In the Empire of Ice

by Gretel Ehrlich

  John’s oral history project is one of a kind and stands as a model for cultural preservation by indigenous peoples all over the world. It can be used locally, to inspire, to teach, to help keep a culture intact. Outsiders can read the histories to appreciate the splendor and sophistication of these circumpolar cultures.

  But changes that will denigrate these cultures even further are still coming. The Northwest Passage mania has begun again. With increased summer ice melt and longer open-water seasons, world powers are salivating at the prospect of using the passage as a permanent shipping route between Europe and Asia. They’ve never paused to think that this traditional migration route, used by Inuit peoples coming from Asia to Alaska, Arctic Canada, and Greenland for thousands of years, will destroy what is left of the maritime ecosystem of Nunavut and Alaska including the last of the subsistence hunting villages along the way.

  What have we lost, what have we gained, and what’s next to go? Narwhal, whale, walrus, and seal habitat, coastal villages and seabirds, hunters and circus performers, filmmakers and translators trying to hold in their memories a spirit world that enclosed the earthly one in ritual circuits and animal-human transformations, and a material ingenuity that allowed them to thrive in a part of the world where most people would be dead in a day.

  Out the window a wild, icy beauty unravels beneath me: frozen water, snow-covered land, rough ice and rock, raven and walrus. Some people thought that the moon spirit caused the weather to be cold by whittling walrus tusks and strewing the shavings on the earth like snow. How is it possible to locate tragedy in such a fine place?

  I doze a bit. I’m feeling seriously unwell—dizzy and debilitated as a cough that will later turn into viral pneumonia comes from someplace deep under my ribs. At the last moment, before leaving Igloolik, I tried to find a Kenn Borek Air plane going to Greenland—one of my heart’s homes, my refuge—but no one was going there, not in the dark time of year.

  There is no life up here without ice, dogsled, seal, or the walrus’s gasping breath, the slide of the pale beluga, the diving auk, the glittering frostfall, the polar bear, the snowdrift spirits, and the dog-trot symphony. But I’m dreaming of another place—Greenland—where the old way of traveling and hunting still go on. Or will until the ice is gone.

  I jolt awake. Have I been sleeping? We’re flying through thick clouds. As the plane reaches altitude, I’m hit in the eye by the sun.

  THE END OF ICE

  GREENLAND

  “Some just say the spirit world searches for us. It wants us to listen.”

  —Linda Hogan, Native American writer

  FEBRUARY 20, 2007. Midwinter, and Greenland’s sea ice is rotting. Graying pans spin and collide with shore-fast ice. Winter sun-fires ignite anything frozen. Wind waves uncoil under sea ice, bucking and jolting until the white ice lid heaves up and shatters.

  We fly up and over the thick waist of this biggest island in the world. The mist tears open, revealing an infinite horizon. The ice sheet drips like hard sauce, tonguing nunataks—mountaintops that stick out of the ice sheet. At cliff edges, ice breaks: Crevasses shatter and cascade down. The ice skin is old, stippled, threaded with dirt and turquoise. In fjords, trapped drift ice chokes inlets. Glaciers dangle from the great sheet and slide waterward, stubbing their floating toes, their long tongues snapping into extinction’s silence.

  Through no fault of their own, the Inuit subsistence hunters of northwestern Greenland and the animals upon which they depend for food are vanishing. Winter sea ice that was routinely 12 to 14 feet thick is now only 7 inches thick. “Eighty or ninety percent of our food comes from the ice,” a hunter says. “Without ice we are nothing. Without ice we can’t travel; without ice, we starve.”

  Below, a stranded iceberg is decapitated. Its ribbed roof ruptures, a porthole drops, a leg of ice bends, making a knee that spins and dissolves. “Are we dying or coming into a different way of living?” an Inuit friend on the plane asks. Wind punches us down toward the Kangerlussuaq Fjord. A fringed cloud the color of spilled claret cuffs the wing. The fjord is milk. We follow it inland for 103 miles. Cerulean tarns, stippled ice, and grooved rock walls flash by as we twist through orange air. It’s morning but twilight. The sun, accustomed to lying below the horizon since October, barely shows now in late February, just a few minutes before diving down.

  Ahead is a blue floodlight: the terminus of the Greenland ice sheet, a remnant from an ice age that ended 10,000 years ago. Musk oxen graze a ridge. The plane stops at the glacier’s snout, turns, and taxis. We left Denmark at 9:15 in the morning and flew four hours. Here, it is only 9:30 a.m. but not yet light, as if we’d been moving backward and forward simultaneously. There are “ancestor stories” that tell of time being lost, of strange beings who live at the edge of the ice cap who can make a year seem like a day. “Time is very wide here,” my Greenlandic friend says. “We’ve now entered aboriginal time.”

  North. Only north. And the disburdenment that comes with it. Once we start the slow progression up the latitudinal ladder, everything else falls away. Ice is home. For the Inuit it is the white world, not the green of a savanna, that greets the eye and instructs the mind to find food and animals, make shelter, grow in happiness.

  SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO I arrived alone in Greenland with no sure idea of where to go or how to travel. I carried under my arm two thick compendiums of ethnographic notes by Knud Rasmussen from his 1917 trip to the north of Greenland, as well as his epic Narrative of the Fifth Thule Expedition, describing a three-and-a-half-year dogsled trip from Greenland to Alaska.

  From Rasmussen I understood that in the Arctic the path of ice was full of odd pairings—danger and plentitude, famine and beauty, humor and sorrow—and that whatever came one’s way was to be met with resiliency, flexibility, modesty, self-discipline, and grace.

  The rigors of this northernmost subsistence-hunting society in the world were modulated by what Rasmussen called the “wizardry” of many local shamans, who acted as intermediaries between populations of spirits, animals, and humans and whose narratives about these different beings have been the carriers of traditional ecological knowledge into the present. I learned that all skins, species, and boundaries were permeable—the polar bear could become a human, the human could be a seal. The constant hunt for food was part of a circle that, once broken, began the unraveling of the entire Arctic ecosystem.

  Now frigid winter weather in Greenland is becoming an anomaly. In the International Polar Year of 2007, the ice in the Arctic Sea shrank to its summer minimum, and daily temperatures in winter were what Inuit people would describe as hot. When one hunter, Mamarut Kristiansen, experienced a temperature of 50°F, he said he hoped never to know that kind of heat again.

  Winter in a polar desert should be cold and placid. Now, because of storminess, it is difficult for sea ice to form. The walls of ice and frigid air that once protected the high Arctic are disintegrating as oceans absorb more solar heat. Everything breathes: Warm ocean water exhales, upping the air temperature; warm air comes back down as precipitation, and oceans grow even warmer.

  At the top of the world clear, frigid air masses functioned as the Arctic’s insulation. They protected the many expressions of deep cold: ice sheets, tundra, permafrost, snow cover, and glaciers. Now these cold treasures are being plundered by global heat. Snow and ice give way to temperate storms. Wind waves batter seasonal sea ice from beneath. Snow comes down, blanketing and incubating ice.

  Little did I know when I first came to the high Arctic that the climate had been changing for decades, that global satellite monitoring of the Arctic would show that seasonal sea ice had begun its sharp decline in the 1970s. Cloud cover was decreasing, Arctic rivers were transporting larger quantities of dissolved organic carbon to the Arctic Sea.

  Before the climate began to change, Greenland’s indigenous culture was thriving. In the far north, to be a provider of food for dogs and families was the most honorable position in society. “Our culture was
not in danger at all. It was not even threatened. We had it all here,” says Jens Danielsen, one of the great hunters of Avaranasua, the farthest north district of Greenland. “We live in modern times but we keep our traditions with us. We hunt with harpoons and use cell phones; we travel on sea ice by dogsled; we made sure that snowmobiles were banned.”

  Now Jens, my longtime guide and friend, spends his days trying to figure out how to salvage an ice-adapted subsistence hunting society that is finding it more and more difficult to provide sufficient food. “We used to hunt from September through June on the sea ice. Now we don’t know when the ice will be strong enough to hold us. We had multiyear ice that never melted. Now it is all hikuliak, new ice. One day it is good; the next day it will not hold our dogsleds, and on the third day it is gone completely,” Jens says. “And so it will be with us.”

  In the days before the ice began to wane, I savored these long trips that could take two days or a month. I stopped “watching the watch.” I wandered. I made new friends. To be “weathered in” or “weathered out” was a luxury, either way. I watched one season pass into another, saw ice come in September in transparent sheets that looked like water. Spring was often sunny and frigid. Seals hauled out—black commas on oceans of ice. In mid-June, the platform of ice on which polar bears, walruses, and ringed seals had flourished quickly dissolved: A whole nation vanished overnight, but only for a few months. Then the ice quickly returned.

  Sun was welcomed. To greet the sun when it appeared over the horizon required pushing one’s hood back and removing one’s mittens. Hands were outstretched in a gesture of gratitude and acceptance. There was no thought that the ice wouldn’t come back, that sun and water would be enemies. Sun and cold, animal and human life, food and shelter were bound in a deep alliance, and water went only one direction—not toward more water but toward endless square miles of ice.

  Of all the nations bordering the Arctic Sea, Greenland has the northernmost continuous inhabitation. Against all odds, Greenland’s subsistence Inuit hunters have maintained their traditions into the 21st century. Ironically, the west coast of Greenland is the hardest hit by the climate crisis, and as the ice goes, so go these last traditional ice age hunters.

  Travel in the northern district is by dogsled only; snowmobiles have been disallowed except for emergencies. Sea ice is the highway. The hunters wear skins. Polar bear pants, fox-fur anoraks, sealskin and polar bear kamiks (knee-high boots) and mittens, and bird-skin underwear have been keeping these men and women warm since they began drifting across the ice of Smith Sound from Baffin Island 5,000 years ago. The sled dogs that once carried their loads across the polar north now pull their long freight sleds up and down the coast of Greenland. They are the descendants of the first dogs that accompanied Inuit people from Siberia, at least 15,000 years ago. When the ice begins to break up in spring, kayaks are lashed onto dogsleds. The hunters travel as far as they can by ice, then finish the journey on water.

  In Greenland I saw how the social and cosmological landscape interacted with the physical. How landforms and oceans of ice determined when and where a glacier would move, as well as how Inuit genius would flourish living on the world’s most dynamic surface—ice—and how it shaped their imaginations in the making of houses, oceangoing umiat and kayaks, masks, songs, dances, clothing, and tools. Greenlanders live with an evolving knowledge of their natural world and participate in a daily engagement with weather and the environment. Cold, storms, drift ice, fog, open water, and the constant search for food order society. Success as a hunter demands a deep intimacy with ice and fearlessness in the face of hunger.

  WE ARE FLYING NORTH from Kangerlussuaq to Ilulissat. The name comes from iluliaq, meaning “iceberg.” Perhaps the name should be changed to auktuq, meaning “melt.” To see the coast of Greenland from the air is to observe a rapidly changing climate in action.

  Ilulissat’s famously productive glacier, the Jakobshavn, is 4 miles wide and 2,000 feet deep. Its movement and calving rate has doubled in the past decade, sliding 120 feet per day and discharging 11 cubic miles of ice each year.

  Scientists say that all of Greenland’s floating ice may soon disintegrate, as well as those glaciers that have retreated inland, where the friction of ice on rock has warmed the base of the glaciers, causing basal sliding. In addition, the basin under the heavy ice sheet is allowing ocean water in and, one scientist said, is “prying them off their beds in a runaway process of collapse.”

  The great floating tongue of the Jakobshavn Glacier, which lies between thousand-foot-high rock walls, has begun to shrink. Since 2000 it has retreated four miles. Floating ice acts as a buttress to the whole stacked sheet of ice. When the tongue falls apart, it “uncorks the glacier,” and the ice behind it, a whole sheet of ice, grows more and more unstable.

  Flying north to Qaarsut, my gut churns. As the plane follows the Viagut Strait and rounds the tip of the Nuusuaaq Peninsula, I see Uummannaq, the heart-shaped island where I lived on and off for several years. Now, as I look down, it is a place I no longer recognize. What should be ice-covered straits and fjords is all open water: dark ocean and black cliffs. In the bent arms of the fjords lie Niaqornat, Ukorsisiuut, Appat, Ikereseq—subsistence villages all without ice.

  From an altitude of 20,000 feet a whole watery basin is revealed. Every island, strait, and village that I’ve explored and visited with Inuit friends on dogsleds and boats is dark and uncovered: To the north is Ubekendt Ejland—Unknown Island—with its one village, Illorsuit, where I spent a lonely but lovely summer, befriended by Marie Louisa, a six-year-old girl.

  Below, two gulls fly under the plane’s wing, their mouths open as if crying out. A layer of thin clouds slides in, mimicking ice. Surely what I’m seeing is not real. Up the Illorsuit Strait the clouds break: erasure. I see the house where I lived, but I don’t see ice. Only imeq—open water, dark heat sink. Beyond, past Upernavik, the northernmost settlement to be colonized by the Scandinavians, we fly up Melville Strait, where the 20th-century shaman Panipaq could amass a head-high stack of fish in an hour. He later committed suicide, perhaps because he knew his world was coming to an end.

  The water is black ink strewn with bits of ice, like the awful glitter of wrecked cars. The gulls veer off, crying. What are the laws of sea ice in a changing climate? The wind-torn, the broken, and the breaking? Buckled heaves, wind-buffeted pancake rounds, dendritic fractures, crumbling snouts. Sea smoke rises from open leads as if from a fire. This ruined paradise.

  We fly into a deeper shade of blue, a sky that still holds the memory of the polar night when there was complete darkness from October to February, when there was ice. The sun rose last week for the first time in four months. Already, it is gone for the day, but the air is bright. Open leads in the sea ice break into small branches. Some describe a rough circle; others widen, demolishing more ice. Greenland lost 54 cubic miles of ice in 2005, twice as much as in the previous ten years.

  Spilling down Greenland’s mountains is the inland ice, Greenland’s great ice sheet. Once it shone solid as a jewel along the length of the island. Now it is sliding on its own soles, too slippery with meltwater to keep standing. As Waleed Abdalati, a NASA scientist, recently said, “The ice cap is starting to stir.”

  We fly past Cape York, with its stupendous bird cliffs and peregrine falcon colonies, and soar over the village of Savissivik, where rock from the meteorite that struck eons ago was used by Inuit hunters for thousands of years to make harpoon points. They refer to the rock as female, a mother that gave them strong tools. Explorer Robert Peary pilfered a large chunk of it and shipped it to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where it still resides.

  Past Thule Air Base, Pituffik, Dundas Village, once a great fox-hunting haven, now an industrialized, top-secret American base built during the Cold War.

  Beneath us is Steensby Land, a rump of Greenland coastline still marked on maps as “Unexplored”—a blue bulge of ice, a white flannel slope ribbed wi
th crevasses, a glimpse into the Arctic’s inner sanctum of cobalt. We enter a rolling wave of sea smoke, but rising above it, a lingering sun shines through, while on the other side of the plane, an almost full moon grows.

  Qaanaaq, population 648, appears with its rows of houses perched on a hill. There’s shore-fast ice, but off its two signature islands, Kiatak and Qeqertarsuaq (Herbert Island), the ice is torn. It lies in long threads like strands of hair. The North Pole, awash in open leads and floating drift ice during summer months, is only 700 miles away. Out in the strait there’s a sprawl of calved ice, blocks and bergs that look like dumped furniture. This is a Greenland I no longer recognize.

  I CAN’T HELP IT. I dance for joy because I’m in my Greenland “home” again. In the one-room airport I’m greeted by Hans Jensen, who owns Qaanaaq’s small hotel. All year he has been sending me sea-ice data sheets and satellite images of the coast of Qaanaaq. “The ice is starting to break all the time now,” he says, loading my duffle bags in what used to be Qaanaaq’s only automobile. Then I see someone whose bearlike walk gives him away. It’s Jens Danielsen.