In the Empire of Ice (31 page)

I’m trying to take in the losses, but I can’t. I’m filled with rage. Perhaps the term climate change should be changed to climate care, since it is carelessness that is bringing so many changes to life as we know it and most likely will bring much of the life of humans and megafauna on this planet to what may be the end.

The Arctic is carrying the deep wounds of the world. Wounds that aren’t healing. Bands of ice and tundra that protected Inuit people for thousands of years, ensuring a continuity of language and lifeways and a meta-stable climate, have been assaulted from above and below, inside and out. Pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, the crushing demands of sovereignty and capitalism, war and religion have severed the strong embrace of ice.

Positive feedback mechanisms are piling up. Once, albedo was king. Now open water exhales mist and draws in heat that melts more ice. The Arctic traps 25 percent of Earth’s CO
₂
. The equilibrium of Greenland’s ice cap is skewed: ablation giving way to ablation with no more snow gain. The polar amplification effect goes against cultural survival: Poleward of 70° N, the temperature can be two or more degrees higher than the global average.

Water begets water. Absorbing solar heat, open oceans stay open; open leads in winter ice exhale mist that shelters the ice from cold, causing the open water to expand. Near the coast water undercuts the sole of a glacier’s foot until it slides.

The Arctic marine ecosystem co-evolved with ice. Seasonal sea ice functions much like the Amazon canopy. It is a ceiling and a shelter; it gives nourishment and creates its own weather. Ice is a presence in the ocean. It keeps things calm and cool; it is home to 90 percent of the animals in the Arctic ecosystem.

Reductions in sea ice thickness change the mixing and upwelling of nutrients in seawater. They alter the open water ecosystem, the migration patterns of marine mammals whose corridors are being invaded by ships carrying iron ore in Nunavut; oil and natural gas in Alaska, Russia, and Greenland; radioactive waste in Russia’s Barents Sea. The ecosystem’s fragility is hard to see, since so much of the life occurs under the ice. But open that lid and you have ruined the lives of polar bears, walruses, seals, fish, birds, Arctic people, and whales.

The natural cycle of a tidewater glacier, even without global warming, is full of complexity. More than melting and snowfall accumulation affect a glacier’s life. Having a toe in the water gives it more vulnerability. Where the glacier enters the water, it is licked by tides, driven by the shape of the coastline and water depth. The thickness and topography of the moraine can alter a glacier’s stability.

So much about a glacier is true of human society. After too forceful an advance, the toe snaps and the terminus of a glacier can become grounded on its own debris.

Water is an awful duality. Water means birth and loss, it being the origin and final death of sea ice and glacier. Once ice loses its skin, texture, temperature, and shape, there’s no getting it back.
La mer de glace
shatters, and the glacier’s face, its toe and snout, and the storytelling tongue.

MORNING. Gedeon comes early to tell me it’s time to leave. The shore ice has firmed up, and we’re going by dogsled north to Siorapaluk, the northernmost subsistence village in the world. At an average of six miles an hour by dogsled, it should take six hours to get there—an easy, straight shot up the coast made so often no one gives it much thought. But this morning, because of the warmth, the snow is wet and the ice under it is mushy.

Instead of the usual wild ride out of town, we move cautiously. The sky is almost dark, almost light. Mikele and Mamarut join us. We are lacking only Jens, because, at the last minute, he was too busy in the mayor’s office to come.

We pass a half-melted iceberg stranded close to shore. The air temperature is warm, but so much open water makes the wind feel cold. There’s a jag on the coast. We stop and look: The ice is all mush and water. The men talk. Gedeon and Mikele shorten the trace lines and we lunge straight up a wall of ice onto the ice foot, suspended at the edge of the coast at low tide. The sleds are heavy and the dogs struggle. A line gets caught, and as three dogs fall backward, Gedeon leaps into the middle of them up and hacks at the ice with a harpoon until the lines come free. The dogs leap; the sled slams down hard. We are on the path of ice once again.

The way is littered with frozen humps, and the ride is so brain shattering that we get off and trot behind the sleds. Trace lines tangle, dogs fall and are dragged, get up, keep running. Near the entrance to Siorapaluk, we jump down again onto the fjord ice. It’s taken ten hours, a ridiculously long travel time. We arrive just as darkness descends.

A village of about 50 people, Siorapaluk sits on a hill on the northern shore of a small fjord. Five glaciers tumble down at the head. Just around the bend, on the way north, are the bird cliffs of Neqe and Pitoravik. Beyond is the historic village site of Etah, the staging ground for many North Pole attempts over the years. Siorapaluk has a small store, a tiny elementary school (grades one through eight), a chapel, and a skinning house where animal skins are prepared, tanned, and sewn.

We’ve rented a house where we can cook and sleep. Its windows overlook the broken shore-fast ice. “This is the second ice of the winter,” Otto Simiqaq, tells me. He and his wife, Pauline, both in their 40s, are fine traditional hunters here. “In the fall we usually go north by dogsled to hunt walrus, but now we have to sail. The water is so rough, when the ice tried to come in, it came up broken by the waves. Then the ice came in and lay down flat, but after last week’s storm, it broke up again.”

Talk of the blizzard that almost killed Gedeon is still on people’s minds here. Just before the storm hit, a hunter tied his dogs to the ice, ran up to his house to get a drink of water, and came back out to find that the fjord ice had broken up completely. He never saw his dogs again.

Eva, a Norwegian schoolteacher who has lived in Siorapaluk for 15 years, recalled it as a terrible night when no one slept. “We could not get to each other. A dog’s house flew against my front door and the dog inside died. Snow filled the schoolhouse and blew into the small doghouses where females with pups find shelter. Every window was blanked out by snow. The whole of the fjord ice broke up.”

After getting the snow out of the schoolhouse, Eva resumed teaching. “I teach ages 6 to 14. The population of this town varies between 62 and 50, depending on who goes down to Qaanaaq in the winter. I was hoping we could get mobile telephones, but it turns out you need 70 people to get the service. We may never have that many here. Now with the ice so bad it becomes quite isolated up here. I haven’t been to Qaanaaq all year.”

From the schoolhouse we walk up the hill to visit Otto and Pauline again. Pauline is sewing a pair of mittens out of sealskin bleached pale tan; the dog-hair ruff is white. “In a normal year, Otto would be up the coast hunting nanoq,” she says. “But not now.”

Otto comes in and pours a cup of coffee. He stirs sugar in and keeps stirring. He’s tall, strongly built, and restless. “Seven years ago we could travel on safe ice all winter and get animals. We didn’t worry about food then. Now it’s different.” He looks out at the fjord. “This is the second ice of the winter. In the fall we now have to sail to get walrus. The seas are very rough and it’s dangerous. We always went to the ice edge west of Kiatak Island. Lots of walrus out there. But the ice doesn’t go that far out now. The walrus are still there, but we can’t get to them.”

He tells me that when the moon is half full, the ocean current is safer and they can travel then. “Before, it didn’t matter,” he says. “Seven or eight dog teams from here would go to Kiatak together twice a month. We could get three to five walrus each time. Last year, in February 2006, I got one walrus. That was the last walrus I got from the ice.”

Now they have to travel by boat, because the water is open. In the dark time it’s hard to see. “On the ice, you can see everything,” he says. “In winter, it is our light.”

Siorapaluk usually empties out in the winter. All the men go north up the coast to Etah and Humboldt Gletscher (Glacier), whose terminus is 75 miles wide, to hunt polar bears. “There’s a huge current up north that moves the ice around,” Otto says. “From year to year we could travel over to Canada, to Ellesmere Island, but that ice is gone now too. Many times I went there in the ’70s and ’80s. I used the drift ice to take me there. Now there’s a border patrolled by Twin Otter planes. The Canadians say it is theirs, but we are all the same people.”

He says that so far, the migration of little auks is still the same. They still come to Siorapaluk, Neqe, and Etah on May 10, and the local families climb straight up the cliffs with long-handled bird nets and scoop them out of the air. In the old times, birds provided food in the season between ice and open water, and they are still a good source of food. Bird-skin parkas were meticulously sewn together from the tiny skins and worn as underwear.

“We still have food, but if the weather keeps getting worse, even the future of Siorapaluk is uncertain,” Otto says. I mention an attempt years before to move north up the coast. “Maybe,” he says. “The weather used to be good up there, maybe it still is. But the current is stronger and the wind, and there’s lots of pressure ice. Even here, where we are protected inside the fjord, the sea current is bringing big waves that are eating away our land.”

Pauline has finished the mittens. She hands them to me. “Would you like them?” She asks. I look at them. Her stitching is impeccable and they fit perfectly. I nod yes and lay a stack of kroner on the table. Otto throws his cold coffee out. He’s distracted and out of sorts. The usual humor isn’t apparent today.

Their boys run in, grab a hunk of bread and run out again. “We have three boys, but their future as hunters is very uncertain,” Pauline says. “We no longer advise them to become hunters. The climate is taking the ice, there are more quotas on animals, and the prices of things are becoming so high. So we want them to get an education.”

I ask if feeding the dogs was becoming a problem, and she says that the local kommune received 24,000 Danish kroner for dog food from Denmark. “But it’s only a short-term solution for a problem that will be getting worse every year.”

Otto goes out. Down on the hill in front of the house he stands, looking at the ice. Pauline continues: “Many of us are behind with our debts. We are not so good in our moods now. I worry when Otto and the others go out on the ice now. It’s more dangerous than it used to be. Around here, it is depression and changing moods. We are becoming just like the ice.”

Evening. I climb the hill to look for my dear friend, the ever elusive Ikuo Oshima. We met in the early 1990s out on the ice. I heard about him when I first arrived in Greenland because he was one of those outsiders—he’s Japanese—who immediately took to Greenlandic ways. In the first month here he mastered Kalaallisut, the Greenlandic language, and learned to drive dogs and hunt walruses and seals. That was in the 1970s. He was an accomplished hunter by the time we met again in 1996. He’d lost most of his dogs to distemper, and Jens was bringing him some puppies on our sled. He did a little jig on the ice in thanks.

Ikuo came to Siorapaluk as part of an expedition team to support the climber Naomi Uemura while he trained for his solo walk to the North Pole. Uemara came and went; Ikuo never left Greenland. He married Otto Simigaq’s sister in Siorapaluk and had three children, who live nearby.

Now Ikuo lives on his own and has just moved into a new house that he and his son built. Below is the skinning house, and that’s where I find him. His back is to me. I tiptoe up and put my hand on his shoulder. He turns, already smiling, and we hug hello.

Ikuo is skinning an artic fox. Everything he does is artful and quick. His forearms are thickly muscled and smooth. He sits on a block of wood positioned on the seat of a chair so he doesn’t have to stand at the table to work. He’s lashing the fox’s tail to a stick with a reindeer thong. The radio is on and Sting is singing. Two young girls peer in shyly. “That’s Matthew Henson’s great-great-granddaughter,” Ikuo says, nodding at one of them. Matthew Henson was the African-American first mate who accompanied Robert Peary to the North Pole and, like Ikuo, quickly learned Greenlandic ways.

After Sting, Ikuo spins toward me on his block of wood. “My son and I are thinking of moving someplace maybe in future years. We might consider moving north. It is terrible when the ice goes out and it’s too dark to hunt by boat. We are trained as ice hunters, and without ice it’s terrible. If global warming was coming gradually, maybe there would be some chance to adapt, but it’s so sudden, this coming of climate change, we are in a panic.

“So I have to think, how can we survive? The game animals on the land are OK, so maybe we will have to be land hunters. But then we’ll need vegetables, because only marine mammals have all the vitamins and minerals we need. But vegetables don’t grow here. We’ve always gotten what we needed from the seals and whales.

“Now fish are coming north. We found salmon in our seal nets. It is all very surprising. There are insects now—mosquitoes and black flies—and we never had them before. We have sickness in the animals, and back home in Japan bird diseases have started.

“Maybe I’m coming old enough, and I’m thinking, we have enough work and food and we must be thankful for the day. When the ice is bad, I go trapping. I walk all the way up these canyons where the glaciers used to be. There’s a snowy owl living up there. Many beautiful things to see. But some of the young people are thinking only of tomorrow, that they can go get money somewhere, but it never happens. It takes many years and still you have no money,” he says laughing. He pulls the fox skin inside out, then hangs it up to dry.

“I was maybe 25 or 26 when I first moved here. First time was 1972. Then left, but came again in 1974 and stayed forever. My nationality is Japanese because my mother is still alive, but she has never visited. I was studying engineering at a university in Tokyo, but I found it to be too organized—no freedom inside of it. See, it’s already fixed up for you, and you just have to choose some numbers to make the thing go together right. That’s not for me!