Moby-Duck

by Donovan Hohn

  He knew whereof he spoke: From 1872 to 1874, Weyprecht and another naval officer, Julius von Payer, had led an Austro-Hungarian expedition to the Arctic. The objective was to reach the North Pole by ship, or, falling short, to transit the Northeast Passage, from Norway to the Bering Sea. Payer, Weyprecht, and the men under their joint command made it as far as Novaya Zemlya, an island due north of the Ural Mountains, before the ice closed in on their three-masted schooner. The Arctic currents carried them, fortuitously, to an archipelago of ice-covered promontories on which Weyprecht and Payer bestowed the name Franz Josef Land, in honor of their emperor. From there, all had made it home alive. Weyprecht was a hero. He’d earned his place in history books. Nevertheless, he considered the expedition a failure.

  The two “forces of Nature” Weyprecht wished most urgently to illuminate were terrestrial magnetism and the aurora borealis. What was needed, Weyprecht told the scientists assembled in Vienna, was a coordinated, synchronous series of expeditions that would set up a ring of research stations around the poles and, using standardized instruments, carry out meteorological observations for at least one year. No single nation could accomplish a project of this scale. For the plan to work, the scientists and governments and militaries of many nations would have to set aside their rivalries and join in common cause.

  Six years later, in 1881, just forty-two years old, a man of his time, Weyprecht died of tuberculosis. By then his plan had gained prominent adherents, and a year after Weyprecht’s death, scientists from eleven nations put it into action. This first International Polar Year, like subsequent International Polar Years, would last longer than a year. Germany established an Arctic research station on Baffin Island, and another at the Antarctic island of South Georgia. The Austro-Hungarian empire established one on Jan Mayen Island, off the east coast of Greenland, Sweden another on Svalbard. The Dutch sent a ship into the Kara Sea. The French, Danish, Norwegians, Finns, and Brits also participated, as did the Russians. In all, fourteen polar expeditions took place between 1882 and 1884. The one that was the most ambitious turned out also to be the most disastrous and, historically, the most notorious—the Greely expedition to Ellesmere Island.

  The scientists of the first IPY didn’t manage to solve the mysteries Weyprecht set out to investigate, but they did manage to collect meteorological data thanks to which we now know just how much the Arctic has warmed in the past century—up to 4 degrees centigrade on average, 5 degrees on land, two to three times faster than the rest of the planet. Climatologists predicted this accelerated Arctic warming years ago. Its primary cause? The ice-albedo effect. Albedo is the amount of sunlight that the planet reflects back out into space. As anyone who’s walked barefoot across a parking lot on a hot summer’s day knows, white surfaces reflect the sun’s rays; black surfaces absorb them. In the Arctic, when the ice retreats and the snow melts, earth and ocean absorb more heat, thereby melting more ice and snow, thereby absorbing more heat.

  None of this was on the mind of Weyprecht when he organized that first International Polar Year, nor was it on the minds, fifty years later, in 1932, of the scientists who staged the second IPY. The organizers of the second IPY decided to reenact Weyprecht’s dream on a more ambitious scale. The phenomenon they hoped to explain was the jet stream. Twenty-five years later, in 1957, yet another generation of scientists staged yet another synchronized scientific assault on the poles. Armed with technological instruments many of which had been developed during the Second World War, they confirmed the existence of mid-ocean ridges, measured for the first time the mass of Antarctica’s ice, sent the first weather satellites into space, and collected some of the first evidence that man-made greenhouse gases were influencing the climate.37 By then, the theory of man-made global warming had been around for almost half a century, though few scientists took it seriously. Most physicists and oceanographers and meteorologists were confident that the oceans would absorb all but an irrelevant fraction of the CO2 we were adding to the atmosphere.

  But in 1957, a group of scientists led by Roger Revelle, an oceanographer at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute, found that the ocean removed CO2 from the air far more slowly than expected. Also in 1957, another beneficiary of Weyprecht’s dream, the climatologist Charles Keeling, set up a pair of observatories, one on Hawaii’s Mauna Loa, another on Antarctica, and for the first time accurately measured atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide. In the following decades, his results would vindicate Revelle: atmospheric CO2 levels were rising dramatically.

  After 1957 scientists and the rest of the world seemed to lose interest in the poles, which by then seemed to have given up their secrets. We now knew that there was no open sea at the North Pole, only ice. We now knew that the Northwest Passage wasn’t a commercially viable shipping lane, so why study it? We had new frontiers to explore. Nuclear waste was our most pressing environmental threat. The moon was the new Arctic; astronauts, the new explorers. It was only later, in the 1980s and 1990s, after the space race had ended, after scientists had begun to investigate the fourth dimension, after the evidence for global warming began to mount, that we once again turned our attention toward the poles. And what we saw was hard to reconcile with what we’d seen before.

  Where before we’d seen permanence, we now saw evanescence—and it was on this theme, the theme of change, that the scientists participating in the fourth International Polar Year would play their variations. The fourth IPY would be the most ambitious one yet, lasting longer than its predecessors—for two years, not one, from March 2007 to March 2009. By the time it was over, 10,000 scientists from more than sixty nations had investigated everything from “ocean-atmosphere-sea ice-snow pack interactions” to “the biodiversity of Arctic spiders” to the threat to Inuit oral traditions posed by hip-hop and rap.

  Of the twelve Arctic expeditions taking place this summer, this one, organized by Eddy Carmack, was among the most ambitious, involving around sixty scientists and not one icebreaker but two. As we entered the Northwest Passage from the east, the Louis’s sister ship—the Sir Wilfrid Laurier, based in Vancouver, carrying yet another company of scientists—would enter it from the west. The shared goal of the scientists aboard both icebreakers was also the goal of Carmack’s life work: to form a high-resolution, megascale picture of how the North Pacific, North Atlantic, and Arctic oceans interact. Underlying this goal was an insight lost on the explorers of the past: far from being an otherworldly place, fortified by ice, mystified by myth and mist, the Arctic is very much of this world, connected to temperate oceans and to Manhattan, Hong Kong, Hilo, Guangzhou, Sitka, Kennebunkport—and to Helsinki and to Dar Es Salaam and to Tasmania and even to Antarctica—by currents and winds.

  ICE PICKING

  Around dawn, when I wake in my little cabin belowdecks, it sounds as though we’re sailing through riprap, through boulders of the sort my son would like to climb. Skipping breakfast, I ascend to the bridge. Where the day before we looked out onto a glassy ocean, we now look out onto a white labyrinth—ice puddled with blue pools of melt, fissured with cracks and leads, which are canal-like channels that open up between plates of ice. “We call it an icebreaker,” says the quartermaster, Dale Hiltz, seated at the helm, “but really it’s an ice-avoider.” You can tell that this is a line he’s delivered before. At the helm, Hiltz, a big man, looks like John Goodman seated in an easy chair, or a king played by John Goodman presiding from his throne. Or picture Captain Kirk at the helm of the Enterprise but imagine that instead of William Shatner, Goodman had played Kirk. That’s what Hiltz at the helm of the Louis is like. With Captain Rothwell stationed by the windows, looking anxiously on, Hiltz seeks the path of least resistance, following leads, or “puddle jumping” between patches of open water. When the leads close up and there are no puddles, Hiltz seeks out the “rotten” ice, ice so old and thin and waterlogged that the Louis can easily steam through it, bubblers bubbling away.

  When we come to a dead end, when the ice at the terminus of a lead i
s hard and thick, the breaking begins. Hiltz pilots us straight at it, so that the bow of the Louis hauls out like a kayak onto a beach. An officer at the controls cranks up the RPMs. The three propellers churn in our slushy wake, pitching the ship forward, bringing its weight and the thrust of its engines down onto the ice, snapping it like a wafer. On the rare occasion that the ice fails to snap on the first attempt, the officers perform a maneuver they call backing and filling. We reverse a hundred yards, and the water churns forward, sending out a white-and-turquoise lacework of eddies and foam. The officer at the controls shouts, “Here were we go!” The ship charges forward under full steam, gaining speed, hitting the ice at eight or nine knots. Inevitably the ice gives way. It isn’t elegant, this diesel-powered battering, nor is it fast, but it works.

  Near the entrance to the Northwest Passage, we emerge once again into open water and, assisted by a following current, make up for lost time. Speaking of time, I’ve begun to lose my sense of it. We’re now in the latitudes of perpetual daylight, and the schedule of fieldwork requires those of us on the scientific team to keep erratic hours, catnapping by day, working by night, taking meal breaks and cocktail breaks when we can.

  A week out of Halifax, I wake up at 3 A.M. to fetch my last batch of bottles. Outside it feels like midday. Off the port bow there floats an iceberg, a white cake-shaped island on the dark water. I hardly give it a glance. How quickly wonders degrade into the ordinary. A fulmar swoops past, and the sunlight reflecting from the ship’s red hull turns its white belly feathers pink. How quickly the ordinary becomes wondrous. It’s cold out, near freezing. So much for the balmy forecast I overheard back in Halifax. If I didn’t know the difference between climate and weather I might well be inclined to dismiss global warming as conspiratorial bunk.

  As I carry my box of bottles to the taffrail, Dale Hiltz, bleary-eyed, soon to begin his next watch, notices my cargo, hitches his trousers, lumbers after me, and asks, sheepishly, “Can I throw some?”

  “By all means,” I say. “As many as you like.” Hiltz’s face lights up. He has been working on this ship for thirty years, and yet the prospect of bottle throwing has elicited from him boyish delight. A graduate student working with the marine biologist Glenn Cooper also requests permission to join us, as does Glenn Cooper, as does the chief scientist, Jane Eert. Our little merry band defiles to aft, along the starboard rail, down the flight of steel stairs, I leading the way, my box of bottles clinking cheerfully.

  There’s something irresistible about throwing bottles into the ocean. You take the bottle by the neck and send it flying tomahawk-style, and as it flies, end over end, there’s a faint whistle, and it catches the light and describes an exuberant arc through the sky, an arc that ends in a sad little splash. Cooper, the marine biologist, starts calling out “Launch!” as if preparing to shoot clay pigeons. Bottles fly—to port, astern, to starboard—tomahawking through the air, plopping into our frothy wake. Watching them drift away, it’s hard not to dream of distant shores. Just two weeks ago one of Eddy Carmack’s bottles, tossed into Baffin Bay last summer, was discovered on an uninhabited island south of Iceland. By tourists on horseback. Tourists who then sent Bonita LeBlanc a reply that read, “Hello! We found this drift bottle last Saturday, the 14th of JUN 2008, off the southwest coast of Snaefellsnes.” Evidently you can reach the southwest coast of Snaefellsnes only at low tide, hurrying out on horseback over the mud. Trying to picture that scene makes me want to saddle up and go there, right now.

  On the far horizon a white line appears, a band of snow-white radiance. Heavy pack ice ahead, Captain Rothwell assumes, and since we’re running late, due in Resolute by tomorrow morning, he decides to dispatch the ice observer, or the “ice pick,” as everyone calls her. The ice pick is Erin Clark, a small twenty-eight-year-old Toronto native who wears her dark brown hair in a bob the pointy tips of which she is forever tucking behind her ears. Though an officer, one of only two female officers on the Louis and one of the youngest, she favors the company of the crew, hirsute oilers and deckhands most of whom are twice her age, spending much of her free time in the smoking lounge, puffing on Player’s Lights, a habit she means to give up one of these summers, but life on ship—the long hours of tedium, the occasional sleep-deprived bursts of action—lends itself to smoking. Her baggy uniform is at least one size too big, and she complements it with a pair of steel-toed shoes. Her duties are twofold. She helps the officers of the Louis navigate the channels of the Northwest Passage, and she e-mails reports to the Canadian Ice Service. Satellites can show you where the ice is, but not what it’s like, not in real time. They can’t show you whether it’s rotten or thick, young or old, where the leads and pressure ridges are. Clark reads ice the way nephrologists read clouds, or psychics, palms.

  She conducts her surveys via helicopter, equipped with a specially designed tablet computer on the screen of which she taps out observations with a stylus, using a color-coded system of alphanumerical glyphs to indicate the varieties and qualities and quantities of ice. She is part cartographer, part meteorologist, a mapmaker mapping mutable terrain. The varieties of ice, like those of clouds, have excellent names—nilas ice (halfway between frazil and grease), pancake ice (round floes that look very much like pancakes on a griddle), fast ice (frozen to the land).

  There happens to be a spare seat in the helicopter, and it’s mine if I want it. I do want it. Yes, please. Very much. Thank you. I want it because I’d like to see the ice through Erin Clark’s eyes, and because from the airborne vantage of a helicopter I’ll be better able to search for flotsam, and because this is the sort of moment I’ve been dreaming of ever since I looked up the Arctic in my Atlas of the World, but also because, as I first learned during the airlift at Gore Point, riding in helicopters is fun. It is in my opinion a grave injustice that Igor Sikorsky is not as famous as Orville and Wilbur. The helicopter, in my opinion, is superior to the airplane because it more closely approximates my recurrent dreams—in which I swoop over the water, and soar into the sky, with the aeronautical grace of a fulmar.

  Chris Swannell fires up the rotors: Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, the blades turning from a ceiling fan into a loud discus of blur. Wearing insulated jumpsuits and life vests, escorted by Chief Officer Stephane Legault, Erin and I rush from the hangar onto the helipad, assuming that hunched posture that helicopter passengers in movies always assume, as if the rotors might lop off their heads, which, as the rotors whoosh inches above your skull, seems a distinct possibility. Clark climbs into the copilot’s seat, I climb into the backseat.

  Before we return, dinner will be over, and so the kindly officers on the bridge would like to take our orders. The menu is simple, beef or pork. “Pork,” Erin Clark says.

  “Pork,” says I.

  Liftoff.

  To the north rise the snow-swept cliffs of Devon Island, a place so remote, so lifeless, that NASA has set up a training camp there the purpose of which is to give would-be astronauts a taste of what it might be like to live on Mars. The dark but sparkly water flashes below. The white line seen from the bridge was not, in fact, pack ice but a mirage. It disappears as soon as we’re aloft. The Arctic is, climatologically, a desert, and as in any desert, mirages are not uncommon. Viewed from a distance, the peak of a mountain can turn into an hourglass, casting a reflection upward into the sky. An eerie blackness can spread across low clouds—a phenomenon known as a water sky; the blackness is a reflection cast up onto the clouds by a patch of open water.

  Now another band of radiance appears on the horizon, and this time it’s for real: ice straight ahead. “There’s a narwhal, a whole school of narwhal,” Swannell says. “There’s one that’s about to break the surface.” At first I don’t see them, but then Swannell banks, and I press my face against glass, and there they are, five or six of them, white, speckled whales that—from this height, three hundred feet—seem tiny as minnows. “They’re nursing their young,” says Swannell. “When they do that they turn on their sides and yo
u can see the whites of their bellies.”

  We keep seeing them, narwhals as well as belugas, foraging at the ice’s edge. Below us lie a million white polygons jumbled loosely together as if a sheet of ice had fallen from the sky and shattered, polygons outlined in dark water. When the wind blows from the west, as it’s blowing now, Erin Clark explains, the edge of the pack loosens and frays, scattering east. As we fly, against the wind, the white puzzle below assembles itself, until it stretches, uniform and solid, from barren shore to barren shore. Above us, the sky is clear. Below us, you can see our helicopter-shaped shadow made nervous against the white fields below. The way through the maze is no longer obvious.

  It’s altogether possible that there’s flotsam down there, but if there is, from this height, not even Clark’s trained eyes would be able to spot it. I wish we could zoom low, but the lower you go, Chris Swannell tells me, the more slowly and cautiously you have to fly; the closer you are to the ground or to the water, the less time a pilot has to react, should something go wrong. Out here, you don’t want to have to make an emergency landing. Our jumpsuits are warm, but they aren’t watertight survival suits. Although helicopter 363 carries enough fuel to fly for two hours and twenty minutes, it never flies that long. What limits its range is the Louis’s radio reception.