In 1999, a frozen cube of permafrost with a mammoth inside was excavated from the Russian tundra. They named this one Jarkov, after the father of the boy who found the carcass. By the time scientists showed up, the tusks had been sawed off and sold. Excavation trenches filled with meltwater. Fuel shortages delayed the arrival of jackhammers. Eventually, the cube of permafrost containing Jarkov was fitted with a metal lifting frame. For the sake of television, new tusks were bolted to the frozen cube. The twenty-three-ton block of permafrost was coaxed into the air by a helicopter rated for twenty tons. The metal frame bent, but the mammoth flew, bolted tusks grandly protruding from the ice. It landed in its new home — a temperature-controlled room, a glorified ice cellar dug into the permafrost. French scientists slowly thawed parts of the cube with a hair dryer. They found Jarkov’s flesh and hair. They also found bones out of place, suggesting that the mammoth was less than perfectly intact. Perhaps in part for the sake of drama, the scientists, in matching overalls, stopped short of disinterring Jarkov. The mammoth remains exhumed but frozen, preserved until the right scientists with the right amount of funding and the right questions come along to thaw it out. Jarkov lies in state — like Lenin, but perhaps colder and less famous.
Frozen mammoths carry with them frozen stomach contents. They have buttercups frozen between their teeth. They may have frozen clues to their extinction, too. If a plague killed the mammoth, saber-toothed tiger, and North American camel, freeze-dried evidence may persist. Certain scientists build careers around looking for the kind of species-jumping virus that might be responsible for the Pleistocene extinctions. They look for something like the AIDS virus, which jumped from monkeys to humans; elephant herpes, which jumps between Asian and African elephants; or rinderpest, which jumps between buffalo, wildebeests, hartebeests, and bongos, causing fever, infection around the mouth, tissue necrosis, and death.
In some cases, the people living among the frozen remains can claim ancestors who lived among the unfrozen reality of living mammoths. These people often believe that the frozen flesh is dangerous, that it brings fatally bad luck. At one time, certain Siberian natives believed that the creatures were large rats that lived underground but died when exposed to the sun. Others believed that they lived in the mountains but came down to feed on human corpses. Until Victorian times, European scientists argued that the remains were nothing more than African elephants swept to the Arctic by the biblical Flood. Thomas Jefferson, believing stories from Native American tribes in the West, suggested that mammoths might still survive in the American interior. Jefferson tasked Lewis and Clark with confirming these stories.
In 1796, based on his comparison of mammoth bones with those of existing elephants, Georges Cuvier suggested that the mammoth might in fact be extinct, gone forever. The mammoth, he believed, was adapted to cold climates. The African elephant and the Asian elephant were not. Cuvier was among the first to articulate the possibility of extinction. “All of these facts,” he wrote, “consistent among themselves, and not opposed by any report, seem to me to prove the existence of a world previous to ours, destroyed by some kind of catastrophe.” In 1887, the paleontologist William Berryman Scott, who somehow mistakenly believed that the mammoth was carnivorous, considered the extinction a blessing: “The world is a much pleasanter place without them, and we can heartily thank heaven that the whole generation is extinct.”
Not everyone would agree. Certain scientists, serious men who publish articles in prestigious scholarly journals, hope to clone a mammoth. The plan is to use DNA salvaged from frozen flesh. One vision involves removing a viable nucleus from a frozen mammoth and inserting it into a single egg cell from an elephant. The fertilized egg would be implanted in an elephant. Some two years later, if all went well, a baby mammoth would appear, brought back to life — an extreme survivor of hypothermia, superior to a seasonally thawed caterpillar, superior to the frozen human sperm that have been thawed and put to work after only a few years below zero, superior to James Bedford, even assuming that he is ever successfully resurrected from his bath of liquid nitrogen.
But to date, viable cells and viable researchers have not connected. Instead, the meat has gone to museums or foxes or wolves or dogs. Or it has rotted on the tundra, or been tasted by field scientists. “It was awful,” said one man who tasted a specimen believed to have died more than twenty thousand years ago. “It tasted like meat left too long in a freezer.”
It is May sixteenth and eighteen degrees on a man-made island in the Beaufort Sea. The island is six acres of gravel piled on the seabed, surrounded by steel sheet pilings and concrete blocks and cramped with oil wells, heavy equipment, and metal buildings full of pipes and tanks and gauges. To the north, six-foot-thick ice stretches to the horizon. To the south, ice stretches to the shore and then gives way to snow and the industrial complex of Prudhoe Bay. An ice road stretches across the sea ice from the shore. Sun glares off the ice.
I stand around watching a dive crew work. With an excavator, they have cut a moat in the ice to reach concrete blocks that form the island’s first line of defense. In winter, the ice wreaks havoc with the concrete blocks. In summer, when the ice pulls away from the island, wind rips off the pack ice farther north and kicks up waves that slam into the island, wreaking more havoc. The divers will replace the blocks. For now, as a preliminary step, one of the divers is clearing ice that the excavator missed. He wears a yellow helmet attached to an umbilical that comes to the surface. The umbilical includes a hose that sends air to the diver’s helmet and another hose that sends hot water to the diver’s suit. The diver stands on the bottom, surrounded by ice water but soaked by a never-ending hot shower from the surface. The diver blasts away with a fire hose connected to a boiler on the surface, pumping hot water against ice-coated concrete blocks five feet below. A typical dive runs several hours.
One of the divers tells me that a polar bear wandered in last year, forcing them to end a dive on short notice. On the surface of the moat, piles of slush and blocks of ice bump the diver’s umbilical. When the sun drops low in the sky, the temperature drops with it, and a thin film of new ice forms.
Despite all of this ice, it is spring. The sun, though it dips close to the horizon, will not set for another two months. Seals bask on the ice like plump tourists on a white sand beach. A pair of ravens guard a nest built high up in a pipe rack. Melting snow drips from the roofs of buildings. I talk to a worker who does two-week stints on the island every month. These six acres of gravel and machinery and oil wells are his home twenty-five weeks each year, half the year minus two weeks for an extended vacation. This is his sixth year. “I love the sound of dripping water,” he tells me, watching meltwater trickling down from metal roofing.
As the world warms, more remains pop out of the permafrost. With some regularity, mammoth hunters in Siberia stumble on human carcasses. Some are said to be victims of the Stalin years. Others may have died during smallpox epidemics. Permafrost is no place to dig a grave. Shallow graves would be the norm for those in a hurry. Stalin’s executioners would not have made time to chisel down into the permafrost. Survivors disposing of plague-ridden corpses would have been equally harried, eager to be done with the dead and impatient with the hard ground.
In 1845, the entire Franklin expedition, 129 men, vanished in the snow and ice of the American Arctic. The disappearance prompted years of search parties, serving the dual purpose of looking for Sir John Franklin and looking for new scientific and geographic information. The search parties added scattered frozen corpses of their own to those of Franklin and his men. For several years after Franklin’s disappearance, there was real hope of finding survivors. Elisha Kent Kane’s expedition, mounted in part to find Franklin, survived three years in the Arctic. Likewise, a few members of the later Greely expedition survived three years. In Franklin’s case, hope was misguided. Franklin and all of his men died north of the Arctic Circle. Some became food for the others. In 1984, a team of anthropologists disinter
red a few of the bodies. These were the early victims, who were buried properly, in marked graves on Beechey Island, before the expedition fell apart and the remaining men understood how desperate the situation would become. The graves of these early victims had been found in 1850, during the search for Franklin and his crew, when hope remained that Franklin and some of his men still might be found alive. The anthropologists opened the graves to find the skin and clothes of the properly buried men intact, preserved by ice. Their hair was intact. Their eyes were frozen open. Their lips were pulled back, exposing bad teeth and signs of scurvy.
The Iceman of the Alps, found in 1991, had been frozen in the Tyrolean mountains for five thousand years. Two hikers spotted the carcass. At first it was thought to be just another dead climber. At least five or six dead climbers had already surfaced that year, some after spending as much as fifty years in the ice. But as the Iceman’s body was hacked from the ice with picks and a ski pole and a jack-hammer, it became apparent that he was somewhat more ancient than originally expected. It became apparent that he was a frozen chunk of the Neolithic. He was five feet two inches tall and in his late forties. When found, he was freeze-dried, drained of the moisture of life, and weighed 30 pounds. In life, he would have weighed something like 140 pounds. He had an arrow wound in his left shoulder. His arteries were clogged. His last meal had been ibex and red deer meat with bread baked from an early form of wheat. He wore a fur hat, a cape of woven grass, a fur wrap, leather leggings, and leather boots. The boots were insulated with grass. He carried a longbow, a stone knife, and a birch-bark cylinder that probably held live embers for starting a fire.
More recently, in 2005, the frozen body of Leo Mustonen was found at the bottom of a glacier in the Sierra Nevada. He had been missing for sixty-three years, along with three others who never returned to Mather Field in Sacramento after a training flight. Leo wore a parachute with the word army stenciled across it. He wore a torn sweater and a badly corroded metal name tag. He carried a comb, fifty-one cents in change, a Sheaffer pen, and an address book. An otherwise illegible note in his address book said, “All the girls know.”
Franklin’s disinterred men — the only complete remains known from the Franklin expedition — were reburied in place on Beechey Island, overlooking the sea. The Iceman lies frozen in an Italian museum. Leo Mustonen was cremated and his ashes were buried next to his departed mother in Minnesota. Leo’s niece was quoted as saying that it was “nice to know he won’t be left alone up in the mountains in a pile of snow.”
It is May nineteenth and about fifty degrees in the shadow of Eklutna Glacier in Alaska’s Chugach State Park. My companion and I bicycled in on a rough gravel road for twelve miles. The gravel road was lined with birch and aspen and poplar in their full spring foliage, no longer simply budding but truly leafed out. At the end of the gravel road, we abandoned the bicycles and walked another mile through patches of snow and across shattered rocks and boulders as big as cars. We scampered over bedrock carved out by ice and smoothed by meltwater. Throughout, our dog trotted along behind, but here, just below the glacier, we surprise a mountain goat. The goat lures our dog along, staying just ahead of him, moving up toward the glacier. Both dog and goat ignore our calls.
Where we stop, waiting for our dog, the glacier has resided recently, probably within our lifetimes. A few wind-borne seeds have taken hold. Dryas, not yet in bloom, lines cracks in the rocks. Here and there, saxifrage has gained a toehold in dirt-filled depressions — its lavender flowers are open — but most of the ground is bare rock. A steady wind blows off the glacier and across the rock. Up the valley, what is left of the glacier is profiled with steep ridges and crevasses of white snow and blue ice. It looks distinctly like a glacier on its way out. Just below us, meltwater paints a pond azure. A quagmire of wet glacial flour surrounds the pond. Farther down, where glaciation is a somewhat more distant memory, patches of shrubs and even trees grow along the slopes. In places, the ground has collapsed, liquefied by melting snow and failing under its own weight or carried away in avalanches. Along the edges of the collapses, the young soil stands exposed, a fragile veneer, a thin skin creeping in behind the glacier. Far down the valley, past the collapses, the landscape is similar to that of Scotland, scarred by long-gone ice but more or less healed.
The goat reappears a quarter of a mile up the valley. Our dog comes limping back. The pads of his feet have been torn open, and he trembles in pain and fear. Out of sight, something happened. The goat butted him, or he tripped and slid on rocks and ice.
This is the sort of scene that would have been common when the Pleistocene ice pulled back: bare rock, patches of snow, struggling vegetation, constant wind, unstable soil, and animals that do not know how to behave.
JUNE
It is June second and just over sixty degrees in London. My taxi driver talks of plans for an afternoon on a Brighton beach after he has dropped me at Heathrow Airport. He insists on pointing out the sights. When he points out Kew Gardens, I ask if he knows that a polar bear skull was found there. During the Pleistocene, I tell him, polar bears roamed through what would become downtown London. “The bears,” I say, “were as big and white as German and American tourists visiting Westminster Abbey.” We ride the remaining twenty minutes in silence.
I fly for six hours above seas recently thawed and land that was glaciated only yesterday, and then I sit in Boston traffic. The thermometer stands north of eighty degrees. Cars battle for position, each belching carbon dioxide at an ice-age-killing rate of something like eight tons per year. In my midsize rental, I turn on the air conditioner. Prior to this, I have not turned on a car air conditioner in at least ten months. The temperature drops abruptly. As abruptly, my clothes turn clammy. King James would have felt this same sudden clamminess upon entering Cornelis Drebbel’s air-conditioned Westminster Abbey four centuries ago. For the king, a sweaty king unaccustomed to air-conditioning and bearing the weight of royal clothes, this feeling of clamminess must have been overwhelming.
I stop at an old house south of Boston, a Cape built for cold weather. A sign outside says maritime museum. Inside, it is as much a museum of shipwrecks as a museum of ships. The curator, an elderly woman full of energy and enthusiasm about ships and shipping, has never heard of Frederic Tudor. She knows nothing of the Boston ice trade to the Caribbean and India. The Ice King means nothing to her. She seems hesitant to believe that ice was commercially harvested from Walden Pond and sold in the tropics.
She shows me a sketch depicting a wreck on a sandbar. Four men are perched atop the splintered remains of a mast. A fifth man is in a life ring of sorts, riding a cable stretched to shore. “They save the youngest first,” the old woman tells me. “They have longer to live.” The sketch, even without color, captures blowing snow and sleet. The hair of one of the men clinging to the mast is blown forward, hiding his face. In conditions like these, their clothes would have been stiff against their skin. Since they were wet and poorly protected, their core temperature would have quickly dropped, their hands numbing and their grip on the mast loosening, their will to live diminishing.
Outside, I am struck by the reality of Boston: traffic and heat and people in cars as big as fishing dories, all doing their level best to pump the atmosphere full of carbon dioxide, all doing their part to warm the planet. They are killing what little is left of their ice age. I stand by my own car for a moment thinking about my plane ride across the Atlantic and knowing that my one seat was responsible for something like half a ton of carbon dioxide. I’ve already dumped another ten pounds from my rental car’s tailpipe in Boston.
“It’s my ice age,” I say to myself, “and I’m killing it.”
The Frenchman Joseph Fourier, orphaned at the age of eight, was active during the French Revolution. As a result, he was awarded an appointment at the École Normale Supérieure and eventually a chair at France’s prestigious engineering school, the École Polytechnique. He probably knew something about the volcanic erupti
ons that caused the Year Without Summer. He served under Napoleon and would have heard of the devastations of frostbite suffered by the French army in Russia. He would have heard of soldiers burning themselves while rewarming frozen digits and limbs over open fires. He would have known something of the death of Vitus Bering and of early British attempts to navigate the Northwest Passage. He likely knew that ammonia could be liquefied at temperatures well below freezing. He may have read of early refrigerators.
In 1827, Fourier published an essay in which he recognized that certain gases in the atmosphere contributed to the warmth of the earth. Carbon dioxide, water vapor, and methane blanketed the earth, allowing visible light to pass through but absorbing warmth that was reflected back up. This was early in the Industrial Revolution, and these were for the most part naturally occurring gases. What Fourier described would later be called the greenhouse effect. Without the greenhouse effect, the average temperature of Miami might approximate that of Bangor, Maine. New York City would be as cold as Fairbanks, Alaska. Barrow, Alaska, would be substantially less inhabitable. On the whole, the earth without the greenhouse effect would be only marginally more tropical than Mars.
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