Dispatches from the End of Ice

by Beth Peterson

  The news showed video footage of people being rescued from their roofs and of roads full of drowned cars. In aerial shots you could see only the tops of buildings and houses in one neighborhood after another; all the streets and driveways and yards, and the first floors of many buildings, were completely underwater. The city’s disaster plan for major storms like Katrina was unearthed sometime later. It warned that there could be “thousands of fatalities,” waterborne and airborne toxins, even “floating coffins,” and that people should be evacuated at least three days before a high-category storm hit land. At the time of Hurricane Katrina, evacuation orders were issued just twenty-four hours ahead.

  HOUSTON, TEXAS

  In 2017, ten years after the plagues, Hurricane Harvey descended and the city of Houston flooded. My friends posted videos online, from the vantage point of their suburban front porches, of the water rising. In one of the videos, a friend stood inside her house with the front door open. The water had filled the entire street, had covered the yard, and was lapping up, not far from the doorway where she stood. The video panned out, showing the water across the street or what was at one time a street but was now a flat, wet expanse. The water rose past the yards and seeped into the houses. Just as my friend stopped filming, a man in a long red kayak paddled by.

  One old friend from college posted about boarding up her windows for the first time and driving north. A former running partner bought a quick plane ticket out of state and figured she would sort out lodging and food when she arrived. Several other friends and acquaintances heeded the mayor’s warnings not to leave town and crowd the highways. Instead, they stayed put, hoping their houses wouldn’t fill with water.

  WILMINGTON, NORTH CAROLINA

  There is a science behind real and recently submerged cities. As temperatures rise across the globe, glaciers, icebergs, and icecaps melt, draining water into the ocean. All that ice has to go somewhere, whether into the air or into the water. It’s not only what’s added, though; warming water expands, and so even a small surge in temperatures, when spread out over an ocean’s worth of water, can mean significant rises in water levels, threatening many low-lying regions. Since the 1880s, sea levels have risen eight inches globally. If temperatures continue to rise at their current rate, by 2100 the earth will be 3.2°C warmer than it was in the preindustrial era, raising ocean levels anywhere between one and six feet and putting Shanghai, Osaka, Alexandria, Rio de Janeiro, Amsterdam, London, Miami, Oakland, and other cities at risk. In the next twenty years some of these cities are predicted to become victims of “chronic, disruptive flooding” or flooding that occurs biweekly on average and impacts at least 10 percent of the city’s land. Warming temperatures also mean more water vapor, feeding hurricanes and increasing their wind strength and intensity. In a March 2017 article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, MIT atmospheric sciences professor Kerry Emanuel details the results of six thousand storm simulations. Factoring for projected changes in temperature, Kerry predicts that by the end of this century, there will be a 118 percent uptick in storms that increase by sixty knots, or about seventy miles an hour, in the twenty-four hours before they hit land. In the past there was about one of these storms every hundred years. By the end of the twenty-first century, they will happen every five to ten years.

  Only two years after Hurricane Harvey came Hurricanes Irma, Maria, Florence, and Michael. After Houston came San Juan, Puerto Rico; Jacksonville, Florida; Wilmington, North Carolina; and Hilo, Hawaii.

  LAKE MICHIGAN

  Not long after Hurricane Harvey, I have a dream that my students and I are traveling to attend a literary festival at a park in the middle of a deep woods. Dark evergreens line the road, making everything feel shadowy and hushed. We’re riding in a van that one of the students is driving. The dream is weird in the way dreams often are; it’s the first day of April and also Easter, and part of the dream involves taking strange turns and not having enough cash for gas or entrance fees to the park and having to stop repeatedly until we find some.

  It’s early in the morning, still dim, when we finally get to the park. We pile out of the van, all of us standing together in a small clearing. As we look around, no one else is there: no booths or speakers or books for sale, no one waiting in lines and no greeters telling us where to go. Instead, in every direction, even the one we’ve come from, the ground emits smoke. Before any of us has time to decide exactly what to do, the park has become an island of small fires: our own Atlantis, burning instead of sinking.

  In real life, sometime before that dream, I did take my students on a trip, but it wasn’t to a dark forest. It was to one of the Great Lakes. Our university owned a small tugboat, the D. J. Angus, that was used as a science research vessel. I’d checked the weather ahead of our trip and cautioned my students to dress warmly, to wear layers and a rain jacket, and to bring anything that would help them take in the journey: pens, notebooks, cameras, binoculars if they had them. In the end, the trip was actually blisteringly hot, and some of my students, delayed after stopping at McDonald’s, almost didn’t make it aboard.

  As we set off, two scientists told us what to watch for and talked about the history of the lake and the fish, plants, and animals residing in it. They detailed the release of Asian carp into the lake and the problematic zebra mussels that had made their way there in the water tanks of ships. My students took furious notes and one photo after another. Before we were beyond the bay, where we launched, and into the wilder, darker waters, one student happened to see a shard of wood sticking out of the water.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  “When ships weren’t useful anymore,” one of the scientists replied, “they were burned or sunk or left just offshore. Since the waters have risen now, all we can see of them are the masts. What you see there, that’s the body of a ship.”

  Long after the boat trip I will think about that leftover body, mostly submerged in water. I will wonder what it looked like before it was sunk. I will wonder what other bodies are left under the water and what bodies are to come.

  ATLANTIS RESORT, BAHAMAS

  One spring, after a particularly long winter, my family and I visited the Atlantis resort in the Bahamas. We were just there on a day trip, a quick stopover, before continuing on elsewhere. I hoped, as soon as we started making travel plans to Nassau, that we might catch a boat out to the ocean, perhaps near the Bimini Road, an ancient underwater rock path that some Atlantis theorists believe is Plato’s sunken land. It rained hard that full day, though, so instead we took a van from the main city center to the resort.

  Long before the van pulled up to the site, we could make out the resort’s Royal Hotel, a castlelike, salmon-colored building topped by turrets and with a large enclosed bridge, several stories high, connecting its two main buildings. My family and I walked through the hotel, past its lobby and aquariums with swimming schools of brightly colored fish, past the onsite casino and high-end shops: Gucci, Rolex, Versace. We walked down palm-tree-lined paths, by pools and waterslides built to look like ancient stepped-stone ruins. We saw a marine habitat called the Dig, where groupers, seahorses, eels, and jellyfish swim among statues and pottery shards—a mockup of Plato’s ancient island city. When a break came in the rain, we headed toward the beach. We walked through scores of empty sunbathing chairs and by an outdoor café, blaring music to only a couple of people sitting at the bar. When we finally reached the edge of the water, the kids ran and played in the white sand while we talked about maybe swimming if the rain continued to hold off.

  In the end, the rain started pouring again. We grabbed the towels and kids and hurried toward the nearest shelter, an overhang beneath a small, artificial lagoon.

  Just for a moment, in the crowd of people that somehow materialized and was also rushing to take cover, I lost my family. There were people everywhere, crowding into the dimly lit stone structure. It turns out it was the Predator Lagoon, the home of Atlantis’s sharks and barracudas. As
I searched the crowd for familiar faces, thunder boomed overhead and I heard a single, piercing scream. The floor was wet, maybe from all the people’s feet or maybe from incoming rain. But what I couldn’t get out of my mind, in that moment, searching for my family in the Predator Lagoon, was a vision of the waters continuing to rise, that small trickle becoming a stream, the stream becoming waves and then rushing in so fast that none of us would know what had happened.

  POMPEII, ITALY

  As a child, I was fascinated by the stories of lost worlds: Treasure Island, Narnia, even the history of Pompeii, buried and then found after so many years. In graduate school I got caught up in maps, which took me back to the lost world, the mapped and unmapped: Erewhon, King Solomon’s Mines, Gulliver’s Travels, Coral Island, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and finally Atlantis. I wanted, more than anything, to travel to these places, to find them in real life or at least to live within their boundaries as long as I could on the page.

  It was the idea that you could walk through the back of a wardrobe or sail just past what you know and find yourself somewhere else. The lost worlds were brilliant and illusory and proof, it seemed, of the value of keeping your eyes wide open. The thing is, as a child I never considered that the world lost at sea might be our own or the one we’d left behind, let go until it was swallowed whole.

  ANTARCTICA

  In 1995 two librarians from British Columbia, Rose and Rand Flem-Ath, put forth another site for the historical Atlantis. Building on the theories of Charles Hapgood, one of Einstein’s contemporaries, the Flem-Aths argued that twelve thousand years ago the earth’s crust shifted, forcing the continents into new positions and causing earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and floods. It was amid all this upheaval that the ancient island of Atlantis was cast off into the sea.

  The Flem-Aths’ book, When the Sky Fell, proposed that Atlantis’s real home was Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf; rather than lost underwater, Atlantis was buried beneath all that ice.

  NOTES

  BAFFIN ISLAND

  The major source for the Norse myth of the Ginnungagap is Snorri Sturluson’s thirteenth-century Prose Edda. I also consulted English translations of the Prose Edda, including the Penguin Classics, Oxford World Classics, and Everyman’s Library editions.

  PAGE 3. chaos of perfect silence Daniel McCoy, founder of Norsemythology.org.

  PAGE 3. yawning emptiness Several writers use this term in reference to the Ginnungagap. I first came across it in Amy T. Peterson and David J. Dunworth, Mythology in Our Midst: A Guide to Cultural References (Greenwood Press, 2004).

  PAGE 4. one entitled Norse Stories Hamilton Wright Mabie, Norse Stories Retold from the Eddas, edited by Katharine Lee Bates (Rand McNally, 1902).

  PAGE 5. The first map I find I consulted several sources on the relationship between cartography and the Ginnungagap: Kristen Seaver, Maps, Myths, and Men: The Story of the Vinland Map (Stanford University Press, 2004); Fridtjof Nansen, In Northern Mists: Arctic Exploration in Early Times (Frederick A. Stokes, 1911); William Babcock, Legendary Islands of the Atlantic: A Study in Medieval Geography (American Geographical Society, 1922); Halldór Hermannsson, Islandica (Cornell University Press, 1920); and James Robert Enterline, Erikson, Eskimos, and Columbus: Medieval European Knowledge of America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).

  PAGE 7. a single flaming sword From Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda, translated by Jesse L. Byock (Penguin Classics, 2004).

  PAGE 8. Swedish visual artist Sigrid Sandström Photographs of Sandström’s exhibit are at inmangallery.com/artists/sandstrom_sigrid/2004_Ginnungagap/13.html and fryemuseum.org/exhibition/72.

  PAGE 8. When a man plants a flag Jen Graves, “Wondering about Wandering: Sandström Asks What We Expect to Find Out There,” The Stranger, June 22, 2006.

  PAGE 9. The Atlas Universel Martin West, “The Mystery of the Vaugondy Maps,” Western Pennsylvania History (Summer 2001).

  PAGE 9. a technology of knowledge Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge, 1995), 27–28.

  PAGE 11. Researchers led by Gifford Miller “Cause and Onset of the Little Ice Age,” University of Colorado Institute for Arctic Research, instaar.colorado.edu/research/projects/cause-and-onset-of-little-ice-age.

  PAGE 12. Buenos Aires, Argentina Sources for short stories about maps and mapmakers in this section include Jorge Luis Borges, “Del rigor en la ciencia” (“On Exactitude in Science”), Los Anales de Buenos Aires (1946); Umberto Eco, “On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1,” in How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays (Harcourt, 1994); and Neil Gaiman, “The Mapmaker,” in Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders (Harper, 2010). I also consulted Jorge Luis Borges’s translation of the Prose Edda, La alucinación de Gylfi (Alianza Editorial, 1984).

  THEORY OF WORLD ICE

  PAGE 20. Austrian engineer Hanns Hörbiger Robert Matthias Erdbeer introduced me to Hörbiger in his spring 2013 lecture at the University of Missouri, “Counter-Science: The World Ice Movement’s Cosmic Visions and Its Rise to Public Fame (1894–1945).” To Erdbeer, Hörbiger’s theory of world ice “was not only a theory of the universe; it was also a universal theory” accounting for biology, geology, the arts, and the humanities. Walter Gratzer’s brief discussion of Hörbiger in The Undergrowth of Science: Delusion, Self-Deception and Human Frailty (Oxford University Press, 2000) provides a succinct explanation of Hörbiger’s theory of the cosmos centered on ice.

  PAGE 22. All ice is made out of hydrogen and oxygen atoms The ice facts in this section are from Kenneth Chang, “Explaining Ice: The Answers Are Slippery,” New York Times, February 21, 2006.

  PAGE 25. one time an elephant was led across the river Tom de Castella, “Frost Fair: When an Elephant Walked on the Frozen River Thames,” BBC News Magazine, January 28, 2014.

  PAGE 25. exorcists were brought in “History of Chamonix Glaciers,” Chamonix.net.

  PAGE 25. Professors were molested in the streets Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians (Dorset Press, 1988).

  PAGE 26. Modern Science seems to foster a desire for a final synthesis Max Benzen, 1934, cited by Erdbeer, “Counter-Science.”

  PAGE 26. Frederic Tudor of the Tudor Ice Company, was the first See Christopher Klein, “The Man Who Shipped New England Ice around the World,” History, August 29, 2012; and Rebecca Rupp, “Frederic Tudor: The King of Ice,” National Geographic, July 19, 2014.

  PAGE 29. Glaciers in Norway have begun to creep down Alister Doyle, “In Norway, Glaciers Are Growing Bigger,” Los Angeles Times, October 28, 1990.

  PAGE 31. the astronomy of the invisible Christina Wessely, “Cosmic Ice Theory: Science, Fiction and the Public, 1894–1945,” Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/research/projects/DeptIII-ChristinaWessely-Welteislehre.

  THE PHILOSOPHER’S CABIN

  Primary sources for details on Wittgenstein include Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (Routledge, 2014); Bertrand Russell, The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, edited by John G. Slater, vol. 8 (Routledge, 1986); Ludwig Wittgenstein et al., Letters to Russell, Keynes, and Moore (Cornell University Press, 1974); Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein in Cambridge: Letters and Documents, 1911–1951, edited by Brian McGuinness (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012); Paul Engelmann, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein, with a Memoir (Basil Blackwell, 1967); David Pinsent, A Portrait of Wittgenstein as a Young Man: From the Diary of David Hume Pinsent, 1912–1914, edited by G. H. von Wright (Basil Blackwell, 1990); and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen: Philosophical Investigations, edited by P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).

  Secondary sources include The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein, edited by Oskari Kuusela and Marie McGinn (Oxford University Press, 2011); “Wittgenstein: The Philosopher and His Works,” Publications of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society, N
ew Series 2, edited by Alois Pichler and Simo Säätelaä (2006); Bernhard Leitner, The Wittgenstein House (Princeton Architectural Press, 2000); Wittgenstein and His Times: Essays by Anthony Kenny, Brian McGuinness, J. C. Nyiri, Rush Rhees, and G. H. von Wright, edited by Brian McGuinness (Basil Blackwell, 1982); and The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, edited by Hans Sluga and David G. Stern (Cambridge University Press, 1996).

  Skjolden resident Edvin Bolstad supplied additional information about Wittgenstein and his history in the village.

  DRIVING WYOMING

  Most of the information on Japan’s volcanoes comes from the Global Volcanism Program, volcano.si.edu. Also, unless directly noted, all italicized Craig Arnold quotations come from his volcano travelogues, available at volcanopilgrim.wordpress.com.

  PAGE 61. perpetual presence of the sublime From Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1836 essay “Nature.”

  PAGE 66. Pompeii … Buried Alive! Edith Kunhardt, Pompeii … Buried Alive! (Random House, 1987).

  PAGE 67. at least forty people have died When I returned to look for the original newspaper source regarding deaths on 287, I was unable to find it in my files. Another similar map was created in 2017, though, by Amelia Arvesen, “US 287 Backdrop for 4 of 19 Boulder County Fatal Crashes in 2017,” Longmont Times-Call, September 23, 2017.

  PAGE 68. a crash killed eight University of Wyoming student athletes “8 UW Cross-Country Athletes Killed in Crash,” Billings Gazette, September 16, 2001. For updated information on Highway 287 crashes being twice as likely to be fatal, see Jeremy Pelzer, “Wyoming Officials: No Easy Solutions to U.S. Highway 287’s High Fatality Rate,” Casper Star Tribune, September 12, 2010.