After the Ice Read online

  There is, I think, an important reason for this excess of disconnected information. Only quite recently have people begun to see the Arctic as a region in its own right. Over the centuries, it has been a last frontier for explorers racing to the North Pole or searching for a new trade route between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. It has been a source of quick wealth for adventurers taking its whale oils, walrus ivory, fox furs, and bear skins. It has been a Cold War border, rimmed by the defensive early warning radars of the United States and the Soviet Union, crisscrossed by the secret trails of submarines hiding under the ice, and with the ever present possibility that the air would fill with nuclear missiles in an all-out nuclear strike.

  But most of the time, the Arctic has just been a long, narrow white space running across the top of maps of the world. A new view of the Arctic as a region of its own, long occupied by its own people and centered on the pole, has emerged only recently. That view owes much to Inuit political activity. Inuit came out of eastern Siberia and spread right across Alaska and Canada to Greenland, long before any such nations existed. When, in the late 1970s, Inuit set up their own Circumpolar Council to represent all their people around the Arctic, regardless of which nation they now found themselves in, they were the first to make us see the way the top of the world was interconnected.

  The vanishing ice has cemented the circumpolar view. Change is coming to every part of the Arctic. As the ice retreats we can see just how close are the nations that ring the pole and how similar are the issues they and all the creatures of the Arctic face. Nothing has driven the circumpolar view forward more than the International Polar Year that lasted until the spring of 2009. Thousands of scientists—natural and social—tackled the myriad issues that are needed to form a big picture of the Arctic. My worry now is not that too little is known, but that so much is known which has not been synthesized.

  The aim of this book is to provide a broad sketch of the whole, so that its different parts are recognizable and in the right places, and none are lost in an excess of detail. I think that I might be the first to attempt this overambitious goal, but I think it is important to try. The Arctic is changing so fast that no one—not the scientists that study it, the politicians who want to control it, the oilmen who want to exploit it, or the indigenous people who call it home—can keep up. The only people who appear to have gone before me, with an even bigger mission, are the brave authors of a couple of travel guides to the entire Arctic. I hope that they did not find it a foolhardy endeavor.

  By writing about the Arctic as a region, though, I don’t want to reinforce the notion of its being a separate, distant, remote place. Nothing could be further from reality; the Arctic is ever more entangled with the south and ever more at the mercy of decisions made elsewhere, often without the slightest consideration for the top of the world.

  One day in Greenland I was out on a long trip in a little boat amid cold ice floes. We stopped for lunch on a tiny islet, where I began to run around quickly in circles to restore my circulation. After coming across a ruined grave with a human skull and bones clearly visible inside it—who knows who died there—I decided my exertions might be disrespectful. I sat down quietly to eat. Raw narwhal was served in the chilly wind. My gracious Inuit host fished around in his many layers of clothing and pulled out a small bottle, saying, “I don’t know if you like this but I find it really goes well with narwhal.” It was a bottle of soy sauce. Two thoughts flashed through my mind. One was how connected the whole world has become, now that soy sauce is served on a lonely Arctic islet that is home only to an unnamed grave. The other was that while eating raw whale might seem exotic, the moment you add soy sauce, you realize it is just the same old sashimi that you can eat in any Japanese restaurant.

  This book does not seek to make the Arctic exotic, although I found much there that was strange. The world does not need a new form of “orientalism” centered on the north. Its focus instead is mostly on the Arctic seas, rarely traveling far into the surrounding lands, in part because of the central importance of sea and ice to the northern people, ecosystems, and economy. I only stray a little when describing the lives and future of the reindeer people of Russia. Elsewhere in the Arctic, the sea provides sustenance for those who live there, but in Russia the reindeer takes the place of the whale.

  In part I have focused on the seas to keep this book to a reasonable length. Had I more space and time I would have written more of the peculiar beauty of the Arctic lands,2 especially those polar deserts where amid arid, red-brown soil and limitless horizons, tussocks of pale yellow Arctic poppy grow, their cup-shaped flowers seeking the low sun’s endless circling, possessed with a fragility that seems so out of place in the harsh North. It is with sadness that I pass them by, for, with the coming warming of the Arctic, these rare deserts, lying close to the shore-bound ice of the most northerly Arctic islands, are under the greatest threat.3 They will disappear soon, before the children of today become adults, and I have been privileged to see them.

  One other issue remains, that of “The Arctic’s Revenge.” Did we really think that we could make so many changes to the far-off Arctic and strip it of its ice, without the Arctic biting back? If we ever did, we were foolish.

  Chapter One

  TURN THE WORLD ON ITS SIDE

  Forget the familiar view of the world with the great land masses of Asia, America, Europe, and Africa dominating the map. Instead, take hold of a globe and look straight down on it from above the North Pole. The Arctic is now laid out before you. The recognizable shapes of the great continents have mostly vanished. Your eyes are filled by a single ocean, rimmed by land. A long, smooth shoreline lies to one side and a cluster of irregular islands to the other. Only the vast ice-capped expanse of Greenland, the biggest island in the world, is immediately recognizable.

  Looking down on this sea you will find much that is unfamiliar. Few of us can quickly locate the Kara or the Laptev, two of the Arctic’s great seas, or the Yamal, the huge peninsula pointing out toward the North Pole where traditional reindeer herders and the Russian gas industry share the same land. The Yenisey and the Lena are two of the world’s greatest rivers, each carrying more freshwater to the sea than the Mississippi or the Nile, yet they flow almost ignored into the Arctic.

  The ocean at the Arctic’s heart is unusual. At 5.4 million square miles, it is the smallest of the world’s oceans (the Atlantic is five times its size) but 50 percent larger than the United States. Surprisingly, its closest relative is the Mediterranean, for like that much smaller sea it is hemmed in by land; not so long ago in geological time it was a lake. Now, the Bering Strait provides the Arctic Ocean with a shallow link to the Pacific, just fifty-two miles wide, while the deep Fram Strait and the Barents Sea connect it to the Atlantic. The only other route into or out of the Arctic Ocean is through the maze of narrow channels that pass among Canada’s northern islands and continue to Baffin Bay and the Davis Strait.

  If we could take away all the ice so that we could see right to the bottom of the Arctic seas, we would find more surprises. The shallow shelves that extend under the seas, especially from the Russian side of the Arctic, cover a little over half the ocean, more than any other in the world. Beyond the shelves, in the deeper central seas, are undersea mountain ranges, basins, and ancient plateaus, crammed together in a small space and of such baffling complexity that geologists simply don’t know precisely how or when the Arctic was made. We can be sure of a few things, though. In an earlier, much warmer era, the continents of North America and Eurasia were closer together. As they gradually moved apart, the basin on the European side of the Arctic widened, leaving a split on the seafloor where molten magma welled up from deep within the earth. This flowing rock created a chain of undersea mountains, the Gakkel Ridge, which now crosses the seas on the European side of the Arctic, dividing them into the Nansen and Amundsen basins. The Gakkel Ridge has a special importance. As this split in the earth began to grow some 50 million years ago,
a sliver of the Eurasian continent broke away and was left behind to form another much larger and higher chain of underwater mountains, the Lomonosov Ridge, which passes very close to the North Pole. The ridge now connects to Russia at one end and to Ellesmere Island (belonging to Canada) and Greenland (belonging to Denmark) at the other. This ancient slow-motion accident is now of great political significance. Under international treaties, whoever can provide the geological evidence that the ridge is a “natural prolongation” of their land can claim seabed rights to the ridge and a large chunk of the Arctic on either side of it too. Russians, Canadians, and Danes have all been out there busily surveying the sea bottom to gather that evidence. The Russians have even planted a flag on the seabed at the North Pole, although it is more a symbol than a threat.

  The polar view of the globe quickly reveals another surprise: the truly enormous stretch of Russia’s northern coast. Its Arctic lands run for over 4,000 miles—almost twice the distance between New York and San Francisco—and span eleven time zones. That distance would be larger still if Russia had not made the mistake of selling Alaska to the United States of America for two cents an acre in 1867. The true scale of Russia, the largest country in the world and not far off double the size of the United States, is hard to take in. I had my moment of realization when I visited the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. A Soviet-era map of the world was on the wall, behind a symbol of Soviet power, a model of a nuclear submarine armed with rows of ballistic missiles. The map was centered so that the Soviet Union ran across the top of the world. Europe, Asia, and Africa hung down from the enormous bulk of the empire, and the Americas were relegated to a margin.

  Russians live in a country that has borders with Europe at one end of their map and with Mongolia, China, Japan, and America at the other. Travel to the Inuit community living on Little Diomede Island in the Bering Strait and you can see Russia’s Great Diomede Island just two and a half miles away. Russians still dream of an undersea rail tunnel linking the two continents.

  Russia’s vast span is important: the more you talk to Russians, the more you will realize it has shaped Russian views of the Arctic in a way that few westerners grasp. Long before the Soviet Union was created, Russian rulers were obsessed with their northern lands, partly because it was the only way they could gain access to the sea. Three hundred years ago, Peter the Great fought endless wars to get a foothold on the Baltic and Black seas to the south, but he had to build his great navy at the Arctic port of Archangel. With the Arctic so critical to the tsar, a series of “Great Northern Expeditions” were launched to map the coast and interior of Siberia. One of them, led by the Danish sea captain Vitus Bering, crossed the strait that now bears his name and reached Alaska in 1741. That’s why in 1784 Russia could claim Alaska as its own, while the just-born United States had a territory that was yet to pass the Mississippi River.

  The Russians moved to exploit their northern lands in a way that no other nation has attempted. Using gulag prison labor and internal exile, first under the tsars and then renewed under Stalin, towns were built across Siberia and up into the Arctic in search of minerals, timber, and other resources. Hundreds and thousands of gulag prisoners built Norilsk, the second-largest city in the Arctic after Murmansk, to exploit the region’s rich nickel deposits. Further north still, the island of Novaya Zemlya also relied on prison labor. Here, more than 2,000 nuclear tests were carried out, including the detonation of a fifty-eight-megaton bomb, the largest man-made explosion in the history of the world.

  No such fervor to colonize the north, regardless of expense, ever gripped the North American side of the Arctic. The first Arctic oil boom sent workers to the north slope of Alaska on a temporary basis, as though they were visiting an alien planet, rather than to settle. Even in Canada, with its 36,000 islands that give it the longest Arctic coastline of any nation, the population cling as close to the southern border as they can without calling themselves Americans. This difference has shaped the Arctic’s past and will shape its future.

  Look at the names on the western side of our Arctic map: Ittoqqor-toormiit, Ilulissat, Iqaluit, and Kugluktuk. These Inuit names have replaced the old colonial names of Scoresby Sound, Jakobshaven, Frobisher Bay, and Coppermine. Unlike Arctic Russia, where indigenous peoples are now a small minority in their own lands, swamped by settlers from the south, a huge swath of the Arctic in Canada and in Greenland has populations that are more than 85 percent Inuit. Gradually they are taking back power, beginning with their place names, over half the Arctic. I suspect that if their strength continues to grow, the future they demand for their Arctic may surprise their southern neighbors.

  Another odd feature stands out when you look at this pole-centered globe, and it turns out to be very important. All the rivers from the surrounding lands flow northward and into the Arctic Ocean. With a conventional map, which has the Arctic at its very top, you can’t help thinking that the rivers flow down to the south. But they don’t. All flow north, some from far-off Kazakhstan. You have to travel a long way south of the Arctic Circle to find the first rivers that flow in the other direction. This was a great annoyance to Stalin, who wanted his engineers to turn the Siberian rivers around so that they would water the arid south. In that he failed.

  The Pechora, Ob, Yenisey, Kotuy, Indigirka, and Kolyma rivers of Russia, along with the Mackenzie of Canada, give 10 percent of the world’s entire freshwater runoff to the Arctic Ocean, although it contains just 1 percent of the world’s seawater. The effect is dramatic. Freshwater spreads out in a shallow layer on the wide shelves fringing the land, where it freezes more easily than the salty water beneath. How this freshwater mixes with the salt and how it spreads farther into the Arctic turns out to have a big influence on the cap of Arctic sea ice. And how this huge pool of freshwater eventually drains into the Atlantic may have a profound effect on the world’s ocean circulation.

  The rivers are critical for transport up into the Arctic, often providing the only route in for barges bearing heavy mining equipment. Once frozen, they provide some of the region’s best roads: the “ice roads” used by fearless truckers. I looked for other roads on the Arctic map, but I couldn’t find any. It turns out that there aren’t any. Outside of Alaska’s infamous Dalton Highway—the road that leads up to the northern oil fields from Fairbanks—Canada’s Dempster Highway and some roads in western Russia and Scandinavia where the climate is much milder, there are very few roads in the Arctic that lead anywhere other than around settlements. This does not necessarily blunt the desire to own an automobile. Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, has more automobiles per head than anywhere outside the United States, even though it is only possible to drive around town, a favorite pastime of its residents.

  Travel in the Arctic is by plane, and most routes head north–south, except for Greenland, whose only air links lead back to its colonial roots in Denmark and Iceland. Our polar map of the Arctic is thus profoundly misleading in one sense: it is a map you can’t really travel around; you can only easily slide off its edges. In 1921, the great Danish-Greenlandic ethnographer Knud Rasmussen traveled over two thousand miles by dogsled along with two Inuit friends, Miteq and Arnalrulunnguaq, from the east around the edge of the Arctic and on to Siberia. He wanted to visit all the Inuit of the world and show that they were one circumpolar people. The journey took sixteen months. Ninety years later, sled is still the only way to complete this journey.

  Pipelines are not on this map either, not because they don’t exist, but because mapmakers don’t seem to have caught up with them. I had to ferret around more than a few energy companies before I could see a complete picture (and would have to pay a small fortune to reproduce them), but they are symbolic of much of the Arctic’s relation to the rest of the world. Pipelines run down from Alaska and out of Arctic Russia. Others may soon come down the Mackenzie Valley of Canada and from deep within Russia’s Barents Sea. While the people of the Arctic may be cut off from one another, the rich resources of oil and gas
among which they live drain away to the populated south through thousands of miles of pipe.

  The map is, of course, no substitute for the real Arctic, which is a place of profound and diverse beauty. Along the shores of Devon Island in Canada’s High North, great red-brown sandstone bluffs descend to the ice-filled sea. Here the Arctic is a desert. Over in Greenland, there are steep mountains and fjords and fast-flowing streams and the vast undulating plains of its great ice cap. Out on the ocean, in summer, there are just the shifting hues of the pale blue-gray sea, the passing ice floes, and a silence broken only by the breath of a passing whale, blown away by the wind while you are still wondering where it came from. All around the Arctic there is an endless rim of tundra, low-lying, covered in moss and lichen and alive with innumerable unnamed ponds and lakes and billions of hungry mosquitoes.1 Even here, the magic is profound, such that when you return to the city, full of people, you feel a peculiar sadness.

  PEOPLE

  Chapter Two

  IN AN INUIT LAND

  I arrived at Grise Fiord on Canada’s Ellesmere Island in the second week of August, which for me is high summer. Even so, the locals were surprised to see our ship. “Usually the ice doesn’t go until the middle or end of August,” they told us when we came ashore. “We’ve never seen a ship come in this early, ever.”