The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2017 Page 15
The suicide ledge is a good place to go to feel small—presumably that’s why it was chosen. Standing at its edge, I could imagine how the Saqqaq and the Dorset were awed by the inhuman beauty. But today even sublimity has been superseded.
The city of ice is the product of the Jakobshavn ice stream. Like the NEGIS, the Jakobshavn originates in central Greenland, only it flows in the opposite direction and into a long fjord. Where the ice meets the water, there’s a calving front, and it’s here that the ice arches and ice castles take form. These float down the fjord toward Ilulissat. (The town’s name is Greenlandic for “icebergs.”) They would continue on out to sea, except that they’re blocked by a submarine ridge—a moraine—composed of rocky debris left behind when the ice sheet shrank at the end of the last ice age. The biggest icebergs become lodged on the moraine and the smaller ones crowd in behind, as in a monumental traffic jam. The very largest, which weigh upward of 100 million tons, can hang around for years before slimming down enough to float free. (It is believed that one of these liberated giants from Ilulissat was the iceberg that sank the Titanic.)
Eight thousand years ago the Jakobshavn filled the fjord completely, all the way to the moraine. By the mid-19th century, when the first observations were recorded, the position of the calving front had shifted inland by about 10 miles. Over the next 150 years the front’s position shifted again, by another 12 miles.
Then, suddenly, in the late 1990s, the Jakobshavn’s stately retreat turned into a rout. Between 2001 and 2006 the calving front withdrew nine miles. Just in the past 15 years it has given up more ground than it did in the previous century. The fjord extends for at least another 40 miles and deepens as it moves inland. At this point there doesn’t seem to be anything to prevent the calving front from withdrawing the entire way.
“It appears now that the retreat cannot be stopped,” David Holland, a professor at NYU who studies the Jakobshavn using seals equipped with electronic sensors, told me. (When the seals surface after a dive, the sensors transmit data about conditions in the fjord.)
Meanwhile, as the calving front has receded, the ice stream has sped up. This appears to be the result of yet another feedback loop. Since the ’90s the Jakobshavn has nearly tripled its pace. In the summer of 2012 it set what’s believed to be an ice-stream rec-ord by flowing at the distinctly unglacial rate of 150 feet per day, or more than six feet an hour. The Jakobshavn’s catchment area is smaller than the NEGIS’s; still, there’s enough ice in it to raise global sea levels by two feet.
A lot of Ilulissat is given over to dogs. They have their own neighborhoods—large expanses of dust and rock, where they live chained up around industrial-size vats of water. In my walks around town I encountered three dog settlements that spread over several acres, and behind my hotel there was a small satellite encampment. In the endless summer sun, the dogs looked stricken. They lay around, panting under their thick coats. Occasionally one group would start to bay and then the rest would take up the cry, so that the whole town seemed to be howling.
Ilulissat’s dogs are all the same kind, a particularly cold-hardy breed of husky, which the Inuit brought with them when they migrated to Greenland. To maintain the purity of the breed, no other type of dog is allowed north of the Arctic Circle.
The huskies used to be central to Greenlandic life. “Give me dogs, give me snow, and you can keep the rest,” Knud Rasmussen, the explorer, who was born in Ilulissat in 1879, supposedly once said. As recently as 1995, Ilulissat, a town of some 4,600 people, was home to more than 8,000 dogs. In the past 20 years the canine population has crashed. Now there are only about 2,000 dogs. This too is an index of global warming.
Ole Dorph, Ilulissat’s mayor, works out of a corner office in the town’s surprisingly sprawling city hall. He’s 61, with a craggy face and rectangular glasses. Dorph grew up in Ilulissat, and he told me that when he was a child, every year the town was iced in from November to April. During those months residents used their dog sleds to go fishing and seal hunting.
“In the old days you could take your sled and go to Disko Island,” Dorph said. The island, the largest in Greenland outside of Greenland itself, lies about 30 miles west of Ilulissat, across Disko Bay.
Since no supply ships could get into Ilulissat’s harbor, for six months a year residents had to live off whatever provisions the stores had laid in, plus whatever they caught. When the ice broke up in the spring and the first ship arrived, “everyone was very happy,” Dorph recalled. “We could buy new apples.” To announce the boat’s approach, the town would “shoot off a cannon three times—bang, bang, bang.”
Then, in the ’90s, the bay started to freeze later and later, until finally it didn’t freeze at all. “The last time we had ice we could use was in 1997,” Dorph told me.
The loss of ice cover from Disko Bay is part of the general decline in Arctic sea ice—a decline that’s been so precipitous it now seems likely there will be open water at the North Pole in summer within the next few decades. Since sea ice reflects the sun’s radiation and open water absorbs it, the loss has enormous implications for the planet as a whole. (Sea ice doesn’t contribute to sea-level rise, because it floats, displacing an equivalent amount of water.) Locally, in Ilulissat, the most obvious impact has been on transportation. Once the bay stopped freezing, supply ships could arrive in January, and sleds became obsolete. Dogs no longer seemed worth the seal meat it took to feed them. Many were euthanized. Those that remain are used mostly for sport.
Dorph told me that people in Ilulissat were “sad because our dogs are going down,” but that this unhappiness was more or less balanced by the benefits of open water. Ilulissat’s major source of income is halibut, and its small harbor, which sits on the opposite side of town from the fjord, is crowded with fishing boats.
“The fishermen, they can take their boats out in winter,” Dorph said. “They feel it’s okay. The price of fish is going up, so the fishermen, they have good days.” I was reminded of what I’d heard in Nuuk—that climate change, while regrettable in many ways, was for Greenlanders filled with economic promise. I asked Dorph, a member of the ruling Siumut Party, about independence.
“I hope it will happen in maybe 10 or 20 years,” he said. “It’s our key to growing up.”
One evening while I was staying in Ilulissat, I hired a boat to go up the coast. The owner, who was also the captain, was a Dane named Anders Lykke Laursen. He met me at the harbor wearing a pair of yellow-tinted sunglasses, which, he explained, would help him spot dangerous chunks of floating ice. The boat, he went on to assure me, had a double hull and met all the standards the Danish Maritime Authority had laid out for operating in the Arctic. If we did hit some ice, he advised, “it’s going to sound bad—but don’t worry.”
About 10 miles north of Ilulissat we passed the tiny town of Oqaatsut, a collection of bright-painted houses hugging the rocks. (Oqaatsut is Greenlandic for “cormorants.”) From the boat not a soul was visible, but when I looked it up later in the phone book—there’s one edition of the white pages for all of Greenland, and it’s about an eighth of an inch thick—I found that Oqaatsut had 18 listed numbers. We motored on, dodging refrigerator-size blocks of floating ice as well as several massive icebergs that had broken free from the moraine. Beyond Oqaatsut the coast rose up. A thin waterfall hundreds of feet high twisted off the rocks. Almost anywhere else in the world the falls would have been a major tourist attraction; in the great emptiness of west-central Greenland, it didn’t even have a name.
Finally, after about three hours, we came within sight of our destination, a rock-strewn cove. It also had no name; its coordinates—69.868245N by 50.317827W—had been sent to me by Eric Rignot, a glaciologist from the University of California, Irvine. The cove was shallow, so we paddled ashore in a rubber dinghy, pushing ice chunks out of the way with the oars.
Rignot, who grew up in France, studies both Greenland’s ice sheet and Antarctica’s. Two years ago he published a paper arguing
that a key section of the West Antarctic ice sheet, the Amundsen Sea sector, had gone into “irreversible retreat.” The Amundsen Sea sector contains more than 200,000 cubic miles of ice, meaning that if Rignot’s analysis is correct, it will inevitably raise global sea levels by four feet.
“This Is What a Holy Shit Moment for Global Warming Looks Like,” Mother Jones declared when the paper was released.
Rignot and three of his students had set up camp on a steep hill just beyond the beach—a cluster of pup tents facing a glacier-filled fjord. In the slanted sunlight—it was about 9 p.m.—the glacier, known as Kangilernata, seemed to be glowing. Its calving front, a 130-foot vertical wall of ice, appeared upside down in the milky-blue waters of the fjord. Behind it, ice stretched to the horizon. Again I was hit, and vaguely sickened, by Greenland’s inhuman scale.
Rignot and his students were monitoring Kangilernata’s movements with a portable radar set, which resembled a rotating badminton net. “We measure changes in the condition of the glacier within millimeters,” Rignot told me. “It’s like making a movie of the flow.” But even without sophisticated equipment the glacier’s retreat was apparent. Rignot pointed to a 50-foot-wide band of gray along the walls of the fjord. This showed how much Kangi-lernata’s height had fallen. Coal-black moraines marked the retreat of its calving front. In the past 15 years the front has pulled back two miles.
Kangilernata is what’s known as a marine-terminating glacier. So is Jakobshavn, and so too are most of the glaciers in West Antarctica. This means that they have one foot in the water and, as the world warms, are melting from the bottom as well as from the top. NASA is so concerned about this effect that it has launched a research project called, suggestively, Oceans Melting Greenland, or OMG. (Rignot is one of the principal investigators on the project.)
At Kangilernata the team was measuring the water temperatures at the base of the calving front every other day. This involved taking a Zodiac into the fjord, dangling some instruments over the side, and hoping the boat wouldn’t be swamped by falling ice.
“What concerns me the most is that this is the kind of experiment we can only do once,” Rignot said. “A lot of people don’t realize that. If we start opening the floodgates on some of these glaciers, even if we stop our emissions, even if we go back to a better climate, the damage is going to be done. There’s no red button to stop this.”
I first visited the Greenland ice sheet in the summer of 2001. At that time vivid illustrations of climate change were hard to come by. Now they’re everywhere—in the flooded streets of Florida and South Carolina, in the beetle-infested forests of Colorado and Montana, in the too-warm waters of the mid-Atlantic and the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, in the mounds of dead mussels that washed up this summer on the coast of Long Island and the piles of dead fish that coated the banks of the Yellowstone River.
But the problem with global warming—and the reason it continues to resist illustration, even as the streets flood and the forests die and the mussels rot on the shores—is that experience is an inadequate guide to what’s going on. The climate operates on a time delay. When carbon dioxide is added to the atmosphere, it takes decades—in a technical sense, millennia—for the earth to equilibrate. This summer’s fish kill was a product of warming that had become inevitable 20 or 30 years ago, and the warming that’s being locked in today won’t be fully felt until today’s toddlers reach middle age. In effect, we are living in the climate of the past, but already we’ve determined the climate’s future.
Global warming’s backloaded temporality makes all the warnings—from scientists, government agencies, and especially journalists—seem hysterical, Cassandra-like—Ototototoi!—even when they are understated. Once feedbacks take over, the climate can change quickly, and it can change radically. At the end of the last ice age, during an event known as meltwater pulse 1A, sea levels rose at the rate of more than a foot a decade. It’s likely that the “floodgates” are already open, and that large sections of Greenland and Antarctica are fated to melt. It’s just the ice in front of us that’s still frozen.
On my last day in Ilulissat, I decided that since I might not be coming back, I ought to go see the ice city again. My hike took me through one of the dusty dog encampments and by the town’s old heliport, where, to help boost tourism, a Danish philanthropy is planning to erect a viewing platform overlooking the fjord. (The platform “will provide a front-row seat for the melting ice sheet,” the head of the philanthropy said in June, when the winning design was announced.) The ice city didn’t appear to have changed much, and I recognized some of the same arches and castles I’d seen earlier. It was a cloudless morning, and again, apart from the mosquitoes, nothing was moving. I’d brought along a notebook and started to make a list of the shapes before me. One iceberg reminded me of an airplane hangar, another of the Guggenheim Museum. There was a sphinx, a pagoda, and a battleship; a barn, a silo, and the Sydney Opera House.
To get back to town I followed a different route. This one took me past Ilulissat’s cemetery. The plots were marked with white wooden crosses and heaped with bright-colored plastic flowers. It was a lovely and oddly cheerful sight, the graveyard overlooking the ice.
ADRIAN GLICK KUDLER
Something Uneasy in the Los Angeles Air
FROM Curbed
People who don’t know any better like to say Los Angeles has no seasons, but that isn’t true; it has five overlapping seasons: the winter rainy season, spring, gloomy early summer (also known as jacaranda season), miserably hot late summer, which lasts through October, and Santa Ana season. For non-Angelenos, the most LA season is that brief spring, when the days are 72 degrees and sunny. But for Angelenos, who have a far more intimate relationship with both nature and apocalypse than the 72-degrees-and-sunny crowd will ever allow, the most Los Angeles season is Santa Ana season.
The mythology around the Santa Ana winds is potent enough that “Santa Ana winds in popular culture” has its own robust Wikipedia page, and they appear everywhere from Steely Dan’s “Babylon Sisters” to Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero to a season-four episode of Beverly Hills, 90210. But the best-known and most cited appearances are in the opening to Raymond Chandler’s story “Red Wind”:
There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.
and the first part of Joan Didion’s essay “Los Angeles Note-book”:
There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sandstorms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night. I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.
In a New York Times article in 1963, Eugene Burdick (who’d grown up in LA!) wondered for several pages how on earth California had recently passed New York to become the most populous state in the country. In 2016 his scene-setting reads like a parody:
One summer day when a “Santa Ana” wind swept tons of desert dust aloft to combine with the smog to give Los Angeles a brown, hazy atmosphere, I visited Muscle Beach at Santa Monica. Sitting on a bench, peering through the warm, brown swirling air, were a dozen senior c
itizens watching a group of young men and women go through the tortures which produce heavily muscled and almost ridiculously perfect physiques.
Like every other common thing in Los Angeles, like everything else around here that Didion has turned her heavy-lidded eyes to, the winds have become a part of the story we tell ourselves about being Angelenos, like earthquakes and irritating development executives at parties, a mysterious force exotic enough to the folks Back East that they can use it to dismiss us.
Pleasant summer winds form over the Pacific Ocean. Santa Anas start in the Great Basin, beyond the Sierra Nevadas, in winter, when the air is cold and the jet stream leaves behind high-pressure systems, which spin clockwise, cold and dense, until the heavy air starts to slide down the mountains toward the coast. Lower pressure at the coast helps by sucking that cold air through the mountains toward Southern California. As it cascades down toward the Los Angeles Basin, the air heats up and dries out, and it speeds up as it snakes its way through narrow passes and canyons, barreling out finally in the flats, blowing 110 miles per hour and 110 degrees some days.
Santa Ana season lasts from October to April, but the winds blow just as hard (and sometimes harder) in September and May. Since the air in the Great Basin starts out hotter in those months, the Santa Anas blow hotter in Los Angeles, and they have a lot to do with those miserably hot late summers. “Typically the hottest daytime temperatures along the coast of Southern California have been recorded during Santa Ana winds,” Alexander Gershunov, a research meteorologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, says.