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ICE MEMORY
by ELIZABETH KOLBERT
Does a glacier hold the secret of how civilization began and how it may end?
Posted 2001-12-31
Ice, like water, flows, and so the North Greenland Ice-core Project, or
North GRIP, lies in the center of the island, along a line known as the
ice divide. This is a desolate spot eight degrees north of the Arctic
Circle, but, thanks to the New York Air National Guard, not actually all
that difficult to reach. The research station is open from mid-May to
mid-August, and every season the Guard provides some half-dozen flights
to it, using specially ski-equipped LC-130s. The planes, also outfitted
with small rockets, can land directly on the ice, which stretches for
hundreds of miles in every direction. (To the extent that there is a
military justification for the flights, it is to keep pilots in
practice; however, the main purpose of practicing seems to be to make
the flights -- an arrangement whose logic I could never quite fathom.)
This past June, I flew up to North GRIP on a plane that was carrying
several thousand feet of drilling cable, a group of glaciologists, and
Denmark's then minister of research, a stout, red-haired woman named
Birthe Weiss. Like the rest of us, the Minister had to sit in the hold,
wearing military-issue earplugs.
One of the station's field directors, J. P. Steffensen, greeted us when
we disembarked. We were dressed in huge insulated boots and heavy snow
gear. Steffensen had on a pair of old sneakers, a filthy parka that was
flapping open, and no gloves. Tiny icicles hung from his beard. First,
he delivered a short lecture on the dangers of dehydration: "It sounds
like a complete contradiction in terms -- you're standing on three
thousand metres of water but it's extremely dry, so make sure that you
have to go and pee." Then he briefed us on camp protocol. North GRIP has
two computerized toilets, from Sweden, but men were kindly requested to
relieve themselves out on the ice, at a spot designated by a little red
flag.
Steffensen, a Dane, runs North GRIP along with his wife, Dorthe
Dahl-Jensen, whom he met on an earlier Greenland expedition. Together
with a few dozen fellow-scientists -- mostly Danes, but also Icelanders,
Swedes, Germans, and Swiss, among others -- they have spent the past six
summers drilling a five-inch-wide hole from the top of the ice sheet
down to the bedrock, ten thousand feet below. Their reason for wanting
to do this is an interest in ancient climates. My reason for wanting to
watch is perhaps best described as an interest -- partly lurid, but also
partly pragmatic -- in apocalypse.
Over the past decade or so, there has been a shift -- inevitably
labelled a "paradigm shift" -- in the way scientists regard the Earth's
climate. The new view goes under the catchphrase "abrupt climate
change," although it might more evocatively be called neo-catastrophism,
after the old, Biblically inspired theories of flood and disaster.
Behind it lies no particular theoretical insight -- scientists have, in
fact, been hard-pressed to come up with a theory to make sense of it --
but it is supported by overwhelming empirical evidence, much of it
gathered in Greenland. The Greenland ice cores have shown that it is a
mistake to regard our own, relatively benign experience of the climate
as the norm. By now, the adherents of neo-catastrophism include
virtually every climatologist of any standing.
Abrupt climate changes occurred long before there was human technology,
and therefore have nothing directly to do with what we refer to as
global warming. Yet the discovery that for most of the past hundred
thousand years the Earth's climate has been in flux, changing not
gradually, or even incrementally, but violently and without warning,
can't help but cast the global-warming debate in new terms. It is still
possible to imagine that the Earth will slowly heat up, and that the
landscape and the weather will gradually evolve in response. But it is
also possible that the change will come, as it has in the past, in the
form of something much worse.
Greenland, the world's largest island, is nearly four times the size of
France -- eight hundred and forty thousand square miles -- and except
for its southern tip lies above the Arctic Circle. The first Europeans
to make a stab at settling it were the Norse, under the leadership of
Erik the Red, who, perhaps deliberately, gave the island its misleading
name. In the year 985, he arrived with twenty-five ships and nearly
seven hundred followers. (Erik had left Norway when his father was
exiled for killing a man, and then was himself exiled from Iceland for
killing several more.) The Norse established two settlements, the
Eastern Settlement, which was actually in the south, and the Western
Settlement, which was to the north of that. For roughly four hundred
years, they managed to scrape by, hunting, raising livestock, and making
occasional logging expeditions to the coast of Canada. But then
something went wrong. The last written record of them is an Icelandic
affidavit regarding the marriage of Thorstein Lafsson and Sigrdur
Bjrnsdttir, which took place in the Eastern Settlement on the "Second
Sunday after the Mass of the Cross" in the autumn of 1408.
These days, the island has fifty-six thousand inhabitants, most of them
Inuit, and almost a quarter live in the capital, Nuuk, about four
hundred miles up the western coast. Since the late nineteen-seventies,
Greenland has enjoyed a measure of home rule, but the Danes, who
consider the island a province, still spend the equivalent of three
hundred and forty million dollars a year to support it. The result is a
thin and not entirely convincing First World veneer. Greenland has
almost no agriculture or industry or, for that matter, roads. Following
Inuit tradition, private ownership of land is not allowed, although it
is possible to buy a house, an expensive proposition in a place where
even the sewage pipes have to be insulated.
More than eighty per cent of Greenland is covered by ice. Locked into
this enormous glacier is eight per cent of the Earth's freshwater
supply: enough, were it to melt, to raise sea levels around the world by
more than twenty feet. Except for researchers in the summer, no one
lives on the ice, or even ventures out onto it very often. (The edges
are riddled with crevasses large enough to swallow a dog sled, or,
should the occasion arise, a five-ton truck.)
Like all glaciers, the Greenland ice sheet is made up entirely of
accumulated snow. The most recent layers are thick and airy, while the
older layers are thin and dense, which means that to drill down through
the ice is to descend backward in time, at first gradually and then much
more rapidly. A hundred and thirty-eight feet down, there is snow dating
from the American Civil War; some twenty-five hundred feet down, snow
from the days of Plato; and, five thousand three hundred and fifty feet
down, from the time when prehistoric painters were decorating the caves
of Lascaux. At the very bottom, there is snow that fell on Greenland
before the last ice age, which began more than a hundred thousand years
ago.
As the snow is compressed, its crystal structure changes to ice. (Two
thousand feet down, there is so much pressure on the ice that a sample
drawn to the surface will, if mishandled, fracture, and in some cases
even explode.) But in most other respects the snow remains unchanged, a
relic of the climate that first formed it. In the Greenland ice there is
volcanic ash from Krakatau, lead pollution from ancient Roman smelters,
and dust blown in from Mongolia on ice-age winds. Every layer also
contains tiny bubbles of trapped air, each of them a sample of a past
atmosphere.
All across the Earth, there are, of course, traces of climate
historyburied in lake sediments, deposited in ancient beetle casings,
piled up on the floor of the oceans. The distinguishing feature of the
Greenland ice, and what separates it from other ice, including ice
extracted from the Antarctic, is its extraordinary resolution.
Even in summer, when the sun never sets, the snow doesn't melt in
central Greenland, though during a clear day some of the top layer will
evaporate. Then at night -- or what passes for night -- this moisture
will refreeze. The immediate effect is lovely to behold: one morning, I
was wandering around North GRIP at about five o'clock, and I saw the
hoarfrost growing in lacy patterns underfoot. As the summer snow gets
buried under winter snow, it maintains its distinctive appearance; in a
snow pit, summer layers show up as both coarser and airier than winter
ones. It turns out that even after thousands of years the difference
between summer snow and winter snow can be distinguished. Thus, simply
by counting backward it is possible to date each layer of ice and also
the climatological information embedded in it.
The North Greenland Ice-core Project consists of six cherry-red tents
arrayed around a black geodesic dome that was purchased, mail order,
from Minnesota. In front of the dome, someone has planted the standard
jokey symbol of isolation, a milepost that shows Kangerlussuaq, the
nearest town, to be nine hundred kilometres away. Nearby stands the
standard jokey symbol of the cold, a plywood palm tree. The view on all
sides is exactly the same: an utterly flat stretch of white which could
be described as sublime or, alternatively, as merely bleak.
Beneath the camp, an eighty-foot-long tunnel leads down to what is known
as the drilling room. This chamber has been hollowed out of the ice, and
inside the temperature never rises above fourteen degrees. A few years
ago, foot-thick pine beams were added to reinforce the ceiling, but the
weight of the snow piling up on top has grown so great that the beams
have splintered. Because of the way the ice moves, the chamber, which is
lit by overhead lights and filled with electronic equipment, is not just
being buried but is also slowly shrinking and at the same time sinking.
Drilling begins at North GRIP every morning at eight. The first task of
the day is to lower the drill, a twelve-foot-long tube with big metal
teeth on one end, down to the bottom of the borehole. Once in position,
the drill can be set spinning so that an ice cylinder gradually forms
within it. This, in turn, can be pulled up to the surface by means of a
steel cable.
The first time I went down to watch the process, a glaciologist from
Iceland and another from Germany were manning the controls. At the depth
they had reached -- nine thousand six hundred and eighty feet -- it took
an hour for the drill just to descend. During that period, there was not
much for the two men to do except monitor the computer, which sat on a
little heating pad, and listen to Abba. The ice near the bottom of the
hole was warmer than expected, and it had been breaking badly. "The word
'stuck' is not in our vocabulary," the Icelander, Thorsteinn
Thorsteinsson, told me, with a nervous giggle. Eventually, the drillers
managed to pull out a short piece of coreabout two feet -- to show
Birthe Weiss, who arrived in the chamber wearing a red snowsuit. To me,
it looked a lot like a two-foot-long cylinder of ordinary ice, except
that it was heavily scored around the edges. It was made up of snow that
had fallen a hundred and five thousand years ago, Thorsteinsson said.
Weiss exclaimed something in Danish and seemed suitably impressed.
After a piece of core comes up, it is packed in a plastic tube, put in
an insulated crate, and shipped out on the next LC-130 to Kangerlussuaq.
>From there, it is flown to Denmark, where it is stored in a refrigerated
vault at the University of Copenhagen, to be cut up later for analysis.
Inevitably, more researchers want a piece of the core than there are
pieces to give out. A small library of papers has been written on the
various gases and dust particles and radioactive by-products that have
been trapped in the ice. These papers have shown that the concentration
of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has fluctuated over time, and that
these fluctuations have occurred roughly in tandem with changes in the
climate. But the crucial insight has to do with the ice itself.
Water occurs naturally in several isotopic forms, depending on the
hydrogen and oxygen atoms that joined together to make it. Typically,
hydrogen has one proton and an atomic weight of 1, but when its nucleus
also contains a neutron and it has an atomic weight of 2, it produces
heavy water, which is used in nuclear reactors. Oxygen generally has
eight neutrons and an atomic weight of 16, but it also comes in another
stable version, with two extra neutrons and an atomic weight of 18. In
any given water sample, the lighter 16-O atoms will vastly outnumber the
heavier 18-O atoms, but by how much, exactly, is variable. In the early
nineteen-sixties, Willi Dansgaard, a Danish chemist, proved that the
ratio between the two in rainwater was related to the temperature.
Dansgaard took samples of rain from around the world and demonstrated
that, by running them through a mass spectrometer, he could in most
cases arrive at the average temperature of the spot where they had
fallen. Subsequently, he showed that this same technique could be
applied to ice and, in particular, to the Greenland ice sheet.
Going back over the past ten thousand years, the Greenland 18-O record
shows lots of bumps and squiggles. There is, for example, a slight but
perceptible increase in temperature in the early years of the Middle
Ages, which leads to what has become known as the Medieval Warm Period,
when the English planted vineyards and the Norse established their
Greenland settlements. And there's a dip some six or seven hundred years
later, corresponding to the Little Ice Age, which killed off the
vineyards and, most likely, led to the demise of the Greenland Norse.
But the variation is limited. Between the Medieval Warm Period and the
Little Ice Age, Greenland's average temperature fell by only a few
degrees. Its average temperature today, meanwhile, is not very different
from what it was ten millennia ago, when our ancestors stopped doing
whatever it was that they had been doing and learned to plant crops.
It's hard to look much farther back in the record, however, without
feeling a little queasy. About twenty thousand years ago, the Earth was
still in the grip of the last ice age. During this period, called the
Wisconsin by American scientists, ice sheets covered nearly a third of
the world's landmass, reaching as far south as New York City.
The transition out of the Wisconsin is preserved in great detail in the
Greenland ice. What the record shows is that it was a period of intense
instability. The temperature did not rise slowly, or even steadily;
instead, the climate flipped several times from temperate conditions
back into those of an ice age, and then back again. Around fifteen
thousand years ago, Greenland abruptly warmed by sixteen degrees in
fifty years or less. In one particularly traumatic episode some twelve
thousand years ago, the mean temperature in Greenland shot up by fifteen
degrees in a single decade.
If we go back farther still, the picture is no more comforting. Even as
much of Europe and North America lay buried under glaciers, the
temperature in Greenland was oscillating wildly, sometimes in spikes of
ten degrees, sometimes in spikes of twenty. In an effort to convey the
erratic nature of these changes, Richard Alley, a geophysicist who is
leading a National Academy of Sciences panel on abrupt climate change,
has compared the climate to a light switch being toyed with by an impish
three-year-old. (The panel recently issued a report warning of the
possibility of "large, abrupt, and unwelcome" climate changes.) He has
also likened it to a freakish carnival ride. "Dozens of rapid changes
litter the record of the last hundred thousand years," he observed. "If
you can possibly imagine the spectacle of some really stupid person (or,
better, a mannequin) bungee jumping off the side of a moving
roller-coaster car, you can begin to picture the climate."
The first Greenland ice core was drilled in the mid-nineteen-sixties, at
a U.S. military installation called Camp Century. The goal was not to
challenge established views of the Earth's climate. Rather, the core was
an instance of what Thomas Kuhn, in his famous essay "The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions," called "normal science" -- although it would
perhaps be unfair to label anything associated with Camp Century as
normal.
Built in 1959 in the northwestern corner of Greenland, the camp was a
semi-secret research station for a very cold war. It featured a tunnel
eleven hundred feet long and twenty-six feet wide, called Main Street,
which led to dormitories, a ten-bed hospital, a mess hall, a skating
rink, and a store that sold perfume to send back home -- all under the
ice. (A favorite camp joke was that there was a girl behind every
tree.) Powering the enterprise was a portable nuclear reactor. "In an
era in which it has become fashionable to describe the democratic
countries as soft or lazy, the fantastic ice city is a wholesome answer
to such nonsensical clichs," one particularly patriotic visitor
reported. (The camp, which closed after a decade in operation, has since
been obliterated by the movement of the ice.)
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers led the camp's ice-coring effort. The
Americans managed to drill their way right down to the bottom of the ice
sheet, but when they were finished they didn't quite know what to do
with the core they had produced. It fell to Chester Langway, a
glaciologist who was working for the Corps's Cold Regions Research and
Engineering Laboratory, to figure something out. Langway is now
semi-retired and operates a small antique store on Cape Cod. He recalled
travelling all around the country, attempting to drum up interest. "Some
people looked at it and they said, 'That's just ice,' which it's not,"
he told me. Eventually, he and Dansgaard got in touch, and together the
two men made the first study of the core.
At the time, one of the central questions in climate research was how
ice ages began and how they ended. One theory, first worked out in
detail in the nineteen-twenties by a Serbian astrophysicist named
Milutin Milankovitch, was that glaciers advance and retreat in response
to slight, periodic changes in the Earth's orbit. These changes alter
the distribution of sunlight at various latitudes during various
seasons, and Milankovitch predicted that the strongest effects would be
observed at intervals of nineteen thousand, twenty-three thousand,
forty-one thousand, and a hundred thousand years.
Dansgaard and Langway's study of the Camp Century core confirmed these
so-called Milankovitch cycles but also gave evidence of the climate's
carnival- ride-like reversals. This evidence was dismissed by many as an
idiosyncrasy of the polar ice. Sigfus Johnsen was a student of
Dansgaard's who worked with him on the Camp Century core, and he
happened to be travelling to North GRIP at the same time I was. Johnsen
is now sixty-one, with wispy white hair and pale-blue eyes, and looks
like a slightly dissolute Santa. He told me that the scientists working
on the Camp Century core weren't sure themselves what to make of what
they had found. "It was too incredible, something we didn't expect at
all," he said.
It took fifteen years for anyone to drill another Greenland core.
Largely because of Dansgaard and Langway's friendship, this second core
was a European-American collaboration. It was drilled at an American
radar base, Dye 3, a spot chosen for budgetary rather than scientific
reasons, and from the outset everyone involved in the project knew that
the location was a problem. Dye 3 was so close to the coast that the
oldest layers of ice had mostly flowed out to sea. Nevertheless, the
core confirmed all the most significant Camp Century results,
demonstrating that findings which had seemed anomalous were at least
reproducible. When the Dye 3 results were published, in the early
nineteen-eighties, they set off what is perhaps best described as an ice
rush, and the spirit of international coperation quickly broke down. The
Europeans decided to drill a new core where the ice is most stable,
along the ice divide, and the Americans decided to do the same thing
some twenty miles away.
Theorists are still struggling to catch up with the data from those two
cores, the first of which was completed in 1992 and the second a year
later. No known external force, or even any that has been hypothesized,
seems capable of yanking the temperature back and forth as violently,
and as often, as these cores have shown to be the case. Somehow, the
climate system -- through some vast and terrible feedback loop -- must,
it is now assumed, be capable of generating its own instabilities. The
most popular hypothesis is that the oceans are responsible. Currents
like the Gulf Stream transfer heat in huge quantities from the tropics
toward the poles, and if this circulation pattern could somehow be shut
off -- by, say, a sudden influx of freshwater -- it would have a swift
and dramatic impact. Computer modellers have tried to reproduce such a
shutdown, with some success. But once the ocean circulation comes to a
halt, modellers have had a hard time getting it to start up again. "We
are in a state now where the more we know, the more it becomes clear how
little we really understand about the system," the oceanographer Jochem
Marotzke told me.
For at least half a million years, and probably a lot longer, warm
periods and ice ages have alternated according to a fairly regular, if
punishing, pattern: ten thousand years of warmth, followed by ninety
thousand years of cold. The current warm period, the Holocene, is now
ten thousand years old, and, all things being equal -- which is to say
had we not interfered with the pattern by burning fossil fuels -- we
should now be heading toward another ice age.
As a continuous temperature record, the Greenland ice gives out at about
a hundred and fifteen thousand years ago, at a moment in the climate
cycle roughly analogous to our ownthe end of the last interglacial
period, which the Europeans call the Eemian and the Americans the
Sangamon. What this part of the record suggests is disputed. The
European core seemed to indicate that the period ended with a cataclysm
even worse than the wild temperature swings that occurred at the end of
the Wisconsin. During this cold snap, temperatures appear to have
plunged from warmer than they are today to the coldest levels of the ice
age, all within a matter of a few decades, and then to have climbed back
up again, equally dramatically, a century or so later. The Europeans
euphemistically dubbed this instant Eemian ice age Event One.
The Americans, however, determined that at the bottom of their core the
ice had folded in on itself as it flowed, making accurate interpretation
impossible. The two groups got together for a conference in Wolfeboro,
New Hampshire, in 1995, and agreed on virtually everything except for
Event One. Steffensen, North GRIP's field leader, recalls that the
Europeans, who had rushed to publish their results, were crestfallen to
have them discredited. He remembers going down to the hotel bar in
Wolfeboro with some colleagues and thinking, The Eemian is dead; we have
to bury it. Then, he told me, "we had a few drinks, and it came back to
life."
The driving purpose behind North GRIP is to drill a core that will
finally provide a clean record of the last interglacial period and
validate Event One. Doing so would obviously be significant for several
reasons: retrospectively, it would show temperature instabilities in yet
another part of the climate cycle, and prospectively it would seem to
suggest a cataclysm in our own not too distant future. "In the first
place, if we find this it will scare the hell out of us," Sigfus Johnsen
told me. But getting back to the Eemian remains a daunting technical
challenge. In the summer of 1997, after the drillers at North GRIP had
reached nearly a mile deep, the drill got stuck and could not be
retrieved. The next summer, they had to start all over again. They were
almost two miles down when, in July, 2000, the drill got stuck again. At
that point, they poured antifreeze down the hole, and eventually managed
to yank the drill back up, but by then the weather was turning, and they
had to close the station for the season. When I arrived, last June, they
had finally finished bailing out the antifreeze and resumed drilling.
Still, things were not going well. Something -- presumably geothermal
heat from some previously undetected "hot spot" -- was warming the ice
from below, making drilling extremely difficult.
Everyone I met at North GRIP was quite open about saying he believed --
and hoped -- that Event One had indeed taken place. Apparently, the
prospect of having spent six summers up on the ice with essentially
nothing to show for it was more disturbing than any fate that might lie
in store for the planet. I found myself feeling torn as well. On the one
hand, Event One did not sound like much to look forward to. On the
other, it did seem to offer a certain perverse consolation: global
warming versus Event One -- either way, things were bound to end badly.
I proposed this idea to Steffensen. Unimpressed, he pointed out that, if
you believed the climate to be inherently unstable, the last thing you'd
want to do is conduct a vast unsupervised experiment on it, and he went
on to explain that it would be wrong to think of global warming and
Event One as alternatives. It is entirely possible, if apparently
paradoxical, that global warming could produce a precipitous cooling, at
least in Europe and parts of North America, by, say, shutting down the
Gulf Stream. It is also possible that it could push the climate into an
unstable mode, leading, especially in the upper latitudes, to a period
of wild temperature swings of the sort that characterized the end of the
last ice age. Finally, it is possible that we have changed the
atmosphere so much -- carbon-dioxide levels are approaching those of the
age of the dinosaurs -- that we will enter a new climate phase
altogether. During the Cretaceous period, there were no major ice
sheets, or ice ages, and much of the planet was covered with steamy
swamps. To the extent that the historical record is any guide, the
result of any climate change is unlikely to be a happy one. Steffensen
recited to me an old Danish saying, whose pertinence I didn't entirely
understand, but which nevertheless stuck with me. He translated it as
"Pissing in your pants will only keep you warm for so long."
Life at North GRIP , if not exactly comfortable, is at least well
supplied. Lunch the day I arrived was a fish stew prepared in a delicate
tomato base. In the midafternoon, there was coffee and cake; then, in
the evening, cocktails, which were served in a chamber hollowed out of
the snowpack, to relieve pressure on the drilling room. The German
driller had provided a recipe for Glhwein , and everyone -- scientists,
graduate students, the Danish minister and her entourage, and the crew
from the Air National Guard -- was standing around in the dark, in
cold-weather gear, drinking. ("Why do all the Danes I meet seem to come
from Copenhagen?" I heard one of the pilots ask a young glaciologist.)
For dinner, although I wasn't really hungry, I had a lamb chop in cream
sauce, topped with diced leeks. At around midnight, the drillers finally
emerged from under the ice. It was broad daylight outside, and inside
the geodesic dome there was still a crowd drinking beer and smoking
cigars.
As with so many recent discoveries about natural history, what seems, in
the end, most surprising about the Greenland cores is exactly what might
have seemed, at the outset, not to require any explanation at all. How
is it that we happen to live in this, climatologically speaking, best of
all possible times? On statistical grounds, it certainly seems
improbable that the only period in the climate record as stable as our
own is our own. And it seems, if anything, even more improbable that
climatologists should make the discovery that we are living in this
period of exceptional stability at the very moment when, by their own
calculations, it is likely nearing an end.
But to approach the problem in this way is to fail to realize the extent
to which we are ourselves a product of the climate record. Scientists
were once puzzled by the evidence in lake sediments of the return of
Arctic flowers to northern Europe at a time when the ice age had been
over for more than a thousand years. Now those lake sediments seem to
provide exemplary evidence of how the climate shifted and shifted again
during that period. The reappearance of cold-loving beetles in the
British Isles and the resurgence of tiny, cold-tolerant foraminifers in
the North Atlantic can also be interpreted in these terms. And so, too,
arguably, can the rise of human civilization and, by extension, the
progress of climatology.
One night, I was sitting in the geodesic dome at North GRIP with
Steffensen. He was coming to the end of a month on the ice, and had the
weatherbeaten look of someone who has spent too long at sea. "If you
look at the paleoclimatic output of ice cores, it has really changed the
picture of the world, our view of past climates, and of human
evolution," he said, while, next to us, a group of graduate students
played board games and listened to the soundtrack from "Buena Vista
Social Club." "Now you're able to put human evolution into a climatic
framework. You can ask, Why did human beings not make civilization fifty
thousand years ago? You know that they had just as big brains as we have
today. When you put it in a climatic framework, you can say, Well, it
was the ice age. And also this ice age was so climatically unstable that
each time you had the beginning of a culture they had to move. Then
comes the present interglacial -- ten thousand years of very stable
climate. The perfect conditions for agriculture. If you look at it,
it's amazing. Civilizations in Persia, in China, and in India start at
the same time, maybe six thousand years ago. They all developed writing
and they all developed religion and they all built cities, all at the
same time, because the climate was stable. I think that if the climate
would have been stable fifty thousand years ago it would have started
then. But they had no chance."
The only way into North GRIP is through Kangerlussuaq, and it is the
only way out as well. The name means "very long fjord," and
Kangerlussuaq does indeed lie at the end of a
hundred-and-eighty-mile-long fjord, which opens out into the Davis
Strait. The setting is spectacular -- snow-covered mountains rising out
of a glacial plain. The town itself, however, is mostly poured concrete
and corrugated iron, the remains of a now defunct American Air Force
base that was called Sonderstrom, or, for short, Sondy. The night I
arrived, I was invited to dinner at the town's best restaurant, at the
airport. I missed the hors d'oeuvres, which had included whale skin, but
arrived in time for the entre, which was reindeer. When I left, at about
9 P.M., I saw a musk ox on the hillside just beyond the terminal.
The edge of the ice sheet lies some ten miles away, and it can be seen
-- a ghostly white blur in the distance -- by climbing just about any
hill. After returning from North GRIP , I had a few days to spend in
Kangerlussuaq, and one afternoon I hitched a ride out to the ice with
some glaciologists who were also awaiting flights home. We took a dirt
road that had been built by Volkswagen, and someone put Pink Floyd on
the truck's CD player. Almost as soon as we got out of town, we were in
the wild, cutting through fields of tiny purple Arctic rhododendron.
The Volkswagen road goes all the way up onto the ice sheet and ends a
hundred miles later at a test track. (Rumor has it that there is also a
three-star hotel and restaurant in a modular building that was trucked
out to the site.) We stopped far short of that, at a fast-running river,
brown with silt. The ice sheet rose up beyond it, like a wall, two
hundred feet high. It was a startling shade of blue. One of the
glaciologists explained that the color was an effect of the ice's
peculiar density. Up at North GRIP, a set of poles that are slowly
drifting apart mark the glacier's flow; at the edge of the ice, the same
process produces more dramatic results. As we were talking, a huge
section of the wall tore free and crashed into the river, sprinkling us
with ice chips.
Although it was a clear blue day, a chill wind was blowing off the
glacier, and, after we had all finished taking pictures, we climbed back
into the truck. Soon we passed a small herd of reindeer that had come
down to drink at a half-frozen lake, and then, a little later, the
remains of a recent reindeer hunt -- a pile of hooves with the fur still
on them. The only other signs of human life we encountered were some
ancient Inuit graves, or cairns; traditionally, Greenlanders buried
their dead under mounds of rocks, a concession to the fact that most of
the year the ground is frozen solid.
Humans are a remarkably resourceful species. We have spread into every
region of the globe that is remotely habitable, and some, like
Greenland, that aren't even that. The fact that we have managed this
feat in an era of exceptional climate stability does not diminish the
accomplishment, but it does make it seem that much more tenuous. As we
drove back to Kangerlussuaq, listening to Pink Floyd -- "Hey you, out
there in the cold / Getting lonely, getting old / Can you feel me?" -- I
found myself thinking again about the Greenland Norse. They had arrived
on the island at a moment of uncharacteristically benign weather, but
they wouldn't have had any way of knowing this. Then the weather turned,
and they were gone.
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