The Library of Ice

by Nancy Campbell

  Flaws develop in sea ice too. In cryologist-speak, the flaw lead is an opening that runs between ice attached to the coast (shore-fast ice) and the ice on the sea (drift ice). The flaw leads are unpredictable: during the autumn they can form anywhere in the frozen ocean where wind or currents place stress on the ice, and they often freeze over again. To find them, look up to the sky: a flaw may be indicated by steam rising from the water, or the dark reflection of the water on a cloud. Hunters often head out over the fast ice to the flaw lead in search of the mammals – seals, whales and narwhals – that gather there to breathe. With the same object in mind, polar bears will arrive over the drift ice. The flaw is an aberration, but also a rich resource; its fault line, a meeting point.

  The museum is an imposing building to have custody of, and I’m glad of a break when Ole and his elegant wife Thrine invite me round for dinner. Also at the table that evening is Bendt, a scientist who has been laying sensors down on the icefjord to observe the movement of the glacier. To celebrate his return to Greenland for another season of hunting data, Thrine serves her signature dish: walrus cooked in the style of beef Wellington. Bendt asks for a large piece of the dark meat and bemoans the drudgery of the cryologist’s life, in which a single light-bulb moment is bracketed by years of carrying heavy, expensive equipment across hostile ice fields, and often watching bits of it disappear into the ice it is supposed to be recording. Ole and Thrine’s table has welcomed many scientists who come to Ilulissat to research the effects of climate change on the permafrost or investigate the vast crevasses opening in the ice sheet. As Bendt grumbles, I understand what has been troubling me about Petersen’s paintings: they represent a romantic depiction of the Arctic, from a more innocent time, before icebergs and sea ice had become an indicator of climate change, when convention framed such a view as majestic rather than temporal or even tragic. Now any iceberg in the bay is likely to have been tracked by a data sensor before it is recorded by a painter, and artists and scientists sit at the same table.

  One of the most interesting exhibits in the museum (to me) was Petersen’s battered travelling trunk, which accompanied him on all his Arctic voyages, containing his art materials and presumably tobacco and some other home comforts. He must have been keen not to lose it: rather than merely tagging it with his name or his initials, he painted a scaled-up version of his official signature on each of its leather faces, as if it is another work of art. Despite the vast galleries at his disposal, Ole has placed the trunk in a corridor by the back door of the museum, next to the lavatory. This is a curatorial stroke of genius, since it seems to emphasize that the artist is just in the process of leaving, as he so often was – and as all too soon I would be too.

  II

  Russell Square is quiet. A sign advertising gelato still hangs outside the park café, but the fountains have been turned off for the winter and the last leaves are being swept from the paths. Rain falls in Bedford Place, where at number 21, Jane Griffin was born on 4 December 1791, and grew up with her three sisters and a governess, Miss Peltreau. It was her beau Peter Roget – a physician who loved lists of words so much he spent the latter part of his life compiling the thesaurus that bears his name – who introduced Jane to the Arctic, and her future husband, taking her in March 1818 to Deptford to see the ships Dorothea and Trent, then under the command of a young lieutenant Franklin on his first Arctic service. Jane would marry John Franklin in 1828. Now the home from which her travels began is occupied by The Penn Club, and I am staying in a slightly scruffy room on the top floor – a part of the house I suspect Jane never saw.

  It’s a short walk along an elegant Georgian terrace to the British Museum. I’m ushered into an auditorium in the basement, where a book launch is in progress. Shari Fox Gearheard is here to introduce The Meaning of Ice on behalf of her large investigative team, who couldn’t travel with her. A photograph of the book’s authors is projected onto a screen instead: they lie in a circle on the ice with their heads together in the centre, half-hidden by the furry hoods of their parkas. Dr Gearheard researches the relationship between humans and sea ice for the National Snow & Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, but she lives and works in Clyde River in Nunavut, in Canada’s far north. As a ‘musher’, someone who drives a team of sled dogs, she can be counted as one of the silalirijiit, an Inuktitut word meaning ‘those who work with or think about weather’. Shari and her co-investigators are pairing local knowledge with climate science and environmental modelling to understand weather patterns around Clyde River – and the ways in which they are changing.

  Shari and her fellow researchers travelled between Clyde River and other communities – Barrow, on the north coast of Alaska, and Qaanaaq in north-west Greenland – compiling traditional knowledge from those living on the ‘ice garden’. She clicks through from the image of her colleagues in their parkas to drawings demonstrating how to make them: the correct ways to skin a seal and then divide the prepared skin into the panels of the coat. These techniques differ between cultures across the north, as does whether you choose to use a skidoo or dog team and, of course, the language you use to describe them.

  Just as ice is formed from a single crystal and grows into a more complex structure, so the Eskaleut languages spoken across the Arctic take a root word – like hiku, which means simply ice of any kind, including ice cream – and add further morphemes to express specific qualities. The English definitions of the long, polysynthetic terms for ice can read like miniature nature essays. Yet some languages, such as that spoken in Qaanaaq, are only beginning to be written as well as spoken.

  I slip away at the end of the talk, before the champagne and canapés. I’d love to ask Shari about her life in Clyde River, across the water from Upernavik, but I know these occasions are no place for conversation. I buy the book and when I get back to Bedford Place I draw an armchair close to the fire in the reading room. I skip to the pages on sea ice terminology, to discover what journey hiku might take me on. The ice conditions in Qaanaaq are closest to my own experience on Upernavik. I begin with haard’dloq, extremely thin new ice that cannot be stepped on without danger, and then hikuliaq, new ice, which is still slippery and yet can be travelled across. When hikuliaq is older it becomes hikuliamineq – you might call it old-new ice – as it gets thicker there are frost flowers (kaneq) on its surface; the kaneq mean it is no longer slippery, no longer dangerous, safe to travel across. But not for ever. When hikuaq and hikuapajaannguaq break up, they make eqinnikkalaat – splinters of thin ice that can lacerate skin.

  Would I be able to tell the difference between hikuliamineq with its frost flowers and hikuuhaq, described as: ‘old ice, which has been frozen in the same place since freeze-up, which has drifted snow cover (agiuppineq) or just snow.’ But while that’s a significant amount of old ice, it’s ice that stays in one place, and I might need to distinguish it from hikuuhaq, ‘ice that comes down from the North; very thick ice; multiyear ice’. These words not only describe visual features but also dynamics and processes, such as tinumihaartoq – when broken ice is moving, as it does on the waves, and makes a sound. They describe the relationship of humans, and of course dogs, to the ice. As well as difficulty, I found there were classifications for danger, such as aukkkarneq, ‘open water in sea ice formed by fast-moving currents under the ice, open area or crack, dangerous’ or aputainnaq, ‘snow cover over open ocean; very dangerous.’ There’s a reason for these distinctions for sea ice – survival. And in a time of rapid climate change, survival can turn on a knife edge.

  What a contrast with the World Meteorological Organization’s glossary of Sea Ice Nomenclature. Originally published in 1970, it’s available as a download for anyone with enough interest in the subject or space on their hard drive. The glossary describes ice in four languages (English, French, Russian and Spanish) and in terms of its size and appearance, rather than how it grew and the way it might be used:

  Floe giant: Over 10 km across.

  Floe vast: 2–1
0 km across.

  Floe big: 500–2000 m across.

  Floe medium: 100–500 m across.

  Floe small: 20–100 m across.

  Small ice cake: Less than 2 m across.

  The glossary contains 220 categories – and that number is growing in response to changing conditions. ‘Dirty ice’, ‘frost flowers’ and ‘small/medium iceberg’ were among the terms added in the latest edition, published in 2014. This dictionary is aimed at communications for shipping and submarines that are trying to avoid ice, or even break through it, rather than those travelling over it.

  In the past, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, based at the World Meteorological Organization’s office in Geneva, has largely relied on information from scientific studies, rather than traditional knowledge. In this, it unfortunately reflected the history of power relationships between indigenous groups and other bodies with interests in the Circumpolar North. But there’s growing recognition from scientists of the insights that traditional knowledge provides. Of course, those with this knowledge never doubted its use.

  ‘I became aware of snow and summer sixty-six years ago,’ Peter Elachik testified at the Snowchange conference in Alaska in 2005, asserting his decades of experience. ‘In the early 1940s, snow was very dry and you could hear footsteps thirty metres away; now because of the moisture you don’t hear footsteps.’ Such detailed understanding of the ice has become more critical, with an uncertain future ahead. Margaret Opie, an elder from Barrow, told others gathered at Snowchange: ‘In my short lifetime, things have really changed for my community and for our subsistence lifestyle. The whaling season is stalled. There are a lot of winds; the ice is many, many miles away. We depend on the marine mammals for our skin boats. Early break-up is hazardous to us. This summer the ice was gone too early and was too far out to get the number of seals needed to replace the skin boat . . . Now we see all the big swells and they won’t quit until the ice is back.’ As Margaret, Peter and their fellow elders shared observations of snow and ice it became clear by consensus that the fast ice on the Alaska coast was a fraction of its former extent, and therefore more easily dispersed by wind. There was more open water along the coast. The pressure ridges (high walls of ice, formed when two floes collide) were still there – but they were much smaller than they had once been.

  This knowledge can’t be separated from the words in which it is expressed. But, like the ice, the reach of some languages is diminishing, to the extent that the state of the language may be of as much concern as the ecosystem it describes. In 2008 the Arctic Indigenous Languages Symposium brought together six groups (the Aleut International Association, the Arctic Athabaskan Council, the Gwich’in Council International, the Inuit Circumpolar Council, the Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North, and the Saami Council) all concerned about their languages’ future. A growing number of books are sharing traditional knowledge in indigenous languages such as The Meaning of Ice and Kingikmi Sigum Qanuq Ilitaavut – Wales Inupiaq Sea Ice Dictionary, a catalogue from the North Alaska–Bering Strait region. In some areas, these glossaries may be the first textbooks for a previously uncodified language.

  These are momentous initiatives as speculation about the future is unusual in the Arctic. The geographer Nicole Gombay writes about the perception of time in Inuit culture: ‘The physical realities of the natural world – knowledge about its unpredictability – translate, I believe, into deeper existential perceptions about the nature of reality in general, and time in particular. Everything is in flux.’ As I had discovered in Upernavik, it is hard to make plans when the weather or hila is constantly changing. Better not to plan to do anything, and wait until the last minute to take action. The term ‘hila’ recognizes the connection between humans and their environment: it can refer not only to the unpredictable atmosphere but also human consciousness.

  The names for different months reveal the importance of ice in the community’s calendar. September, for hunters in Nunavut, is Akullirut or the waiting season. ‘During this time there is snow on the ground and everyone is waiting for sea ice to form,’ Joelie Sanguya explains in The Meaning of Ice. In October – Amiraijaut – when the sea ice arrives from the north on ocean currents, the hunters know that ‘freeze-up’ is beginning. This month, Tusaqtuut (November) means ‘news time’: the sea ice allowed people to travel long distances between camps and meet up with each other after months of separation and open water, bringing news of friends and family along with them. In contrast to the explorers for whom the arrival of the ice meant the end of their journey, the cessation of contact with their kin, for those who knew the Arctic best it was only the beginning.

  III

  The next day I meet a friend I haven’t seen for a few years. Last time I met Bethan she had just finished cataloguing the British Museum’s vast collection of William Blake prints. In a Greek café around the corner, she tells me about her latest discovery: the Dalziel Brothers.

  ‘Who?’ I ask, mouth full of spanakopita.

  ‘You’d like them,’ she says. ‘They made some wonderful engravings of icebergs.’

  Dalziel – there’s even something icy about the name. But ice wasn’t all they did – far from it. Bethan could interest anyone in the artists, according to their predilections. The wood engraving firm – the Getty Images of their day – illustrated everything from novels and theatre programmes to trade manuals. As well as illustrations for the works of Charles Dickens and William Wordsworth, they created images of flotation aids and diagrams showing resuscitation procedures for the Life Boat Institution and advertisements for hot chocolate and musical instruments. There were small decorative initials for poetry anthologies and humorous vignettes for magazines. Before each finished woodblock was sent from the engraving workshop to the printer, a proof was taken on fine paper as a record of the firm’s achievement. Day after day, these were trimmed and glued into giant leather-bound albums, with only occasional notations, such as a date, scribbled alongside. These surreal scrapbooks are a Great Exhibition in miniature, reflecting the industry and ambition of the age. But in an era famous for productivity, little else has survived: many of the books the Dalziels illustrated never went into more than one edition, and only a few, like the works of Dickens, outlasted changing literary tastes. The even more ephemeral trade logos and advertisements faded as fast as the fashionable items they promoted. Even the albums kept by the firm were put aside and forgotten for many years, due to a lack of interest in commercial art. Bethan has stumbled upon a treasure trove.

  She tells me that George Dalziel was the first of the family to move from Northumberland to London, travelling south by ship in 1835. His brother Edward joined him in the capital four years later. They worked together for over fifty years, seeing their firm through the many technological, cultural and commercial changes of that busy century. Their work included the production of dramatic illustrations to works of Arctic exploration for readers whose curiosity was aroused by Franklin’s sensational disappearance while searching for the Northwest Passage. These illustrations enabled readers to visualize the Arctic, long before wildlife documentaries with their seductive drone footage showing icebergs from above. None of the Dalziels had seen the scenes they depicted: they worked from explorers’ sketches, a draughtsman’s designs, photography or their own imaginations.

  ‘I found some images of Inuit hunters,’ Bethan says. ‘You should come and see.’

  The following week I make my way up the north stairs of the museum to the Prints and Drawings Gallery, where an exhibition of Maggi Hambling’s monotypes of the sea has just opened. The secure door to the Print Room is concealed behind an enormous Michelangelo chalk drawing. I stuff my coat, bag and water bottle into a locker, and put the key on its safety pin carefully in my pocket. Thus stripped of twenty-first-century impedimenta, I enter a chamber redolent of the Dalziel era. On every wall glass cases reach up to the ceiling, holding shelf upon shelf of grey archival boxes, which in turn hold l
ayers of prints. The weak autumn light falling through the vaulted roof windows is supplemented by brass lamps on the desks. Books are laid out on thick foam rests and readers are studiously not touching the pages.

  It’s easy to spot Bethan’s bright wax-print blouse in this subdued setting. She sits on a high stool, methodically cataloguing the finely burnished proofs. She heaves an album onto a foam rest and opens it at the title page to show me the copperplate legend, tidy as ship’s rigging: ‘India-Proofs of Wood-Engravings by the Brothers Dalziel. General Work. Various. 1865.’ Underneath the date is added: ‘This Book was made at the Time the Engravings were done.’ Each phrase is underlined three times. Bethan turns the pages for me, pointing out how illustrations to Alice in Wonderland and equally fantastical works share a spread with technical diagrams and anatomical illustrations.