And another, and another. The 1.5-metre cylinders continue to be raised to the surface, until at last the drill touches the base of the ice sheet – or it breaks. There is no way to retrieve delinquent drill parts, stuck deep in the ice. The work is gruelling and may take several polar summers. The South Pole: the name suggests a long cylinder embedded at the end of the Earth, as if scientists could extract the essence of the Pole itself. Once, explorers rammed their flagpoles into the ice as proof of conquest; now science leaves behind only a cylindrical absence, tempered by chemical traces.
These giant icicles are witnesses to global climate and its history. Within them is evidence of past temperature, the gas composition of the lower atmosphere, solar variability, ocean volume, volcanic eruptions, rainfall, the extent of deserts and forest fires. Under the magnifying glass the cross-sections of the core glow like magic lantern slides. Summer and winter snowfall have an entirely different appearance: the coarse-grained summer hoar is covered with a fine-grained layer, densely packed by the winter winds. This pairing is known by scientists as the ‘depth hoar/wind slab couplet’. It is a surprisingly poetic term, which calls to mind the neat closing lines of a sonnet. The couplet forms an annual marker that – like the growth rings of trees – can be counted to date the core. One of the longest cores extracted to date, at Vostok, reached back 420,000 years. Its ice had lasted through four previous glacial cycles – surviving every time ice has formed on the planet’s surface, and then melted away.
Human beings, lodged on Earth’s thin crust, must drill deep or soar high to understand their environment. Knowledge comes from far beneath our feet, from distant outer space. The Antarctic ice stretches back to an era before the Cold War, before the competition between nations to reach the Poles, and the era of exploration that preceded it. By mining a single spot beneath the ice, scientists travel in time to a place beyond human memory, before any of the books here in the Bodleian Library were written. The polar ice is the first archive, a compressed narrative of all time in a language humans have just begun to learn. Only a few people are fluent: we rely on scientists to read the alphabet of elements and isotopes for us. I imagine Dr Abram recording her research, compiling graphs, the lines of which ascend and descend like ice formations. Drip, drip. The slow accumulation of data, the meticulous accretion of science.
II
‘For the Lord spake unto Job: Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow? Out of whose womb came the ice?’
Surely no contemporary scientist would quote the Bible in their work? My interest in the patterns in the firn has brought me to an early study of snowflakes. Its author, Johannes Kepler, describes himself as a man ‘who has nothing and receives nothing’. The seventeenth-century mathematician and astronomer was concerned with harmony in nature and made significant advances in the field of optics, inventing – among other things – an improved version of the refracting telescope, which bears his name.
Kepler did not only investigate the vast reaches of the solar system. He also examined tiny forms close to hand, using his understanding of the stars to look at snow, which ‘falls from the heavens and looks like the stars’. His treatise on the spaces between snowflakes suggested a new theory of the tessellation of spheres, but it remained conjecture, and in time it acquired the dubious honour of being the oldest problem in geometry. In 1900 David Hilbert included it in his famous list of twenty-three unsolved mathematical problems. Eventually, over four hundred years after the publication of Kepler’s work, as I write these words, the BBC news announces that Thomas Hales’s ‘Flyspeck’ project has presented formal proof of Kepler’s conjecture.
Kepler’s research all began quite light-heartedly. De Nive Sexangula had its origins in a winter walk through Prague. ‘For as I write again it has begun to snow, and more thickly than a moment ago. I have been busy examining the little flakes. The water vapour thickened through the cold to snow, and single small snowflakes fell on my coat, all were six-cornered with feathered spokes . . .’ Kepler considers their symmetry. Why were they all six-cornered, he wondered? I can’t read any further, as the next page is uncut. Then I notice that every other page in the book is uncut – in other words I’m the first person to read this copy. There are library guidelines for situations like this. I go to the librarian’s desk to explain, and he gives me a silver paperknife. I’m astonished that I am allowed agency in this act – when I first joined the library, I had to sign a form to say I would never ‘kindle a flame’ in the building – but I take the knife back to my desk. I feel like a thief as I slip the knife into the fold and slice along the top edge of the page with two swift strokes. In doing so, I reveal a spread of information that previously I could only squint at. It is a privilege to be the first person to have access to these pages – but I don’t start reading them yet. The destructive action is addictive. I slit the next signature, and the next, all the way through the book. The paper sighs: I can almost feel the text escaping.
Now there’s a light fluff at the top of each page where my knife has passed. Kepler’s text – jaunty and self-effacing by turns – considers not only snowflakes but also the hexagonal cells of a honeycomb, the shape of pomegranate seeds, the arrangement of peas in a pod, three- and six-petalled flowers, regular Platonic solids, semi-regular Archimedean solids, the tiling of planes and the filling of spaces. Kepler contemplates the best way to stack cannonballs in order to occupy the smallest area.
Cannonballs for snowflakes: an unexpected conflation. Another conundrum faced by Kepler – one that I can understand – is how to anchor something as ephemeral as a snowflake in language, in order to explain his study of it. In the end, the snow comes to symbolize the very insecurity of his life. He hopes to be able to bring the snowflake that has fallen on his jacket to his patron and the treatise’s dedicatee, Imperial Councillor Baron Johannes Matthäus Wackher von Wackhenfels, but the moment he notices it, it melts away. Ironically it is his own existence – the warmth of his body – that destroys it. ‘Now quickly bring the present to my benefactor, as long as it exists and hasn’t through body warmth disappeared into nothingness.’ But it has disappeared into nothingness. The written word of his treatise must suffice to describe it.
At a climate conference in London a few weeks ago I paired up, during the one-minute speed-meeting session, with an amiable, bearded scientist, who told me that he’d held a piece of the Vostok ice core in the palm of his hand. Chris used up his whole minute describing the experience. ‘The thing is, it fizzed,’ he said. ‘It was melting with the warmth of my palm, and the air was under such pressure that it exploded out of its ice pockets. It fizzed,’ he repeated, ‘then it melted, and I just wiped it on my shirt.’ He passes his hand across the checked cotton covering his chest, an expression of mild bewilderment on his face as he relives his Keplerian encounter with a 20,000-year-old piece of ice.
I download a paper on the Vostok core from a science journal, hoping it will help me understand the work of cryologists. It joins other PDFs, chapters from PhD theses on modelling ice flow and UNESCO conservation reports, cascading across my screen, long slivers of text on a radiant white background.
I open the file with a single click and scroll through the text, which is crammed into two columns between a list of multiple authors and the dense footnotes. Science has so many authors! The tone is less personal than Kepler’s: these days, scientists must appeal to their sponsors not through friendship or the use of wit but by other means. This study describes eras of time that defy conventional numbering and must be represented by numerals crouching above the line like little deities. One language cannot convey the ice’s properties: symbols – Greek letters, geometric shapes – stand in for words. Charts saw-tooth across the page, recording variations over time, a silent sonograph between the regular, linear text.
Something causes me to look up from my computer. It has begun to rain. After a minute my screen, through inactivity, grows dim. Time telescopes. I’m summoned back from th
e Ice Age to my own era, the Anthropocene. Instead of struggling to comprehend millennia, I watch as the rhythm of raindrops on the glass quickens.
Somewhere in Antarctica, the snow that may never melt is falling, preserving isotopic evidence of my daily actions. Years from now, a scientist not yet born may read this story in the ice.
III
Sunlight filters into the University Museum through the glass-vaulted ceiling, the struts of which were designed to mirror the animal skeletons below. I haven’t come to see bones on my lunch break, but a rather special skin. I hurry to the back of the building where an almost-hidden archway gives access to the collection next door – the Pitt Rivers Museum. I descend to the gallery where objects from the Arctic are exhibited. I came here before I went to Greenland, hoping to learn something about the place I was travelling to. I’ve returned to look at an object that I haven’t been able to get out of my thoughts: the skin of a seal on which an outline of the Bering Strait has been painted. Did the irregular shape of the skin suggest a map to the artist? The coastlines of America and Russia almost follow its edge, an inch or less away in some places, in others slightly more – just enough to fit in a vignette of figures firing arrows at a bear, or a herder leading his reindeer.
It’s winter, and the sea is covered in ice. We know this because a man is standing in the centre of the yellowed skin, harpooning a seal at its breathing hole. The anchor line of a ship extends for several inches to the shoreline, a precaution often taken when wintering in a harbour where the ice might shift. Two dog teams pulling sleds approach the three-masted vessel. None of these activities would take place unless the seas were frozen. The sealskin is not only a map of winter hunting grounds: it also depicts the story of Europeans coming to the region in the 1850s and 1860s, making this a historical, as well as a geographic, chart.
Chronologies and cartographies were once very similar in Europe too. While the map-makers of the sixteenth century were making strides in their depiction of the globe, historians still faced the challenge of how to give form to time. They knew that the way they presented chronology would influence the perception of time itself. One solution was a chart in which individual events, reigns and crusades were listed in separate boxes. These remind me of the pages in my diary which show miles between train stations, hours between airports. Or even the periodic table. Out in the world, the chemical elements don’t stay in discrete boxes like distances do: they combine and mutate – and time doesn’t always do what you expect either.
To express the peculiar passage of time, some chronographers began to produce charts of world history that looked like maps of the globe, with different areas for different eras. This fashion culminated in Friedrich Strass’s Der Strom der Zeiten (1804) which shows history as a ‘Stream of Time’. It is an extraordinary production, which even follows a folding model like a map. At the top of the document, storm clouds gather and streams flow out from them. In fact, this landscape is nothing but water, with scarcely even a sandbank between the colourful tributaries, waterfalls and lakes – representing dynasties and nations – that crowd the paper, more like thirsty pot-bound plant roots than streams. The chart’s English translator William Bell wrote:
However natural it may be to assist the perceptive faculty, in its assumption of abstract time, by the idea of a line . . . it is astonishing that . . . the idea of a Stream should not have presented itself to any one . . . The expressions of gliding, and rolling on; or of the rapid current, applied to time, are equally familiar to us with those of long and short.
How small a step it is from a river of time to an ice core. Long before the bore-hole technology used to collect ice cores was invented (ironically to facilitate drilling for oil), the use of a line was mooted by scholars to order world history. One of the first uses of a linear narrative to depict the passage of time was a magnificent, untitled, 336-page work published in 1493, only a few decades after the invention of metal type in Europe. The book, known to English readers as the Nuremberg Chronicle, divides history into eight ages. Its author Hartmann Schedel began with the First Age of the World, which lasted from the Creation to the Deluge. ‘We wish to write briefly of these first days and the beginnings,’ he wrote, ‘as much as befits things that lie so far in the past.’ Schedel may have been inclined to brevity from an awareness that any accurate dating of those ‘first days’ was impossible: holy books in ancient Hebrew and Greek differed on the interval between the Creation and the Flood by six hundred years. Schedel was on surer ground with more recent, and better documented, events. His Sixth Age culminated in a careful account of the election of Maximilian as Holy Roman Emperor in 1486. Between 1486 and the end of the world, Schedel left three blank pages for readers to fill with any significant events that might occur between publication and the Apocalypse.
Christopher Columbus’s first sight of Jamaica in 1494, John Cabot’s voyage to Newfoundland in 1497, Vasco da Gama landing in India in 1498: these were still to come. When I think of all the events that have unfolded between then and now, the three pages in the Chronicle seem a laughable allowance. Not even the most talented scribe could fit into them a comprehensive narrative of the last five hundred years – and if humans are lucky, there may be more decades ahead. (If only Schedel had been able to harness the seemingly limitless dimensions of the internet.) While he did not know the immediate future, the events of the Apocalypse itself were reassuringly preordained by biblical accounts. The Eighth Age would end in the Last Judgement. Schedel wrote:
On the first day the sea will rise 40 cubits above the highest mountain, replacing it like a wall. On the second day it will recede to a level where it may barely be seen. On the third day the monsters of the sea will appear on the waters, and their cries and howls will reach to the heavens. On the fourth day the sea will be aflame.
A historian is no longer obliged to predict the future. Alongside postcards of shrunken heads and puffer fish, the museum gift shop sells ‘History by the Metre’, a novelty folding ruler that lists the major events of the last 2,000 years. (It does not include the relatively late adoption of the metre as a standard unit of length following the French Revolution in 1789.) I unfold it from the middle, finding the invention of printing with moveable type in Europe in 1448, followed on the next flange by the publication of Kepler’s laws of planetary motion in 1609. Eras pass swiftly when each centimetre represents a decade and each year is only a millimetre in length. Yet even a ruler this long can’t encompass eternity: it stops at the millennium, the last notable event being the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. It is a handy crib for school history exams. The graphic representation of time as a line we travel – whether straight or crooked – rather than a space we inhabit is a convention arrived at through centuries of experiments, so commonplace that it even makes it onto a novelty ruler. But as Kepler discovered, the straight and sure line is not the first form in nature. Our planet has always moved in an ellipsis around the sun.
IV
The ruler may be a toy, but it reminds me that time is short – I should press on with my research. I walk past the Radcliffe Camera, a former science library which now houses literature and history. I hop off the pavement onto the wet cobbles to avoid passing between two tourists, one of whom is holding up a phone to snap the other in front of the neo-classical dome. Across the High Street, behind the crenellated wall of University College, there is another cupola. It’s built on the site of the rooms rented by Robert Boyle, one of the founders of modern chemistry. His lodgings in Cross Hall are long gone, as are fellow members of the mysterious ‘invisible college’ which Boyle mentions obliquely in his letters. Born into a wealthy family in Lismore on Ireland’s east coast, Boyle moved to Oxford in the mid-seventeenth century to be close to a group of like-minded natural philosophers who sought to acquire knowledge through experimental investigation. This was an era in which chemistry and alchemy each held the promise of the other: knowledge might lead to riches, but riches could be defined as knowledg
e. The transmutation of lead into gold, the creation of an elixir of life, were no longer the only business of the laboratory. Boyle remained in Oxford for over a decade, until 1668. I imagine him walking up Catte Street, the paved alleyway which I take daily. The medieval street would have seemed old even then by comparison with the sandstone quadrangle of the Bodleian Library, built just fifty years before. The book trade was centred in this part of town: binders, printers, copyists, were all within Boyle’s reach.
However, it was in London, at the Sign of the Ship in St Paul’s Churchyard, that Boyle’s New Experiments and Observations Touching Cold was first printed. I consult an edition from 1665. It’s a small volume, but chubby. The leather hinges are so worn with use that the front and back boards have come away from the spine and are now held in place by a ribbon tied around the book; the faded tail-band hangs by one silken thread. I place the book carefully on a foam rest. All the edges are gilt, protecting the pages from dust; an ancient hand has scrawled the accession number 8°B.16.art. BS over the shining fore-edge in black ink.
Poor Robert Boyle. This was one of his first published books, and it seems he was unprepared for the tribulations of seeing his research to press. There’s an introductory note from the publisher: ‘The Noble Author being at Oxford, when the Book was printed at London, he hopes the Reader will not impute to him the Errors of the Press, which yet he is perswaded will not be many’. This might seem to be the usual publisher’s caveat, but the story becomes more complicated. He warns the reader to expect a blank section or two, and explains:
The Library of Ice Page 3