It was early and so most of the bus was quiet. Luke and Tom, across the aisle, slept. Sam and I talked for a while, but then we too succumbed to the silence, watching the landscape outside the bus windows change. Even after a month in Norway for Sam and several stays in Norway for the rest of us, the views outside the bus windows were startling: the bright-blue fjord stretching like a channel between evergreen heights, precipices of rocks, whitewater and fishermen in the snow-fed rivers, mountainside meadows, and the glacier beyond, fading into the cirrus sky.
The bus traveled in and out of the countryside, all along the one highway that could take us to the glacier: Norway’s winding, two-lane 604. The bus passed an evergreen forest, high hills, crossed and crossed again a single river in a straight-north course from the fjord to the glacier. The bus hurtled through tiny villages—blurs of houses and farms and sometimes a single store or gas station—past ships loaded with orange and blue metal-sided shipping containers, past a camping park and a small sign advertising, in English, rafting and zipline tours.
Finally, past a steeply sloped valley dotted with summer houses and sheep farms—hiking and climbing gear clanking on the floor, water bottles, cameras, and ropes on people’s laps, crampons and axes strapped to backpacks—the bus turned down the winding four-kilometer toll road that leads to the Breheimsenteret.
It all looked the same; so much of it looked the same. Perhaps this is why I didn’t notice, why I didn’t see.
EXHIBIT 21
“You see what you want to see,” my father tells me one day. We have just flown across the country for a family vacation, and I look down to discover the driver’s license that I have been carrying around for months has misspelled my name and I haven’t once noticed.
My architecture professor in the only drawing course I will take in college will tell me the same thing, except he will say, “You choose what to see.” He is trying to teach the eleven students in our class—all sitting on high stools with white drafting tables and blank sheets of paper—to draw models and buildings in the same way, by not seeing the object itself but the blank space surrounding it.
I do not perfect drawing the blank space. In that room, I never want to draw around the models or pieces of fruit. I see only the high narrow skylights and the open door behind me, pitching sunspots, warm winter light, onto my pencil box.
EXHIBIT 22
My first year in Norway, I bought a book whose jacket copy compared a collection of lyric essays to the Museum of Jurassic Technology: this book “is to essays what the Museum of Jurassic Technology is to gallery dioramas.”
A few years later I read an endorsement by Lawrence Weschler—author of Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, the story of the Museum of Jurassic Technology—on another book jacket for a different essayist. “Downright near infinite,” he writes, “at any rate, the good fortune of a city blessed with such antic chroniclers.”
“To build a museum,” Sverre Fehn once said in an interview, “where there is no object, the museum becomes the object and architecture the story. It is a search into the surface of the earth…. The invisible becomes visible.”
EXHIBIT 23
In 1973 Swedish museologist Ulla Keding Olofsson declared that the increased demand for museums “has been so rapid and has reached such a level that museums have to now turn down requests for service.” She continued, “So far as it can be foreseen, the factors responsible for increased demands on museums are likely to continue to prevail indefinitely.”
EXHIBIT 24
By 1990 curators and researchers had begun to complain that many museums, but particularly the natural history museum, focused on education and display over research. Their habitat dioramas and “nature-faking,” as one curator put it, are more products of imagination than science. Museums around the world began to change their names, from natural history museums to museums of science. Patrons, these curators argued, wanted experience, not collection; they didn’t have the patience for reconstruction, for that certain sort of seeing.
EXHIBIT 25
In a 2012 museum symposium, “The Elephant in the Room,” Oxford curator Darren Mann declared that for the cost of one painting the Ashmolean had recently purchased (£7.8 million), the United Kingdom’s entire collection of entomological specimens held outside museums and universities could be rehoused.
EXHIBIT 26
In 2013 Oxford’s Museum of Natural History held another symposium, “Crap in the Attic?”, which tried to respond to the threat of the loss of natural history museums altogether.
EXHIBIT 27
The bus jerks to a halt and there’s a blur of movement. The red ski suits are shuffling and grabbing long black gear bags from overhead, hoisting them on their shoulders or under arms and filing off the bus. The Norwegian students and day tourists are gathering their things too, reaching under seats, zipping backpacks, capping bottles, and tying bootlaces. There’s a glint of sun through the window. The bus driver leans into the aisle and stretches his legs.
I begin getting up too. I collect my notebook, pen, water, my camera, and my extra clothes, and I stand up and walk a few paces down the narrow aisle of mostly empty seats toward the low tree line of just-green mountains in the distance, toward the long deep lake framed by the silt-covered beach, toward the ashen-white glacier, thick and vast and filling the valley like a renegade river, like a flooded dam, toward the hikers and brightly colored climbers that I know will already be out, ascending the mountain in long slow lines, toward the day and the museum.
I get to the bus door and realize the guys haven’t followed. As I turn around, Sam calls from the back, one hand resting on the edge of my seat, the other gesturing out the now-clear window. “Is this it?”
I look, but I cannot see.
I leave my bag on the front seat of the bus and step out into the warming air; it smells of smoke and pine, and even though it’s mostly overcast, the light reflecting off the snow in the distance stings my eyes.
I move through the crowd, past the skiers and the hikers and the families snapping photos and milling about the blacktop parking lot. I walk past the buses and parked cars and a thicket of dark pines and spruce, some scraggly, some full and bursting with branches, all shadowed by the mountain, all rising from the sidelong horizon, from the empty valley in front of the bus.
There are no stone walls, no long wooden door, no large reflective windows, mirroring the mountains back at themselves. There is no shake-shingled roof, split in two and merged by a single center stripe of paneled glass. There are no exhibits or information desk, no photographs of the glacier, and no discussions of its recession. There are no tour guides in matching black polo shirts, no signs, no ice flow or flora and fauna charts labeled in English and Norwegian, German, and French, no lines of people waiting to buy ice cream or an extra pair of gloves or a map of the mountains.
Instead, just past the spot where I stand, there are blackened hunks of wood and concrete and piles of dirt and rock. There’s a level spot of ground where a building’s foundation once was, and in the air, cut off at the fourth rung, a metal casing and some remnants of glass.
When the wind picks up, all around the parking lot move loose pieces of ash, like a thin coating of snow, like scraps of paper.
EXHIBIT 28
The year before he died, a friend and former student of mine told me about Los Angeles’s Getty Museum. It was the spring before I first went to Norway. We were standing on a brick-lined sidewalk outside a small library; flowering dogwoods and hydrangeas edged the building, spilled over onto the path. He told me, that day, that the white walls of the Getty gleamed in the sun like the snow on a mountaintop before it had been walked on, on a new morning, in the winter air, in the early light.
I watched him intently, nodded along, but I did not realize at the time that this was a metaphor. So he told me the story again, except that this time there was white pavement, white flowers, white statues in reclining positions. It was white as clouds on string
s, my friend told me, in the valley of angels.
EXHIBIT 29
One year winter wildfires begin to spark across Norway. I watch a Norwegian news broadcast of these fires, gray plumes of smoke drifting over the water, across rocky plains. The footage is taken from a helicopter. Occasionally you see the rounded outline of the helicopter’s window on the screen’s edge, and then, all at once—following the smoke’s same horizontal line—bursts of red. “Freakish winter wildfires in Norway,” wrote the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, “have underlined the importance of adopting a multi-hazard approach to disaster risk management in an era of changing climate.”
EXHIBIT 30
A neighbor saw it first—flames—shooting up the side of the building, using the wood roof as kindling, torching the exhibits. Townspeople came out and firemen; the museum’s curators were called, but there was nothing they could do so they stood back, a hundred meters or more, leaning on cars, crouched along the wet pavement of the highway, and they watched smoke drift over the high glacial mountains as the fire blazed on, like a burning bush, like the apostles’ tongues, like a photon emitted from the sun.
EXHIBIT 31
“You feel like you are seeing everything now. Nothing was happening, and now everything is happening. Why does your sight seem now so sharp and clear?”—Craig Arnold
PAULING’S CORE
In 1935, when he was thirty-four years old, Linus Pauling created the ice-type model. Young, handsome, and by all accounts dynamic, Pauling was in his eighth year on the faculty at the California Institute of Technology and had already made several significant scientific discoveries, compelling enough that even Albert Einstein had attended one of his lectures. Still, Pauling was interested in ice; he wanted to know how ice was structured, what exactly it was made of, its most essential elements and its inner workings. I see a photo from that year of Pauling with a friend, sitting on a set of steps. Pauling wears a dark suit and striped tie; his arms are crossed, but he’s smiling. He has grown—briefly it seems—a thick beard. His wavy hair is just beginning to recede. Pauling’s friend, Norman Elliott, has his arm around Pauling, but Pauling doesn’t return the favor.
It had been understood for some time by then that ice was comprised of both hydrogen and oxygen and that the oxygen atoms were fixed, in the same known positions. What wasn’t known was exactly what was happening with the hydrogen atoms. “It has been generally recognized,” Pauling would write in his article “The Structure and Entropy of Ice and of Other Crystals with Some Randomness of Atomic Arrangement,” “since the discovery of the hydrogen bond that the unusual properties of water and ice (high melting and boiling points, low density, association, etc.) owe their existence to hydrogen bonds between water molecules.” Just a few sentences later he adds, “The question now arises as to whether a given hydrogen atom is midway between the two oxygen atoms it connects or closer to one than to the other.”
In what one biographer called “a flash of insight,” Pauling not only realized that observations on ice’s entropy meant that hydrogen atoms had to be closer to one oxygen atom than another but also that the hydrogen atoms could come in several arrangements. “Thus we assume,” Pauling wrote, “that an ice crystal can exist in any one of a large number of configurations, each corresponding to certain orientations of the water molecules. The crystal can change from one configuration to another by rotation of some of the molecules or by the motion of some of the hydrogen nuclei.”
I will wonder, when I read about it, where Pauling had this “flash of insight.” Was he in his Caltech office—surrounded by a sea of papers—or working out a diagram before his students on a blackboard? Was he lying on a desk, as he sometimes did when he taught—“Roman-style,” as he called it—or was he out walking on the Mediterranean-inspired campus? Was he away, on one of his many trips to Berkeley, to Harvard, or overseas? Was he somewhere outside, or was he in a lab, looking at ice?
Perhaps, in the end, it wasn’t as important where Pauling was as much as what he saw, or foresaw. “Seeing everything,” biographer Algis Valiunas writes, “was to be Pauling’s specialty.”
I first think about ice when I move several hours north of my parents’ house for college. It’s not that I hadn’t encountered ice before, but carless my first year on campus, I now had to walk in ice, and great distances sometimes. I lived that year—and for all four years of school—on what was called “upper campus.” My university was built on both the top and the bottom of a hill, with a major river near the base of the hill, and so there was lower campus with most of the academic buildings on the bottom of the hill, upper campus with housing on top, and then the art and music buildings were the lone part of the university sectioned across the river. The campus was gorgeous in summer and fall and even spring—tree-lined and blooming—but winter was a different story.
There were three ways down and up the almost-hundred-foot hill between upper and lower campus. First, there were the back stairs, a series of wooden steps cut right through a small, heavily wooded forest and spilling out behind the academic buildings. Much closer to where I lived, there was the road and adjacent sidewalk, which climbed all one hundred of those feet in a mere eighth of a mile. Finally, there were the front stairs, seven sets of eleven or twelve steep concrete steps heading straight down the other side of the hill, this side broad and grassy. I tried all three paths, up and down, and alternated between them, joking with friends that it was a law of averages here: one trip up the hill for each late-night slice of pizza.
The first major snowstorm of my freshman year of college, I walked down the sidewalk version of the hill just behind a guy in white khakis and a light-colored jacket. We shuffled along slowly, bundled up, with backpacks on. Suddenly the guy in the white khakis hit a patch of ice on the hill and went sliding, straight down the hill, at a remarkable speed. People in front of him cleared the way as they heard a body hurtling by. He made no noise—maybe he didn’t have time to; he just kept skidding down, his backpack flying behind him. Thirty or forty feet after he started sliding, he finally stopped, in a heap. As I watched, unmoved from the spot where I’d been when he started the slide, he picked himself up, his white khakis dirty and wet, and kept walking to class.
I never forgot that student’s resolve, but I quickly decided to always wear dark jeans to class and asked for some metal treads for the bottoms of my boots for Christmas. I also began to watch for ice everywhere I went; it seemed vital to understand what I’d gotten myself into. There was a thin layer of ice on the parking lots seemingly all winter; there was ice hanging off the roofs of the older buildings; ice even lined the long field just outside my dorm, enough ice that eventually they sent someone over to fill it in and add goalposts: a makeshift hockey rink.
The ice I was most interested in, though—most taken with—was the first ice of the season, the ice that was barely there and then gone. Sometimes, on early mornings when it was almost winter, my friends and I would go for long runs. The sky was dark when we started—cloudy nights turning into cool mornings—and as it lightened, we’d see the first or second frost, coating windshields and then hardening the tips of the grass. If we ran far enough, we’d sometimes pass the remnants of a farm field, long rows of what was once wheat or corn, now flanked in ice. It felt like magic; one day everything was green, and then suddenly, on those early mornings, it would be white.
The study of ice began in earnest almost 175 years ago, though it’s possible individual scientists studied and collected ice much before that. In his “History of Early Polar Ice Cores,” Chester C. Langway Jr. notes that as early as the 1840s and up until the 1940s scientists dug deep pits in glaciers, trying to discover their thickness. Some researchers cut through the ice manually; others used chainsaws to dig these holes, holes big enough for the scientists to climb inside. One of these early ice researchers, Ernst Sorge, lived in a snow cave underground for seven months next to his fifteen-meter-deep pit of ice. In a biography of Sorge,
I read that a group of men, convinced that he might run out of food, once hiked all the way to Sorge’s snow cave and pit with food and a series of winter supplies. As the story goes, the snow was so deep that only two men actually made it to Sorge’s site, and on the way back, neither of those men made it back alive.
Ice studies gradually moved away from hand-dug pits and toward cutting long samples, or cores, straight from the ice. In the late 1940s and early 1950s three separate excursions set out to recover and study one-hundred-meter deep ice cores: a Norwegian-British-Swedish team on Queen Maud Land, the French Polar Expedition in Greenland, and the Juneau Ice Field Research Project in Alaska. Along with collecting polar ice cores, these expeditions began to study measurements like grain size, density, and air bubbles.
According to many scientists, though, it was in 1957 that modern ice research emerged when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began to extract even deeper ice cores, four hundred meters deep. When they were taken out of the ice, ice cores were then shipped to “cold rooms,” placed in long metal canisters, labeled, and stored on rows of metal shelving. In black-and-white photographs from the early days of storage, there are rooms full of those metal cannisters, the ends penned with details about the ice. Scientists in those photos attend to the ice in parkas and snow pants.
Dispatches from the End of Ice Page 12