After the Ice

by Alun Anderson

  This is not quite the end of the tale. There is another message from Chukotka. Here, too, there is great natural wealth, although in the form of minerals rather than oil, but the region’s terrible remoteness makes it hard to exploit them profitably. One option the Chukotka government considered just recently was for a part of the population to be encouraged to move to a more favorable climate zone. About 20,000 people would remain, 16,000 of them indigenous. Chukotka would be abandoned.

  Although that idea was never implemented, it raises a wider question: when oil, gas, and mineral resources are too expensive to develop, or when, as in the case of Yamal, they are exhausted (in less than fifty years on current plans), will the future of the Arctic look more like its past? Remember that reindeer herding is the only sustainable form of agriculture in the Russian Arctic and it may prosper, especially if it not only survives the current rush for Arctic wealth, but takes what it can from it while local economies boom. That’s just what a former reindeer herder who came along to the EALÁT project meeting in Nadym thought. “Academician Alferov once was asked how long oil and gas would last as an energy resource,” he recounted. “His answer was about seventy years. If we hold our positions in the tundra now, the Nenets with their reindeer will reign the tundra after these seventy years have passed. And all these iron pieces will disappear in the earth.”11

  I asked Otto Habeck, who works at the Siberian Studies Center at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, and is coordinator of NOMAD, an International Polar Year (IPY) project that looks at social change among reindeer herders right across Russia’s far north, for his view.

  “I think that reindeer husbandry does have a future in Russia,” he replied, “but it has been developing very differently in different regions over the past twenty years. In Yamal and a little bit farther to the east in the Gydan Peninsula, the herds are flourishing. In Chukotka herding came to a standstill, but is being quite successfully reestablished. But we have yet to see what the outcome is. If we turn back to the west, to the European north of Russia and the Komi Republic, the situation is more or less stable. If you look at the Kola Peninsula there is a shift from herding to ranching. There herds are rounded up a couple of times each year, but there is not the close association where herders look after their animals all day long.”

  Habeck acknowledges that there are risks. “The oil industry does actually pay quite a lot. So some members of a reindeer herding family may find a better income with a job, even as a security guard. If people lose the skills then there will be a problem. You cannot learn the skills from books. But oil and gas extraction is not happening in all the regions and usually has a peak after some years. I think people will see that herding can provide a source of income. So I think people will not abandon it.”

  What might the future look like? Habeck says that reindeer herding will always need government support. The herds were at their biggest when the Soviet Union poured money into them in the 1930s. In Europe, farming depends very much on state support, especially in the more marginal lands. Large parts of Europe would look very different if that help were not there and, over time, it has come to include support for farming’s role in maintaining the landscape and rural populations. “I can imagine this will happen in Russia too,” he says.

  That jibes with something Bruce Forbes told me. He mentioned that the oil and gas companies might one day like to brag about having a functioning reindeer social and ecological system in the middle of a modern gas field. The reindeer herders might even become a great “brand” for the Yamal region. A few months later, on a Russian Web site I came across an advertisement for a holiday tour to Nar’yan Mar, capital of the Nenets region, which included going out to spend time with the “famous reindeer people.” Maybe that is a first glimpse of what is to come. After everything the herders have been through, I hope they will be able to cope with fame and tourists.

  ICE

  Chapter Four

  ADRIFT ON THE ICE

  The strongest wooden ship that ever sailed the seas now sits in a light and spacious museum just across the harbor from downtown Oslo. Built in 1892 to a revolutionary design, the ship still takes your breath away. Deep down in its interior, rows of huge wooden buttresses, designed to brace the hull against pressure from the outside, arch upward and meet in the ship’s center. Walking among them in the dim light you feel as if you have entered some ancient wooden cathedral built by trolls. Here you can best sense the vessel’s enormous strength. The planking surrounding you is two feet thick and built up from layers of tough Italian oak and greenheart, a wood selected because its dense, fine grain allows it to bend without breaking. The ship’s bow is backed by three huge timbers, each too big to wrap your arms around.

  Immensely strong though this ship may be, it is its shape, not its bulk, which excites wonder. From whatever direction you look, from bow or stern, from high up on the galleries set in the museum walls, or from low down on the floor on which the ship’s keel rests, you are struck by the smooth, endlessly rounded curve of the hull. The ship’s proportions are taken from those of a coconut shell and are quite unlike those of any other boat you have ever seen, or any other boat that has ever been built, bar none.

  The ship is the Fram and although it took place more than a hundred years ago, the story of its first great voyage remains an excellent starting point for an explanation of why the ice in the Arctic is disappearing so fast now. The Fram (meaning “forward”) was built for the great Norwegian scientist and explorer Fridtjof Nansen. Just thirty-one years old when the Fram was launched, Nansen was already a successful scientist and famous explorer, having completed the first crossing of the Greenland ice cap four years earlier.

  At the time that Nansen conceived of the Fram, Westerners knew nothing of the interior of the Arctic for the simple reason that no one had ever been there. In the nineteenth century, a popular theory held that the central Arctic was open water. Ice, it was argued, formed only near land, and because warm currents flowed up toward the Arctic, the central seas should be free of ice. Some even claimed to have seen this “open Arctic sea” from the north of Greenland. Others believed that the shallow seas fringing the Arctic indicated that there was more land to be discovered, and that the North Pole might be found at the top of a mountain.

  This was the state of knowledge when a newspaper article about the Jeanette expedition, written by the Norwegian meteorologist Henrik Mohn, caught Nansen’s attention. In 1879 a U.S. expedition had left San Francisco in the Jeanette with thirty-three men on board, intending to find that open polar sea and continue to the North Pole. The ship had been quickly caught in the ice and was trapped for almost two years. Eventually the force of the ice was too great. The deck of the ship bowed upward as the pressure on the hull increased and the oakum packing was sent flying from between its planks. The Jeanette sank rapidly north of the New Siberian Islands. Twenty-five of the crew managed to reach the coast of Siberia, but twelve more, including the expedition’s leader, died while trekking inland looking for help. The survivors returned home.

  The newspaper article discussed an astonishing find. Wreckage from the Jeanette, including handwritten documents and clothes with the names of the crew on them, had apparently turned up on an ice floe off the coast of southwest Greenland, almost 3,000 miles from eastern Siberia where the ship had sunk. The wreckage must have traveled directly across the frozen Arctic Ocean and then down into the Atlantic to have made its way to Greenland. Nansen concluded that there was a flow of ice across the Arctic from the far end of Siberia.

  That idea was new. There were, however, older hints that ice might travel long distances across the Arctic. In 1852, the British ship HMS Resolute journeyed deep into the Canadian Arctic on a fruitless hunt for the Franklin expedition, which had vanished several years earlier while searching for the Northwest Passage. During the winter of 1853, the Resolute became stuck in the ice off Viscount Melville Sound, far to the west of Baffin Island,
and was abandoned. Two years later, the still-intact ship was found by a U.S. whaling boat in Davis Strait. It had drifted, unmanned, 1,200 miles across the Arctic in two years. The ship was repaired and returned to Queen Victoria as a gift from the United States. Later, when the ship left service, part of its timber was made into a desk and given to the U.S. government. The desk still sits in the Oval Office at the White House.

  Nansen was not a man to merely contemplate a new theory. He at once set out to raise funds for an expedition to the North Pole that would, as he put it, “work with the forces of Nature and not against them.” His aim was to build an immensely strong, round-hulled ship that could survive in the frozen seas by being squeezed up and out of the ice rather than being caught and crushed by it. During the summer, he would sail the ship as far north as he could off the eastern coast of Siberia where the Jeanette had perished, let it be frozen into the ice and then carried along across the Arctic until it was close to the North Pole. A small party would travel to the pole by dogsled and ski—at that time a revolutionary means of travel in the Arctic. His goal was both to gather new scientific information about the interior of the Arctic and to win fame by being first to the pole.

  To turn this idea into reality, Nansen found a partner in the naval architect Colin Archer, a Norwegian of Scottish descent. Others were not convinced that the journey was feasible or that the flow of ice even existed. In the United States, reports that items from the Jeanette had been found in Greenland were dismissed as a hoax, and Nansen’s plans as madness. “The history of Arctic expeditions contains enough stupidity not to also have to bear the burden of Dr. Nansen’s illogical plan for self-destruction,” wrote Adolphus Greely, one of America’s most famous Arctic explorers.1 “Records of unquestioned accuracy demonstrate that no system of currents exists in the North Polar Ocean,” William Dall of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., told newspapermen.2

  Nansen was not to be discouraged. He froze the Fram into the ice off the New Siberian Islands in September 1893, and let it drift across the Arctic for three years in a meandering track while he collected a huge store of new scientific observations. The journey was not easy. Weeks when the Fram drifted north were followed by those when it headed in the other direction. Nansen’s confidence sometimes collapsed. “My theories, my castle, where I self-assuredly rose above all foolish objections, have come crashing down like a pack of cards…. There is no northbound current,” he wrote in his diary when the ship was heading in the wrong direction.3 But the Fram behaved as designed. As the ice closed in, the ship creaked and moaned and then with a bang, “jumped into the air.”4

  When the Fram neared the pole, Nansen and a companion left on skis with dog teams. He was right that this was the fastest way to travel across the ice, but it was still not fast enough. The two men were forced to turn back 230 miles from the pole and plod over the ice until they reached the then unmapped islands of Franz Josef Land, more than 500 miles from the mainland. They lived on polar bear and walrus through the winter and had the good fortune to run into another Arctic expedition and a ship home in the spring. Nansen hadn’t reached the pole, but he had traveled farther north than anyone else. Meanwhile, the Fram had continued its travels and emerged with its crew safe off Spitsbergen. Despite the ridicule that his ideas had received, the Arctic ice was flowing just as Nansen had predicted.

  In September 2006, a French yacht, the Tara, set off to repeat Nansen’s voyage. The Tara’s wide, curving line copied the essence of the Fram’s unique coconut-shell design, but with a length of 118 feet and a beam of 33 feet was just a little smaller. Of course, the Tara was built not of wood but of aluminum, and was insulated with foam rubber rather than the reindeer hair favored by Nansen. And the Tara could contact base by satellite phone, while nothing was heard from the Fram for more than three years. The yacht went into the ice off the same New Siberian Islands and passed even closer to the pole than the Fram. Remarkably, the Tara completed the Fram’s three-year voyage in just sixteen months, exiting the ice off Greenland in January 2008. The great ice stream that Nansen discovered is still flowing but at double the speed of a century ago (an observation to which we will return).

  Nansen’s discovery of the ice stream on the eastern side of the Arctic was the first step in seeing the true, dynamic nature of the “frozen North,” and would be his last big expedition. The Fram was to continue, taking another Norwegian polar hero, Roald Amundsen, to Antarctica, where he won the race to be first to the South Pole in 1911. Nansen went in a different direction and became a great diplomat.5 He received the Nobel Peace Prize for his work saving the lives of thousands of refugees and prisoners in the aftermath of the First World War.

  The next step, traveling even deeper inside the Arctic, had to wait for another generation of polar scientists. They took a different approach, reasoning that there was no need for a ship like the Fram when they could use the ice itself as a ship. Living aboard ice floe “drift camps” set up by daring pilots who would fly them deep into the Arctic in small ski-equipped planes, they would travel where the ice took them.

  The first to set out on a long, uncontrollable drift was the Soviet scientist Ivan Papanin, twice honored as a “hero of the Soviet Union.” In May 1937, Papanin and three colleagues landed at the North Pole, the first time that planes had touched down anywhere so far out into the Arctic. The four men, equipped with tents, food, a hand winch to sound the ocean bottom, a chess set, a dog called Jolly to warn of polar bears, a portrait of Stalin, and a wireless transmitter, set up their camp. Then they went where the ice took them, regularly broadcasting radio reports and eulogies to their great leader Stalin.6 The whole world followed their adventures.

  After six months of wandering in the central Arctic, “North Pole 1,” as the ice camp was christened, began to head straight for the gap between Greenland and Spitsbergen and its speed picked up. “We continue to drift at a devilishly fast rate southward,” Papanin wrote in his diary as the floe began to travel thirty miles a day. A few weeks later they grew alarmed that they were being driven at speed toward the shore and that their voyage might end “with a final smash against the coastal cliffs” of Greenland’s northeast cape. Instead they traveled on farther south as the ice melted under their feet. An inflatable rubber boat became essential to move around as lakes formed on the floe. Planes could no longer land anywhere nearby. “We live as if on a powder keg,” wrote Papanin, “for any moment an ice jam may occur, the ice floe crack apart and capsize, and draw us down with it to the depths.” A rescue ship arrived just in time. The camp had been invaded by what Papanin called “black snakes.” Sudden dark cracks in the ice would appear, spread horribly quickly, cut under tents and widen into fissures. They had been on the floe for 274 days.7

  Many more Russian scientists came forward, willing to risk months or even years out on the ice. On the U.S. side, too, American scientists took to the ice. They set up camps on giant ice islands, ten to fifteen miles long, which had broken free from Ellesmere Island’s ice shelves and traveled around the Arctic in style. The most famous of them, T3, wandered the Arctic from 1952 to 1974. Overall, in sheer numbers, the Soviets led the way. By the beginning of the 1990s, eighty-eight Soviet camps had clocked 105,000 miles of meandering Arctic travel at an average speed of almost four miles a day. With 44,000 depth soundings and vast numbers of weather and ocean measurements, they had transformed knowledge of the Arctic.8

  Not all the work was innocent science. Both sides used ice floes to spy on the other. The United States wanted to move closer to the sites where the Soviet Union was testing huge nuclear bombs, and they especially wanted to test equipment for detecting submarines beneath the ice. The Soviets tried building a radar station out on the ice to warn of U.S. attacks. And in 1958, a Soviet nuclear bomber was spotted on an ice runway in the middle of the Arctic.9 Whether spies or scientists, they left behind records of the tracks of their slow journeys; when added up they provide a remarkable and unexpected picture
of the movement of the ice around the Arctic, one that will help us to understand why the ice is disappearing now.

  The picture leaps from the page if we just draw the tracks of the Fram and the Tara onto a map of the Arctic, along with one of the Russian North Pole series (NP6) and America’s famous T3 island’s wanderings. The Fram, Tara, and NP6 drift deep within the Arctic almost parallel to the Siberian coast, travel past Greenland and on out into the Atlantic. The enormous American ice island, T3, started closer to the North American side of the pole and simply traveled in huge circles round and round the Arctic.

  The voyages chart two great streams: the Transpolar Drift Stream, running off the coast of Siberia down to Greenland, which the Fram followed, and the Beaufort Gyre, a slowly moving circular swirl of water some 1,250 miles across, that trapped T3. The ice island’s first spin around the outer part of the gyre took almost ten years, but the second, when it had been drawn farther toward the center of this giant whirlpool, took just five years. After that, the island was flung out of the gyre and headed off toward Ellesmere Island.

  Two important consequences follow. Ice in the Beaufort Gyre will have a good chance, like the ice island T3, of circling the Arctic for years. Each summer, as temperatures rise, some of the ice will melt away, but when the winter freeze returns, the surviving ice will thicken and grow. That ice will have a better chance of passing through the next melt season to grow yet again until it has become “multiyear” ice, on average a little over nine feet thick with a foot of ice sticking up above the surface of the water. This is the ice that ships fear most. As it passes through a succession of winters, the ice grows ever stronger and harder. The endlessly circling Beaufort Gyre is a giant factory that builds thick, old ice.