The Future of Ice

by Gretel Ehrlich

  A collar of ice encircles the glacier's top edge, not white but eggshell blue. Twenty thousand years ago temperatures plummeted and ice grew down from the top of the world in long vines and wide groundcovers. Glaciers sprouted and surged, covering 10 million square miles—more than thirteen times what they cover now. In the southern Andes, ice sheets fingered their way between high peaks all the way south to the Strait of Magellan and the Beagle Channel.

  Now clouds slide over, banking up, one on top of the other, as if trying to help the glacier grow. But this one is receding. Already its forehead has been torn open and is poised to fall.

  Worldwide, glaciers are on the wane. As a result, the albedo effect—the ability of ice and snow to deflect heat back into space—is declining as glaciers melt and less and less snow covers the ground each winter. Snow and ice are the Earth's built-in air conditioner, crucial to the health of the planet. Without winter's white mantle, earth will become a heat sponge, and only smoke from a volcano could shield us from incoming UV rays. As heat escalates, all our sources of fresh water—already in danger of being depleted—will disappear.

  The warming Earth is causing meltwater to stream into oceans, changing temperature and salinity; sea ice and permafrost is thawing, pulsing methane into the air. Seawater is expanding, causing floods and deep intrusions into rivers and estuaries; islands are disappearing, and vast human populations in places like Bangladesh are in grave danger. The high-mountain peoples of Peru, Chile, and Bolivia who depend on meltwater from snowpack are at risk of being lost; the Inuits of Siberia, Alaska, arctic Canada, and Greenland who depend on ice for transportation and live on a diet of marine mammals will disappear. The early onset of spring and the late arrival of winter is creating ecosystem pandemonium in temperate climates everywhere.

  It is not unreasonable to think that a whole season can become extinct, at least for a time. Winter might last only one day—minor punctuation in a long sentence of heat. Mirages rising from shimmering heat waves would be the only storms.

  We have already destroyed so much natural vegetation on the planet that the increased heat due to bare ground, ineffectual rainfall, and city pavement will have particularly dire effects with nothing to modify them. Land-ocean-atmosphere-solar-galactic cycles are inextricably linked. One flap of the butterfly and everyone fries.

  A hem is torn out. Clouds unzip and drop rain. An ice block falls, thundering down between the bare walls of the couloir. A stream of water erupts, baring a rock wall. This is how a river grows longer in high mountains: by going uphill. Let me explain. As the glacier recedes, the waterline—the point at which water begins to flow—shifts upward. Perhaps this glacial river will someday meet its source: the snowflake that fell one thousand years ago.

  Gary returns from a six-hour walkabout. We argue about how long our “short-term” relationship can possibly last. A snow squall migrates down the narrow canyon toward our tent. I grab the shirts and underwear I washed and pull them in. The wrathful and peaceful deities at the center of this mountain complex are still spinning storms around with their hundred flailing arms, still telling us what, in Sanskrit, is called a pariplava—a circular story. Things between us will end when they end. But not yet. There are more storms to come. Behind clouds, sun strobes. If the path is whatever passes, no end in itself, why are we walking in a circle? Why don't we just stand?

  For a minute the clouds clear and the orange granite towers peek through. A single bumblebee flies by our tent, headed into the storm. In the high Arctic at latitude 80 degrees north the Bombus polaris shiver to keep warm. The worker bees die at the end of summer, and the impregnated queen starts a new colony when warm weather returns. I don't know this bee, but it must be cold-adapted in ways that we humans are not. Will it be able to adapt to heat? Gary and I hold each other; we shiver with cold. The bee is bright orange and looks like a piece of fire.

  PERITO MORENO:

  CHRONICLES OF ICE

  A trapped turbulence. As if wind had solidified. Then noise: timpani and a hard crack, the glacier's internal heat spilling out as an ice stream far below. I've come on a bus from El Calafate to see this World Heritage glacier.

  Some glaciers retreat, some surge, some do both, advancing and retreating even as the climate warms. The surface of Perito Moreno is 160 square miles across. It advances six feet per day at the center. From the platform where I'm standing, I can look directly down on the glacier's snout. Two spires tilt forward, their tips touching. They meet head-to-head, but their bodies are hollow. Sun scours them; they twist toward light.

  Gary is gone. He has taken the bus to Río Gallegos and from there will continue north. He wanted to walk two more routes; he wanted to be alone. I watched the bus back slowly out of the station and disappear down a hill. Afterward, I caught a ride to this face of ice to see its bowls, lips, wombs, fenders, gravelly elbows, ponds, and ice streams, and to learn whatever lessons a glacier might teach me.

  A glacier is not static. Snow falls, accretes, and settles, until finally its own weight presses it down. The flakes become deformed: they lose coherence and pattern, become firn that turns to ice. As an ice mountain grows, its weight displaces its bulk and it spreads outward, filling whole valleys, hanging off mountains, running toward seas.

  There are warm glaciers and cold glaciers, depending on latitude and altitude. Warm glaciers have internal melt-streams at every level and torrents of water flow out from under the ice at the glacier's toe. The “sole” of the glacier is close to the melting point and slides easily over rock. The quasi-liquid surface that results forms a disordered layer, a complicated boundary where heat and cold, melting and freezing, play off each other and are inextricably bound, like madness and sanity, silence and screams.

  Friction creates heat; heat increases sole melt, slipperiness, and speed. Because ice melts as it moves and moves as it melts, a glacier is always undermining itself; it lives by giving itself away.

  Cold glaciers don't slide easily; they're fixed and frozen to rock. They move like men on stilts: all awkwardness on broken bones of sheared rock. Internal deformation affects flow patterns: melting occurs faster at the margins than in the center. A glacier's velocity is parabolic, its internal melt-streams deep and swift yet sinuous. Their meandering is said to be regular and precise, like a mind going for a walk.

  A glacier balances its gains and losses like a banker. Accumulation has to exceed ablation for it to grow. At the top, snow stacks up and does not melt. Midway down, the area of “mass balance” is where the profits and losses of snow can go either way. Surface melting can mean that water percolates down, re-freezes, melts, and freezes again, creating a lens of ice, a Cyclopean eye. Unlike the dry powder at top, this is the wet snow zone, where profits melt but losses can be regained quickly.

  Below this region of equilibrium, ablation occurs. Profits are lost there when the rate of melting exceeds the rate of accumulation. But a glacier can still advance if enough snow falls at the top and stays.

  Everything is always becoming something else. But glacier ice goes only one way: toward more ice, or ice that is becoming water—because ice never reverts directly back to being a snowflake. In Japan's snow country, people say that ice and water are yin—female—and snow is yang—male; that a glacier starts out masculine but quickly becomes a moving giant of femininity.

  Ice comes from water but can teach water about cold, the poet Muso Soseki says. After, it goes back to being water again. A glacier's fenders and underpinnings can move at different speeds, yet it appears to be a single mass. In midsummer crevasses deepen and meltwater ponds can split open. The fissures cut straight down, and the turquoise eyes drain. This is water teaching ice how to become water.

  A glacier is a kind of blind eye. It can hoard snow without seeing how big its own body is getting. And it can give away more than it takes in. Is this compassion or self-loathing? What makes it act this way? For a glacier, the first law of imperma-nence is: something has to give.


  A glacier is an archivist and historian. It saves everything no matter how small or big, including pollen, dust, heavy metals, bugs, bones, and minerals. It registers every fluctuation of weather. A glacier is time incarnate, a moving image of time. When we lose a glacier—and we are losing most of them—we lose history, an eye into the past; we lose stories of how living beings evolved, how weather vacillated, why plants and animals died. The retreat and disappearance of glaciers—there are only 160,000 left—means we're burning libraries and damaging the planet, possibly beyond repair. Bit by bit, glacier by glacier, rib by rib, we're living the Fall.

  I walk down stairs to a platform that gives me a more intimate view of the glacier's face. A row of ice teeth is bent sideways, indicating basal movement. Out of the corner of my eye something falls. A spectator gasps. An icy cheekbone crumbles. People become enthralled by the falling and failings, forgetting about the power it takes for the glacier to stay unified. From inside the glacier there's a deep rumbling. Internal warfare, someone says. In some places the ice has warmed enough to undulate, as if trying to make itself look like open sea, its roof, all crenulations, a whole ocean of ice. Other, smaller glaciers ride distant mountains to join the mass. Right here, a snow squall dissipates and sun touches our shoulders. Thunder emanates from behind a million blue spires. So much in a glacier, like so much in a brain, is hidden, we don't know what a thought or a mass of ice is saying, or why it moves.

  A sign tells me that an internal stream is running at a depth of 180 meters and is called the Canal de los Tempanos. More drums sound. Water pours from the portal at the glacier's foot. Sun shines. White whiskers snap. A piece of wall breaks and drops, and waves radiate out carrying the shards. For now the glacier advances and almost nothing is lost: all the broken bones are subsumed by the ice's hungry foot. Or are they?

  The wind shifts; bits of ice curl back on water and are shunted into a cove. Up top, the snow squall advances; below, an azure turret tears away, revealing what looks like a ruptured spleen. No blood, only turquoise glistening.

  I walk to a different level. A blue dome made of bent spires collapses into itself. Ice falls down the front of the portal, starting a riptide, causing the river to swallow itself. Timpani sounds. Or is it a hammer tapping glass? A gunshot? A whole leaf of ice spills forward. What is the final straw that makes ice break?

  A moment, that's all it will take in geological time, for the sun to torch this glacier. I start climbing stairs. There are a thousand of them—same as the height of the ice. “Andale,” the bus driver calls out. It's 9:00 p.m. but still light, and I don't want to leave. Can it be that human and animal life and the life of this glacier are coming to an end all because we didn't care enough to stop their destruction?

  The sun starts to drop and the ice goes purple. Life ends like this every night and revs up again in the morning. Climbing the stairs is like climbing a waterfall, the violet foliage of ice melting and rushing over my feet. It is dark and the current of the vertical lays me flat. The Milky Way comes into being, and pours virtual water on real Patagonian dust.

  The bus takes me back to town. I get out near a grove of trees where saddle horses have been let loose to wander. It's good to be in a place where there are such freedoms.

  At the edge of a half-dry lake I look toward mountains. Gary's sudden absence currents through me. Love without attachment—is it possible? “Loneliness is the starvation of ego,” Trungpa Rinpoche said. Around the lake's cracked mirror four birds begin to sing. Evensong, or else the blues. All that's holding me together at the moment is the thought of the terns in the middle of their molt. Some are sitting on bits of ice drifting south; others are in the water eating krill. Discarded flight feathers bump across the chop. The birds wait. Wind grooves the Weddell Sea; new flight feathers are growing.

  I eat alone at a rustic bar with other travelers. It's late when night comes, maybe ten-thirty. Gary is traveling north into hot, dry mountains. I'll take winter anytime. “Why pretend to light an empty lantern?” an old Chinese proverb goes. In the darkness, Perito Moreno is still calving and moving, grabbing snowflakes, stirring weather, spitting out ice water, and it makes me smile.

  SWIMMING STRAIGHT,

  WALKING IN CIRCLES

  Arctic terns know that the return is different from the beginning. They flew eleven thousand miles in August from an island off central Greenland, down the coast of Europe to South Africa, then used the south polar winds to take them to Antarctica. But to return they'll follow the coast of Patagonia, turning east at Cabo São Roque in Brazil, then fly north with the Gulf Stream.

  Flying out of El Calafate, I return alone to Ushuaia and check into the same hotel. Guillermo gives me a room on the back side, facing the patio, where he's working on the mast of the boat that brought him here from Buenos Aires. “But now I won't be sailing very far,” he tells me. “This is my home; my girlfriend owns this hotel.”

  I lie on the bed and close my eyes. When I was a child I'd pretend that the silverware at the dinner table was very heavy, and struggle to lift a fork or spoon. My charade brought laughter. Now I wonder why I feel so light. Why the terns’ contrails of sinew, feather, and bone are the only things carrying me.

  To a friend at a Zen center, I email that I feel disoriented. He replies immediately: “Disoriented from WHAT?” I buy a bottle of wine and drink it. The local newspaper carries a story about a Patagonian toothfish that made a transequatorial migration all the way to Greenland. While Gary and I were hiking the Paine circuit, this fish was swimming in a straight line. The toothfish, whose home is the ocean off the Antarctic, weighed 154 pounds. Also known as a Chilean sea bass, although it is not a true bass, it is endangered from overfishing. The farthest north such a fish has ever been found is off the coast of Uruguay. This one swam from latitude 45 degrees south to latitude 63 degrees north. It could only have made the trip by diving deep and using the cold currents that run beneath the tropical ones at the equator.

  The toothfish was caught by a fisherman in Davis Strait off the west coast of Greenland. Where was it going? Was it swimming laps between the poles? The fish must have been hungry when it died. When the fisherman opened it up, the only thing in its stomach was the upper beak of a cephalopod.

  I lie back on the bed. The arctic tern, with its lightweight, hollow wing bones, logs in something like 600,000 miles during its twenty-five-year life. The hippocampus of any migratory bird is said to be larger than one in a bird that stays put. For the bird on the wing, memory needs to tackle more, so the brain enlarges to accommodate increased input. Perhaps the same is true for fish and even humans. If so, I'm in luck. I haven't spent more than three months in any one place for years.

  Right now I'm tired of vagrancy. Maybe I should change my mode of travel. I want to travel meridians, not latitudes, and trace a magnetic line from stem to stern. I want to feel how the force of the Earth's rotation churns the flow of ocean nutrients and pushes warm surface water westward away from its shore. I want to slice through current flows, through regions of water that have never mixed, and take the pulse of a storm by placing my three fingers on its wrist. I want to drink ocean weather instead of wine and dance to the brain's metronome of transient electrochemical throbs.

  I want to follow a male tern during courtship as he catches a fish in his mouth and offers it to his loved one, waiting to see if she will take that prize. I want to fly wingtip to wingtip with long-tailed skuas, sanderlings, terns, and jaegers until the dead-end, austral shore of antarctic ice comes into view. Then, in February, begin the terns’ long flight north, arriving in May at the old nest site on Oodaaq Island, latitude 83 degrees north in Greenland.

  If I can't do that, I'll think of other things: I'll build a hut on the Barren Grounds. Writing will happen only at night. I'll sleep only in direct sun. I'll swim naked under the ice. I'll ride the back of the toothfish all the way home.

  We humans with our blunted senses know so little about things. What does the toothfish know
, or the tern? Even our own bodies are mysterious to us. I read that human male sperm has a sense of smell and swims directly toward the ovum once it catches the scent. I want to sniff that deep perfume. Not the season but the seasoning—that's what I want. And the man with the sperm.

  Recently I've had trouble telling when any season actually begins, since it snowed on the vernal equinox and the autumnal equinox as well as on the winter and summer solstices. That's how I know our confusion is semantic—it isn't the season that matters but the deeper forces at work: the way an ooze of water tears at the ground, widening a way to become a river. I want geological violence speeded up so I can see it. I want winter in the form of white swans.

  The next morning Guillermo suggests that I go down to the dock and hitch a ride on a boat cruising the Beagle Channel. We sail out in calm seas and my eyes fill: Magellanic penguins cling to a rocky islet and face the sun with open mouths, closed eyes. While they sleep, seals cavort. A black-browed albatross cruises by the hulking remains of a wrecked ship.

  Tucked up into the cirques of these coastal mountains are the remnants of glaciers that Darwin described as covering almost the whole mountain. Now ice has receded and tree line struggles upslope. We visit Harberton, the historic sheep ranch where, as a young man, Lucas Bridges “went native” and became an initiate of the Yamana and Selk'nam tribes.

  To the south are rocky islets, stepping-stones through the furious seas that lead to the Larsen Ice Shelf of Antarctica. Terns are aloft, but so far up I can't tell if they are Sterna para-disaea or common terns that live in Tierra del Fuego year round.

  At the end of the day the boat heads home. Far ahead, the entire Darwin Range has been blasted white. Just a summer snowstorm, a German geographer says. The weather turns cold and blustery. A young Argentine woman stirs up a tiny pot of maté and offers it to us. We take turns sipping tea from a silver straw while the sun goes down. I read aloud from Voyaging, written by Rockwell Kent when he sailed this way in the 1920s, stopping to paint and explore: “We drop away, the widening black water tosses up the ship's reflected lights like flames,” he wrote. “We pass out of the illuminated radius into the darkness, and by the darkness into the solitude of the world's end.”