Alice stopped talking while she manoeuvred the boat backwards, because we were being lapped towards the glacier, drawn into its coldness. I sat quietly, shivering violently, waiting for her to resume. Alice said: ‘This business of drift, the Arctic drift, you mentioned it earlier. Since the 1980s there have been systematic changes in the ice around the North Pole. Nearly all scientists now agree that this is very unlikely to be caused just by nature,’ she continued. ‘It is the speed which makes the change different from before. There have been very low sea ice measurements and these yearly lows have strangely coincided with years when there has been an unusually large transport of ice from the Siberian Ocean towards Canada.
‘Many of the travelling chemicals are carried westwards by the current that Nansen hoped would take him to the Pole,’ said Alice. ‘They come from the Ob, the Lena and the Yenisey, as the torrent pours into the Arctic Ocean. There are ships operating in the Barents Sea, and there is prospecting for oil and gas in the region. The Russian military installations also present a source of pollution. There is nuclear waste; there are chemical and biological weapons and other military equipment,’ said Alice bleakly.
And I thought of Nansen’s Fram, drifting towards the infinite shadows of the North Pole, prow held high, drifting into darkness. Sailing towards the pure ice-plains, untouched by humans. I thought of Nansen, standing among the rocks, obscured by the mist. His journey prophetically outlined some of the future problems that areas such as Svalbard would later be confronted by. Alice told me that Nansen’s Arctic drift theory was now the basis of modern research into the passage of pollutants from Siberia across the Arctic region. Now this current moved chemicals around the far north, dragging the overspill of Russian rivers into the ice. A torrent of waste, drifting across the silent ice. It was a distressed version of Nansen’s theory of polar drift—the Arctic Ocean dragging polluted waters towards a formerly unknown region around the Pole.
‘And now,’ Alice resumed, ‘the ice is warmed by polluting currents and melts into the ocean. No ice, no polar bears,’ she added, firmly. ‘This is already happening in North America. Polar bears are specialists, they specialize in killing seals, and of course we know where seals live. The polar bear lives and hunts and eats on the ice. The female bears only stay on land to give birth. If the ice were to melt,’ said Alice, ‘then the polar bears would lose their habitat, they would lose the seals. They wouldn’t survive.’
Alice paused to listen to the glacier. The rumblings were heavy and ponderous now, promising a minor explosion of ice, a swell in the waves. We moved away from the ice wall, back towards the bird colonies, where Alice paused to glance up at the spiralling guillemots. She nodded, scarcely perceptibly, at a crowd of squealing birds.
‘And these chemicals I told you about,’ Alice said, ‘they are drifting in the seawater from the Russian coast, and they are carried by air from Europe and North America. They come from so many places—but there are persistent organic pollutants—we call them POPs—which end up in Svalbard in high quantities, and they are stored in the fat in an animal’s body. The more fat you eat, the more pollutants you get. So, a polar bear, at the top of the food chain, receives the highest quantity of these pollutants. Some of the polar bears—the females—are growing male organs. Whether this change in hormone balance also changes their behaviour, we are not yet sure. Perhaps it will.’
The hermaphrodites of Thule. The victims of an unplanned experiment, the introduction of man-made chemicals into an Arctic wilderness. The animals were changing, becoming grotesque and outlandish, more like the mythical beasts once thought to stalk across the northern lands.
‘And it’s not just the animals, of course. The Inuit have a far higher level of POPs than other humans, because they eat seals,’ Alice said slowly.
There was another long pause, as we listened to the noise of the birds swelling around us. ‘I assume this is not a good thing,’ said Alice. ‘And then there is global warming, which might cause the melting of the ice around the Poles. Well, we have already seen parts of the ice shelf breaking off, drifting into the sea, and lower levels of sea ice than usual. We don’t know,’ she was saying, ‘we don’t know what will happen. But we can guess at some things. As the earth loses its white surfaces, its ice, then it gains more dark areas, and the dark areas absorb more of the sun’s radiation, so this makes the earth hotter. So it might get worse still, if it gets worse.’
‘None of this is a crazy fantasy,’ she said. ‘None of it is science fiction, or outlandish. It’s now respectable science, performed by trusted scientists, by cautious people. I think it is completely possible that the ice around the North Pole would one day melt. It might be possible to avert this, but we don’t seem to be trying very hard.’
There was a final pause, as I shook with the cold, and then Alice said: ‘I think we should return to the shore,’ and she gripped the tiller with resolution, speeding us past the muddy icebergs, back towards the lights of Ny-Ålesund. Alice lived in suspense, in the northern scientific base. Scientists were usually cautious, and Alice was as cautious as any. Her conclusions were partial. Some things had been improving in recent years, she said, they might continue to improve. At the same time, Alice discerned something she couldn’t control, a creeping threat to the natural world she observed.
At the harbour we kicked off our luminous suits, and shook hands.
The past and the future lurked at the edges of the daytime dusk. Walking back to my room I passed a bust of Roald Amundsen, his head cloaked in a hood. It was one more Arctic shrine, and I stood for a few minutes in the freezing wind, reading the inscription. Behind him, there was an orange wooden building, now housing the small sanatorium, which had once been Amundsen’s house. I found that I didn’t want to go back to the hotel. I walked from the circle of buildings across the tundra, where a rusting mast stood at the edge of the fjord. I wasn’t sure if I needed a gun, so I watched the surrounding hillsides nervously, imagining each pale rock was a bear. The mast looked like an electricity pylon, but a sign had been hammered to the metal:
AMUNDSEN - ELLSWORTH - NOBILE TRANSPOLAR FLIGHT 1926 HONOURING A GLORIOUS ACHIEVEMENT OF HUMAN ENDEAVOUR TO ROALD AMUNDSEN LINCOLN ELLSWORTH UMBERTO NOBILE AND THE CREW OF THE AIRSHIP NORGE N1 WHO FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY FLEW OVER THE NORTH POLE FROM EUROPE TO NORTH AMERICA OPENING THE POLAR ROUTE. TAKE OFF: SPITSBERGEN 11 MAY. LANDING: ALASKA 13 MAY 1926.
The airship had been anchored to this mast, and it stood as a memorial. Amundsen had flown in an airship above the ice fjord, above the glinting whiteness of the glacier, and across the North Pole, hurling flags onto the ice. It was his last great piece of exploration.
The mast stood, surrounded by the vastness of the mountains.
In some of the stories, Thule lay between the earth and the world of the gods, somewhere beyond the reach of mortals. Past and future lurked at the edges of vision in Svalbard. The future was an untouched continent; like Nansen in the ice we were drifting towards it, on a temporal boat called Forward, perfectly passive, waiting to arrive. When all these formerly mysterious places were mapped, the future seemed to me as the blanks on the map must have seemed to the explorers: out of reach, impossible precisely to imagine however much we might speculate. Anyone might guess, but absolute certainty was impossible. As the scientists, experts, explorers of earlier centuries threw out ideas about what might lie in the remote north, so the scientists on Svalbard were trying to calculate the future.
Svalbard looked like a dream of a perfect place—an idyllic empty land, with the ice gleaming like diamonds and the sky a perpetual dusk-dark blue. Without these scientists, I could have slipped into the silence of the mountains, admiring the metallic waters of the fjord and the mottled bergs, watching the sun dying across the mountains. In Svalbard the quest for knowledge lurked behind every drifting cloud of mist, every soft sound of the waves lapping on the shore. The scientists could have packed up and gone home, with a scientific Que sera, sera, accepti
ng that their predictions would fall on deaf ears, that their tentative conclusions would be used to argue for inaction. Instead they kept churning out their charts, stacking up statistics and scenarios. They kept working in sub-zero winds, in forgotten outposts, as determined as the explorers had been, trying to shine a light into the darkness ahead.
I was standing on the edge of the frozen fjord, thinking of the writers and explorers and cartographers, with all their theories and their certainty. Each in their own way had been certain; each had stood at the transmillennial debate with a glass firmly in their hand, toasting their version of Thule. ‘Peace,’ ‘Ice,’ ‘Scotland,’ ‘Iceland,’ ‘Norway,’ ‘A retreat,’ ‘The last land of the world,’ ‘An interim land between humanity and the gods,’ ‘Home of the Hyperboreans’ ‘Gothic fantasy,’ ‘A wild, weird clime’ they had all toasted, convinced of their rightness.
I had found no single answer, no grail glinting on the rocks. But I understood what Thule might mean to me. For me, Thule was about the northern lands, the clouds drifting across the northern sky, the flickering green of the Northern Lights, the whiteness of the ice creeping across the mountains, the pale lakes and semi-frozen seas, the mountains like cathedrals, baroquely patterned. Thule was an ancient fragment, representing thousands of years of discovery in the north. It was an ancient human fragment, a piece of story-telling about the far north. It expressed the ambivalence of the human relationship to nature, as I felt it—the desire for space, the appreciation of grandeur and beauty, the sense of unease in hostile, uninhabitable nature, the need to make use of nature to survive, the perilous balance between survival and exploitation. It expressed the ambivalence of the human relationship to perfection: a desirable but impossible state, a state glimpsed and occasionally seized, for a fleeting moment, but doomed to transience. Thule was ambiguous, available for use or corruption. Thule represented all the explorers and writers imagining and travelling and trying to understand. They knew the worst, they knew the desperate struggle and the terrible cold, but they had watched the play of colours across the ice, they had been struck by the beauty and silence around them.
Svalbard lay under a pale sun, the ice fragments drifted across the fjord. I understood that it was inevitable that as the lands of the north became part of human history, they would lose the plainness of perfection, the sheen of purity. The yearning to return to a blank space, a space allowing endless fantasy, was utopian and impossible. It was regressive; it sought to forget the desperate struggles of the explorers. The question was how far we wanted to go, how much we wanted to transform these ancient tracts of ice. Humans had always had the power to transform the scenery by acts of imagination, to make symbolism of a barren rock, or mystery of a sluggish sea. Humans had always hunted and lived in the remote north. But now humanity could fundamentally alter the balance of natural elements, maybe even melt an ice-shelf or two. All the remaining remoteness of the north couldn’t save it from chemicals that drifted in the oceans, or pollution that was brought on the wind, or a gradual shift in global temperature. The pragmatic colony of Svalbard was a place where fantasy and beauty existed alongside nervous prophecy. No one was bellowing certainty from the rocks. The scientists all said their talk of future destruction might be just another theory. It might be mocked by later generations as one more dream of the ignorant. Or it might be an accurate forecast of the coming world. The future was shrouded in darkness, as the maps once were. But the rumbling had been heard in the distance, the frozen ocean might one day be nothing more than an old fairytale, a story from a vanished world.
The birds circled above and the mountains shimmered in the mist. The moon was shining across the glacier. I stood at the edge of the fjord, thinking of the ice swirling into the darkness around the Pole. It was a beautiful night. The glacier was groaning gently in the distance, the bergs were moving slowly along the fjord. From the runway above the settlement a light aircraft lifted into the sky, drifting towards the ice mountains. There was the sound of propellers beating across the settlement, and then the noise died away, leaving just the silence of the ice and the moon glinting through the clouds.
. . . ONLY THE PAST IS IMMORTAL.
DECIDE TO TAKE A TRIP, READ BOOKS OF TRAVEL
GO QUICKLY! EVEN SOCRATES IS MORTAL
MENTION THE NAME OF HAPPINESS: IT IS
ATLANTIS, ULTIMA THULE, OR THE LIMELIGHT,
CATHAY OR HEAVEN. BUT GO QUICKLY . . .
“PERSONAE,” DELMORE SCHWARTZ (1913-1966)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For supplying the ideal environment in which to finish the book, thanks to Sir Alistair Horne and also to Sir Marrack Goulding and the Fellows of St. Antony’s College, Oxford.
For formal and informal briefings along the way, thanks to President Lennart Meri, President Vaira Vike-Freiberga, former Prime Minister Mart Laar, Minister Kristiina Ojuland, Commander Neil Rasmusson, David Hempleman-Adams, Borge Ousland, Roland Huntford, Jasper Griffin, Arne Naess, Heather O’Donoghue, Geir Wing Gabrielsen, Frederic Hauge, Liz Morris, Bragi Olafsson, Olav Orheim, Per Egil Hegge and Tiina Peil.
For logistical support, many thanks to the Norwegian Embassy in London, particularly to Ambassador Brautaset, Mrs. Elisabeth Mohr Brautaset, John Petter Opdahl and Anne Ulset. Thanks also to the International Press Centre in Oslo, the British Antarctic Survey and the US Embassy in Copenhagen, particularly to Alistair Thompson.
Thanks to Kim Witherspoon and David Forrer at InkWell Management and to my editor, Carolyn Carlson.
Various editors supplied me with the best kind of employment for the peripatetic writer—flexible commissions which allowed me to thrash out ideas and steady my bank balance when I’d spent too much money on trains and boats and ’planes. For this, many thanks to: Robert Silvers at the New York Review of Books; Mary-Kay Wilmers and Paul Laity at the London Review of Books; Claire Armitstead, Giles Foden and Andy Pietrasik at the Guardian; Robert McCrum and Stephanie Merritt at the Observer and Andrew Johnston at the International Herald Tribune.
For generous deeds, discussions, reading of drafts, thanks to Brian and Peggy-Lou Martin, Eyjólfur Emilsson, Arna Mathiesen, Beate Elvebakk, Hallvard Fossheim, Per Ariansen, Oystein Ska, Jonas Jølle, Ragnheidur Kristjansdottir, Svavar Svavarsson, Tim Garton Ash, Avi Shlaim, Felix Martin, Kristina Hemon, Rory Stewart, Sophie Breese, Arho Anttila, Katri Krone, Robert Macfarlane, Erik Rutherford, Beccy Asher, Tristan Quinn, Katherine Shave and Abigail Reynolds.
Many thanks to my parents and to my brother Daniel.
And most of all to Barnes.
The Ice Museum Page 31