Atlantic

by Simon Winchester

  It took many hours, and there were many close calls, but we eventually made it to the boat; and though she was to be stuck in the ice for a while herself, as her crew had feared, and though we had to shoot yet another animal—this time a musk ox—in order to eat, and despite more rafts of difficulties that are not wholly relevant to the story,83 we did make it out to the Scoresbysund, and within a week we did get back to England. Moreover, the four of the six of us who were students made it in time for the start of classes that term, though just barely.

  • • •

  Of the six, five went on to become professional geologists, and two used to go back to that same part of Greenland almost every year. They have come to know the ice, rocks, and animals—and the weather—of this utterly remote corner of the world almost as well as do the Greenlanders who still live there. And over the years they have noticed that some things have changed, rather strangely.

  Outwardly, some are of a kind that would be wholly expected. The settlement is now a little larger—it was peopled by four hundred then; it has five hundred now. It has changed its name, no longer memorializing a British whaling captain named William Scoresby: it is now Ittoqqortoormiit, the Greenlandic word meaning the big house. The icebreaker from Copenhagen still calls twice a year; but now there is a twice-weekly air service in the summertime, too. Entalik is long gone, but in its place there is a bigger and much sturdier boat. The young men who crewed back in 1965 are old-timers now, and there is a party of strong young hunters and sailors who take the new craft into the farthest recesses of the fjord system—at 220 miles from the Atlantic to most distant feeder glacier, the longest in the world—taking supplies to those who have chosen to live even more remotely, far from the open sea.

  These young men who work the boat were the ones who noticed the most significant difference in their surroundings. When first they started their job, they could assume that if they took out their boat late in the season, there would inevitably be days when they ran into storm-blown pack ice, just as we did in 1965. The fjord would close up on them with the same billions of tons of floes, and navigation would become difficult if not impossible. The first blow-in usually occurred in late September—a signal, regular as clockwork, that the winter was about to begin, the water to freeze and Scoresbysund to become fully welded into the Denmark Strait ice pack, as usual. Very occasionally the ice would blow in some weeks before; in our case the ice that impeded our passage home had come in the first week of September. Very, very occasionally ice was seen in the fjord at the end of August. But this was rare, and when it did occur, as to the men on the old Entalik, it was very unwelcome indeed.

  But what then started to happen—and so far as the Greenlanders remember, it started to happen in the middle of the 1990s—was that the first appearance of blown-in floe ice in the fjord began to be delayed, pushed back until later and later in the season. There was never any ice in August, which was a relief. But the blow-in seldom occurred in early September, either—and that, even if reason for good cheer among the boatmen, was rather odd. For season after season at the end of the twentieth century and then on into the twenty-first, the fjord remained ice-free until very late in the month. Indeed, there might be no ice at all until the very end of September, which was hitherto unheard-of.

  And then the yearly close-up, the moment when the ice in the fjord becomes so thick and permanent that all the local boats are hauled up onto shore and turned upside down for the remainder of the dark winter. By then the sun was well down in the sky, and it was half dark for most of the day. Such blackness normally coincided with the onset of thick ice, but now there was open sea outside, and waves, and the sounds of splashing and trickling water that were usually associated with all-day sunshine. The Arctic winter might have set in, but the Arctic waters were not as cold as they used to be; and the ice was not there in the amounts that used to be seen. By the end of the new century’s first decade, everyone began to realize that what at first seemed just peculiar was now a trend. The Arctic, or at least this small part of it, was really getting warmer.

  The steady melting of the Arctic ice sheet since 1979 is returning much of the north polar region to blue water during the northern summer. Scoresbysund in East Greenland—the largest fjord system on earth—is the two-pronged inlet seen on the lower east side of the island. Despite being solid with floe ice in the 1960s, its fjords are now entirely ice-free until late winter.

  Thus has climate change arrived at a small Atlantic settlement in East Greenland. The rise in temperature in this corner of the ocean is quite gentle, perhaps—not as impressive as the breakup of country-sized ice sheets that lie eight thousand miles to the south, off the coast of Antarctica. The economic consequences for East Greenland will not be as profound as that of the melting of the polar ice pack north of Russia, which in 2009 allowed cargo ships to traverse the so-called Northeast Passage between Archangel and Vladivostok. But it will alter the voyaging habits of the Greenlanders—the late onset of winter will lengthen the time they hunt for narwhal, walrus, or seal; it will extend the time they can devote to fishing; and it will affect the dates when they can expect to see the icebreaker coming up from Copenhagen at the beginning of the season—for, yes, the late freeze-up in the autumn is also matched by an ever-earlier breakup of the ice in spring, as one might expect—and the date on which the final one will go home to Europe. Consequences both profound and dangerous are said to be likely from the coming warming of the world. In remote places like Ittoqqortoormiit lesser changes will be coming, too, and not all of them in this corner of the world are thought to be entirely bad.

  A whole series of hitherto unanticipated events like this—some of them small and mattering only locally, others very large and of worldwide concern—are currently being observed all around the world’s oceans but are most keenly observed in and around the Atlantic. We know all too well what many of these changes are. Some of the creatures that inhabit the seas and the coasts—from whales to codfish to polar bears—are now and in disturbing numbers dying, or being involuntarily culled, or are having their livelihoods threatened and their habitats altered. Some ocean currents are changing their routes, their size, and their strengths. The ambient temperatures of the world’s seas and the air above them are both increasing, and, according to some, are increasing much more rapidly than at first supposed, which is said to be especially troubling.

  The patterns of weather in places are being disrupted, and dramatic storms are becoming more numerous, their intensities steadily and ominously worsening. Ice caps, glaciers, and hitherto persistent snowfields are melting, and they are doing so swiftly, and this immense translation of solid into trillions of tons of liquid water is compelling the oceans to rise to levels that may well threaten all of our coasts and many of our cities.

  There is much alarm about all this. Not a few see widespread doom in the oceans’ ills, and there has been a good deal of apocalyptic fretting. It is widely held—but far from universally—that mankind’s industrial excesses are greatly to blame for this, and that unless humans change their ways, the world, and the seas that give it life, will shortly be in the direst trouble.

  2. THE APPORTIONMENT OF DOOM

  One truth is inescapable: the Atlantic Ocean as an entity will one day disappear. The continents that surround it and give it its current distinctive shape will themselves change their appearance; under the influence of great forces, they will move around the surface of the globe, and the Atlantic’s waters will be forced to go elsewhere. Whatever well-publicized other troubles may be afflicting the ocean today, they will have no bearing on this. The length of the Atlantic’s existence as an ocean is entirely independent of whether its temperature rises or falls, or in which direction its currents go or whether its toothfish or its polar bears live or die. The length of the Atlantic’s existence has nothing whatsoever to do with man, who has no influence on how long it survives, and man will have long ceased to exist by the time the ocean is ready to vanish
.

  But the relationship between humankind and the ocean is a different matter entirely. That is something that surely depends to a very significant degree on just how solicitously humankind treats the oceans under its care. A noisy argument is in full spate right now, just as this chapter is being written (and will probably be continuing as it is read, and well beyond) over the degree to which the bad habits of man play a significant role in the circumstances of the sea.

  We know the sea is in trouble. We know that man plays at least some part in the wreaking of that trouble. Examples abound, most recently in the Gulf of Mexico—officially defined by the seers of Monaco as part of the Atlantic, even if it doesn’t look as though it should be—which in the early summer of 2010 was being catastrophically polluted by a drilling rig that exploded and sank in waters a few miles from New Orleans, a city that was itself still recovering from the trials of Hurricane Katrina five years earlier. A volcanic torrent of oil from a ruptured seabed pipe a mile below the Deepwater Horizon platform spread to coastlines from Texas to Florida, despoiling and polluting and killing. Eleven men died in the explosion itself.

  The event—which was both predictable and preventable—promptly confounded the growing lobby of those one time skeptics who were starting to think that undersea oil exploration was safe, or at least safe enough. But to those others who recalled other great tragedies in the Atlantic—the 1988 loss of the Piper Alpha North Sea platform, with its appalling casualties, being the most egregious—it was a catastrophe that simply served to confirm another belief, that oil drilling at sea was a business inevitably and ultimately harmful to sea and man alike.

  However, there was a third group—and a very large one. These were people who were quite beyond persuasion, and who believed that the world’s modern industrial needs must in any case trump such petty concerns. To this group the loss of the rig and the pollution it caused, though tragic, were of rather less consequence. They were something that, as environmentalists shudder to hear, just went with the territory.

  The melancholy events in the Gulf serve to pose the question one further time: what is the truth? Are the legions of troubles of the sea truly the result of the mischief of man? And further: could it be that when giant hurricanes like Katrina are spawned, or when the polders of Holland are indundated or the beaches of Africa are clawed away and villages founder beneath the waves—could it be that the sea is showing signs (at least to those who like to anthropomorphize it) of somehow striking back? Or are all the ocean’s troubles entirely cyclical and natural-born, are the storms and sea-level rises parts of cycles, too, and is the ocean more than likely just to remain ponderously aloof to man’s fleabites of bad behavior?

  This is where complication and controversy begin to appear. I recognize all too well that it would nicely serve this book’s purpose to be able to show that man is fully or even wholly responsible for the ocean’s ills, and I would clearly like to be able to do so. But I also know that there is a vast body of competing claims on the topic—with people of great distinction and good faith arguing that of course man is responsible, while others of equally stellar reputation and good faith claim that to suppose such a thing is the height of arrogance, and that man is far too puny and crabbed to be of any importance at all to an entity as vast as the Atlantic Ocean. Ever since 1995, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change uttered its historic declaration that it saw “a discernible human influence on the global climate,” the debate has assumed totemic importance, its adherents and opponents battling for hearts and minds as though hierarchs of some newfangled religion. Politics, somewhat unhelpfully, is now a party to the argument, too, muddying the issues still further, adding new and louder voices to what is already a cacophony.

  That all being said, there are now a handful of proven verities, certain hard truths about the present situation of the seas that even the most ardent deniers of change have generally come to accept.

  The first is at once the most simple and the most profound: the world is getting warmer, and the temperature of the oceans, and especially the temperature of the Atlantic Ocean, is currently rising at a sudden and an alarming rate. And this is going to have consequences for many of those who live on or near the sea and derive their sustenance from it. Whether these consequences are temporary or permanent matters little: the importance is that they are going to affect everyone, and not just the narwhal hunters of Ittoqqortoormiit.

  The specific central facts of the argument appear to be these, with three sets of observed data seeming to be unassailable (which does not mean they pass unassailed, as we shall see). First, it is measurably clear that during the last quarter century, the average temperature of the atmosphere at the world’s surface has been increasing, and has risen by an average of 0.19 degrees centigrade during each decade. Second, observations from ships, aircraft, satellites, and scientists on the ground have led to the conclusion that the ice sheets and ice caps in the Arctic Ocean, on Greenland, and on the continent of Antarctica are all losing mass; and that since 1990 the glaciers and ice caps elsewhere that have been slowly shrinking for half a century have suddenly started melting very rapidly. And third, according to satellite observations, the world’s sea level has been rising at the rate of 3.4 millimeters every year for the last fifteen years, and the rate of rise is increasing.

  Beyond these three facts, a number of other less certain—or more contentious—assertions and predictions are made, and by an overwhelming number of climate scientists. First, the global sea level is estimated to keep on rising, and by 2100 it will have risen by more than one meter, perhaps by as much as two. Second, this rise in global sea level is linked to the melting of the ice caps. Third, a series of so-called tipping points are now fast being approached, and if the observed warming trend continues (which is itself by no means a certainty), then changes to all manner of the world’s features and phenomena—rain forests, monsoons, hurricane frequency, desertification—will occur and may become irreversible.

  The fourth point, made by many and now believed by most, is that all of these developments are occurring at the same time as a dramatic rise in the tonnage of carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases—which in essence sit in the upper atmosphere and prevent the escape of heat from the planet—that are being spewed out by the chimneys and exhaust pipes of industrial mankind. These emissions, which have all stemmed, one way or another, from the burning of fossil fuels, have increased by no less than 40 percent since 1990.

  The fifth point, made by most but disbelieved by many, links all of the unassailable facts about warming, melting, and rising to this last well-known fact: that the increase in mankind’s carbon emissions is not merely coincident with the increase in global temperature, but is the ultimate cause of it. And at this point the two lobbies part ways, decisively, noisily, and with often passionate discourtesy. The one lobby insists that this is so; the other casts all manner of doubt and claims that the world’s money—vast quantities of which are being earmarked to pay for a lowering of mankind’s carbon emissions to decelerate the rate of warming—could and should be far better spent elsewhere. Population, most of these climate skeptics say, is the major problem (although recent data have shown that population may be beginning to peak, and maybe shrink back) and other vast troubles—diseases, lack of water, poverty—need to be addressed first, long before attention is given to what they say is the utterly unprovable linkage between carbon emissions and global warming.

  3. UP SHE RISES

  There are many predicted consequences of the warming of the world. Some of them are restricted to the land, as with the increase in droughts and the expansion of deserts. Most, however, are bound up with the future of the seas, and of them two are becoming paramount: the rise in the level of the sea and a slew of possible changes in the world’s weather.

  The rise in sea level is perhaps of the greatest immediate interest, not least because the millions who live beside the sea are often vividly aware of when a
nd if it is happening. There are two causes for the phenomenon, which is a very real and (at least in human terms) rather long-term trend: since 1870, when data used to be collected from mechanical tide gauges, rather than by today’s satellites, the world’s seas have risen by some eight inches.

  The first cause of this rise stems from a simple law of physics: that as the ambient temperature increases, water expands. The warming sea, in other words, is becoming not so much taller as more bloated.

  Though this thermal expansion is expected to contribute about 40 percent of the global sea-level rise—perhaps more than half of it, say some—it is a rather difficult concept to conjure with. Some argue that the basins that hold the seas will grow bigger in hotter weather and thus keep the level the same. Physicists who support the bloating idea counter by explaining that water expands more than rock, and so their assertion is correct. One has to take the word of science in matters such as these.84

  It is much easier to grasp the other reason for sea-level change, one calculated to be responsible for the other 60 percent of the rise, and which concerns the physical form of water that has much of the high-latitude and high-altitude world in its grip: ice. As long as the world’s land-based ice—its glaciers, ice caps, permanent snowfields—remains frozen, then all will be well, or at least all will be stable. But if a large proportion of this ice melts, as it has been doing for at least the past twenty years, and if the melting continues to accelerate, as it has started to do in recent years, and if all the locked-in water becomes unlocked and flows down into the seas, then there will be trouble—or at least there will be instability. That’s because the world’s seas will become fuller, and their levels will go up and up, and they will do so for perhaps a very long while, and possibly unstoppably.