Cold

by Bill Streever

  I drive toward the coast to meet a group intent on releasing a seal. The seal was found inland months ago with its jaw broken and its flippers and face frostbitten. It was captured, flown south, and treated. Today it is to be set free. It shows up in a plastic dog kennel of the sort used to fly pets. Two biologists carry the kennel from the back of a truck and place it on a gravel beach. An oil field worker wearing a hard hat and an industry-issued fireproof work jacket unlatches the door. The seal, seemingly suspicious, sniffs the air. It shuffles a flipper length forward and looks around. It shuffles another few flipper lengths and stops to look around again. Its eyes are brown spheres of the sort that would melt the heart of the most field-hardened biologist. Its body is that of a Butterball turkey, almost as wide as it is round. An orange satellite transmitter has been glued to its back and will stay there until it sheds its fur next spring. It breaks for the sea, shuffling hastily across the remaining few feet of gravel. It plunges into a light chop. It swims, then pauses. Head up, it looks out toward the sea ice, perhaps a mile to the north. It turns to bless us once more with its brown-eyed gaze, then submerges, dipping like a submarine. When it reappears a few minutes later, it is heading due north, toward the sea ice. Toward home.

  Warm water is less dense than cold water, and hence warm water floats on top of cold water. Freshwater is less dense than salt water, and hence freshwater floats on top of salt water. Water warmed in the tropics floats on the colder underlying water and spreads out to the north. As it spreads, it loses heat. A portion of it evaporates, and it becomes increasingly salty. By the time it reaches the North Atlantic, it has lost enough heat and become salty enough to sink. The sinking water spreads south across deep ocean basins. It may not rise again for a thousand years.

  This movement of ocean water has been called the conveyor belt. The belt conveys the equivalent of one hundred Amazon Rivers and carries enough heat to warm western Europe. Without this belt, Berlin might be as cold as Edmonton. Without this belt, Scottish sheep might be grazing hip-deep in snow.

  Great Britain’s former prime minister Tony Blair, advised by scientists, began to worry about sudden changes in climate, about what more and more specialists were thinking of as catastrophic tipping points. One thing he might have had on his mind was a conveyor belt breakdown. As polar ice melts, it dumps freshwater into the North Atlantic. North Atlantic water is cold and salty, so it sinks, and in sinking it powers the conveyor belt. Melted ice is not salty. It will not sink as well as the cold salty water of the North Atlantic. By not sinking, it will slow the conveyor belt. With the greenhouse effect and global warming, western Europe will warm for a time, but if the conveyor belt slows, western Europe may suddenly cool down. British farmers, it has been said, may have to learn to grow crops in snow. Blair may have been worried, too, about the tipping point of the ice itself. For the three decades since satellites have been in place to watch the poles, more than a quarter of the once permanent pack ice has disappeared. The melting of ice, the weakening of the hydrogen bonds that hold water molecules in the lockstep crystalline structure of ice, requires a great deal of heat, but that heat does not change the temperature of the ice or water. The heat does nothing more than weaken the hydrogen bonds between molecules. A one-square-mile block of ice measures thirty-two degrees just before it melts. Apply heat until the one-square-mile block of ice melts, and the pool of liquid water will measure thirty-two degrees. Apply the same amount of heat needed to melt that block of ice to the pool of liquid water and the water temperature will rise one hundred and seventy-six degrees. After the ice is gone, after the hydrogen bonds are weakened, after the solid collapses into a formless liquid: add heat and the temperature soars.

  And Blair may have worried, too, about methane. As permafrost melts, as Arctic tundra warms, the methane trapped in soil will be released into the atmosphere. Methane is twenty times more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. In 2005, scientists looking at Russian permafrost reported melting. What had been frozen peat was becoming a landscape of mud and lakes. An area the size of Germany and France combined could be poised to release seventy billion tons of methane. More would come from Alaska and Canada and various mountain peaks. Sergei Kirpotin at Tomsk State University in western Siberia called the situation “an ecological landslide.” David Viner, a senior scientist at the University of East Anglia in England and part of the Russian permafrost project, said, “There are no brakes you can apply.”

  It is June twentieth, the eve of the summer solstice, on Alaska’s North Slope and 60 degrees Fahrenheit, or 16 degrees Celsius, or 289 Kelvin. Said another way, it is 520 degrees Fahrenheit above absolute zero.

  A man tells me of a musk ox frozen in the sea ice, standing up, thirty miles west of here. I find this hard to believe. He produces a photograph. The ox is indeed standing in ice and frozen. Its head hangs low, in the normal posture of a musk ox, but its breath has formed a frozen pedestal. It reminds me of the stories of cattle frozen during the School Children’s Blizzard. The difference is that here the ox will fall into the Beaufort Sea as the ice melts. The man with the photograph is worried that the carcass, melting, will attract polar bears.

  I stand on the western edge of Prudhoe Bay at the spot where I swam almost a year ago, on the first of July. Here the ice remains hard up against the shore. It is rotten ice, very nearly the kind of ice called aunniq by the Inupiat, but without holes of open water. Swimming is out of the question anywhere nearby. The ice stretches out across Prudhoe Bay and to the north, ragged and in places dirty, in places cracked, in places heaved up into miniature pressure ridges. Brownish blocks of ice stand above the frozen surface like glacial erratics. The blocks cast shadows that look like seals, but I see no actual seals.

  I think for a moment of Father Henry living in his ice cave, of the caterpillars just becoming active on the tundra, of Adolphus Greely. Tomorrow will mark the anniversary of Greely’s salvation. Sergeant David Brainard, one of the survivors of Greely’s expedition, did not record a journal entry on June twentieth. He did, however, write an entry for the twenty-first, about nine hours before the rescue ship sailed into view: “Our summer solstice! The wind is still blowing a gale from the south. Temperature 7 a.m. 31°, minimum recorded 28°.” He ate lichen stew and boiled sealskin that day. “Since the day before yesterday,” he wrote, in a comment that would be echoed in the journal of his savior, “Elison has eaten his stew by having a spoon tied to the stump of his frozen arm.” At eight thirty in the evening, the rescue ship steamed into sight. Brainard, Greely, and four others returned to civilization and family and careers. Elison, taken aboard the rescue ship but too far gone to be saved, died in Greenland on July 8, 1884, just seventeen days after the rescue.

  At this moment, there is just enough breeze to keep the mosquitoes down. I consider applying sunscreen to my ears and nose. I look out across the sea ice. Through binoculars, I have to look well offshore to find pockets of open water. There will be no walking to the North Pole today, but the arrival of a rescue ship would also be out of the question.

  With a perverse desire to swim, I consider driving to the other side of Prudhoe Bay, to the open water where the seal was released. But I decide against it. Instead, I stand next to the ice, worn out from a long winter, enjoying the breeze and the view of the sea ice, simultaneously disappointed and thankful that it remains too cold for swimming.

  Looking Down on the Northern Hemisphere

  Geographic illustration prepared by Bill Lee

  Looking Down on the Southern Hemisphere

  Geographic illustration prepared by Bill Lee

  Permafrost of the Northern Hemisphere

  Geographic illustration prepared by Bill Lee based on J. Brown, O. J. Ferrians Jr., J. A. Heginbottom, and E. S. Melnikov. 1997. Circum-Arctic map of permafrost and ground-ice conditions. U.S. Geological Survey Circum-Pacific Map CP-45, 1:10,000,000. Reston, Virginia.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Over the past eight years, I have met
and worked with hundreds of people in the Alaskan Arctic. Inupiat hunters, biologists, archaeologists, oil field workers, activists, engineers, teachers, and others have all influenced my thinking about the Arctic and about cold in general, as have the many gifted authors who have written about the world’s cold regions. My agent, Elizabeth Wales, worked hard to place this book with Little, Brown and Company. My editor, John Parsley, provided important comments and suggestions that improved the book, while also patiently walking me through the publication process. After I thought the book was finished, copyeditor Barb Jatkola pointed out hundreds (literally) of opportunities for improvement. Glenn Wolff, with talent and tolerance of my vagaries, drew illustrations that captured key aspects of the text. Although I have never met Robert Twigger, his book The Extinction Club inspired the approach I used in Cold. Lisanne Aerts, Matt Cronin, Jason Hale, John Kelley, Amy King, Bill Lee, and Kathryn Temple provided comments on the draft manuscript as well as much-needed encouragement. Bill Lee, John Kelley, and especially Lisanne Aerts also appeared, along with many others, as unnamed companions in various passages in the book. Lastly, my dog, Lucky, deserves credit for his willingness to lie on the office floor while I worked, even though he would rather have been out in the snow.

  NOTES

  With a Few References, Definitions, Clarifications, and Suggested Readings

  JULY

  The words “Inupiat,” “Iñupiaq,” “Inupiaq,” and “Inupiak” are sometimes used interchangeably, although some residents of the far north say that “Inupiat” refers to the people while “Iñupiaq” refers to the language, or that “Inupiat” should be used as a noun and “Iñupiaq” as an adjective (as in “Iñupiaq people”). The Inupiat include some of the Alaskan native coastal people, or Alaskan Eskimos, one of many Inuit, or native coastal people of the Arctic in Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. Iñupiaq (the language) is notoriously difficult for outsiders, but online dictionaries are available, such as the Iñupiaq Eskimo Dictionary at www.alaskool.org/language/dictionaries/inupiaq.

  World War II, like many other wars, provides interesting stories of hypothermia and frostbite. The story of the foundered German troop carrier is related in R. Tidow’s “Aerzliche Fragen bei Seenot” (1960, Wehrmedizinische Mitteilungen), which was summarized in an attachment to Lorentz Wittmers and Margaret Savage’s “Cold Water Immersion,” published as chapter 17 in volume 1 of Medical Aspects of Harsh Environments (2002, Department of the Army, Office of the Surgeon General, Borden Institute). Medical Aspects of Harsh Environments also includes an atlas of cold-related injuries with gruesome but interesting full-color photographs of frostbitten hands, feet, ears, and noses. The book can be viewed at www.bordeninstitute.army.mil/published_ volumes/harshEnv1/harshEnv1.html.

  Orcutt Frost’s Bering: The Russian Discovery of America (2003, Vail-Ballou Press, New York) was the first book-length biography of Bering in a hundred years. Neither Bering’s life itself nor written descriptions of his life have been kind, but his journeys across Siberia and then to America were remarkable accomplishments.

  Adolphus W. Greely is a well-known figure. His memoir, Three Years of Arctic Service: An Account of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition of 1881–84 and the Attainment of the Farthest North, was first published in 1886 (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York). Reprints remain available on the used-book market.

  Father Henry is described in Kabloona: Among the Inuit, written by the French aristocrat Gontran De Poncins and Lewis Galantiere in 1941 and recently reprinted as part of the Graywolf Rediscovery Series (1996, Graywolf Press, St. Paul). The word “Kabloona” means “white man.” The book tells the story of Father Henry, and also the story of one of the author’s understanding and to some degree accepting the ways of a very foreign culture.

  Tom Shachtman’s Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold (1999, Mariner Books, New York) gives an engaging account of the history of thermometers. Daniel Fahrenheit, whose surname has been immor talized by his temperature scale, contributed one step in the long and still ongoing journey of temperature measurement. His scale is not especially useful outside the ranges typically encountered by humans.

  Although Celsius can be converted to a rough approximation of Fahrenheit by multiplying by two and then adding thirty-two, a more exact conversion is degrees Fahrenheit = (degrees Celsius × 9/5) + 32. Similarly, Fahrenheit can be converted to a rough approximation of Celsius by subtracting thirty-two and then dividing by two, but a more exact conversion is degrees Celsius = (degrees Fahrenheit − 32) × 5/9.

  The precise conversion of zero Kelvin, or absolute zero, is usually given as 459.67° below zero Fahrenheit.

  The complete quotation about achieving a temperature low enough to result in the formation of a super atom, from Eric Cornell, as reported in a joint press release by the University of Colorado and the National Institute of Standards and Technology on July 13, 1995, was “This state could never have existed naturally anywhere in the universe. So the sample in our lab is the only chunk of this stuff in the universe, unless it is in a lab in some other solar system.” The experiment, credited jointly to Cornell and Carl Wieman, had taken six years and involved eight graduate students and three undergraduate students. While talking to a reporter about the Nobel Prize that came from this work, Wieman explained that he had to rush off to teach a physics class for nonscientists. Despite his success, he retained the dedication and modesty needed to teach undergraduate physics to a broad range of students.

  Apsley Cherry-Garrard, of the Scott expedition, seemed to especially enjoy talking about temperature in terms of “degrees of frost.” He often talked of “degrees of frost” in is his 607-page memoir, The Worst Journey in the World (reprint, 2000, Carroll and Graf, New York), which has won high praise as an example of fine travel writing. Polar explorers were not the only ones to measure cold temperatures in degrees of frost. In the famous short story “To Build a Fire,” Jack London refers to a temperature of “one hundred and seven degrees of frost.”

  Dante’s Inferno can be described as a travelogue through the circles of Hell. Canto Thirty-one takes readers into the tenth and final circle of Hell, where traitors reside, including “betrayers of kindred” who have murdered their brothers, as well as Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius. In Canto Thirty-four, still in the frozen tenth circle of Hell, readers meet Satan himself: “The emperor of the reign of misery from his chest up emerges from the ice.”

  Gynaephora rossii, the woolly bear caterpillar and the moth that it becomes, is described by D. C. Ferguson in a chapter called “Noctuoidea (in part): Lyantriidae” in the 1978 book The Moths of America North of Mexico, edited by R. B. Dominick et al. (E. W. Classey, London).

  Neil Davis’s textbook Permafrost: A Guide to Frozen Ground in Transition (2001, University of Alaska Press, Fairbanks) offers a thorough technical introduction to permafrost and the formation of various permafrost features, such as pingos, ice wedges, polygonized ground, and frost boils. Davis has been criticized for undertaking a textbook outside his own field of geophysics, but nevertheless Permafrost is well worth reading.

  The story of the abandonment of the Endurance is well known, mostly because of Ernest Shackleton’s South: The Endurance Expedition, which has been widely read since its original publication in 1919 (William Heinemann, London). The book was reprinted in 1999 by Signet (New York).

  Charles Wright’s interviewer was Charles Neider, who edited the book Antarctica: Firsthand Accounts of Exploration and Endurance (2000, Cooper Square Press, New York). His interview of Wright appears in a chapter called “Beyond Cape Horn” in the collection Ice: Stories of Survival from Polar Exploration, edited by Clint Willis (1999, Thunder Mouth Press, New York).

  Robert Falcon Scott’s journals were reprinted in 1996 as Scott’s Last Expedition: The Journals (Carroll and Graf, New York).

  Captain George E. Tyson’s Tyson’s Wonderful Drift was published in 1871 and is now difficult to find. However, it has been reprinted in part in the collection
Ring of Ice: True Tales of Adventure, Exploration, and Arctic Life (2000, Lyons Press, New York).

  Roald Amundsen is sometimes described as the most practical of the polar explorers. He considered “adventure” to be “an unwelcome interruption” of the explorer’s “serious labours,” and he was critical of the poor planning and poor judgment that so often led to tragedy during exploration. His book Roald Amundsen — My Life as an Explorer (1927, Doubleday, Garden City, NY) came out one year before he disappeared when his plane crashed during a rescue mission in the Arctic.

  Various versions of The Story of Comock the Eskimo remain available, including one published by Simon and Schuster (New York) in 1968. The authors are Comock, R. J. Flaherty, and E. S. Carpenter.

  Frederick Albert Cook’s My Attainment of the Pole (1913, Mitchell Kennedy, New York) was reprinted in 2001 by Polar Publishing (New York). Cook, considered a charlatan by many of his contemporaries, believed that few people “have ever been made to suffer so bitterly and so inexpressively as I because of the assertion of my achievement.”