In the Empire of Ice

by Gretel Ehrlich

  For example, the end of one ice age can sometimes bring on another. Some 11,500 years ago, just as the world was getting warm again, the Laurentide ice sheet, which once covered the northern Unites States and all of Canada, burst and collapsed, sending the largest freshwater pulse in the past 100,000 years. Trillions of cubic feet of meltwater spilled into the North Atlantic, flooding parts of Europe and giving rise to the legend of Noah’s ark. The sudden intrusion of fresh water interrupted the conveyor of warm water, the Gulf Stream. No warm winds carried heat to Britain and Europe, and immediately what is known as the Younger Dryas event began. Sea ice formed and another short ice age came into being, ending just as quickly a thousand years later.

  Ice sheets are laid down, melt, and laid down again. The current Greenland ice sheet is more than two miles thick at the summit but has been in place only since the last glacial period 11,500 years ago. In the previous interglacial, boreal forests reached all the way north to the Arctic Sea, and 53 million years ago, when it was hotter there than today, the ancestors of rhinos and tapirs roamed the high-latitude mountains. Now the last ice sheet in the Northern Hemisphere is disappearing. It is starving to death because the rate of melting is exceeding the rate of snow accumulation. This is no natural fluctuation but climate forcing caused by human activity. In 2009 the air temperatures over the Arctic Ocean rose between 1.8° and 3.6°F. The area over the Barents Sea was even warmer—more than 7.2°F as a result of the absence of sea ice cover—while the Bering Sea was colder that year.

  In 2004, while I was traveling by dogsled on bad ice down the coast of Greenland, two satellites, jointly called GRACE, were measuring the thickness of the Greenland ice sheet. The data received showed that the melt rate had doubled and was increasing exponentially. That same year two icebreakers were pulling 1,400-foot-long sediment cores from the bottom of the Arctic Sea in an attempt to grasp what the environment was like during the Eocene, a hothouse period 55 million years ago. Then the Arctic Ocean was 73°F and dinosaurs were clambering about in areas long since covered by ice. Sudden global heating in the Eocene was caused by shifting tectonic plates. Carbon dioxide sequestered in seafloor limestone was released and pumped into the atmosphere by volcanoes. Two teratons of carbon dioxide spewed out, raising the temperature of the Arctic by 15 degrees. By understanding that abrupt climate shift, we might be able to prepare for the changes we are experiencing now. Or will there not be time?

  The carbon pollution we are pumping into the atmosphere now is no geologic accident, yet reluctance to change our carbon habits is puzzling, given that our own lives are at stake. In 2004 NASA scientist James Hansen, who headed the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said that the Bush Administration censored him because it was thought that climate change news would be bad for business. But “business as usual” is what climate scientists say will be our undoing.

  Positive feedback loops amplify heat. They are a vicious circle, a dog chasing its tail, an addictive rush that can be quelled only by the cool hand of negative feedbacks in a homeostatic balancing act, not too different from the autonomic controls inside our bodies. But when positive feedbacks stack up as they are doing now, the stampede toward enhanced heating and the melting of snow and ice become impossible to stop. What’s known as the polar amplification effect is devastating the Arctic, and therefore we too will soon feel the killing force of unmitigated heat. The Arctic drives the climate of the whole world.

  Groundwater, aquifers, and meltwater from snowpack will be at a premium. Yet in the Arctic, water is the enemy of ice: The more ice melts and the more open water there is, the more ice melts. As a result, ocean water, which is a heat sink, grows exponentially warmer. In the Arctic, areas of open water, even very small ones, give off mist called sea smoke that hangs over the open-water hole, insulating it further from freezing. Any hole in the ice destabilizes the ice around it, causing it to break up.

  Pack ice retreats from northern coasts, leaving huge gaps of open water and dissolving land-fast ice, allowing algae and plankton blooms to occur out of season. The animals and fish that depend on the ice are thus deprived. Warmer water brings on parasites and disease in marine mammals. The Arctic supports the biggest seabird colonies in the world, but if food availability is affected, the birds cannot nest and fledge successfully. Ivory gulls, among other birds, are already in decline.

  Oceans are becoming dead zones. As they acidify, they will be unable to sequester carbon dioxide. Permafrost is suddenly not so permanent—that collar at the top of the world is melting and exhaling methane.

  The disequilibrium of glaciers has gone the way of ablation. They are giving away more than they get in the way of snow. Ice sheets have been tipped on their sides, and melting icebergs crowd fjords. Pack ice has retreated from shallow continental shelves where walruses delicately whisk the sandy bottoms for mollusks. Spring snow falls on broken ice. Ringed seals’ denning sites, just under the snow and ice, are shattered. Pack ice has moved away from every Arctic coastline so that polar bears and walruses have to come ashore to rest, mate, hunt, and eat. Wind waves push pancake ice, cakes of newly formed ice broken by wind. The faster it drifts, the more it thins, and it’s been moving fast. The sea ice extent is declining by 2.7 percent per decade, losing an average of 16,000 square miles of ice per year.

  Some of the outlet glaciers that fringe the Arctic coasts of Ellesmere Island and Greenland are surging, slipping forward rapidly and breaking off in cascading floods of ice. Up on the ice cap massive pieces of ice, some weighing as much as 10 billion tons, are sliding and breaking off, causing “glacier quakes.” There have been hundreds of them, and they are increasing in frequency. Recently, there was a magnitude 6.1 quake in Qaanaaq. Under the ice sheet, the bones of the Arctic world are breaking.

  Rapid anthropogenic climate change is full of paradoxes. Without ice, oceans, bare ground, roads, and cities are heat sinks, and the world grows hotter and hotter. A hot Earth is one that loses its groundwater. Rainfall becomes ineffective on parched, overgrazed, overfarmed land, which leads to more aridity. Persistent drought is overtaking whole continents, in the case of Australia and the farming valleys of California, the western U.S. states, the southern parts of France, all of Spain, and North Africa, where growing deserts are replacing once prolific grasslands.

  Climate scientists say the Greenland ice sheet will continue to melt completely, causing global sea levels to rise by 23 feet. So much seawater, and yet fresh water will become scarce. Food production is already being diminished by fires and drought, but the human population continues to grow.

  If the freshwater flux stops, the Gulf Stream and the British Isles and other parts of Europe will have frigid winters. When that cold air, driven by transpolar winds, hits the warm Pacific air, who knows what kinds of storms will erupt?

  Tropical cyclones are responsible for 15 percent of the water vapor in the stratosphere. Airborne, this water vapor causes more intense cyclones, more precipitation, and many more storms that reach all the way up to the Arctic, causing coastal erosion and breaking up even more ice.

  Rock and soil that have been frozen for thousands of years are melting and letting go of their carbon- and methane-rich ice. After a ten-year plateau, methane emissions increased in 2008 from the not-so-permanent permafrost around the top of the world, as well as from agricultural, oceanic, and industrial sites.

  Ice is wild and appears to be what it is not. It is composed of crushed snowflakes, trapped oxygen, hard glint, captured toxins, and impermanence. It teaches us about melting solidities and how appearances can obscure the fragility of things, reminding us that because of our carelessness, the world can no longer carry us.

  Care and carelessness. Why is the beauty of the Arctic important, the people and animals that inhabit it, the shifting shapes of icebergs, the wet, black mountain walls, and the layers of light—cerulean and silver threads that carry the eye a long way off? Why is the circumpolar north—which has no industry, agriculture, few roads o
r cars, nothing to burn, and few people—the most polluted part of the planet? How can beauty and pollution ride the same trail?

  Spring in the Arctic is now toxic. The sun has burned away winter’s black hood and shines hard on ice. Ice is an archivist. It traps a winter’s worth of airborne contaminants from industrialized nations. Carried north up the east coast of Greenland, these contaminants circle the top of the world in the transpolar winds. “We’re talkin’ social justice issues, we’re talkin’ heavy metals, radioactivity, mercury, soot, and POPs [persistent organic pollutants],” an angry Inuit friend in Greenland told me. “We’re carrying mercury from your coal plants, eating your endocrine disruptors, drinking your soot, imbibing radioactive fish and reindeer. And we are the last traditional, ice age hunting people in the world.”

  Greenlanders have the highest mercury count in their bodies in the world. Methyl mercury in humans causes retardation, psychological disorders, and renal damage. Black carbon causes snow and ice to melt faster, one of many subtle positive feedback loops at work. POPs are fat soluble and accumulate in the fatty tissues of marine mammals and fish. Cod is eaten by seals; seals are eaten by polar bears, sled dogs, and humans; arctic foxes and ravens feed on what’s left. Very quickly, everyone is contaminated. Immune systems are compromised. The chemicals in the flame retardants used in fabric and plastic coverings replace natural hormones, causing hermaphroditic polar bears, seals, and seabirds, and a lowered sperm count in humans. Carbon dioxide is just one of our problems—the accumulation of contaminants has overburdened our skies, our waters, our ground, and our bodies.

  Now, the final paradox: The world’s pollution is causing “global dimming,” which alleviates some solar radiation and keeps things cooler, but it’s a toxic shield that causes disease and disabilities. Take away all the pollution, and the Earth grows even hotter. A “fool’s climate,” James Lovelock calls it. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

  I DREAM OF ICE. Wavy, greasy, splintered, and rough. I dream that my Inuit friends are laying panes of ice on the tormented seas. I watch the ice spreading until it slides under the dogsled on which I’ve been traveling. I feel the calm it brings, its presence working as a balm, its white canopy giving life. I watch pancake ice break up, the world’s floor going gray and rotting. I see the broken and the breaking.

  This is a book about genocide: the abuse of indigenous peoples at the top of the world. This is a book about terricide: the abuse of the planet for progress and profit, paying no heed to the biological health of the world. It’s like building a house with no footing. Eventually, collapse occurs.

  There are things that can be done. First we need the discipline to make decisions about the natural world based on the biological health of the planet, instead of profit only. We need a cumulative carbon budget and serious penalties for every excess. We need climate change conferences to declare legally binding resolutions. There must be adequate funding for geoengineering strategies to reduce carbon emissions, and no-nonsense schemes to capture carbon—such as burying biochar (charcoal that holds carbon) in the oceans or growing blue-light nanocrystals—and new, nontoxic ways to scrub the smokestacks of power plants. Harvested sunlight, wind, and tidal power will all be bigger and bigger providers of energy, but short-term climate targets, such as urgent and rapid industrial and agricultural emissions cuts, the shutting down of all coal plants, must be acted on now. We can no longer hide from the truth. “We’ve dealt ourselves a bad hand,” a scientist said. “We can’t bluff the planet.”

  Surrender is not normally a word used to wage war against extinction. But surrender we must—that is, surrender our sovereignty over the planet. The interglacial paradise in which we’ve been living so comfortably is shifting to a world that will not be compatible with human life. Part of James Lovelock’s Gaian concept was an entreaty to get people to see themselves as part of Earth’s living systems, not the masters of them. As masters, we’ve done a poor job. We’ve ignored the larger workings of Earth, talking about it as if it was something apart from our lives. But take one breath and we breathe in weather; exhale one breath and we add CO2 to the atmosphere.

  The Earth cannot hold us. Its arms are too full. Despairing, I think about ancient ideas of beauty, such as the Navajo word hozho, which alludes to the total environment (ho). It is a permeating beauty that includes harmony and happiness and all the steps we must keep taking to enhance hozho throughout life. Beauty saves us. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “Beauty is the form under which the intellect prefers to study the world.” Perhaps our sense of delight in the richness of the world has faded along with our discipline for the study of it. I hope not. My Greenlandic friend Jens Danielsen said: “The ice is not happy that the weather is going against it. I look and look and don’t see the ice wanting to come back. Please tell me, whose weather is this? It is not mine.”

  THE ICE NEVER SLEEPS

  THE BERING STRAIT, ALASKA

  “To many who are unfamiliar with the world of the Inupiat, it is a dark, unforgiving world…The land and the sea will show you its wrath if you cannot read what it tells you.”

  —Herbert O. Anungazuk

  IF GIVEN A SINGLE YEAR to make a circumpolar journey, it’s necessary to visit some places in midwinter, when, under a dark sky and in frigid temperatures, not much is happening. That was the circumstance under which I visited Wales, an Arctic village of 150 people, across a 50-mile-wide strait from northeastern Siberia. Winter is “story-telling time,” and I listened while the people of Wales talked about their lives.

  Despite the modern conveniences of snowmobiles, telephones, computers, and an airport, the people of Wales, like villagers all the way up the Seward Peninsula, are semisubsistence hunters who live off bowhead whales, walruses, and seals. They also hunt eider ducks and geese, fish through the ice for tomcod, and go inland for caribou in the fall.

  When ice age hunters and their families walked across Beringia, and later sailed the Bering Strait in their bidarkas, they continued their seminomadic hunting lives in what we now know as Alaska, all the way up to the north coast to present-day Barrow, Deadhorse, and Kaktovik.

  Because Arctic Alaska is relatively low in latitude, their “larder” was much richer and more varied than that of Arctic Canada or Greenland. In some places, providing food for their families took less time, and as a result their ceremonial and material culture thrived. Much has been lost, though. Inuit people, indigenous to Arctic Alaska, are now a minority population here. Yet if you dig deeply enough, you find the essence of a culture is still there.

  SIQIEAASRUGRUK (JANUARY)—the Month of the New Sun or the “Sun that Shines on Bearded Seals.” Snow has been falling. Light comes late and goes early—19 hours of darkness—but the white ground and white sky bring radiance to the far north. From my high perch in a ten-story-high hotel in Anchorage, the only patch of darkness is Cook Inlet, where open water slaps the shore and pancake ice has rotted into gray rounds that drift out as the tide changes.

  “The Earth possessed us,” a woman from the village of Shishmaref once said. Ice shaped the Inuit mind and society, the ecological imagination, and the ethnographic landscape. Ice is womb, home, and hearse for every Arctic species. Food, shelter, clothing, spirits, shamans, masks, drum dances, watercraft, and dogsleds were elements that bound life together on the ice. To say that Inuit people and Arctic animals “adapted” to ice is to miss the point. They co-evolved with ice. Without it, humans, walruses, seals, polar bears, and whales will die. When I first began traveling in the Arctic, the sea ice was up to 14 feet thick between December and May. Now it is often no more than six inches thick in the coldest months, barely strong enough to hold a human or a polar bear.

  Sea ice is dynamic, always changing. Bering Strait’s pack ice grinds and gyrates, pulling away from shore toward Little Diomede Island, flowing north along the coast toward Point Hope, then pushing south again, its stacked pressure ridges visible and audible from shore.

  Pack ice is the
platform from which walruses make shallow dives to scratch at sand for shellfish, the platform on which polar bears travel, hunt, and rest. Bearded seals and ringed seals haul out on its floes to catch spring sun. Pack ice is the staging ground for human hunters as well.

  Seasonal sea ice is a villager’s highway, a hunter’s path in spring to the ice edge where bowhead and beluga whales, walruses, and bearded seals can be found. As the ice recedes and breaks up in what are now chaotic weather patterns as a result of warming temperatures, both the hunters and the hunted in this high Arctic ecosystem are threatened. According to one Inuit hunter, “The weather is so strange it can no longer be understood. That’s how much it has changed.”

  I HAD MET MY GUIDE, Joseph Senungetuk, and his wife, Catherine, in Anchorage, where they live. I’d noticed them in the crowd at the local bookstore, and, feeling lonely on a book tour, I invited them to dinner. A native of Wales, Alaska, a tiny Inuit village on the Seward Peninsula, Joe jumped cultures early on and went to the San Francisco Art Institute. Since then, his artwork has been collected by museums. Like many Inuit people I’ve met, he’s a man between. His book Give or Take a Century chronicles his childhood in Wales. After reading it, I invited Joe to be my guide and interpreter on a trip to Wales during my 2007 circumpolar journey.

  The night before we leave Anchorage, we visit an old friend of his, Herb Anungazuk, another Wales native and now a National Parks anthropologist who has the privilege of studying his own culture. That evening we go to his two-story house on a cul-de-sac. “I don’t want office talk—I want to talk about the old days,” Herb says. Slight of build and jittery, he is also in his 60s and happy to see his old friend Joe. We nibble chocolate cookies. “It used to be very cold in the wintertime in Wales,” he says. “We always had 25-foot drifts. Remember how hard it was getting to school, sliding down drifts from the second-story window? Now it’s windier and the storms are fiercer, with more south winds occurring in wintertime,” he says, looking out the window as if from a village house that faced the frozen sea.