Scientists had declared 1957—the year glacial drilling took off—the International Geophysical Year. Following the example of earlier international polar years, sixty-seven countries worked on scientific ventures. Along with the glacial study, Sputnik 1 was launched that year, then Sputnik 2, Explorer 1, and Vanguard 1 all spun into space.
Linus Pauling didn’t stick with the subject of ice forever. After his ice-type model, Pauling would then go on to research ionic crystal structures, molecular genetics, quantum mechanics, DNA, and vitamin C; he’d write an introduction to a chemistry textbook and win a National Medal of Science, a Presidential Medal for Merit, and two Nobel Prizes. Finally, he would add to his list of many accomplishments and goals the protesting of the atomic bomb tests, an action that would put him, at least briefly, on the House list of those supporting un-American activities.
Though Pauling moved onto other subjects and fields, what he did do was encourage his protégé and later son-in-law, Barclay Kamb, to take up ice. Kamb took Pauling’s advice, quickly rising to become one of the world’s leading glaciologists: presenting at the first International Symposium on the Physics of Ice in Munich in 1968; being awarded the highest honor in glaciology, the Seligman Crystal Award, in 1977; and having an ice stream near Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf named after him in 2003. Eventually Kamb and one of his colleagues even designed a new ice core drill, one that used hot water jets to quickly melt cylinders of ice as it cored. While some ice core drills only went partway into the ice, Kamb focused on drilling to the very bottom, where ice met land.
Kamb was interested in glaciers’ movement; his research took him on trips to study glaciers in Washington state and Alaska, and on over a dozen trips to study Antarctic ice. In his later research—those Antarctic trips—Kamb found deep and wide streams within the ice sheets that cover Antarctica, streams up to fifty kilometers wide and five hundred kilometers long and that move at a hundred times the speed of normal ice sheets. “The question is,” Kamb once posed, “what will happen to ice streams in the future. Will they cause a big enough effect on the flow of the ice sheet to contribute appreciably to sea level rise?” He and his own team of students and colleagues did their best to find out, collecting ice cores from some spots on the ice sheets, gathering remote video sensing data and temperature readings from others.
When I begin to look, I’m able to find various photographs online of Barclay Kamb on research trips to glaciers. In one photograph, Kamb—wiry, with thick gray hair—stands in the back of a team of researchers, leaning against a green tent in a hot water drilling camp. For some reason, most of the others in the photo are wearing Dr. Seuss hats or Dr. Seuss–inspired clothing. Kamb is in regular clothes: a long-sleeved blue shirt, sunglasses tethered around his neck; he holds a small glass in one hand and smiles slightly. In another photo, a much younger Kamb stands inside a hollowed-out piece of ice, his helmet and shoulders covered in snow. In another, he stands over the top of a narrow crevasse, skis on, poles just behind him in the snow, lining up a camera.
Whatever he was doing, Barclay Kamb always made sure to remain close to his father-in-law and mentor, Linus Pauling.
Today the largest depository of ice outside of nature is in Lakewood, Colorado. There the U.S. National Ice Core Laboratory stores and studies its own long, cylindrical glacial ice cores, currently over 17,000 meters of ice. Like the cores in those original cold rooms, the ice is stored in metal canisters and kept at –36 degrees Celsius. Also like those earlier cold rooms, the ice samples are cored from glaciers around the world and shipped or brought by scientists to the lab, who still study the ice in hats, gloves, and parkas. They saw and plane small pieces of ice off larger chunks and send these back to their own universities or research labs for study.
The basic idea of the National Ice Core Lab is both safekeeping and science; in taking samples of ice from around the world, the lab collects for research and study, but it also guards against the loss of the fragile evidence. The cores are studied; particles in the ice, air bubbles, dust, and pollen trapped inside tell the scientists studying them about changes in climate and historical events: volcanic eruptions, warm and cold spells, and increases in greenhouse gas. The ice cores are kept safe—or relatively safe—if safe means frozen.
I first hear about the National Ice Core Lab in Colorado from another teacher at my university. Between classes one day—students filing out of his course and into mine—we talk about the writing we’re both doing. When I mention that I’m interested in maybe doing some research on glaciers, he gets excited. “You have to talk to my friend,” he says. He tells me this friend once worked at the National Ice Core Lab, before it was housed in Denver, but he felt that there was too much government meddling with his work and finally left with his graduate students and his ice for Europe.
I imagine, while the other teacher talks, a midnight flight across the ocean and a plane packed—instead of with passengers—with large blocks of ice, taking up the seats, filling the cargo area, the pilots and stewards walking the aisles in snowsuits or parkas, a thin mist of frost covering everything.
By the time I finally do begin writing on ice, the other teacher and I no longer work at the same school. The note where I put his contact information is long gone—perhaps lost in my latest move—and I’m unable to track down his last name from any of my friends or former colleagues.
What I do is try to get a media pass to visit the lab. I will be in Denver for a conference: it seems perfect, but when I email the lab to ask, four or five weeks before my proposed visit, the person who replies tells me that there is a waiting list of at least three to four months.
Instead, from my own house I watch video footage of scientists preparing the cores for the lab, the mechanized augers twisting and cutting round pillars of ice, pulling them straight out of the snow-covered ground. I look through the lab’s photographs of rooms filled with shelves of long metal canisters, each canister labeled, in black marker, with serial numbers of some sort, perhaps length and width or coordinates of the ice. I look and I think about all that ice, all those hydrogen atoms; I wonder how many configurations a hallway of ice cores might have.
Sometime after I come back from the conference in Denver, the small city that I live in has the biggest ice storm since I moved there, one of the biggest storms in its history. I watch the news from my warm upstairs apartment, above a doctor’s office. Within just a few hours, more than two hundred crashes are reported: cars sliding into ditches, cars sliding into one another, a semi forking, pileups on the highway. One friend gets her car out of the driveway but then spins out of her lane on her way down one of the hills in town, her kids in the backseat; others simply abandon their cars on the sides of major city roads and trek out by foot. I decide not to chance it with my own lightweight car, one whose front driver’s side window has been stuck, two inches rolled down, for months. I walk out to a nearby store and get a few groceries and then call to cancel my plans with friends and tuck in for the night. After the ice comes snow, falling steadily for hours.
The next morning I take out the snowshoes I’ve never once used since moving from Wyoming, bundle up in fleece pants, a sweatshirt, and jacket, and head outside. Everything has changed; the roads and sidewalks and yards are all a single flat expanse of snow. Buildings are covered in white, their roofs piled high with snow; the drifts come up several steps onto the outdoor staircase of my own red-brick building. Boundaries between one thing and the next—driveways and yards, trees and bushes, even between houses far in the distance—have become porous. It was as if I’d left out my usual door, then slipped into somewhere different, someplace more northern and less peopled. In fact, there were no people, not that I could see: no one driving cars, no one out shoveling, no one standing and looking over the balconies, only snow and more snow and ice.
I move out, snowshoeing up a single large hill and then down what might or might not be the road. There’s a slight wind, but otherwise the only sound is my me
tal snowshoes landing softly on snow each time I take a step. I head away from the nearby business district and toward a rural road I sometimes run down. On this road I do see someone else; he’s skiing in the opposite direction of me. He takes a wide angle, nodding as he passes, and then gives me my distance. I plow on, finally circling back when my face begins to feel chapped and my fingertips numb.
I end where I started, just outside the steps to my apartment. It’s there, when I’m taking off my snowshoes, that I notice: the three evergreens near the bottom of the steps are covered in ice and leaning: once-crisp individual needles look like they’re encased in glass, and then that glass is covered in a thin, powdery coating. It’s like those individual blades of frosted grass I saw on my runs in college: recognizable but also strange in their newness, in their ability to be changed. I walk closer and guide my hand across one of the branches; it’s stiff, as I’d imagine, but the ice is thick enough that I can skate my fingers across it, that I can hold onto it like I might a fine piece of crystal, careful so it does not snap. I crouch down after a minute and look between the branches; there’s a surge of snow there too, but otherwise, from that vantage point, all I see is ice, common and sublime.
Was it for Linus Pauling, I wonder, all clear and calculated—his now-proven theories on hydrogen atoms and the structure of ice—or was there a moment for him too of the sublime? Was there a line or meter, a rhythm to the arrangement of those atoms? Was the study of ice, for him, a sort of poetry?
The thing I haven’t told you is this: on January 30, 1960, Linus Pauling—that great scientist and creator of the ice-type model—disappeared while out on a winter hike.
He had started on a walk near his cabin, midway between Monterey and San Luis Obispo; I see an inset map of this in an archived newspaper article: a black-and-white cutout of California with “Pauling Ranch” labeled in a rectangular box, just as large as the label for San Francisco. The Pauling Ranch—or Deer Flat Ranch, as the two-room cabin and the surrounding land was called—was adjacent to Los Padres National Forest and within striking distance of the great expanse of the Pacific Ocean. That morning, Pauling told his wife, Ava Helen, that he was going to check the fence lines on their property; he set out just before lunchtime on a deer path not far from the house. Ava Helen watched him leave.
By noon Pauling had lost his way as he walked along the cliff-lined shore. Perhaps it looked familiar, perhaps he thought it would lead him back, back to the small cabin where his wife was waiting. It didn’t; instead it led up. As one newspaper writer narrated, Pauling “climbed—clawed, actually—until he found himself trapped under a large overhanging rock about 300 feet above the water. The surface there was chiefly blue shale, slippery and dangerous.” After getting up on the cliff—an eighty-degree ledge—Pauling could not get down. He was worried that any movement he might make would toss him into the ocean below, and so there, in a light sport coat and slacks, he waited.
As the night went on—and a false report began circulating in the news that the great scientist Linus Pauling had been found dead at the bottom of a cliff—Pauling followed the movement of the constellations to track passing hours; he recited to himself the periodic table; he counted as high as he could in several languages. Finally, out there in the dark—after a search party called his name but could not hear him calling back, after his wife and his daughter and his son-in-law Barclay Kamb began to become extremely frightened—Linus Pauling covered himself with an unfolded map and “lectured the surf,” as one newspaper reporter would put it, on all he’d long ago discovered about the nature of chemical bonds.
THE ICEBERG PROPOSAL
In 2017 the National Advisor Bureau, a private company from Abu Dhabi, proposed solving the United Arab Emirates’ freshwater shortage by using powerful boats to tow a three-kilometer-long iceberg from Antarctica over 9,000 kilometers across the Indian Ocean to the eastern coast of the UAE. After the yearlong tow, the ice would be sliced into small blocks and then those blocks melted. The project’s directors argued that a single towed iceberg could supply the entire population of the country’s capital with drinking water for about eight years.
I learn about the plan—the Emirates Iceberg Project—from a website, Science Alert, that the same day also features the articles “The Mystery of This Tiny ‘Alien’ Skeleton Has Finally Been Solved” and “Massive Oil Fields in Texas Are Heaving, Sinking, and Opening Up Like Mouths.” Skeptical, I probe further. I quickly find out that indeed news of this project is all over. By the time I check, the Guardian, the Independent, the New York Post, Newsweek, and the Huffington Post have all picked up the story. “The icebergs are just floating in the Indian Ocean,” the director of the Emirates Iceberg Project says in one of these interviews about the project and its plans. “They are up for grabs to whoever can take them.”
Several of the articles link to videos the Emirates Iceberg Project had uploaded to YouTube. One begins with the animated characters of a young boy and a man, standing alone in a desert, holding a book entitled Filling the Empty Quarter. Soon the video pans out to images of icebergs, bright white and looming massive above an aqua-green ocean, and against black and then blue skies. “Climate Change Is Causing Ice to Melt around the World” the subtitles begin, “Wasting Billions of Gallons of Fresh Water on Earth.” The video pans over oceans and huge cloud-covered mountains, moving from animated images to real ones. One frame shows a tall blue wall of a glacier calving directly into the sea, snow rising in a mass from the water; another frame shows a second glacier calving, this time small pieces of snow falling first, before a colossal wall of snow drops, as if in a plummeting elevator, and splits into the sea. “Ice Is the Purest Source of Water Known,” the subtitles continue. “That Source of Fresh Water Can Be Brought to the U.A.E. from an Island Called the Heard Island Which Is 9,200 Kilometers Away.”
The video moves on to show an animated image of a beach, umbrellas and palm trees waving in the wind. Just beyond the beach is a giant block of ice: an Antarctic iceberg, covered in penguins and polar bears.
The National Advisor Bureau isn’t the first organization or even person to suggest towing icebergs. In 1949 oceanographer John Isaacs—now recognized as the “godfather of the modern iceberg towing movement”—gave a lecture at California’s Scripps Institute of Oceanography where he proposed towing a glacier from the Antarctic to San Clemente Island, this time to solve California’s water problems.
The proposal had evolved for Isaacs over time. According to his biographer, Daniel Behrman, Isaacs came upon the idea after wondering whether it would be feasible to create a pipeline connecting the Columbia River and southern California. “When I started to optimize it,” Isaacs relayed, “I saw that as you make the pipe bigger, the cost of moving an acre-foot of water becomes cheaper. Obviously, I should have known at the time that it would never stop optimizing.” Soon Isaacs realized it would make sense to, as he put it, “shorten the pipe and just use it as a towed container.” As he began to think about how a massive container could be built to hold all that water, he realized something new and surprising. “When you optimize your container, you see that you have come just to the dimensions of the ordinary tabular Antarctic iceberg, a free package. You begin to see how little energy per acre-foot is needed to move it and you realize you might as well start in Antarctica.”
Isaacs’s was one of a series of seminars at the Scripps Institute. Searching through the University of California San Diego’s special collections, I see a black-and-white photo from one of these seminars, maybe the first lecture that Isaacs gave or maybe another. There are three or four women and about thirty men sitting in small, right-handed desks; some are in suits and ties, some are in lab coats, all facing forward. Two windows are open; the rest have the shades pulled. No one in the room is smiling, or not quite, but they seem to be rapt, listening with marked interest to whatever Isaacs is saying.
One winter, a couple of years before the Emirates Iceberg Project is proposed, I
have a chance to visit the Scripps Institute myself. I’m in California with my family over a long weekend. It’s March when we travel to San Diego, and my parents have rented a guesthouse just off the beach, close enough that on early morning walks we can see a cove filled with forty or fifty seals sunning themselves, flopping in and out of the water, and we can watch the reflection of the sunset over the waves even from the living room window.
The Scripps Institute isn’t far from where we’re staying—maybe a ten-minute drive at most—and so one afternoon I steer our rental car up a set of hilly roads, weaving toward the institute’s drive. We miss the turn, the small sign for it receding behind bushes and flowers on one side of an intersection. On the second pass we see the sign and follow the scrub- and pine-sided road a bit farther. Just outside the entrance to the Birch Aquarium—the institute’s showcase for the public—are two circular fountains. The first features two life-sized bronze whales diving out of it, and the second, just to the side, features another whale’s tail. We pass by both and into the building.
I don’t see anything about towing icebergs in the institute’s public collections, but there is an exhibit entitled Feeling the Heat. After wandering through an aquarium that houses California moray, sheep crab, and red rock shrimp, I walk around the exhibit, through the artifacts, displays, and even hands-on activities related to global warming and oceans. I watch films and see signs and diagrams about carbon and marine life and rain. “As you warm the upper layers of the ocean,” one video explains, “that warm water is lighter, and it is much harder now to be able to mix the ocean vertically … we put a lid on the ocean.”
There’s a wall-sized graph of CO2 in the atmosphere too, with the question “How high will it go?” in black letters on yellow paint, pointing toward the graphed CO2 line. The line rises and drops in fits and starts along a horizontal plane through various ice ages. It becomes nearly vertical in showing the increase in carbon parts per million from the Industrial Revolution until today.
Dispatches from the End of Ice Page 13