Late summer off the coast of Kulusuk Island, south-east Greenland, and a single iceberg sweats in the channel. The berg is vast, perhaps 100 feet from sea to summit, shaped like a mainsail with a rounded tip. It glistens white as wet wax. Its submerged bulk shows as a bottle-green aura.
Dark blue of the channel, sharp blue of the cloudless sky. Daytime moon above a shield-shaped mountain. On the far side of the channel, a glacier runs down to the water, six miles or so distant, the cliff of the calving face faintly visible.
It’s low tide. On the foreshore of the village bay a man is leaning over something. He is straight-legged, bent at the waist. His sleeves are rolled up and his arms are red to the elbow. He wears a luminous yellow hi-vis jacket and hose-down clothes. The carcass of a porpoise lies slack across seaweedy rocks. He uses one hand to grip a flap of the black skin of the porpoise, then peels it back towards him, using the curved flensing knife in his other hand to cut away the meat as it comes. It looks like he is helping the porpoise out of a wetsuit.
A hundred or so wooden houses, each perched on an ice-smoothed table of gneiss. This is Kulusuk: more aviary than a village. The houses have brightly coloured outer panels of red, blue and yellow, with white dabs of anti-rust paint marking the nail-heads on the panels. Most are lashed down with steel cables for when the big winter storms come. The piteraq – the katabatic wind that rushes down off the ice cap – can reach hurricane force here, stripping the earth down to bare rock, leaving snowdrifts many feet high on the lee side of buildings, and shattering the shoreline sea ice.
There’s no wind today. The air is warm. Unprecedentedly warm. The berg sweats. The man flenses the porpoise. Down at the breakwater, stout pale objects float a foot or so down, swaying slightly in the swell, tethered by rope to the lower rungs of the iron ladder that’s bolted to the side of the breakwater. They’re the bodies of ringed seals, heads and front flippers cut off, tied up by their tails. The bodies have been there a while. They glow faint green. Guts trail amid the kelp. It’s been a poor month for the hunters of Kulusuk.
On the east side of the bay, in the lee of a crag, a slew of white wooden crosses drops down almost to the tideline. They’re different sizes. Some have wonky crossbars. From a distance it looks like a snow patch or a tiny glacier, running off the steeper ground. It’s a cemetery: one of the few sites in the village where enough topsoil has accumulated to bury a body.
The air is split by a high howl, and immediately thirty or forty other howls join it in chorus. The Kulusuk huskies are sitting and howling up at the sky, straight-backed, full-on wolf-howls. One is straining so hard the chain is taut as a bar, and the collar cuts at the howl, strangles it.
Four children and a husky pup are on a big trampoline, bouncing together, the children’s feet stretching the net down almost to the rock on which the trampoline is set. The husky spreads out his legs, braces himself. When the howling starts, the pup howls too and then the children howl as well, bouncing and howling together.
The berg sweats, the man flenses the porpoise, the children and the dogs bounce and howl.
~
All through that hot summer of 2016, before I went to Greenland, ice around the world was yielding up long-held secrets. The cryosphere was melting, and as it melted things that would have better stayed buried were coming to the surface.
On the Yamal peninsula, between the Kara Sea and the Gulf of Ob, 4,500 square miles of permafrost thawed. Cemeteries and animal burial grounds turned to slush. Reindeer corpses that had died of anthrax seventy years earlier were exposed to the air. Twenty-three people were infected, their skin blackened with lesions. One, a child, died. Russian veterinarians travelled the region dressed in white anti-contamination suits, vaccinating reindeer and their herders. Russian troops burned infected corpses in high-temperature pyres. Russian agriculturalists said that nothing would ever grow in the region again. Russian epidemiologists predicted other releases from Arctic burial sites and shallow graves: smallpox from victims who had perished in the late 1800s, giant viruses that had been long-dormant in the frozen bodies of mammoths.
On the Siachen glacier in the Karakoram, where Indian and Pakistani troops have been fighting a forgotten war since 1984, the retreating ice was revealing spent shells, ice axes, bullets, abandoned uniforms, vehicle tyres, radio sets – and slaughtered human bodies.
In north-west Greenland, a buried Cold War US military base and the toxic waste it contained began to rise. Camp Century was excavated by the US army engineering corps in 1959. They tunnelled into the ice cap and created a hidden town: a two-mile network of passageways housing laboratories, a shop, a hospital, a cinema, a chapel, and accommodation for 200 soldiers, all powered by the world’s first mobile nuclear generator. The base was abandoned in 1967. The departing soldiers took the reaction chamber of the nuclear generator with them. But they left the rest of the base’s infrastructure intact under the ice, including the biological, chemical and radioactive waste it contained, assuming – as the Pentagon closure reports declared – that it would be ‘preserved for eternity’ by the perpetual snowfalls of northern Greenland. It is all interred there still: some 200,000 litres of diesel fuel and unknown amounts of radioactive coolant and other pollutants, including PCBs. But as global temperatures have risen, so snowmelt is forecast to exceed snow accumulation in the region of Camp Century. In a dynamic I have seen so often in the underland that it has become a master trope, troublesome history thought long since entombed is emerging again.
The heat in the Arctic that summer was record-breaking, and so was the melt. New lows were set for the extent of Arctic sea-ice coverage. In Nuuk, the Greenlandic capital, the temperature hit 24°C. Meteorologists in Denmark rechecked their measurements. No mistake. For the past decade, the ice cap had been losing mass at twice the rate of the previous century. That year it also began melting a month earlier than usual, and the flow rates on the meltwater rivers of the glaciers reached exceptional speeds. The glaciologists checked their models. No mistake.
The meltwater ran hard from April onwards, pooling as blue and green lakes up on the ice cap, flowing as rivers on the glaciers. The increased amounts of meltwater on the ice cap helped shift the albedo: more sunshine was being absorbed, increasing the temperature, resulting in more melt, and therefore more absorption – a classic feedback loop which winter would only pause.
The calving faces of Greenland’s glaciers thundered. Icebergs sweated in Greenland’s fjords. Polar scientists brought forwards their predictions of when the Arctic Ocean might be fully ice-free. The highest rates of ice loss were in the north-west and the south-east of the country, where I was heading.
Uneasy stories circulated about disappearances in the ice. A Russian businessman had flown in on the east coast, wearing a camel-skin coat and carrying a briefcase, and never flown out again. A Japanese hiker had vanished in the west of the country, been missing for weeks. Local people spoke half-jokingly of the kisuwak, the wild creature that roamed the ice and snatched unwary travellers – an animate version of the glacial crevasse or the silky-thin sea ice.
In that region, at this time of history, it felt as if there were many places where one might fall right through the world’s surface.
~
‘The year has been exceptional,’ says Matt. ‘The sea ice was gone from the fjords by June. The snowfall over the winter was minimal. No one’s ever seen a year like it. Normally now the channel would be full of ice. A bear was seen swimming off Kulusuk two weeks ago. He must have been desperate. No one shot him.’
Matt has been in Kulusuk since he was nineteen. This is his sixteenth year. He and his partner Helen live in a blue-boarded house, just above the store and the school. They are both climbers, skiers and guides of formidable experience. They both carry themselves with the quiet competence of people whose abilities in wild country are exceptional, but who have no need to prove themselves unless circumstances demand it. Their commitment to the Greenlandic community they have joined is total, proved by the length of time Matt has lived in the village and by the profound friendships he has formed there.
‘Welcome to our home!’ Matt says when we arrive. The house is light and airy inside, with pale wood floors and white walls. A large-scale map of the region is framed on one wall. The coastline is coralline in its complexity. We sit and drink tea together. As well as Matt and Helen, there are three of us, all good friends: me; Bill Carslake, a composer and conductor, gentle and funny of manner, who I have known for twenty years; and another Helen, Helen Mort, who I have known for only a year or two but already regard as one of the most talented people of my acquaintance. Helen M, as we come to call her in the mountains, to distinguish her from the other Helen – is a rock climber, a runner, and a writer of rare abilities. She is modest to a fault, gifted to an alarming degree and consistently subtle in her engagement with people and with landscapes. Together we have come to climb the peaks of Greenland’s east coast, and to explore the underland of ice on this, the greatest glaciation outside Antarctica.
I go to the westerly window. It looks across the bay. A group of mothers and children are walking along the path by the sea. They are all wearing black head-nets cinched tight around their necks. They resemble a funeral procession, or a bee-keepers’ outing.
‘That’s a new sight in Kulusuk,’ says Matt, joining me at the window. ‘Twenty years ago there were no mosquitoes; now, as things have warmed, mosquitoes and gnats have arrived. Some people here wear nets over their heads throughout the summer months.’
Kulusuk is one of a handful of small settlements on the east coast of Greenland – fingernail-holds on the edges of this great island. Fewer than 3,000 people live on around 1,600 miles of coastline. Like many of the smaller Greenlandic settlements, Kulusuk is a society ruptured by transition – a previously part-nomadic subsistence-hunting culture, into which modernity has intruded in the forms of stasis and alcohol.
Helen introduces me to Geo, a powerfully built Greenlander in his early sixties.
‘Geo is my father,’ says Matt, ‘and I don’t mean that sentimentally. He has become my father and I have become his son.’
When Geo smiles, which he does often, the crease-lines around his eyes run almost from ear to ear. Geo is a very good hunter, renowned for his boat-handling and dog-handling skills, and legendary for his toughness.
‘Two winters ago, when a big storm blew in,’ says Matt, ‘the men were coming back from a hunting trip. The storm hit fast, and the snow was soon too thick for the dogs to pull the sleds. They had a high pass to get over to reach the village. People started to falter. It was a very serious situation. Geo went to the front of the team, put his head down, and broke trail for six hours. They got back safely.’
Geo lies Roman-style on the sofa in the main room, propped up on one arm, listening to the story being retold, smiling quietly. He, Matt and Helen communicate in a mixture of broken English and broken Greenlandic. The lack of a fluent shared language is no barrier to intimacy. They are physically at ease with one another. When they sit together, they often do so with an arm around each other’s shoulders, or legs pressed together.
As a boy, Geo was taken to Denmark for a year, part of the ill-conceived ‘Northern Danes’ project of the 1960s, which sought to assimilate Greenlanders to the Danish way of life by forcing Greenlandic children to live with Danish families.
‘Geo still shudders when you ask him about it,’ says Helen.
He has visited England twice, as a guest of Matt and Helen – and on each occasion he has acquired a tattoo, one on each forearm. He rolls up his sleeves to show me: ‘This one, Glasgow,’ he says, pointing at a cross on his right forearm. ‘This one, Kendal,’ pointing at an anchor on his left.
‘I took Geo out for a night on the town in Glasgow,’ says Matt. ‘We ended up in some pretty rough bars. Geo was a non-standard presence. In Filthy McNasty’s I could see folk spotting Geo across the bar, thinking about coming over to take the piss – then having another look and thinking much the better of it. They had correctly assumed that Geo was hard beyond even the measure of Glasgow on a Friday night.’
Geo picks up the guitar that stands in the corner of the room, and sings a quiet, melancholy East Greenlandic song.
There is a knock on the door. It is Siggy, an Icelandic sailor with whom Matt once voyaged north up the coast. Siggy has a beautiful new-old boat, wooden-hulled, which he has sailed here from Reykjavik. He wears green moleskin trousers and speaks calmly.
‘This is the year of no ice,’ says Siggy. ‘We can get anywhere, have been able to explore freely. We’ve been wearing T-shirts on deck.’
He shrugs.
‘The weather should not be like this, but life has been made more easy for us sailors.’
I think of the Old English term unweder – ‘unweather’ – used to mean weather so extreme that it seems to have come from another climate or time altogether. Greenland is experiencing unweather.
Geo stops playing, lays down the guitar, and speaks matter-of-factly. ‘In ten years, no snow, no ice, no hunting, no dogs.’
The sea ice is thinning to a degree that makes sailing easy for incomers, but hunting impossible for the native Greenlanders. The intricate stages of hardening through which sea ice annually cycles – frazil, grease, nilas, grey – are no longer being fulfilled in many places, for the temperature of the seawater is spiking above the key freeze-point of 28.6°F. When the men cannot travel safely over the sea ice, hunting becomes difficult. Seals haul out further offshore. Bears die of starvation rather than bullets. Inlets and fjords are dangerous to cross. Snowmobiles run the risk of plunging through thin ice, carrying their drivers with them. Hunting – one of the few aspects of traditional Greenlandic life that survived settlement – is under threat of erasure, this time by global temperature change.
Ice has a social life. Its changeability shapes the culture, language and stories of those who live near it. In Kulusuk, the consequences of recent changes are widely apparent. The inhabitants of this village are part of the precariat of a volatile, fast-warping planet. The melting of the ice, together with forced settlement and other factors, has had severe effects upon the mental and physical health of native Greenlanders, causing rates of depression, alcoholism, obesity and suicide to rise, especially in small communities. ‘The loss of that landscape of ice,’ writes Andrew Solomon, studying depression rates in Greenland, ‘is not merely an environmental catastrophe, but also a cultural one.’ The Inuktitut of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic have begun to use a word that refers at once to the changes in the weather, the changes in the ice, and the consequent changes in the people themselves. The word is uggianaqtuq – meaning ‘to behave strangely, unpredictably’. Yet if any population knows what it is like to live with the unpredictability of ice it is surely the Inuit, who have been adapting to its shifts for millennia.
Later that day Helen introduces me to Frederick and Christina, two of the pillars of the Kulusuk community. Christina is Kulusuk born and bred, and she is the village’s schoolteacher. Frederick is from West Greenland, but moved to Kulusuk with Christina years previously. They are both deeply cultured and self-aware; disinclined to any kind of romanticism, with a strong sense of the fine margins of tolerance for life here, but also proud of the resilience proved by Kulusuk’s continued existence.
‘Climate change is felt in our lives here strongly,’ says Frederick. ‘New species have come here, old ones have gone. There is thunder and lightning sometimes in autumn. The sea ice used to be so deep always’ – he gestures from the floor to the ceiling of the house, a distance of eight or nine feet – ‘but each year it is thinner and this spring it was this thin’ – he places his hands a forearm’s length apart – ‘and too much danger for the dog-sledding. It is harder to hunt. We can travel less far.’
He shrugs. ‘It is a change to our spirit, as well as our lives.’ Christina looks on, listens. She disappears into a side room, and emerges holding a gaudily painted wooden canoe, two feet or so long, in which stand in single file a zebra, a lion, a tiger and a giraffe.
‘Our son made this at school,’ says Christina. ‘He called it Noah’s Kayak, because it is saving the animals from the flood of global warming.’
There are no humans on board the kayak.
The melt is seen by some as an opportunity rather than a loss. Foreign investors have gathered as the ice has retreated, and access to Greenland’s fabulous mineral wealth has become easier. ‘There’ll be a lot of billionaires made by what the melt reveals,’ a geologist told me before I came to Greenland. ‘Mining’s coming to Greenland soon, and big style – in a country that’s never before had anything much deeper than a quarry.’
The last few years have seen the granting of more than fifty mining licences in Greenland, allowing exploratory mining for gold, rubies, diamonds, nickel and copper, among other minerals. And on the southern tip of Greenland, close to a small town with high unemployment called Narsaq, lies one of the world’s largest uranium deposits. Niels Bohr, the Nobel Prize-winning atomic physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, visited Narsaq in 1957, shortly after the discovery of the deposit. A joint Chinese-Australian mining project now proposes to establish an open-pit mine behind Narsaq, in order to acquire not only uranium but also the rare earth minerals used in wind turbines, mobile phones, hybrid cars and lasers.
That evening in Kulusuk a lurid sunset brews above the village, lilac and orange backlighting a sawtooth ridge of peaks, with incandescent reefs of ribbed clouds. It is alpenglow of a kind – but of an incredible wattage.
‘It’s the ice cap that makes sunsets like this,’ Matt explains. ‘It’s probably the biggest mirror in the world: hundreds of thousands of square miles of ice reflecting up the sun as it dips towards the horizon.’
We all walk together up a short switchback path to the top of the rock outcrop around which the village was built. I go to the western edge of the outcrop for a better view of the sunset in the fjord – and stop.
The little bay beneath me is the village’s rubbish tip. Thousands of bin bags, a slew of plastic crates, cracked kayaks, melamine cupboards and white fridges have all been heaved over the cliff edge here to make the midden. It looks, in the dusk, like a tongue of ice flowing down towards the waterline: a glacier in advance, not retreat.
~
Ice has a memory. It remembers in detail and it remembers for a million years or more.
Ice remembers forest fires and rising seas. Ice remembers the chemical composition of the air around the start of the last Ice Age, 110,000 years ago. It remembers how many days of sunshine fell upon it in a summer 50,000 years ago. It remembers the temperature in the clouds at a moment of snowfall early in the Holocene. It remembers the explosions of Tambora in 1815, Laki in 1783, Mount St Helens in 1482 and Kumae in 1454. It remembers the smelting boom of the Romans, and it remembers the lethal quantities of lead that were present in petrol in the decades after the Second World War. It remembers and it tells – tells us that we live on a fickle planet, capable of swift shifts and rapid reversals.
Ice has a memory and the colour of this memory is blue.
High on the ice cap, snow falls and settles in soft layers known as firn. As the firn forms, air is trapped between snowflakes, and so too are dust and other particles. More snow falls, settling upon the existing layers of firn, starting to seal the air within them. More snow falls, and still more. The weight of snow begins to build up above the original layer, compressing it, changing the structure of the snow. The intricate geometries of the flakes begin to collapse. Under pressure, snow starts to sinter into ice. As ice crystals form, the trapped air gets squeezed together into tiny bubbles. This burial is a form of preservation. Each of those air bubbles is a museum, a silver reliquary in which is kept a record of the atmosphere at the time the snow first fell. Initially, the bubbles form as spheres. As the ice moves deeper down, and the pressure builds on it, those bubbles are squeezed into long rods or flattened discs or cursive loops.
The colour of deep ice is blue, a blue unlike any other in the world – the blue of time.
The blue of time is glimpsed in the depths of crevasses.
The blue of time is glimpsed at the calving faces of glaciers, where bergs of 100,000-year-old ice surge to the surface of fjords from far below the water level.
The blue of time is so beautiful that it pulls body and mind towards it.
Ice is a recording medium and a storage medium. It collects and keeps data for millennia. Unlike our hard disks and terrabyte blocks, which are quickly updated or become outdated, ice has been consistent in its technology over millions of years. Once you know how to read its archive, it is legible almost as far back – as far down – as the ice goes. Trapped air bubbles preserve details of atmospheric composition. The isotopic content of water molecules in the snow records temperature. Impurities in the snow – sulphuric acid, hydrogen peroxide – indicate past volcanic eruptions, pollution levels, biomass burning, or the extent of sea ice and its proximity. Hydrogen peroxide levels show how much sunlight fell upon the snow. To imagine ice as a ‘medium’ in this sense might also be to imagine it as a ‘medium’ in the supernatural sense: a presence permitting communication with the dead and the buried, across gulfs of deep time, through which one might hear distant messages from the Pleistocene.
Ice has an exceptional memory – but it also suffers from memory loss.
The weight on 2,000-year-old ice can reach half-a-ton per square inch. The air in this ice has been so compressed that cores brought up by deep drilling will fracture and snap as the air expands. This is why glaciers sound like shooting ranges. This is why if you were to drop a piece of very old blue ice in a glass of water or whisky, it might shatter the glass.
Deeper still – in ice aged between 8,000 and 12,000 years – the pressure becomes so great that air bubbles can no longer survive as vacancies within the structure of the ice. They vanish as visible forms, instead combining with the ice to form an ice-air mixture called clathrate. Clathrate is harder to read as a medium, and the messages it holds are fainter, more encrypted.
In mile-deep ice, individual layers can only just be made out as ‘greyish ghostly bands . . . visible in the focused beam of a fibre-optic lamp’. And because ice flows – because it continues to flow even when under immense pressures – it distorts its record, its layers folding and sliding, such that sequence can be almost impossible to discern.
At the deepest points of the Greenland and Antarctic ice cap, where the ice is miles deep and hundreds of thousands of years old, the weight is so great that it depresses the rock beneath it into the Earth’s crust. At that depth, the compressed ice acts like a blanket, trapping the geothermal heat emanating from the bedrock. That deepest ice absorbs some of that heat, and melts slowly into water. This is why there are freshwater lakes sunk miles below the Antarctic ice cap – 500 or more of these subglacial reservoirs, showing up as spectral dashed outlines on maps of the region, unexposed for millions of years, as alien as the ice-covered oceans thought to exist on Saturn’s moon, Enceladus.
As a human mind might, late in life, struggle to remember its earliest moments – buried as they are beneath an accumulation of subsequent memories – so the oldest memory of ice is harder to retrieve, and more vulnerable to loss.
~
We load the boat chain-style on a rising tide, slipping on the kelpy rocks as we heave blue bear-proof barrels, weapons and packs along the line.
‘Watch where you put things down,’ says Helen. ‘There’s seal guts and cod heads and all sorts smeared on the rocks here.’
It takes half an hour to load and check. Then Geo guns the Yamaha 1200, spins the boat around from the dock, and we roar out across the channel, aiming for where the glacier called Apusiajik – ‘the Little Ice’ – meets the sea.
There is a high cry – haunting, falling away and then repeating, silver-gold in colour – that sets my neck tingling.
A red-throated diver, no, three red-throated divers, flying in formation northwards over the channel, the same direction as us. Big birds, heavy-set in the body but graceful in their lines, smooth in silhouette as if poured from water rather than made of feathers. I haven’t heard the cry of a diver for a decade, since seeing one hunt on a loch in the shadow of Suilven in the far north-west of Scotland, and before that another decade earlier, on a forested lake in British Columbia.
‘Truly a bird of the north,’ says Matt.
We can hear the divers calling long after they are lost to sight.
Buck of the boat off the wave-chop. Salt spray, air cold and fast on the face. Sharp peaks rising in all directions. Fjords cutting away. A sense beginning to build in me of the scale of this landscape, beyond anything I have ever experienced or imagined: the vastness of the coastline, and always somewhere behind it to the west the ice cap itself, so huge it annihilates all features other than itself, all colours other than white and blue. I can feel a buzzing in my stomach, the surging excitement of a big journey starting. We will not see Kulusuk again for weeks.
The lower mountains are scabbed with snow. The exposed rock is golden, brown, red, white: warm marbled colours. It is some of the oldest surface rock in the world, and I know that it makes a torn-page match with the gneiss of the Outer Hebrides. Hundreds of millions of years ago, these two coastlines were united. A deep time kinship existed between this wildly unfamiliar region, and those Scottish islands in which I felt at home.
It is six miles across the channel from Kulusuk to Apusiajik, but it looks as if we could swim it. The glacier itself is five miles long, but it looks as if we could wander up it in a couple of hours with hands in pockets. We would die if we tried either.
The foreshortening illusion is powerful, born of the air’s pristine clarity, and it is the first of countless misprisions of scale I will experience in Greenland. This is, I will learn, a landscape that plays tricks on the eye, dupes perception, induces forms of clarity that are in fact forms of delusion. Rock and ice walls reflect and redirect sound misleadingly: events occurring ahead of us seem to issue from behind. There are no usual units to which the eye has become accustomed: no buildings, no cars, no distant people. The terrain is built out of a few elements – rock, ice, water – that echo their own forms up and down the orders of magnitude.
Geo steers expertly, using one hand, past a group of black rock islands near the middle of the channel.
‘There were orca around here a few days ago,’ says Matt. ‘And sei whales. We heard them before we saw them: the hooing of their blowholes.’
As we near Apusiajik, the water thickens with blue-white pebbles and boulders of ice that thunk on the hull. Geo steers an elegant course, but eventually the ice is too thick to avoid, and so he lowers speed and noses through it, thud, thunk, thump, thud, closing in on the snout of the glacier.
Apusiajik tumbles into the water. The tideline calving face is perhaps 2,500 feet in length, and pale blue at the points of freshest calving. Above the face the ice rolls over a drop, and a central bulge of rock is visible, splitting the roll-over, streaked black with lines of meltwater.
‘That’s new,’ says Matt. ‘A couple of years ago that wasn’t there – it was pure ice.’
I will remember that island of fresh rock much later, when we take as our sleeping place another such ice-island, also recently revealed by the melt, far up a much bigger glacier.
Geo slows the boat, then pulls the engine back to an idle. We float along parallel to the face, keeping 1,500 feet or so distant, to give us time to get clear if a big calving happens. Geo points at the glacier, then turns back towards Kulusuk and a peninsula of bare rock that pushes out from the margin of the glacier, into the channel.
‘Fifty years ago, when I was a boy,’ he says, indicating the peninsula in the channel, ‘ice was there.’
Then he points to an island yet further out in the channel.
‘My father’s time, ice was there.’
He points back to Kulusuk, then holds his hands to his ears, bunches his fingertips and flicks them open, miming an explosion.
‘Before, in Kulusuk, we hear glacier boom! Now, no sound.’
In the course of Geo’s life, the face of the Apusiajik glacier has retreated so far back and around that the noises of its calvings are no longer audible in the village. Melt has changed the soundscape of everyday life. The glacier is experienced as a silence.
~
We unload the boat chain-style on a falling tide, heaving the gear onto a rock-sand beach of white quartz and black mica. The tide has left little bergs stranded on the sand, along the line of the bay. They shine blue-silver in the late light. There is something exhausted about them. Other small bergs lap slowly towards land, or mill around in the offshore currents.
We hump the gear for about 900 feet, making four return trips, through a shallow boulder valley and onto a flattened plain of mossy topsoil and boulders, along which a stream runs on a gradual incline to the sea.
The plain is the path of a vanished glacier: moraines to seaward indicate the former extent of the glaciation. We are making camp in ghost ice.
I think of the accounts I have read of how small craft hugging the Greenland coastline will sometimes find their GPS navigation devices screaming alarm, warning of collision. The coordinates of the former extent of glaciers have been inputted into the mapping, but the retreat rate has been so fast that they are sailing into and through the digital phantom left behind by the ice.
The air around our tents is filled with white specks I cannot identify, which are not snow and are not dust, so that the atmosphere seems electrified, scintillating.
Two grey gulls fly overhead, cranking their wings against the rising easterly. A raven circles, croaking, then glides down to land on the erratic against which we have piled our gear. It folds its glossy wings, shakes itself down, and watches us with a cocked head, curiously.
We pitch the tents in a line, side to side, six feet separating each of them. Then we set to work on establishing a bear perimeter. Polar bears can smell a food source from up to twenty miles away. If you see a bear, you can be sure the bear has known of you for far longer, and has come to investigate. None of us wants to see a bear, for our sake and its sake. We have two weapons with us: massive-bore rifles that fire adapted shotgun shells containing single slugs rather than pellets. Each person carries flares at all times.
Around the camp we start to set a rectangular boundary of tripwires which, if triggered, fire blank cartridges downwards into the earth, scaring away an inquisitive bear. We string the wires at a height of about two feet, so that they won’t be snagged by any white foxes coming to scavenge.
It takes two hours to set camp to Matt’s satisfaction. We sing as we work. Bill is a professional singer, blessed with a resonant bass voice. I warble happily. The sun lowers to the west. Two bergs move from left to right across the bay.
In a landscape as vast as the Arctic, the eye is surprised by details. Though the topsoil around the camp is only a few inches deep, it supports a diversity of mosses and plants. Club moss flourishes in the lee of boulders, and the rocks are painted with lichens: blotches of orange Xanthoria parietina, the intricate cartography of map lichens, and a crisp lettuce-like lichen I cannot name – acid green in colour, hard to the touch.
Everywhere are the emerald leaves of the tiny dwarf willow. I pick a leaf, half the size of my little fingernail, and hold it to the sun. It shines green, and I can see the delicate red vein-work that marks it. I know this Salix only from the Cairngorms, Britain’s equivalent of the Arctic, where it grows sparsely on the highest parts of the plateau. Here it covers the ground, creeping sideways, its pitch-black branches a few millimetres thick at most.
We have pitched our tents on top of a forest, I realize. We are canopy dwellers.
I recall a joke I heard in Reykjavik. Question: ‘How do you find your way out of a forest in Iceland?’ Answer: ‘Stand up.’
Now and then a muffled boom moves through the landscape, arriving softly but forcefully as a push on the eardrums, a vibration in the flesh. It is the sound of calving ice, made by a slab of glacier crashing into the water from the Apusiajik face, round the mountain from us. Sound is a blow delivered by air, through the ear, on the brain and the blood, and transmitted to the soul . . .
Big bergs make slow journeys across the bay: a stricken U-boat, a cruise liner, the Scottie dog from a Monopoly set, white and clean, nodding its way over the course of the evening.
‘Sun dogs!’ calls Helen, pointing upwards with a smile. Glittering rainbow arcs stand at a convex to the curve of the sun itself.
Ice in the inlet, ice in the sky. Ice in the bay. Ice in the air above us. Sounds of ice from the glacier. We are sleeping where ice had once been.
That night the Northern Lights appear for the first time. A scarf of radar-green flutters in the sky. The mountains shoot jade searchlights into space.
We lie on our backs in the cold black air and watch the show, amazed into silence.
~
A week before leaving for Greenland, I go to the British Antarctic Survey on the outskirts of Cambridge to see a man called Robert Mulvaney. Mulvaney is an ice-core scientist, a palaeoclimatologist and glaciologist. He has spent his career studying the underland of ice: reading its memory for what it tells him about past climate and environment – and what it might foreknow about climate changes to come.
Mulvaney has worked for twenty drilling seasons in Antarctica and five in Greenland. In the field he grows a big beard and moustache; in the office he is clean-shaven. He shakes my hand hard, leads me briskly through the corridors of BAS, speaks quickly.
‘I may seem like a relaxed person,’ he says. ‘I’m not. Not at all.’
He doesn’t seem like a relaxed person. He seems like an impressive person who has spent most of a lifetime performing challenging tasks under conditions in which efficiency of effort is essential.
As a young man Mulvaney was a hard climber, and a hard caver too. I tell him about the Timavo, and about descending the Abyss of Trebiciano with Sergio puffing on his briarwood pipe.
‘Ah, you were in the karst, then. I did some fairly far-out caving near there. Exploratory stuff in Yugoslavia, floating into wet systems on rafts, that kind of thing. I always preferred Yorkshire limestone, though. Drier.’ He looks briefly nostalgic for life under the earth.
He takes me to his study, points me to a seat. ‘I gave up serious caving and climbing when I’d lost too many friends to death and injury,’ he says. ‘So I became a sailor instead.’
Pinned on the noticeboard above his desk is a tattered pennant in Jamaican black, gold and green.
‘I sewed that myself,’ he says with unguarded pride, ‘as we approached land at the end of my first Atlantic crossing.’
Next to it is a yellowed photograph of his wife and two daughters, waving at the camera out of the cockpit of a drastically tilted yacht, beached on wet mud. It’s unclear if they are waving in greeting or distress.
‘We’d run aground on a mud pinnacle somewhere off Essex,’ Mulvaney says. ‘If you haven’t grounded when sailing the east coast, then you haven’t sailed the east coast.’
Propped behind his computer is a handwritten postcard-sized sign in faded felt-tip, written in block capitals by a childish hand. It reads:
ROB MULVANEY GONE TO THE ANTARCTIC
Whereas Merlin and his fellow mycologists look down into the ‘black box’ of soil, Mulvaney and his fellow palaeoclimatologists look down into the ‘white box’ of ice. They use ice-penetrating phase-sensitive radar, which bounces off reflective horizons, to build up detailed images showing the internal layering and folding of deep ice. They use sonar: detonating explosions and mapping the echo returns. And they use core-drilling – the technique pioneered up in Camp Century by American scientists, while their military peers covertly tunnelled out the ice missile base.
Mulvaney has worked with core from its early days as a technology, and he has personally designed and engineered several of the standard drill types used in British climate science.
‘For shallow drilling, down to twenty metres or so – that’s about 200 years back in time – it’s done by hand,’ he says. ‘Quick work. You stop off, set up, twist the drill down by hand. Any deeper than that and you have to move to electro-mechanical drilling: an engine-driven drill that’s dropped down and then pulled up again by winch.’
He shows me a hand drill. It is a strikingly analogue tool. A 1.5-metre sleeve of metal, an internal drill bit with tool-steel teeth, a screw-form outer that guides the ice chippings up between the bit and the sleeve, and pop-out fins that prevent the torquing of the barrel when the drill is in action, but retract when it is being drawn back to the surface.
The drill is lowered, cuts its core, is retrieved, the core is disgorged, the drill is lowered again. Lower, bite, drill, raise, disgorge; lower, bite, drill, raise, disgorge. Repeat some 700 times to bore a kilometre of ice.
Ice-core science is industrial work, hard labour. Mulvaney once cored for ninety-two consecutive days, working up to fourteen hours a day in temperatures of -15°C. Ice-core scientists don’t tend to be the kind of people who bring workplace lawsuits because the office air conditioning is set too low for comfort.
Ice-core science also tests patience. Once, Mulvaney tells me, he lost a drill 1,000 metres down. That was it. There was nothing to be done. It couldn’t be fetched up.
‘It took a year to set up the drill site, a year to drill to a kilometre, a second to lose the drill, and another year to relocate the drilling site.’
When core is brought up it is cut into standard ‘bag’ lengths, which are then wrapped, tagged and made ready for transfer out to the cold stores of laboratories around the world. Back in the labs, each core section is cut along its length into six parts, according to a standard profile. One of these parts is known as the Forever Archive, kept in case everything else is lost. The others are used for research.
In Greenland, Mulvaney was involved with a project known as NEEM, the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling Project. NEEM’s aim was to drill and analyse core from the Eemian, the last interglacial period, which extended from around 130,000 to 115,000 years ago. The Eemian is of intense interest to scientists because it is thought to approximate to the climate processes and feedbacks that may be expected by the end of the twenty-first century. It has become, says Mulvaney, ‘a hot spot for predictive research’. Fourteen nations were involved in the project.
At the NEEM research site in north-west Greenland, a 25-foot-deep drill-pit was chainsawed out of the ice and covered to create an ‘ice cave’. Down in the ice cave, ambient temperatures were a balmy -20°C, and scientists were able to work twenty-four hours a day during the field season to extract and analyse the core. Over the course of two years they drilled more than two and a half kilometres to hit bedrock. The core they extracted was the first complete record of the Eemian.
What that core revealed was that intense surface melt of the Greenland ice cap had occurred during the warmth of the Eemian period. The meltwater had soaked into underlying snow and refrozen, leaving tell-tale long-term signatures in the ice layers. Uncannily for the researchers, similar conditions repeated themselves during the coring work in the summer of 2012 – temperatures rose, rain fell, and the meltwater formed refrozen layers: Eemian echoes in the Anthropocene.
Mulvaney reaches behind his computer and picks up two small objects.
‘Hold out your hand.’
He drops one of the objects into my palm. It is a small, heavy grey fang. I recognize it as the tooth of a coring drill bit. The cutting edge of the tooth is deformed, like a bullet after impact.
‘That’s one of the drill teeth that hit bedrock in Antarctica,’ says Mulvaney proudly. ‘Nine hundred and fifty metres down below Berkner Island.’
It looks good for nothing but spreading butter now.
‘Is hitting bedrock an ice-core scientist’s hallelujah moment?’ I ask. ‘Like a tycoon striking oil?’
‘Oh yes, there’s nothing better. Here, look at this, too.’
He hands me the other object, a small transparent plastic phial. I hold it up to the light. It contains a pinch of blond sand.
‘These are the grains that came up in the last core before we hit bedrock on Berkner,’ he said. ‘This is the basal sediment. If you look at these under magnification, you’ll see that they’re rounded grains: they’re aeolian – wind-blown quartz fragments, around 0.2 milli-metres in diameter, smoothed and frosted.
‘Show these to any geologist, and they’ll tell you they were formed in desert-like conditions, and got rounded off by the wind. So what we know from these is that, at some point, the land that now lies a kilometre below the ice was once a Sahara.’
‘They’re beautiful,’ I say. ‘Desert diamonds from the bottom of the world.’
‘I can tell you’re not a scientist,’ he says.
Mulvaney takes me to the cold store. We open a heavy door and push through butcher’s-shop hanging strips of heavy plastic.
The cold of the cold store is a killing cold, a knives-under-the-skin cold, a needles-in-the-eyes cold. It is so cold the ink in my pen freezes in under a minute. Mulvaney doesn’t seem to notice. He wears a shirt with the sleeves rolled up. I am wearing three layers and wonder how long I can survive.
Mulvaney creaks the lid off a white polystyrene chest. It is filled with core sections in marked transparent bags. He rummages, then picks out a bag. Written on the side in black marker is ‘140,000 YA’.
‘This one’s from well before the last interglacial,’ he says, giving it to me. I cradle it like a newborn baby, though it is very old, then I place it gently on a work surface, as far from an edge as possible.
He slides something from a plastic sleeve and passes it to me. It is a disc of ice a few millimetres thick that has been cut from the end of a section of core.
‘That’s young ice,’ Mulvaney says. ‘Baby ice. Maybe 10,000 years old, no more. Hold it up to the light.’
I lift it to the strip-light. It is instantly, witchily beautiful: silver and translucent, and seething within it like stars are scores of gleaming ice bubbles.
‘Those are where the real gold is stored,’ Mulvaney says. ‘Each bubble is a museum.’
I remember Browne’s use of the word ‘conservatorie’ in Urne-Burialle, to mean a space where something is conserved. Ice has long been one of our most brilliant ‘conservatories’: ice houses kept peaches and strawberries fresh long before the invention of fridges, chilled shipping containers move luxury perishables around the world, glaciers curate the bodies of the long dead, and in cryogenic facilities, billionaires with Lazarus delusions prepare the technology necessary to freeze their brains after death. In all of these scenarios, ice serves as a substance that slows change, and reaches far into both the future and the past.
‘The search is now on for the oldest ice,’ says Mulvaney. ‘We want to drill to at least a million years, maybe even a million and a half, in Antarctica.
‘It’s a ten-year project at least,’ he continues. ‘First we need to locate the perfect drilling spot for ultra-deep drilling – and there’s plenty of dispute over that. Strangely, the Japanese think it’s near their territory, whereas the Russians think it’s around Lake Vostock, where they have their base, and the British and Americans think it’s around Dome C, where they work!’
He speaks with pride of the achievements of ice-core science.
‘We helped get rid of lead in petrol. And we produced the CO2/temperature graphs that rang the bell on climate change. A few years ago, I thought my science was mostly coming to an end. What was there left to do now we’d called out global warming and cleaned up cars? Now I see a whole future opening up, in the search for the oldest ice. There’s a climate puzzle that no one has been able to solve. Around one million years ago, the climate flips its periodicity from a 40,000-year frequency to a 100,000-year frequency. Why? No one knows. And if we can’t explain that about the climate, how can we claim to know anything? If we can find and drill the oldest ice, well, we might just solve that puzzle. The secrets are in the depths.’
Before I leave I ask Mulvaney a last question, a version of the one I asked Christopher, the dark-matter physicist, far below the earth at Boulby.
‘Does working in spans of time as great as those you inhabit – 100,000 years, a million years – make the human present, our hours, our minutes, seem somehow brighter and more true, or does it crush them to irrelevance?’
‘Sometimes I hold a piece of rock and a piece of ice in my hand,’ he says. ‘Both have come from far under the surface, both carry messages from pre-human history. But in ten minutes’ time the ice will have vanished, while the rock will still be here.’
‘This is why ice is exciting to me and rock is not. This is why I’m a glaciologist and not a geologist. Ice still thrills me with its durability and its perishability, even after all these years and all this core.’
~
Crunch and rasp of broken glass, the ice snapping at our feet. A hot, high Greenlandic sun, its light more white than yellow. Bergs in the bays, but a cloudless sky. We move in line, roped, sharp, wired.
From the bay that morning we follow a stream uphill from camp and enter a wide valley slung between peaks. There we come upon the shores of a shallow lake, unforeseen, its far shore set tight in the shadows of the easterly peaks. It appears frozen, but on approaching I realize that what seems to be ice is in fact alluvium: silt scoured from rock by the glaciers whose melt-streams feed the lake, giving it its burnish. Our arrival sends up a flock of seagulls, wings clapping the water as they take off.
We move along the lake’s western shore, hopping from boulder to boulder, stepping on foot-hugging cushions of moss. The low-lying flora is vibrant: slews of pink fireweed, scarlet lichen beds, yellow willows.
An hour’s work brings us to a low pass above the lake, and there the sound of our footfalls changes as we pass onto fine gravel, beached in a gorge between boulders. We rest. Matt unslings the weapon he always carries across his back, rolls his shoulders to ease them out. The clear cries of geese can be heard, growing in strength as they near, echoing off the mountain cirque to our east.
‘That’s a perfect fourth!’ says Bill delightedly. He listens to landscapes like no one I have travelled with before, sees and hears them musically.
The geese pass high overhead, a dozen or so in a tight V. I take them to be pink-foots, and guess they are beginning their autumn migration south: probably to Iceland as their next stopover, and from there to England, where they might land honking on the fields around my parents’ house in Cumbria.
‘This valley is one of the great highways of this region,’ says Matt. ‘For creatures and also for people. It’s the main dog-sled route from Kulusuk up to the northern fjords. From the village you come across the bay on the sea ice – if it’s thick enough – make landfall not far from our camp, then up and over this low pass and down towards Igterajipima and on towards Sermiligaq. Geo and Helen and I have done it dozens of times. We ski it all the time, too, if we don’t need the dogs. It’s like a main road for us.’
I think of the aurora of the night before, the long green scarf that had shimmered down the length of the same valley. What was it that Barry Lopez called these old routes of movement and migration within the landscape? Corridors of breath. That was it – and the auroral light had seemed like a vivid, otherworldly breathing.
The gravel gorge is the route of a dry glacial stream, and it leads us directly to the snout of the glacier. This is the back of Apusiajik, the landward side, where it flows eastwards off the mountain that makes it. Where the tongue of the glacier dips to meet the rock, it is dirty with dust and debris. The tongue is hollowed where meltwater streams emerge from beneath it, leaving a brown carapace of hard ice arched above mouths of melt-tunnels that lead far back under the glacier.
We step up onto the carapace one after the other, stamping our feet, testing the ice for weakness. Each step booms, echoing through the underhang of the snout.
When you move onto a glacier, you enter its space. Sound changes, temperature drops, danger grows. The cold comes at you not in the form of fingers, probing, but as a cloud, an aura that surrounds you and settles in your core: You’re in my zone now.
So much of an iceberg is below the water’s surface; so much of a glacier is below the ice’s surface. As a river flows calmly over gentle ground, so does a glacier. Where it moves over steeper ground – a ‘roll-over’ – or turns a corner, the ice disrupts and cracks. Crevasses are the glacier’s equivalent of river rapids: expressions of turbulence in the flow.
Mountaineers speak of ‘dry’ zones and ‘wet’ zones on a glacier. In the wet parts of a glacier, the ice is covered by a layer of lying snow; in dry parts, there is no such covering. Wet zones are often easier to move on, but more perilous, as the dangers of crevasse and berg-schrund are concealed, and it is hard to predict the weight-bearing qualities of the snow. When travelling on a wet glacier, the experience is one of near-continuous menace. A sense builds and stays of what lies beneath you: the great blue depths under the lying snow, the ever-present underland of ice. You are conscious of taking each step with care.
The lower reaches of the glacier that day are dry, and so we can see down into the ice’s depths. There are little eye-shaped dolines, shimmering with cobalt meltwater. Fine fissures, only as wide as a finger or a palm or a forearm, narrow below us into blue. Crevasses yawn into chasms big enough to swallow a car or a house. Rounded pipes plunge vertically down, so straight and true it seems you might loose an arrow into one and hit bedrock.
Everywhere the underland of the glacier declares itself less as structure than as hue, a radiant blue brimming in every fissure or shaft. In Scandinavia, this blue light is sometimes known as the ‘blood’ of the glacier: an uncanny image for an uncanny phenomenon.
I stop to drink at a meltwater pool, dip my face to the ice, feel the blue blood-light soak into my eyes, my skull.
Our aim that day is a nameless peak, one of the summits whose upper corries breed the ice that gathers to become the Apusiajik glacier. The only map of the region, an unreliable 1:250,000, scarcely notices it. Its summit is a graceful curve of tawny rock rising from a glaciated cirque. It is very attractive indeed – and it is just one of the countless thousands of summits that rear from the ice and the fjords up and down this coast.
Far up the glacier we find a moulin, our first – and nothing to what we will find and descend many days later on the Knud Rasmussen glacier, far to the north of here. A moulin – the word is French for ‘mill’ – typically begins to form in a declivity on a glacier. Meltwater gathers in the declivity and, being slightly above freezing in temperature, warms the ice on which it pools. This increases the declivity, which in turn draws more water, which in turn begins to drill deeper as current and gravity come also to bear as boring forces. Under certain circumstances the meltwater will bore a hole into the glacier; grinding through the ice, sinking a shaft. Some moulins are skinny, only a few inches across. Some are hundreds of yards in diameter. Some reach only a few dozen feet into the ice before dispersing into side channels or sealing up completely. Some are up to a vertical mile in depth, and drop all the way to bedrock.
Moulins have become increasingly of interest to glaciologists and climate scientists for two reasons. Firstly because they are signs of rising surface melt-rates on glaciers and ice caps. And secondly because the deepest moulins duct water directly to the bed of the glacier. Because the meltwater is warmer than the ice, it transports thermal energy deep into the glaciers and melts more ice – so-called cryo-hydrologic warming. It is now also understood that the water can sometimes act as a lubricant, hastening the rate at which the ice slides over the rock beneath it, such that glaciers ride their own melting.
This quickened slide-speed can in turn quicken the rate at which glaciers calve into the sea, which in turn quickens the rate of sea-level rise. Across Greenland – as across Antarctica – glaciers are both shrinking and speeding up. The East Greenlandic glaciers presently have some of the fastest retreat rates and fastest flow rates of any on the planet. In warmer temperatures, meltwater lakes grow over days on the ice sheet, before abruptly draining through a self-created moulin in the course of a few hours.
A sub-science of speleo-glaciology has emerged, with scientists abseiling into moulins to retrieve information about temperature and flow rate, or sending data monitors into their depths. In north Greenland a NASA scientist named Alberto Behar launched a flotilla of yellow rubber ducks down a mile-long moulin to see if they would emerge at the tidal snout of the glacier: a low-tech way of mapping the interior of the ice, recalling the pine cones dropped into the karst rivers of Greece and Italy to fathom their courses.
The moulin we find that day is perhaps four feet wide, perfectly circular at the surface, and its blue shaft slides away at a diagonal into the depths of the ice. And it sings, the moulin sings, with a high, steady, neck-tingling cry. Air is moving within it and within the invisible system of melt-carved ice tunnels to which it connects, driven by water flow far down in the glacier’s tunnel system.
Bill tilts his head towards the moulin, then looks up in wonder.
‘That’s an A, a D and a C sharp,’ he says. ‘It’s the harmonic series of D!’
The moulin is a pipe of the vast aeolian organ of the glacier itself. I wish we could tune in, record its sounds, learn what it has to say.
‘Sea ice is incredibly musical too,’ says Helen. ‘In the winter, it really hisses and whistles – around the tideline, especially, it seems somehow to hum.’ I feel again the eerie sense of the ice as alive: the repertoire of its sounds, the variety of its forms, its colossal, shaping presence in this landscape.
As we approach the upper cirque of glacier, the ice becomes more contorted, the crevasses almost fully covered. We move over a soft white snowfield, aware we are walking above great depth. Everyone is vigilant, keeping the rope tight in case of sudden fall. I have again a sense of doors locking behind us; remember entering other intimidating labyrinths through which I have passed – the boulder ruckle in the Mendips, the catacombs in Paris, the descent of the Abyss of Trebiciano. Here, our footprints are our Ariadne’s thread: the thin winding line that will show us the safe route out at the end of the day.
Matt has wondered if the bergschrund might be impassable, or if we might need to abseil into it and climb back up its far side: a committing and time-consuming move. But when we reach it, hot from the work of the ascent, there is a single viable crossing place: a pinch-point where the sides close to within a few feet of one another, the gap spanned by a snow bridge.
We cross one by one, treading softly, the climbers before and beyond on the rope standing braced to take a fall if the bridge collapses.
It comes to my turn. I intend to cross quickly, but for reasons I cannot explain I pause on the bridge. I look down into the depths of the bergschrund to the right, and feel a bloom of fear in my chest, like a drop of ink spreading in water. Below the snow bridge the sides of the bergschrund fall like a blue gorge, more than 150 feet deep, big enough to eat a truck and its trailer, its upper cliff overhanging, its true depth lost in shadow.
‘Keep moving, Rob,’ calls Helen from behind me, urgently. ‘That’s no place to stop.’
I realize I have stopped, have been stopped by the void and the glimpse into the depths that it gives or demands.
Half an hour later we step from the high ice and onto the lion-coloured rock of the summit ridge. We take off crampons, make a kit depot, rope up. Matt still has the rifle slung over his back.
‘Surely you can leave that here and we can pick it up on the return?’ I say to him. ‘We’re hardly going to meet bears up here?’
‘Polar bears were encountered at 2,000 metres in 1913 on the first ascent of the highest peak in this region,’ says Matt.
‘Oh,’ I say.
We move together up the ridge. There is no need to pitch it.
Lodged in the lichen of the summit boulders I find the pale quill of a raven feather and a single, implausible shell, bleached pure white.
We sit quietly together in the sunshine, on the warm rocks of that peak, and look out over the wildest land I have ever seen. Ridge upon ridge of rock spires, range upon range of summits extending as far south and north as the eye could see.
Fjord after fjord, inlet after inlet, island chains, peaks.
Blue ocean endless to the east, on which icebergs glint.
Shorelines pricked with gleams of white: thousands of beached bergs.
Green-water estuaries marbled with brown alluvial outwash, furling into flowerish patterns.
Over the valley, at the same altitude as us, lies a high circular corrie. In it sits a green lake of water, circular in form and cupped by seracs. It has the appearance of a font in a church, and its still surface catches the clouds and sunlight that move across it.
‘Look behind you,’ says Helen M, pointing.
There, away to the west, running laterally between the ridges of the highest peaks, is the ice cap itself.
It appears as a floating band of white, impossibly elevated, nacreous and faint. This is the ‘Inner Ice’ and it extends unbroken to the Arctic Ocean on the west side and the north, running for tens of thousands of square miles. Trillions of tons of ice, up to 11,000 feet thick, so great in their mass that they have warped the bedrock beneath them down into the Earth’s crust by up to 1,180 feet below sea level. If melted at a stroke, the ice would reveal a vast concavity occupying the island’s centre: flattened mountains, crushed valleys.
The Inner Ice looks off-worldly. I feel a longing to get up onto it, to traverse it, to be in that floating white for thirty days.
‘Hey, there! Down in the bay, that dark shape in the water! Whale, I think.’ Matt’s eyes are incredibly sharp and so too is the air, the lensatic effect of its dustless clarity collapsing distance. We are two miles or more distant in space from the bay, but the whale can still be seen with the naked eye.
Except it isn’t one whale, it’s three. Three shadows in the green water of the bay, two large and one small, parents and a calf, feeding in the outflow where the glacial melt-river sweeps food into the sea. They move in the space between two big icebergs with turquoise underwater bulks.
We watch the whales through binoculars, breaching and disappearing, dark forms disclosing themselves then sinking back into invisibility.
A plume of gulls, a shake of silver, tracks their movements.
Far below us, half a day’s travel away, we can also see the orange specks of our tents, and from this altitude we can clearly see the terminal and lateral moraines marking the former reach of the ice that had once spilled down the valley, which would have submerged our campsite under white.
‘The Inuit don’t come to the summits. Why would they?’ says Matt. ‘Every now and then, Geo will use the Inuit word for “beautiful”, of a glacier or a place. But mostly this landscape is the venue of work, danger, and life for him. He loves the land too, though. I remember once he and I were in a boat near the calving face of a glacier, and he turned to me, nodded, smiled, and said, “I like to come hunting in this place in October.”’
Bergs slip along the sea’s horizon. The crumps of calvings reach us minutes after the events that have made them. A snow bunting flits among rocks to the north, startlingly fast.
We stay in that sunshine, on that marvellous summit, for an hour and an era. We don’t talk much. Up there, language seems impossible, impertinent, sliding stupidly off this landscape. Its size makes metaphor and simile seem preposterous. It is like nowhere I have ever been. It shucks story, leaves the usual forms of meaning-making derelict.
Glint of ice cap, breach of whales, silt swirls in outflows, sapphire veins of a crevasse field.
A powerful dissonance overtakes my mind, whereby everything seems both distant and proximate at the same time. It feels as if I could lean from that summit and press a finger into the crevasses, tip a drop of water from the serac pool, nudge a berg along the skyline with my fingertip. I realize how configured my sense of distance has become from living so much on the Internet, where everything is in reach and nothing is within touch.
The immensity and the vibrancy of the ice are beyond anything I have encountered before. Seen in deep time – viewed even in the relatively shallow time since the last glaciation – the notion of human dominance over the planet seems greedy, delusory.
Up there on that summit, at that moment, gazing from the Inner Ice to the berg-filled sea, the idea of the Anthropocene feels at best a conceit, at worst a perilous vanity. I recall the Inuit word I first heard in northern Canada: ilira, meaning ‘a sense of fear and awe’, and also carrying an implication of the landscape’s sentience with it. Yes. That is what I feel here. Ilira. It’s comforting.
But then I think of the melt that is happening, that has happened, that is hastening. The cryosphere across the globe is troublingly on the move, as carbon dioxide levels rise and the planet warms. The roaring moulins, the sweating bergs, the collapsing permafrost yielding its grim contents; Geo describing how the sound of his village has changed as the glacier has retreated; the camp we have made in a ghost glacier; the dwindling sea ice; Mulvaney pulling up kilometre-deep core – delving down as a means of foretelling the climate future . . . And I think of Christina’s son building his Noah’s Kayak-Ark at school: the escape vessel for this newly melting world, with no room for humans on it.
Looking out from that summit, I no longer feel awed and exhilarated, but instead faintly sick. Sick at Greenland’s scale – but also by our ability to encompass it. There is something obscene both to the ice and its meltings – to its vastness and vulnerability. The ice seems a ‘thing’ that is beyond our comprehension to know but within our capacity to destroy.
Three big bergs creep into view on the horizon: white sailing ships stealing up over the Earth’s curve. The sun catches the upper edge of the first berg, sparks silver, then flares on its apex such that the berg appears to be aflame.
~
There is a passage in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon known as the ‘Mycenae Lookout’ section. It concerns a watchman in a roof tower whose task is to look for the brazier fire on the horizon that will tell him that Troy has fallen, and to cry out if he sees it. At last, after many years of keeping watch, the watchman does see the fire flame on the horizon in the distance. But he finds he cannot cry the vital words. He is struck dumb, unable to articulate. In Aeschylus’ memorable image, he feels as if ‘
’ – ‘a great ox has stood on [my] tongue.’ In Seamus Heaney’s version, the watchmen feels his tongue to be ‘deaden[ed] . . . like the dropped gangplank of a cattle truck’.
When I consider our attempts to speak the Anthropocene, I think of that watchman with the ox on his tongue, unable to cry out his warning, so that the danger draws ever closer. The idea of the Anthropocene repeatedly strikes us dumb. In the complexity of its structures and the range of its scales within time and space – from nanometric to the planetary, from picoseconds to aeons – the Anthropocene confronts us with huge challenges. How to interpret, or even refer to it? Its energies are interactive, its properties emergent and its structures are withdrawn. We find speaking of the Anthropocene, even speaking in the Anthropocene, difficult. It is, perhaps, best imagined as an epoch of loss – of species, places and people – for which we are seeking a language of grief and, even harder to find, a language of hope.
The cultural theorist Sianne Ngai suggests that, when shocked or grieving, we find ourselves able to speak of the experience only in ‘thick speech’. When speaking thickly, Ngai says, we are challenged in our usual ability to ‘interpret or respond’. A drastic slowdown and recursion of language occurs, a rhetorical enactment of fatigue and confusion. Tenses work against one another. There is a ‘backflowing’, a loss of causal drive, a gathering of hesitancies and stutters. We speak an eddying speech, cloyed to the point of congealing.
Up there on the thinning ice, during those weeks in Greenland, I recognized this ‘thick speech’. I would struggle often to stop language from sticking in my throat. The black-inked words in my notebooks seemed sluggish, tar-slow. Writing lost its point, clotted into purposelessness, there in an ice world that was both unhomely and untimely. Often it felt easier to say nothing; or rather, to observe but not to try to understand. I had an Anthropocene ox on my Holocene tongue.
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We are descending the north-west ridge of the mountain, in the summit’s cold shadow, when Helen M cries out.
‘Look! Look up – shooting stars!’
How can there be shooting stars in broad daylight? I glance back at the summit and stop, amazed. The sun is silhouetting the peak, and the blue air above the top swarms with tiny silver points, swirling and darting with life-like energy and intent. There are hundreds of these glittering sprites, vanishing instantly when they pass into the shadow and out of the light. We all watch, mesmerized, for a minute or two. It is one of the most exquisite, eldritch sights I have ever seen in the mountains – these seething silver sparks, these scattering star-shards.
Later, we realize that it was probably willow snow, the white wisps of the dwarf willows shedding their seeds, which had been blown by the easterly wind and swept 2,000 feet up from the valley and over the summit, to where the hard Arctic sun backlit and silvered them, and the cold Arctic wind set them dancing.
We retrace our steps safely back down the glacier, unlocking in reverse the doors through which we passed on the way up: the berg-schrund, the crevasse field, the roll-over . . . One by one at last we jump with thumps off the snout-ice and back onto the fine glacial gravel, which hushes under our feet.
Back out through the valley between the boulders, down to the shores of the lake, where we set the seagulls chattering up again in commotion.
The sun across the plain that evening at camp is low and white and bright, and it sets fire to the landscape. Cotton-grass heads glow like bulbs. The moss flames green. Each willow leaf, each pebble, each beached berg carries a flash of that late-day light.
The aurora that night comes as green fog-banks, rolling, coalescing, ebbing. The first star shows over the glacier, then there are none, and then they come fast and faster.
We sit out together in silence again.
After an hour or so the aurora fades, burned out by moonrise. A full moon appears fast over the shoulder of the peak above our camp, as if lifting off the glacier we have climbed that day. We pass binoculars between us; viewed through lenses the moon is almost too bright for the eye. We can see crater rings, impact sites, low lunar seas and high lunar mountains. Its yellow light, borrowed from the sun, lends shadows to the rocks and the tents and to us. I feel an intense loneliness, made by the moonlight, that surprises me with its force.
A thunder of the glacier rouses me at two o’clock that night. I step out of the tent.
Sharp calls of sanderlings in the darkness. The moon still massive and yellow. Northern lights flickering as curtains of green above the ice cap, and a single streamer leading back up and over the summit of the peak we climbed.
The glacier roars again, incomprehensible, the reverberations taking twenty seconds to die away.
The next morning we wake to find the camp in a thick white mist, as if the ice has returned overnight and submerged us. Dew beads the tripwire lines. A raven circles above us, invisible, cawing.
Two days and two peaks later we break camp and leave for the Knud Rasmussen glacier, to seek a moulin that bores into its blue depths.