The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2017 Page 14

  Mostly Dansgaard’s results confirmed what was already known about climate history. For instance, he observed that Greenland had experienced a cold snap from around the year 1300 to 1800—the so-called Little Ice Age. He found that for most of the past 10,000 years it had been relatively warm on Greenland, and for tens of thousands of years before that it had been frigid.

  But Dansgaard also turned up something totally unexpected. It appeared from his analysis of the Camp Century core that in the midst of the last ice age, temperatures on Greenland had shot up by 15 degrees in 50 years. Then they’d dropped again, almost as abruptly. This had happened not just once but many times.

  Everyone, including Dansgaard, was perplexed. A temperature swing of 15 degrees? It was as if New York City had suddenly become Houston or Houston had become Riyadh. Could these violent swings in the data correspond to real events? Or were they some sort of glitch?

  Over the next 40 years, five more complete cores were extracted from different parts of the ice sheet. Each time the wild swings showed up. Meanwhile other climate records, including pollen deposits from a lake in Italy, ocean sediments from the Arabian Sea, and stalactites from a cave in China, revealed the same pattern. The temperature swings became known, after Dansgaard and a Swiss colleague, Hans Oeschger, as Dansgaard-Oeschger events. There have been 25 such events in the past 115,000 years.

  Ice ages are triggered by small, periodic changes in the earth’s orbit that alter the amount of sunlight hitting different parts of the globe at different times of year. The Dansgaard-Oeschger (or D-O) events, which occurred at irregular intervals, have no apparent cause. The best explanation anyone has been able to offer is that the sheer complexity of the climate system renders it unstable—capable of flipping from one state to another,

  “It’s a great interplay between the glaciers, the atmosphere, the sea ice, and the oceans,” Dahl-Jensen told me. We were sitting in her office, which is in the cupola of the double dome and reachable, treehouse-style, via ladder. It was a few hours after the thesis defense, and the sun was finally dipping toward the horizon.

  “But we still struggle to understand how we can get these very big abrupt changes,” she went on. “And I really think that understanding them is one of the most important challenges we face. Because if we fail to be able to understand them in our past, we don’t have the tools to understand the risk of them in the future.”

  All the D-O events predate the emergence of civilization, and this is probably no coincidence. In climatic terms, the past 10,000 years have been exceptionally stable. Go back further than that and devastating shifts show up again and again. Somehow or other, our ancestors came through that chaos, but before the invention of agriculture people traveled light. They never stayed in one place long enough to develop complex societies and all that followed—cities, metallurgy, livestock, writing, money. When a D-O event occurred, bands of hunter-gatherers presumably picked up and moved on. Either that or they died out.

  II

  Greenland is the world’s largest island, unless you count Australia, which is usually put in its own category, since it’s a continent. The ice sheet covers about 80 percent of the island, making it one of the least green places on earth.

  “Greenland should be called Iceland and Iceland should be called Greenland,” Inuuteq Holm Olsen, Greenland’s representative to the United States, told me with a shrug of irritation. “You don’t know how many times I’ve heard that.” If Greenland were its own country, it would be the biggest nation in Europe, although, geologically speaking, it’s part of North America. The ice-free territory alone—some 170,000 square miles—is larger than Germany. As it is, the island is ruled by the Kingdom of Denmark, and Olsen occupies an office in the basement of the Danish embassy in Washington, D.C. Like most Greenlanders, he’s of Inuit descent.

  For as long as they could, the Danes kept Greenland under a sort of reverse quarantine: the goal was not to keep residents in but everybody else out. Foreigners wishing to visit had to apply to Copenhagen for approval; the difficulties of obtaining permission, Rockwell Kent complained in 1930, were “serious and many.” (At that point there was no such thing as private property on the island, and indeed even today, in keeping with Inuit tradition, all land is held in common.) According to the Danes, the arrangement was maintained for the good of the Greenlanders, to guard them against the “destructive trends” of modern life. As late as 1940, many families still lived in turf houses and lit their homes with seal-oil lamps.

  During the Second World War, Denmark was occupied by the Nazis, and the United States built several airbases on Greenland. By the time the conflict was over, Greenlanders had seen too much of modern life, destructive or otherwise, to go back. What followed was what one Danish chronicler has described as “a social quantum leap unmatched in depth, extent and pace anywhere in the world.”

  Today Greenland has 56,000 residents, 12,000 Internet connections, 50 farms, and, by American standards, no trees. (The native dwarf willows top out at about a foot.) One Greenlander I met, who’d recently left the island for the first time to attend a meeting in upstate New York, told me that his favorite part of the trip had been the noise of the wind sighing through the leaves.

  “I love that sound,” he said. “Shoosh, shoosh.”

  There are few roads in Greenland—to get from one town to another you have to take a boat or fly—and, aside from fish-processing plants, little industry. A block grant of $535 million, sent every year by the Danes, constitutes nearly a third of the island’s GDP. In a measured, Scandinavian sort of way, relations between the grantor and the grantee are tense.

  In 2008, Greenlanders voted overwhelmingly in favor of moving toward independence. Under what’s known as the self-rule agreement, which was approved in Copenhagen and in the Greenlandic capital of Nuuk, Greenland gained the right to negotiate some of its own foreign agreements—hence Olsen’s basement office. Greenlandic, an Inuit dialect, became the island’s official language, and the size of the annual grant from Copenhagen was capped.

  Greenland celebrates its version of July Fourth on June 21. This past June, in an effort to demonstrate solidarity, the Danish government instructed its agencies and embassies to raise the Greenlandic flag. A half-red, half-white circle on a half-white, half-red background, the flag is supposed to represent the ice sheet over the ocean, with the sun sinking beneath the waves. Many Danish agencies complied with the directive but, awkwardly enough, flew the flag upside down.

  “We have a lot of postcolonial problems,” Niviaq Korneliussen, a 26-year-old woman who may be Greenland’s most widely read novelist, told me. “We have a lot of racism going on from both ends. There are a lot of young people who hate Danish people because their parents did. So there’s a long way to go for things to get better.”

  Almost a third of the island’s population lives in Nuuk, which is by far Greenland’s largest town, and in between trips onto the ice sheet I went for a visit. On my 10-minute taxi ride from the airport, I think I passed through all three of Greenland’s stoplights.

  Nuuk sits on the southwest coast. It was founded in the early 18th century by a Danish-Norwegian missionary named Hans Egede and for most of its existence was known as Godthåb. When Egede arrived, he discovered that the native people had neither bread nor a word for it, so he translated the line from the Lord’s Prayer as “Give us this day our daily seal.” Today a giant statue of Egede presides over Nuuk much the way Christ the Redeemer presides over Rio.

  My visit to Nuuk coincided with a political conclave hosted by Greenland’s largest labor union. Many of the island’s elected officials were supposed to be there, so one afternoon I made my way over. The walk took me past a set of 10 identical Soviet-style apartment complexes. These were put up in the 1960s, when the Danes decided to empty many of Greenland’s tiny fishing villages and concentrate people in larger towns. In their day the apartments, with electricity and indoor plumbing, seemed the height of modernity; now, surro
unded by sleeker, newer buildings, they’re considered a slum.

  The conclave was being held at a large gym with a vaulted ceiling. Inside, about a hundred people were listening to a panel discussion on the subject “Is Greenland ready for the mineral industry?” Simultaneous translation was being provided from Greenlandic into Danish, from Danish into Greenlandic, and from both languages into English. I picked up a headset, but the English channel kept cutting out, and after a while it occurred to me that I was probably the only person trying to listen to it. Tables had been set up around the perimeter of the gym; from them the island’s political parties were dispensing sweets, pamphlets, and swag. Groups of impossibly cute children were roaming from one table to the next, grabbing as many balloons and cookies as they could. I struck up a conversation with a man named Per Rosing-Petersen, who was staffing the table for a party called Partii Naleraq. (Almost all Greenlanders nowadays have Danish names, and owing to hundreds of years of intermarriage, many also have blue eyes.) It turned out that Rosing-Petersen was a member of the Greenlandic parliament. Partii Naleraq’s offerings included orange plastic bracelets that said “Tassa asu! Naalagaafinngorta!” which he translated as “Let’s go! Independence!”

  “If you look at the businesses in Greenland, 90 percent are owned and managed by Danes,” Rosing-Petersen told me. “The Greenlanders are the working class. I call it apartheid—de facto apartheid. We want to change this picture.”

  Though Greenland’s independence movement has nothing directly to do with climate change, indirectly the links are many. For Greenland to break away, it would have to sacrifice the annual grant from Denmark, which would leave a gaping hole in its budget. The island is rich in minerals, and the theory is that these will become easier to get at as winters grow shorter and harbors remain ice-free year-round. Greenland’s deposits of rare earth elements are, by some accounts, the largest outside China; the island also has significant deposits of iron, zinc, molybdenum, and gold. In 2014 the Greenlandic government released a plan that called for at least three new mines to be operating within four years. “The mineral resources should—so to speak—be made to work for us,” the plan said.

  Next to Partii Naleraq’s was the table for Siumut, Greenland’s ruling party. Manning it was another member of parliament, Jens-Erik Kirkegaard, who, as it happened, had been the minister of industry and mineral resources when the plan was released.

  “We haven’t had that boon yet,” Kirkegaard acknowledged. At the time I visited, the island had no working mines, and the only one under construction—a ruby mine south of Nuuk—was stalled because its Canadian backers had run out of cash. Mostly Kirkegaard blamed the collapse in commodity prices.

  “A few years back mineral prices were very high, but then they declined very hard,” he told me. Still, he was optimistic. More melt off the ice sheet meant more attention for Greenland.

  “Climate change does a lot of marketing for us,” he said. “It’s easier to attract investment.” And as the shipping season grew longer, costs would come down: “Some projects that weren’t economical, maybe they will be as conditions change.”

  Greenland’s Institute of Natural Resources, known in Greenlandic as the Pinngortitaleriffik, occupies a stylish wood-and-glass complex at the edge of Nuuk. The day after the conclave at the gym I went to the institute to speak to Lene Kielsen Holm, a social anthropologist who studies Greenlanders’ perceptions of climate change. Holm does a lot of her work in Qaanaaq, a town in Greenland’s northwest corner that was founded in the early 1950s, when the U.S. decided to expand one of its airbases—Thule—and forced most of those living in the area to move out of the way. Qaanaaq, population 630, is one of the few places in Greenland where people still subsist on what they catch.

  “They have always been adapting to a changing environment,” Holm said of the hunters and fishermen she interviews. “This is their daily life. If they didn’t have this kind of know-how, they wouldn’t survive.

  “I think it’s part of our culture that we have been living with changes for a long time,” she added.

  That Greenlanders are unusually resilient is a view I heard many times. “Denmark will disappear,” Rosing-Petersen told me. “Holland will disappear. But Greenland will still remain. We’ve been adapting to living conditions for 5,000 years.”

  Certainly it’s true that life in Greenland is tough. In Qaanaaq, during the winter months temperatures average around 10 degrees below zero and the sun never appears above the horizon. “When the long Darkness spreads itself over the country, many hidden things are revealed, and men’s thoughts travel along devious paths,” a west Greenlander told the explorer Knud Rasmussen sometime around 1904.

  But the record of human habitation of Greenland testifies to more than human resourcefulness. Depending on how you count, Greenland has been a graveyard for four, five, or even six societies.

  The first people to migrate to Greenland are known as the Independence I. This group made its way to the island, probably from Canada, about 4,500 years ago and settled in a particularly inhospitable territory some 400 miles northeast of where EGRIP sits today. The Atlas of the North American Indian notes that the Independence I people “lacked two elements later Arctic dwellers would consider essential: adequate clothing and reliable fuel for fire in a treeless landscape.” Somehow they managed to eke out a living for almost a millennium. Then they disappeared.

  The Independence I people were followed by a group called Independence II, which also vanished. Meanwhile people known as the Saqqaq arrived in western Greenland. They lasted almost 2,000 years and were replaced by what archaeologists call the Dorset. Recent DNA analysis of their remains suggests that both the Saqqaq and the Dorset died off without descendants. From around the time of the birth of Christ to around the time of Charlemagne, Greenland was, it appears, uninhabited.

  In the late 10th century the island was repopulated, this time from the east, by a contingent of Norse led by Erik the Red. It’s debated whether Erik called the place Greenland because at that time it really was greener or because he thought it would be good PR. The Norse established two main colonies: the Western Settlement, which was not far from present-day Nuuk, and the Eastern Settlement, which was actually in the south. The settlements prospered and grew until something went terribly wrong. When Hans Egede set out for Greenland in 1721, he was hoping to bring Protestantism to the Norse, who, he worried, had missed out on the Reformation. But all that was left of the settlements was ruins.

  Archaeologists have since determined that the Western Settlement failed around the year 1400 and the Eastern Settlement a few decades later. In climatological terms, this timing is suggestive. The Europeans arrived in Greenland during the so-called Medieval Warm Period, and they vanished not long after the onset of the Little Ice Age.

  Still, archaeologists have sought alternative explanations for their disappearance. It’s been hypothesized that the Norse were overpowered by the Inuit, who arrived in Greenland, also from Canada, sometime around A.D. 1200. Or that they were done in by a drop in the value of walrus ivory. In Collapse (2005), Jared Diamond attributes their demise to an oddly self-punishing cultural conservatism. The European settlers had brought with them cattle and sheep. According to Diamond, they continued to rely on their livestock even though they would have been a lot better off copying the Inuit and adopting a marine-based diet.

  “The Norse starved in the presence of abundant unutilized food resources,” he writes. But according to more recent research, based on the isotopic composition of Norse bones, the Europeans did ditch their cows. By the time the Norse vanished, at least half their calories were coming from seal meat.

  “If anything, they might have become bored with eating seals” is how Niels Lynnerup, of the University of Copenhagen, one of the scientists who led the research, put it.

  “It’s one of those things where, wow, you realize you can be resilient, you can be adaptive, you can be clever, and you can still all be extinct,�
�� Thomas McGovern, a professor of archaeology at Hunter College who has studied the Norse for 35 years, told me.

  As Greenland warms, the record of the Norse settlements, along with any clues that it might yield, is being erased. “Back in the old days these sites were frozen most of the year,” McGovern continued. “When I was visiting south Greenland in the 1980s, I was able to jump down in trenches guys had left open from the ’50s and ’60s, and sticking out the sides you could see hair, feathers, wool, and incredibly well-preserved animal bones.” A graduate student of McGovern’s who started working in Greenland in 2005 found at the same sites mostly decomposing mush.

  “We’re losing everything,” McGovern said. “Basically, we have the equivalent of the Library of Alexandria in the ground, and it’s on fire.”

  III

  The town of Ilulissat sits 350 miles north of Nuuk, above the Arctic Circle. It’s home to one of Greenland’s richest archaeological sites—a stretch of springy tundra that was inhabited first by the Saqqaq, then by the Dorset, and finally by the Inuit. Near the abandoned settlement is a bare stone ledge overhanging a fjord. Elderly Greenlanders used to jump from the ledge to avoid becoming a burden to their families, or so the story goes. The day I went to stand on the ledge, several Danish tourists were taking photos and batting away mosquitoes. Instead of jumping, we had come to admire the view.

  Rising from the fjord in front of us was a vast, improbable collection of icebergs. These were jammed together as in a frozen metropolis. Towers of ice leaned against arches of ice, which pressed into palaces of ice. Some of the icebergs had smaller icebergs perched on top of them, like minarets. There were ice pyramids and what looked to me like an ice cathedral. The city of ice stretched on for miles. It was all a dazzling white except for pools of meltwater—that fantastic shade of Popsicle blue. Nothing moved, and apart from the droning of the mosquitoes, the only sound was the patter of water running off the bergs.