, pooling along the lower railing and running down the deck in dozens of streams toward the back of the boat. I readjust the hood of my rain jacket and rub my hands together under the rain cover; one of the streams hits the edge of my right shoe, then diverts around it.
“You know,” Luke says after a while, nodding toward the fjord, “all this used to be ice.”
I ask him to tell me more and he tells me about glaciers and about how carbon dioxide—from humans and other sources—is absorbed by the world’s water, how he wants to know, but doesn’t yet, what effect this has on plants and animals and the water itself. He’s begun studying this in the Southern Ocean around South Africa and now wants to trace it north to the Arctic too. He explains that it all has an effect; even noise changes water: carbon dioxide, heat, ships, melting ice.
“The ice is compacted,” he says, “something like clear plastic. If you were down at the bottom of a glacier, you could look through it like a window.”
I nod along and then lean back against the boat’s side and trace the wet white deck with my gloved hand. I watch the misted water, just beyond my feet, in motion, rolling. As I look out at the water, for the first time ever, I think of all the hydrogen bonds in that sea breaking—from ice to liquid water—and I wonder if they made noise as they did; I imagine the glacial ice caps that were once there, polished: smooth as pool balls, as pressed flowers.
In the early 1990s Norway’s glaciers appeared to be growing. Though most of the world’s ice was shrinking, in those years some of Norway’s glaciers experienced higher snowfall than normal and actually began to expand. “Glaciers in Norway have begun to creep down from their mountain strongholds,” a 1990 news article noted of Norway’s Briksdalsbreen Glacier, “in apparent defiance of global warming.”
I see a chart of glacier cumulative front variation, or changing lengths, prepared by scientists at the University of Bergen. In the 1990s—and, in some cases, as early as the 1950s—some of the glacier lengths did began to increase.
By the 2000s, though, every single one of Norway’s glacier lengths had dropped, like most of the glaciers worldwide. At last count, France’s Mer de Glace Glacier has retreated 2,300 meters. Norway’s Rembesdalsskaka has retreated 2,000 meters. In a few months alone, the Briksdalsbreen glacier in Norway retreated 130 meters, far enough that it began to break off of the rest of the ice.
I first hear about Hanns Hörbiger and his theory of world ice in a lecture sponsored by my university. The lecture is put on by another department, but a friend sends me the dark, art deco–styled flyer with a note, “Ice: maybe you’d be interested?” On the left side of the flyer is a graphic of swirling cosmos in a black background; on the right the title “Counter-Science: The World Ice Movement’s Cosmic Visions and Its Rise to Fame (1894–1945)” and an image, perhaps a book cover, this time with an astronomical dial, yellow planets aligned but a triangular mass of particles spreading out from the sun.
My friend knows me well. Ironically, the scheduled lecture is canceled for the rare heavy dumping of spring snow in Missouri, but when the talk is rescheduled, I tell my students about it and let them out of class early so they can attend if they want. One of my students does attend; he, five other people, and I show up in a room built for forty or fifty, long rows of seats sloping toward a podium and screen in the front, toward a German scholar dressed in a turtleneck and jacket.
I take furious notes; I tape the talk on my phone. “How have I not heard of Hörbiger?” I ask my friend who sent th
e flyer when we go for a run on our favorite trail the next day, a layer of already-packed snow turning underneath our feet, the dusky light paling the leaf-bare trees we pass. “Well, I’d never heard of Hörbiger either,” she replies, “though I guess I’m not as interested in ice.”
I try to find an English translation of the Theory of Cosmic Ice and spend an afternoon in the stacks of our university library, looking for critical articles or historical newspapers that mention his name or cosmic ice. After hours of searching, though, I only find two new facts: first, that Hörbiger thought even the Northern Lights could be explained by ice—maybe cosmic ice dust, maybe, as one writer described Hörbiger’s thinking, “distant glaciers reflecting the sun.”
Everything else is in German, comes from sources that I’m not sure I can trust, or goes over material that the scholar had already mentioned in the Cosmic Ice talk. Everything, that is, except for one additional fact, a fact that I will take with me and not after that day forget: Hanns Hörbiger is said to have called his new world theory “the astronomy of the invisible.”
We’ve made it through most of the Sognefjord—seen several of its icy plumes—when we round a bend and the ferry begins slowly aiming toward a landside dock, covered in a row of black, half-blown tires. It’s Luke’s stop; he’s getting off the boat before we do, taking a railroad named Flam—one of the steepest trains in the world—to a high mountain village, then coming back the same way again. We walk Luke down to pick up his luggage and wave at him as he disembarks.
Soon we disembark too, hoisting our backpacks off the gangway and onto a still-wet dock as the Fjord1 speeds away in the distance.
When we arrive at the glacier, it’s too late to hike and so I camp overnight, in view of the ice but not quite at it, on the edge of a small campground. There are clean bathrooms, a kitchen, a washing machine, showers, and even wireless internet in the campground, but I pitch the tent as far away as I can from all this and even the other tents and caravans. I sit along a white-stone shore on a glacial-fed river and wash my feet and my face in the icy water. I lock the zippers to the tent with a luggage lock, realizing the ridiculousness of this and unsure what I’m trying to keep in or out but still doing it. I wake up to frost-covered ground and a tourist bus carrying a group from New Jersey.
The wind had settled into the valley again that morning; I could feel it from the blacktop parking lot where a local bus dropped me and two other passengers—teachers from California—off. It rustles the sleeves of my jacket, pulsating against my already chapped face. My friend had traveled farther on the evening before and so I was on my own this day, making my way toward the glacial ice; I could see it from the parking lot: wide ridges of snow in the distance, staggered along the crease between mountains and angling down, though not all the way to the base of the mountain, to the lake or the low forest between me and it.
“Mind if we join you?” one of the teachers asks as we get off the bus, pointing toward the steeply pitched trail ahead.
“Not at all,” I reply.
There is a narrow break in the trees, just past the parking lot, and so we walk down a few dirt-carved steps toward it. The wind immediately cuts back; there are scraggly trees on both sides of the break and an ankle-deep partially frozen stream crossing under a few logs and pieces of squared wood. Just beyond the small clearing is the trail. As we begin down the stony footpath, I talk with the teachers for a little while about our lives and jobs and the different mountains that we’ve hiked. Eventually, though, they fall a few paces behind and I continue on in silence, pulled forward through the low canopy of dark branches by the steady sounds of the moving air and my own shoes striking ground. I walk over rocks and brush, past trees whose shadows are almost smaller than my own but glance still off the wet ground in a thicket of movement. I watch the shapes as I walk: thin rods of darkness interlocking and then suddenly splitting, letting in pieces of air and light. The path changes with them too, sometimes small pieces of gravel, sometimes bare ground, sometimes long stretches of slick rock.
I walk over several small streams, part ice, part water, hike up and down and around wind-washed boulders, some smooth, some patterned with winding orange and gray striations. I climb a single set of wooden steps onto a wide boardwalk that, the next time I visit the glacier, will be completely washed out, smashed up by spring flooding or a winter storm or maybe just the regular beat of wind through the valley.
I follow the pierlike bleached wood onward, up and up toward a long ledge of rock, toward spots of sun falling from the gossamer sky onto the snow-covered mountain in the distance. There is a metal sign about walking on the glacier at your own risk somewhere past the wood, and a field of rocks, mostly smooth, some small enough to hold in a single hand but others as wide as ponds or rivers. High on both sides of the expanse of rock are snowy hills—perhaps mountains, I’m not sure—treeless but mossy, ascending like a frozen sea swell, high enough I cannot see beyond them.
I pass quickly across level surfaces, steady my hands and feet along the smaller piles of rock. I listen to the path shift under the weight of my body. There are no animals and no other people, nothing breathing but the land ahead and behind and the teachers from California. The distance between me and them grows and I let it, though I stay always in earshot. As they fall farther and farther behind, I clamber over one small ledge and another until, finally, I’m there, at the farthest edge of the glacier.
Snow walls rise a few stories above the broad flat rock where I stand; they gather in apartment-sized drifts, blown like the foam cresting on waves, like sand on dunes. Cirrus clouds perch overhead, and a scattering of light gleams off the steep surface of the ice, fills it up like a glass. In places, that light is diffused—shades of sun swept up into thick currents of snow—but in other spots, the light is sharp and clear. Still, even from a distance and even in all that light, I can see that the ice is less like a mirror and more like a cratered moon, like the rounded, scarred underside of my own hand.
I move closer—five or ten meters—until I’m close enough to make out individual grains of ice, dense and compressed but still glinting. There’s a tunnel ahead, wet and rounded, and sheer walls of snow, streaked with small bits of sediment, thousands of them. It’s indigo—the blue inside that tunnel—not aqua, not robin’s egg, not cobalt, not violet. It’s urgently blue, luminescent. It’s the blue of the fjord from a plane’s window, the blue of an almost-night sky, the blue of the earth as viewed from some distant constellation.
It’s a blue I’ve seen before, at night, in a Puerto Rican bay, when hundreds of dinoflagellates circled my kayak, flashing neon against a dusky sky. The sky at the glacier is not dusky; it’s a hazy white, but the ice is the same: unexpectedly blue. And in the same way I thought of cupping my hand through the water in the ocean, here too I suddenly have an urge to touch the blue, as if I might take it in, might hold onto the color and the moment, absorb it into my own skin.
I walk forward and reach out my hand but at the last second stop myself and pull my hand back, remembering how even one warm body can change a landscape.
I step away from the glacier and walk a few paces down the mountain. Wind pulls at my hood and seeps through my thin jacket again. I can hear the pair from California now; they’ve moved closer and are taking photographs of each other and the ice. They’re talking yet the noise of their voices is muted, even in the short distance between us.
It takes me a while to decipher what the other noise I hear is. It’s steady and in the background, pushing against the now-loud wind, the sound of my new friends and the flapping of my own backpack and jacket against my shirt and my bare arms. It’s hollow and constant and coming from somewhere deep below where I stand, the sound of something thrown against ice walls, pummeling through the ground, dashing against the granite.
There on the edge of the glacial ice is the sound of water rushing.
A few months before my first trip to Norway, I went on a boat to see other glacier
s, that time to Alaska. It was a cruise ship then, and I was on it with my parents, my brother, his wife, and his in-laws. I was sleeping for ten days in a tiny, shared room, on a sofa that did not pull out. I was so cold that on the first stop of the trip, I had to buy another jacket. There were hot tubs and swimming pools on the ship—probably remnants of some other time when the boat sailed in a different season or a warmer place—but I never once saw them used. The towns the cruise ship docked at weren’t even real towns but ports staffed by cruise ship employees eager to take money for excursions or mailed-in trinkets. I learned this one day walking past the port, a few miles to the real town, a town where there were no trinket shops and where a grizzly bear would later that day be reported roaming the streets.
What I did see from that ship were shards of ice, floating in the water like winter salt on a dark road. And one night, standing on the top deck, I watched a huge sheet of ice from the side of a glacier crack and hit the surface of the water, the snow around it rising like gunpowder. Later I’d watch a video of the ice breaking, or what I assumed was the same glacier breaking by the date and time stamp. In the background of that video, when all that ice came down, people clapped and cheered.
Forty years after its introduction, Einstein’s theory would be almost universally accepted; Hanns Hörbiger’s Welteislehre theory would be discredited by even its staunchest supporters. Hörbiger’s ideas, in that time, had gotten tied up with politics and bad leaders and problematic philosophies, but most of all, despite Hörbiger’s best efforts, the larger public didn’t believe ice could ever be as important as Hörbiger surmised.
My friend will meet Luke once more, later in the summer, at a bar in Bergen for a drink and to watch a soccer match. I won’t see him again, though I will see his name again and again in the many months to come as I look through articles and research statements on ice and CO2, on blue whales in the Arctic and on global warming and carbon and oceans. I will think of him when I read, back home, six years later, a new oceanography study, which found that the places where glaciers melt into fjords may be the noisiest spots in the ocean.
Dispatches from the End of Ice Page 3