Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies

by Alastair Bonnett

  Fransson goes on to explain how the pumice abraded the bottom of his boat: “Like we’d sailed through sandpaper.” His photographs show miles of packed rock floating freely on the sea. Photographs taken by marine scientists indicate that the pumice can pile up quite deeply, sometimes extending several feet above the surface and forming an undulating landscape. It is at this point that the rafts can bear a human’s weight, although so far it appears that this has been put to the test only near shorelines.

  The rafts eventually drift toward land, clogging up the harbors they bump into. When they make contact with terra firma it becomes evident that they are far from barren. Clinging to the pumice fragments are a range of shellfish. One of the new scientific theories about how plants and animals spread around the world goes under the title of “rapid long-distance dispersal by pumice rafting.” A study of the migration and inhabitants of the rafts spat up from the same undersea eruption that the Maiken sailed into found them to be teeming with life. Erik Klemetti, a professor of geosciences at Denison University, records what was found:

  The pumice quickly became home to upwards of 80 different species of marine life over the course of its journey—in some cases, single pumice clasts [fragments of rock] were home to over 200 individuals of a single species of barnacle (this means that over 10 billion barnacles colonized the pumice raft). Some of these critters were permanent inhabitants (that is, they were attached) while others were mobile, so if the pumice landed on a beach, off onto the island a crab might scuttle. By a year and a half after the pumice raft was erupted, some clasts had ¾ of their surface covered. It could reach such an extreme that the biological hitchhikers would cause the pumice to sink or preferential float with one side facing up, creating microenvironments on a single pumice clast!

  Klemetti concludes that “these volcanic events that have happened frequently in the recent geologic record all over the world may play an important role in how life colonized different parts of the world’s oceans.”

  In recent years, stories about pumice rafts—especially the blog and photographs of Fredrik Fransson—have been working their way around the world in the form of “look at this!” email attachments. Everyone loves them. The Pacific Trash Vortex is a scarier but no less jaw-dropping prospect. Estimates of its size vary considerably. The truth probably lies between 270,000 square miles and 5,800,000 square miles. Since Belgium appears to have become an international standard for judging the size of large floating objects, we can also translate these figures as 22 times the size of Belgium to 592 times the size of Belgium—in other words, nearly twice the size of Australia. Also known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the Trash Vortex does not exist as a single entity but is more like a soup or galaxy of garbage, most of which floats just underwater but often coagulates on the surface. Footballs, kayaks, and Lego blocks have all been spotted, along with the usual mass of plastic bottles and fishing nets. As Donovan Hohn revealed in Moby-Duck, it is also the resting place of a good many toy ducks.

  All the things that are thrown off ships or swept up off the coasts of the Pacific and get caught in the circulation of the ocean waters end up in this graveyard of consumerism. As with the pumice rafts, one of the first accounts we have of this new landscape came from an adventurous yachtsman. In 1997 Charles Moore was on his way back to Los Angeles from Hawaii. He decided to take his yacht into a part of the ocean usually avoided by sailors because of its slow currents and lack of wind. To his astonishment he found himself sailing into a sea of gunk. “Every time I came on deck, there was trash floating by. How could we have fouled such a huge area? How could this go on for a week?” Moore, heir to a fortune from the oil industry, has since become a leading campaigner and researcher on trash vortices. Despite their size, and their human origins, they are little understood. Basic questions about how they move, how rubbish is sorted within them, and where that stuff then goes have yet to be answered. Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer has argued that they “move around like a big animal without a leash,” and every so often they find a shore and cough up plastic all over the beach. Ebbesmeyer puts it in suitably grotesque language: “The garbage patch barfs, and you get a beach covered with this confetti of plastic.”

  Since all oceans have circulating currents, called gyres, and since rubbish is being picked up by such currents around the world, one would expect that trash vortices are forming in many oceans. In fact, the Pacific has two: an Eastern Garbage Patch has been discovered off Japan. But there is also the North Atlantic Garbage Patch, first identified in 1972. It drifts about one thousand miles in the course of a year. Rare photos of it have been taken by the research vessel Sea Dragon, which since 2010 has been studying trash vortices all over the globe. They show a mass of floating debris on rough seas.

  But we can’t end the story there. A narrative arc that takes us from Homer’s Aeolia to a gray gazpacho of plastic in the cold Atlantic may satisfy the modern urge for environmentalist misery, but it’s too short a tale to do justice to our love affair with places that float, because even when they are made of rubbish they are still amazing. A very old desire has been whetted, one that, as we shall now see, is today being fulfilled and tested by manufactured floating islands.

  Nipterk P-32 Spray Ice Island

  One of the most remarkable of island-building technologies—the spray ice island—is likely to have only a brief moment of glory. Almost at the very moment it was perfected, it started to look like the debris of another era, a parable for our generation of the fate of the Arctic, which within decades will be completely ice-free in high summer.

  In 1989 ExxonMobil built Nipterk P-32 in Canada’s Beaufort Sea, at the frozen top of the North American continent, and while not the first of these islands, it was the biggest and most ambitious. The region holds vast oil reserves, but until recently, most of the year the Beaufort Sea has been entirely iced over, with only a small coastal channel leaking open between August and September. Making spray ice islands in such a subzero climate is simple, and starts by hosing water high into the air. The water freezes before it can hit the ground and builds up on the sea ice. In shallow waters, after many days of continuous spraying the sea ice is weighed down to the ocean floor, so it’s not a true floating island for long. The hoses remain on until a roundish island is formed well above water level.

  Ice islands take a variety of forms, but the best-known ones are made by nature. When ice shelves shoved forward by glaciers break off into the sea, they can create floating islands vastly bigger than any iceberg. In northern Greenland the Petermann glacier has calved some huge ice islands over the past decade. One of the largest, a forty-six-square-mile island that came to be called Petermann Ice Island, broke off in 2010 and began a zigzag journey west and north toward the Canadian Arctic. For a part for the way it was accompanied by the BBC’s Helen Czerski, who described Petermann’s landscape, in very English terms, as “like a mini version of the South Downs”: “gentle mounds were separated by valleys, and these led down to waterfalls of melt water cascading into the ocean.”

  The most accurate descriptions of natural ice islands date back to 1955, when American scientists lived on another one that snapped off from Greenland. From April all the way to September they mapped every last gulley and crest, along with all its hitchhiking animals and rocks, and their island followed the same zigzag pattern, up and westward. And it had the same fate as Petermann Ice Island, eventually breaking up, many of the lumps getting grounded and stuck fast in the polar wilderness.

  Whereas nature’s erratic ice islands bump around and head off into oblivion, manufactured ice islands are designed to stay in one place. Engineers were first attracted to ice as a building material because it floats. The earliest plans were some of the most ambitious. In the 1930s a German designer called Dr. A. Gerke came up with a plan for floating ice airports based in the mid-Atlantic. In October 1932, Modern Mechanix magazine reported that Dr. Gerke had “erected an ice island in Lake Zurich by artificial means, whi
ch endured six days after the refrigerating machinery was switched off.” Although Gerke’s idea wasn’t taken up in Germany, a few years later it was developed by the British scientist Geoffrey Pyke. In the early 1940s he experimented with building an aircraft carrier out of a mixture of ice and wood pulp, which he called pykrete. A prototype was constructed in Patricia Lake in Alberta, Canada, but Pyke’s scheme also stalled at an early stage. Unfortunately, although both Gerke’s and Pyke’s plans have a geeky charm, they were wildly impractical because the seas of the temperate zone are just too warm for ice islands.

  Ice has been used for many years as a material for temporary buildings. From igloos to grand houses, such as the ice palace built in St. Petersburg in 1740, it has long been valued as a lightweight, strong, and—if you are in the right place—cheap material. But it was only when detailed plans for the first spray ice island were patented in the United States in the early 1970s that islands made of ice started to attract serious money. Nipterk P-32 was preceded in the 1980s by Mars Ice Island, Angasak Ice Island, and Karluk Ice Island. While they established that spray ice technology worked and that it could provide a stable platform, Nipterk took the technology into uncharted territory.

  With a total volume of 860,000 cubic meters, it was nearly twice as big as the largest of the older islands. Moreover, it was situated well out to sea, beyond the protection of barrier islands, in a region where the sea ice can move ten meters in a day. To build it, engineers had to wait until winter, when ice roads could be laid up to the site that were firm enough to allow four spray pumps to be put in position. Spraying started on November 28, 1989, and the temperature hovered around minus-20 Celsius, cold enough for hard ice to be formed in the air and packed into place with bulldozers. For a couple of weeks it got so cold that the ice roads cracked open. There were other unknowns: Would an island this size stay put? Would it split apart if it got too cold? Would it be smashed to bits by the surrounding sea ice? Given these risks, the stability of the island was monitored day and night, enabling the engineers to see how much Nipterk was being compacted and shunted, the biggest lateral movement being measured in millimeters. Nipterk, completed in fifty-three days, was a stunning success, and it was soon able to support a rig as well as service and housing structures.

  A new island-building technology had been invented, developed, and shown to work over a period of a decade and a half. And this was not the only type of island that the oil companies created. In the Beaufort Sea, where much of the most innovative activity has happened, there are a dozen or so sacrificial beach islands, which consist of scooped-up beach debris. There are even more gravel islands and various caisson islands, which involve concrete or steel structures being sunk into the sea. There are even rubble spray islands, which are hybrid gravel-and-spray-ice constructions. Nowhere else on earth can one find so many new island-building technologies or see them advance so rapidly. Many of these islands are far bigger than Nipterk. Endicott Island, which lies in Alaskan waters, covers forty-five acres and is made up of two gravel islands linked to the shore by a causeway. But dumping heavy stuff into the sea is expensive. Spray ice islands are about half the price of gravel islands, and they are also cheap to decommission. For a while they looked like the future. Today, however, they look more like victims of their own success. As sea temperatures rise, the Arctic is losing its ice cover and the Beaufort Sea is getting deeper and stormier. Even in October and November large areas of the southern part of the Beaufort Sea are ice-free. The temperate zones where Dr. A. Gerke and Geoffrey Pyke imagined their ice islands are creeping north. As the world heats up, the ice island is headed back into the realm of speculation.

  The Floating Maldives

  It used to be thought that “living on the water is just for the poor,” the young Dutch architect Koen Olthuis said at a public lecture at the University of Warwick in 2012. But as populations expand and sea levels rise, a new attitude is needed. Olthuis works for Dutch Docklands. Founded in 2005, the company has established itself as the market leader in floating island technology. Its projects range from a floating ice hotel in Norway to the Floating Proverb, a planned group of eighty-nine floating islands around Palm Jebel Ali in Dubai that will spell out a poem written by the country’s monarch, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum: “Take wisdom from the wise . . . It takes a man of vision to write on water.”

  But it is in the Republic of the Maldives that Dutch Docklands is making its name. There is already a healthy trade in the floating houses dotted along the Ocean Flower, a flower-shaped raft of planned luxury villas that will be twenty minutes by boat from the capital, Malé. The poor don’t come into it: prices for the smallest unit start at $950,000. “The Ocean Flower is an excellent opportunity to gain an outstanding return on investment,” runs the Dutch Docklands pitch, especially once you begin “renting out your property through a five star hotel operator.”

  Ocean Flower is just the start of it. The Maldivian government has signed a contract with Dutch Docklands, leasing to the company four other lagoons around Malé Atoll for a period of fifty years. Using massive rafts pumped with foam and concrete, Dutch Docklands is planning to build an assortment of floating shapes and sizes, including a floating golf course that spans a mini-archipelago, and the Greenstar, a star-shaped and tiered green island that houses a luxury hotel in its upper layers. Apparently the star shape has significance, since, in the words of Dutch Docklands, it “symbolizes Maldivians’ innovative route to conquer climate change.” They add that it “will become the number 1 location for conventions about climate change, water management and sustainability. A unique Floating Restaurant Island will be built next to it.”

  Now the super-rich can look forward to flying between their increasingly valuable floating properties while simultaneously saving the planet from environmental catastrophe. It’s a trend summarized by a recent Time headline: “Floating Technology Will Turn Rising Seas into Prime Real Estate.” But according to Olthuis, the rich are just a convenient resource. A young man with long black curls and a boyishly earnest manner, who has already convinced a lot of people that the role of the rich is to “pay for the innovation for the poor,” the architect wants nothing less than a complete reorientation of our attitudes toward building space that happens to be covered with water. He used his University of Warwick lecture to argue that “water is a workable building layer” and that “if you turn water into space, which is a dramatic change of mindset, there’s a whole new world of possibilities.” For Olthuis it is all about getting beyond the static city. With movable floating platforms the “hydrocities” of the future can be as “flexible as a shuffle puzzle.” Perhaps an even better analogy is Olthuis’s idea that water platforms should be seen as “city apps,” each doing a specific job—some for leisure or for sport, some for eating out or for providing trees and wildlife. Each could be called up and deployed when needed, creating a versatile and expandable landscape.

  It is a vision that would make not just existing maps but the very idea of maps obsolete. If a city is composed of blocks that can be dragged somewhere else at any time, then old-style visual devices like maps, which are designed as snapshots of a static city, will have to be replaced. Perhaps the new forms of geographical representation that we will need will be more akin to airport gate numbers, digits and time frames that are quickly called up and just as soon forgotten.

  Floating villages seem to be coming of age. The first one to be built was in Okinawa, Japan, in 1975, and called Aquapolis. Declared “A Small First Step Toward a Future of Limitless Possibilities,” Aquapolis was a thirty-two-meter-high world’s fair exhibit that was also designed to function as a self-contained marine community. Twenty years later it was towed to Shanghai and sold for scrap. But Japan continued to build floating structures, and the longest so far has been Mega-Float, a 1,000-meter airport runway that sat in Tokyo Bay. In 2011 another Mega-Float was used to store contaminated water from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The larges
t set of floating buildings ever completed is anchored in the Han River in Seoul, South Korea. It’s a giant conference and events center made up of three connected islands. At the other end of the spectrum there is Joyxee Island, a tiny private island built by British expatriate Richart “Rishi” Sowa off the coast of Cancún. It is made from about 100,000 recycled plastic bottles and supports a small house.

  For the people of the Maldives one would think there were practical and immediate reasons for building floating structures. No part of the 1,200 islands that make up the Maldives is more than six feet above sea level, meaning that the whole place could soon be under water. It’s odd, then, that all the Dutch Docklands projects are about bringing new people in and not finding homes for those living there now. The government of the Maldives seems to see the rich in about the same way that Koen Olthuis does. But the government has a very different take on how the money they will generate should be used. A few years ago the prime minister revealed plans to buy up land in India, Sri Lanka, and Australia. The idea was that a “sovereign wealth fund” could be built from tourism revenues and a “New Maldives” established overseas. The tourists would stay and the Maldivians would leave and collect the rent. “Our actions will be a template, an action kit for other nations across the world,” the prime minister boasted. Yet the prospect of repopulating one’s country with floating pseudo-environmentalist millionaires, while the indigenous people are transformed from a sovereign body into an ethnic minority living thousands of miles from home, did not have wide support. A more popular solution is for the construction of new islands for the locals using sand dredged from lagoons. The first phase of this process has already been completed. A large new island, called Hulhumalé, has been built using tried and tested methods, and it is one of the highest, and hence safest, places in the Maldives. When the island is fully developed, the government hopes that it will be able to house a third of the Maldives’ population. Yet the rise of Hulhumalé casts a further shadow over the pretensions of Dutch Docklands’s floating islands to be anything other than playgrounds for the super-rich.