Icebreaker

by Horatio Clare

  Tem and Sampo fly the drone, gathering publicity footage. Its cameras relay shots of us standing in a wave pattern of snow like tide lines on the ice, which is blown clear here and there, shining black. I think all three of us are missing our children. You want children out here, to run and point, to shout and marvel, to skitter on the ice and laugh at the drone, to chase and flee from it. We would caution them about looking anywhere near the sun. A glance in its direction is met by a shattering silver glare, the snow throwing the light outward and skyward: the albedo effect. To experience the albedo is to stand in a still storm of light and radiation.

  On a day like this around 90 per cent of solar radiation reflects off the snow. If the snow ridges or hummocks, the albedo drops to 80 per cent; when the temperature climbs above zero the snow dulls, pools appear and 50 per cent of the radiation is absorbed. When the ice melts open water reflects only 10 per cent of the radiation and the planet warms. It is estimated that the loss of summer sea ice and its albedo in the last forty years has raised global temperatures as much as if humans had emitted 25 per cent more carbon dioxide in that time.

  Fast feedback, as this process is called, creates warm air over water where before there was cold air over ice, so snowlines along Arctic coasts retreat, leaving bare tundra. While the radiation effect of the loss of albedo over ice is known (having been measured by satellite) the equivalent calculations for the tundra have yet to be made. Satellite imagery reveals that in high summer there are now six million fewer square kilometres of snow than there were in 1980, with a corresponding loss of albedo. At a certain point the loss of snow and ice albedo will drive global warming by so-called radiation forcing. This direct heating by the sun of a planet whose reflective polar shield has melted means the effect of any additions or reductions in atmospheric carbon dioxide will make comparatively little difference. We will enter the stage of runaway warming. Loss of albedo is the biggest threat to our existence, according to this model. We have not reached runaway warming yet; we stand on diminishing ice, thinking of our children, in the era of not yet, barely daring to guess at how soon. A sober date for soon was given by the British Met Office in June 2016: ‘Models vary in their ability to capture recent changes in the Arctic sea ice, but climate projections from models that perform well against observations of past climate show that a plausible earliest date that the Arctic could be seasonally “ice-free” in a given year is the 2040s.’

  High in the blue above the drone, satellites are preparing to capture images of the maximum extent of the year’s winter ice, which occurs in early March. By the end of the month the results will be published and reported: ice coverage will be the lowest in the thirty-eight-year satellite record. ‘Truly uncharted territory,’ the UN World Meteorological Organisation will say. ‘In thirty-five years I have never seen anything close to what we’ve experienced these past two winters,’ the director of the US National Snow and Ice Data Center will comment. Scientists and newspapers will conclude that the influence of human activities on the climate system has become more and more evident – as if it had not been evident for forty years, as if there were still a reasonable doubt, as if by repeating the obvious with more and more evidence, deniers and the indifferent will be brought to a place of sudden realisation, after which humanity will work as one to make planet-saving alterations to our behaviour.

  As seafarers know, disaster unfolds this way. The concentration with which Sampo, Arvo and Ville perform even small course changes is a function of the habitual vigilance of sailors familiar with the rhythm of misadventure: slow, slow, quick, very quick. The mass and momentum of ships mean that by the time you begin to make urgent changes the point at which they could make any difference has passed. I have seen it on small craft and large – the apprehension, the small alteration, full comprehension and the sudden reversing of engines, the spinning of the wheel, the crunch.

  With the Paris Agreement of 2015 – setting a limit of two degrees temperature rise above pre-industrial levels, while recognising that 1.5 degrees is what is actually needed – humanity signalled its apprehension and a willingness to make adjustments. Paris envisages a ‘ratcheting up’ of ambitions to reduce climate change. Beneath this approach to our custody of the planet is the tacit understanding that as a race we require disaster before we make dramatic change. The rallying cries of the environmentally and socially minded echo around the Internet, but we all know the calculation much of the world is making, though you never hear it said: better our great-grandchildren run out of planet than our children should lack for whatever we can grab for ourselves and them.

  Toting the drone and its control boxes, we straggle back to the ship like children returning from kite flying, the temperature sinking with the sun.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Coast of Lapland

  WE MAKE FOR the northern corner of the bay, where the port cities of Tornio and Kemi are the transit points for cargoes travelling to and from Lapland, north-east Sweden and Murmansk on the Barents Sea.

  ‘The ice has thickened,’ Ville announces with a restrained urgency which I think signals delight. ‘There’s no open water in the north.’

  Tem is on the phone to his fleet. Ships are sticking and queuing, icebreakers stuttering, a vessel is trapped in the middle of nowhere and Sampo is buoyant.

  ‘Kemi-Tornio is a kind of chaos. A vortex, and we are here on the event horizon … but being drawn in!’

  ‘Polaris has lost one of her engines,’ Tem says, ‘so we will go and cut this ship free, and Polaris can come down and do Raahe.’

  Polaris is in her first season of operations, the most powerful Finnish icebreaker afloat and the first to be partly powered by liquid natural gas.

  ‘Where’s this lost ship?’ I ask.

  ‘She’s out here …’

  On the computer her icon is a little box with a dot and a vector line out in the middle of a black screen.

  ‘Hurrah! Action!’

  Pushing north at full power seems to charge the bridge with a euphoric vandalism. Smashing ice, dazzling half the night with our searchlights and listening to Radio Nova is joyous. Nova is relentlessly sunny, playing Bon Jovi and Belinda Carlisle, music from the time of the first alarms over the Antarctic, the thinning of the ozone layer. Through simple legislation – the banning of CFCs – the hole healed. It can be done! Change can come! And if not, stuff the emissions and God bless the ice! A ship is stuck – what else matters? Polaris, the cleanest, greenest most advanced icebreaker in the world, has a teething problem. Great! Bad news is good news, the worse the better.

  ‘What happens when you get storms?’ I ask Sampo. (I love a storm.)

  ‘At twenty-five metres per second we close the gulf at the Åland Islands. That’s it. The VTS and the coordinating captain shut it down.’

  The VTS, the vessel traffic service, manages the passage of ships in the gulf. Wind at twenty-five metres per second is forty-eight knots, fifty-five miles per hour – a force ten storm on the Beaufort scale.

  ‘Then everything stops. In 2011 you could wait thirteen days, iced in. One ship we pulled out, they’d been there so long that their agent in the port said, “We’re going to call the police on you.” “Ha ha! You’re very welcome!” We moved ships in convoys of eight that year. The Russians do it differently. They get thirty ships together with a couple of icebreakers and move them all. But then when they get to port they have to wait again for everyone to go in and out.’

  Ville explains what will happen when we reach the trapped ship, a small chemical tanker on a run between Sweden and Finland.

  ‘So we pass close to her, go around her, and then she can follow our track. If we are moving quickly the ice around her breaks.’

  ‘How close?’

  ‘You have seen the stick?’

  The stick is a plank a couple of metres long poking out of Otso’s starboard side. It is marked with red and black stripes ten centimetres thick, allowing the helmsman to peer down from the bridge, c
ompare the stripes to the profile of broken ice shards and estimate the thickness of the pack.

  ‘We went so close to one the stick broke, but we didn’t touch.’

  ‘Crumbs!’

  Ville has a way of signalling amusement without smiling.

  ‘Look …’ He brings up a page of photographs on a screen. Here is a steel strut which you might just bracelet with two hands, cut in half by a breaking towline. Here are bulbous bows crunched by impact. Here are bent and twisted gunwales.

  ‘When the tow breaks …’ I wince.

  ‘You don’t want to be near. We take risks every time.’

  It is said with matter-of-factness, not pride. The pride is in the doing of the thing.

  ‘You can spend your life at sea and never steer the ship,’ Sampo says, ‘Autopilot all the way to port, and then the pilot comes on board. But we are almost always on manual. If you go from icebreaking to a merchant vessel and anything happens, you don’t hesitate. You switch off the autopilot and steer.’

  There is a crystalline brilliance in the moonless darkness. It is a night for shooting stars, for planets suspended like portents, for strange lights and for those who

  … follow the Night-Hag when, call’d

  In secret, riding through the Air she comes,

  Lur’d with the smell of infant blood, to dance

  With Lapland witches, while the labouring Moon

  Eclipses at their charms.

  In Paradise Lost John Milton deploys the night-hag and the Lapland witches as an earthly measure for the followers of his Satan. By the late seventeenth century, when Milton was writing, the ‘witches’, Saami shamans, were having their sacred drums burned and their ritual trances proscribed by Christian missionaries inspired to zeal by this last redoubt of European paganism. Witch trials were held and rewards offered for the surrender of the drums, which led to a boom in their manufacture. Fantasies of child sacrifice and orgiastic gatherings so terrible they eclipsed the moon reveal more about imaginative Christian excitement at the wild possibilities of paganism than they do about innocent reindeer herders: the Saami were believed to be able to summon the wind, to direct curses by spitting on a knife and touching the victim with the spittle, to possess second sight and mysterious powers of connection with the forest and sea. Something of these powers attached themselves to all Finns, according to sixteenth-century accounts, which have sailors being offered winds for sale, tied up in knotted ropes.

  The sea tonight lies black-glazed, white reefs of snow-dust lying in waves across the ice. Arvo is at the helm, a grandfatherly man who meets your gaze over his spectacles. His regard is stately and amused. Arvo is a Swedish-speaking Finn; as a young man he worked on boats between the mainland and the Åland Islands.

  ‘Then I was going there for training and I met my wife. And then it was container ships. I would be away for six months; it’s OK when you are younger.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Ah, my wife is from the Åland Islands. There have always been many sailors there. She is quite fine. I did many trips between Europe and South America. I was working for Chiquita; it was a good company but they went into bankruptcy in 2001. One ship I left, my friend rings me up – “Arvo you’ve got to come back! We hit a rock!” I said in the middle of the Mediterranean you hit a rock? You can’t! But they did. Huge torn hole in the bow.’

  ‘So you prefer icebreaking?’

  ‘Now we will see!’

  The trapped ship is Ursula E, a small orange tanker lit up like a prize in a trophy cabinet, no longer than we are and much lower in the water. Arvo does not reduce speed at all as he angles in towards her stern. She has been running her engines, keeping her propeller turning; there is a clear patch of turbulent water behind her but she is dug in hard at the bow. Closer, closer we go. Ville comes over and stands behind Arvo, whose concentration is palpable. For all his years at sea, Arvo is still catching up with Ville at the helm. Ville is feeling the ship through his feet, chewing gum and gazing as if he is concentrating for Arvo, willing the older man to make the perfect pass. The shock of our passage splinters the ice fifteen metres perpendicular to our stern. Arvo performs a tight skidding turn, towing destruction around the tanker; we look down on her as if swooping in by helicopter. The cracks fly out across the ice, linking the ships, shattering the sheet and setting the tanker free.

  ‘Full ahead and follow my track,’ Ville tells the tanker over the radio.

  She takes up station behind us.

  ‘How was that, Arvo?’

  With a laugh he looks over the top of his spectacles. ‘Fun! No one else can play with big ships like this. Only icebreakers can do it.’

  Between ten and midnight, high in the gulf, we have crossed Sampo’s event horizon and reached a kind of icebreaking bazaar. We lead our tanker past a stuck ship, Transvolante, whose icebreaker has turned away to help someone else. Transvolante will follow us. Coming down from the north is something like a fallen star, a white explosion of light which turns out to be Polaris. She looks almost frightening, her array of searchlights are swords of light. Now there are more lights, and two more ships, the icebreaker Sisu and her charge, a trim blue German tanker. We sidestep the blue tanker, our orange Ursula following, and the blue tanker heads south in our tracks. Now we turn away, intending to hand Transvolante over to Sisu, but in the ice between us Transvolante sticks. Sisu backs around her then cuts in front of her and on they go, but as we back towards our new charge, the blue German tanker, Transvolante sticks again. Polaris and Sisu reverse.

  Now three icebreakers appear to be willing one trapped ship to move. We can all push a ship backwards, stern to bow, but cutting them out in reverse does not work so well: manoeuvring astern at low speed is tricky and does not generate enough wash or shock to shatter the trap. The icebreakers talk to one another in Finnish, but there is a lot of Finnish silence too. It is not anyone’s place to tell anyone else what to do, exactly. From a distance we must look like a convocation of sea beasts, eyes glaring, in a stand-off over prey. Arvo and Ville say little but their expressions are eloquent. Come on.

  Before midnight the new watch comes up, Sampo and Villi-Matti, wishing everyone good morning.

  ‘How do you like your visit to Lapland?’ Sampo asks.

  ‘It was sweet of you to lay on all these ships!’

  Good mornings are exchanged on the radio, as if daytime and daylight are unconnected. There is a professional solidarity in this company of the night, a resolute cheerfulness in the net of voices across the gulf. Fatigue and mockery are kept away from the radio. Atle, a Swedish icebreaker, asks us for work. Whoever is on her radio sounds hopeful more than expectant, a bubble of amusement under a slightly forlorn request. We have to say we have nothing for her at the moment.

  ‘Swedes are scared of Finnish ice,’ says a watchkeeper in the dark on the port side of the bridge. ‘They want Swedish hairdresser ice.’ (The Swedes are manifestly scared of nothing, and Atle is desperate to be involved.) ‘They will be laughing at Finland again. We have one ship being repaired so we have hired them to come over to this side. If there’s not enough work they will laugh at the stupid Finns …’

  Two centuries after it ended, the six-hundred-year period of Swedish rule still leaves a chip on some Finnish shoulders, clearly. Finnish jokes require Swedes to be the butt, as Swedish jokes need Norwegians.

  Eventually Transvolante is freed. She follows us closely through the ice and the small hours as we steam south, Polaris trailing us until we pass Oulu, where she turns away, her formidable eyes still blazing, heading for a foxhole, as the icebreakers call their parking spots in the pack.

  CHAPTER 8

  Care of Ice

  MARITIME LANGUAGE HAS a lovely way of writing place and approximate position on featureless water, making the sea’s face legible. We are in Raahe’s roads, also known as its roadstead, an indeterminate spot a couple of nautical miles from port where ships can anchor in relative shelter. Behind us, seen from l
and, is the offing, which is the further part of the sea, the more distant view. It is a pearly day of soft horizontals, silver bars of sky above, black leads streaking the ice. Otso grinds through a narrow fairway choked with a mush of ice boulders, shuga, Sampo calls it, pronounced shoo-gar, using the Russian term for this rubble of ice balls, grease ice (freezing slush) and mashed-pancake ice. The battered Dutch bulk carrier behind us slows to pick up pilots and finds she cannot move. We back up and flush her clear with a blast of wake. She sticks again. This time Sampo reverses to contact with her bows and pushes her backwards. She is running her engines full ahead to keep the propellers clear of ice but Otso does not notice. Now she stops a third time, a stew of shuga heaped up against her bows.

  ‘See,’ Sampo says, patiently backing again. ‘Every time we use the fairway we churn the ice into balls like this, and then more balls, and then they are linking up. So at the end of the spring we are actually making ice. The last we have to break will be in the fairways into the ports.’

  Tem surveys the trapped Dutchman. Behind her the air is so clear you feel you can see the curvature of the earth.

  ‘In Kemi they save some clean ice where they can go when the channels are filled,’ he says.

  ‘You are making and breaking ice at the same time? Isn’t this a very weird job, Sampo?’

  His age still eludes me; he has a boyish face and a rigour in his dress and presentation that is almost naval.

  ‘When I was a student doing environmental science I was working in this bar. It was a very hot day and I was holding on to these two pumps and I thought, I really should have something else to hold on to. So when I was twenty-four I went to sea. It just shows you, a small decision on a hot day can send you to north-east Greenland! And now I have the master mariner’s certificate.’

  ‘Are you a natural sailor?’

  ‘Well I’m good at details. My wife says I never remember anything important, just details. But our business relies on details, settings, numbers. I have a second job, renovating at home, but it’s not voluntary. It’s mandatory, by my wife …’