Moby-Duck (56 page)

Even in that National Geographic documentary, the portraiture of the bear kept wavering confusingly between pity and fear. As the ice diminishes, the baritone narrator informed us, so does the bear's habitat. Less ice, fewer seals, more hungry bears eager to snack on Swedish graduate students. If that weren't bad enough, evidence suggests that one class of toxins drifting to the Arctic (flame retardant polybrominated diphenyls) are elevating the rates of polar bear hermaphroditism. Roll a tranquilized polar bear over now and it might well be difficult to determine its sex. Whatever the sex, a polar bear is now the totem of global warming, and photographs of them—stranded on an ice floe, or swimming in open water—are in great demand, which is why the Snapper joined us on the first leg of the voyage. He shot pictures of Macdonald and Gobeil deploying their box corer, and of scientists tossing bottles from the stern (he asked me to step out of the frame). But the big money, he said, was in bears.

On the bridge of the
Louis
, somewhere in Peel Sound, we were all still watching the bear beside the hole. Its patience was so great that it resembled somnolence. I swear to both God and the monsters thereof, that as we watched, a seal popped up to catch a breath, and as it did the until now statuesque bear sprang forth, catlike, extending its fatal paw. With one terrible and yet somewhat leisurely swipe it snared the seal by the neck, punctured the jugular with one terrible bite, and then, limp carcass hanging from its jaws, trailing blood, lumbered off, making an exit that Nansen describes well, assuming “an easy shambling gait, without deigning to pay any further attention to such a trifle as a ship.” Then it disappeared behind a pressure ridge to enjoy its meal in private.

Eddy Carmack, sixty-seven, does not resemble the Arctic explorers whose black-and-white portraits I've seen in history books—those pipesmoking Victorians and Edwardians wearing layers of wool and layers of beard. Beardless, since boarding the
Louis
, Carmack has worn, as if it were a kind of uniform, a navy-blue fleece cardigan vest decorated with the logo of the Canada's Three Oceans Project. He has short brown hair, little round glasses, a thin, scholarly face, almost no visible jawbone to speak of (a trait he and I share, one that makes his neck and mine resemble that of an iguana), and a nervous habit of smiling for no apparent reason. Talking to him, I'm often left wondering why he's smiling and what he's thinking. When he smiles, the smile lines in his cheeks crinkle almost to his ears.

When I visited him at his office in British Columbia, back in January, after disembarking from the
Ottawa
, I asked him the same questions I'd asked John Toole, Amy Bower, and just about every other oceanographer I'd met: If flotsam can tell us where stuff really goes, as Carmack believed, then where, upon entering Bering Strait, had the ducks really gone? And why in the summer of 2003, despite Ebbesmeyer's predictions, hadn't the beachcombers of New England found them?

“You had one finding,” Carmack said.

“One
sighting
,” I said. “I interviewed them, the people in Maine who reported the sighting. Put it this way, I don't think their testimony would have held up in court.” (How long ago and far away that drizzly morning in Maine seemed! Had a duck made an appearance in Kennebunkport or hadn't it? Science or no science? Proof or no proof? Was this a children's fable after all?)

In his office, Carmack had smiled, inscrutably, knitting his fingers, but said nothing. The window above his desk looked out onto fir trees. Affixed to the glass was the translucent likeness of a cardinal, and on one of his bookshelves was a framed photo of his own feet, in brown sandals, propped up on the prow of a red kayak afloat on some tropical lagoon.

To fill the silence, I'd continued: “So from what I understand, this question turns out to be a fairly difficult one to answer. Given that the spill happened in 1992, you now have fifteen years of climate to be thinking about, and from what I've read the climate of the Arctic has changed a lot since 1992.”

From behind his little spectacles, Carmack's eyes seemed to twinkle a little. It was then that he'd told me about the Drift Bottle Project, fetching a beer bottle from a bookshelf, saying, “So here is the Canadian version of the rubber duckie.” Then he shared with me one of his preliminary findings: “The Arctic is moving faster.”

Down the hall, on a colleague's computer, he pulled up satellite footage of the polar ice cap. The footage began in September 2007, the same month that I'd voyaged to the Labrador Sea. Watching this grainy, pixelated, black-and-white, yin-yang, stop-motion montage of ice swirling and expanding and contracting inside the Arctic Basin, I was reminded, weirdly, of watching a fetus on a sonogram screen. “This shows you what an ice catastrophe last year was,” Carmack said. “I mean it broke all records. Smashed them. It was hell up there.”

Now, months later, one evening, before the bar opened for business, in the
Louis
's main lounge, in heavy ice, the bubblers screaming, somewhere in Franklin Strait, Carmack delivered a lecture in which he expounded and expanded on the preliminary findings he'd shared with me seven months before. His was among the last in a series of lectures. When he boarded the
Louis
in Resolute, he'd brought with him, in addition to Erin Freeland-Ballantyne, a number of supernumeraries whom he referred to as VIPs—luminaries of oceanography, all dressed, like him, in matching fleece cardigan vests onto which was embroidered the logo of this expedition—the C30 project, Carmack had called it, for Canada's Three Oceans. His idea for the second leg of our voyage was to turn the
Louis
into a kind of icebreaking, traveling oceanographic lyceum.

During the lectures the VIPs delivered, I learned many interesting facts—for instance, that in the “microbiome” of the human body, only a portion of our cells, genetically speaking, are human in origin. The rest are bacterial. (While learning this, I found myself looking down, examining my midriff, into which, in the main mess, I'd recently deposited some potatoes, carrots, and buttery cod. The cloth between the buttons of my quick-dry adventure shirt was puckering over the waistband of my quick-dry adventure pants in an unflattering way, and I tried to smooth the puckers flat.) I learned that herring are shrinking but also that eighty-two “jumbo squids” had recently been caught in Canadian waters, and that these squids were members of an invasive, southern species. (To my mind this didn't sound so bad—less herring, more calamari.) I learned that approximately every ten years the prevailing winds of the Arctic shift, a phenomenon known as the Arctic Oscillation, and that this wind regime plays a role in the movement of ice.

In the main lounge of the
Louis,
Carmack stood before a screen onto which a computer projected various slides. The computer also projected slides onto Carmack. As he paced back and forth over the carpeting, rocking in his mocassins, knitting and unknitting his fingers, smiling his sphynxlike smile, maps and diagrams played across his plaid shirt and jeans and cardigan vest, and made the lenses of his little spectacles shine.

Around five million years ago, Carmack told us, the Isthmus of Panama, without the efforts of Teddy Roosevelt, had been a strait, conducting equatorial currents freely between the Pacific and the Atlantic. Only after the Isthmus of Panama closed, and deflected the currents in both the Pacific and the Atlantic, did the oceans come to resemble the oceans of today, “with high-pressure centers in the subtropics and low-pressure centers in the subarctic, and clockwise currents traveling around the subtropical gyres and counterclockwise gyres flowing around the high latitudes north of the subtropical front.” Over the past five million years, two distinctly different kinds of oceans had formed.

There is on the one hand the ocean most of us have heard of and thought about. The one we like to go bathing in, on the beaches of Coney Island or Costa Rica or the Côte d'Azur. This is the “thermally stratified ocean,” where variations in temperature and salinity and therefore in density make layers of water mingle and move. Then, on the other hand, there's the northern ocean, which is “permanently stratified by the accumulation of freshwater.” Much of the freshwater—sixteen thousand cubic kilometers of it or so per year—comes from the comparatively fresh currents that flow into the Arctic from the Pacific through the Bering Strait. Another thirty to forty thousand cubic meters or so come from the northerly rivers of Canada and Siberia and Europe. It was thanks to the freshwater as much as to the low temperatures (1.7 degrees Celsius, last I checked) that right now, in the middle of July, through the closed curtains of the
Louis
's main lounge, the creaky thunder of crumbling ice—six feet thick and stretching from shore to shore and riddled with seal holes and stalked by bears—could be heard.

The northern ocean, Carmack emphasized, is connected to the “global ocean” by subtle currents and winds. In fact, the climate as we know it depends on those currents and winds, which transport excess heat away from the equator, to be released back into space at the poles. And the subpolar front, the boundary between “these two counterrotating gyres”—the boundary along which sixteen years ago twelve containers tumbled overboard, along which bath toys had traveled to Sitka—“acts as a bit of a wave guide for storm tracks.” The weather in Myanmar as in Manhattan is the consequence, in other words, of the Isthmus of Panama and of those currents circling and spiraling through time and space, currents that with alarming swiftness, as the Arctic warms, are changing in measurable if not always visible ways.

“You look out now,” Carmack said in the main lounge, directing his gaze toward the closed curtains, his computer projecting a cartoon planet Earth onto his shirt. “Well, you know what kind of ice we've had in the last couple of days.” Since Resolute, far from ice-free, the Northwest Passage had seemed more like the Northwest Impasse. One might as soon attempt to transit the Gowanus Expressway in an icebreaker as the frozen thoroughfare in which, the previous evening, we'd found ourselves trapped.

While I was chatting about winged copepods with Glenn Cooper over beers, a strange look had passed over the biologist's face. He'd paused midsentence and was gazing, rapt, out the windows of the main lounge. I followed his gaze, expecting to see I'm not sure what—perhaps a polar bear feasting on a paleochemist. “We're not moving,” Cooper had said. Yes, now that he mentioned it, I noticed it, too. I was experiencing the sensation of beer but not the sensation of drift—nary one of the six degrees of freedom. The
Louis
, weighing 11,345 tons, outfitted with three propellers each one of which can exert eighty tons of thrust, was frozen in, beset like the
Jeannette,
stuck. Out by the starboard rail a couple of graduate students were joking about having to get out and push. We were in Peel Sound, not quite halfway between Resolute and Cambridge Bay.

Up on the bridge, Quartermaster Dale Hiltz was at the helm and Captain Rothwell was standing nervously by, dressed casually, in sneakers and a sweatshirt, looking out the windows and rubbing his mustache. He was supposed to be off-duty, asleep by seven, in his cabin one deck down. His second-in-command, Stephane Legault, also dressed casually, in sandals and shorts, was supposed to be in the main lounge enjoying a beer. Cathy Lacombe, in uniform, was supposed to be the commanding officer. Having encountered thick ice, Hiltz and Lacombe had performed the usual maneuver. They'd backed. They'd filled. They'd charged. The bow of the
Louis
had hauled out onto the ice. And the ice had refused to break, and the
Louis
to reverse, and now we were parked there, like a beached whale, propellers churning. The late evening sun, however, still shone brightly as a midday sun, making the ten thousand pools of melt that speckled and marbled and gilded and puddled the ice flash, as if some Nordic or Inuit god had dropped a handful of change. The watery puddles and the white hummocks formed a pleasing pattern—not a perfect pattern, but a discernible if erratic one, a kind of messy paisley. If you've ever noticed the rills waves make on packed sand, you can imagine those that the wind and puddles make on thawing land-fast ice.

To Hiltz, in thirty years of icebreaking, this had happened only once before. “Come on, girl, patience!” he bellowed as the propellers churned. Robie Macdonald, his white hair resembling the nest of an eider duck, had never seen it happen. “It's all one piece!” he said of the ice, meaning that there were no cracks and that Peel Sound was frozen fast from shore to shore. Captain Rothwell said, “It's like an ice grip!” Then he said, “If it's like this the rest of the way it won't be good.” And Macdonald, thinking of the years he'd spent planning his scientific fieldwork, said, “No, it won't be good.”

When the captain of your ship begins speaking in perplexed exclamations and gloomy prognostications, it is hard, I've found, to keep the hysterical flights of fancy at bay. With a full tank the helicopter had enough gas, I knew, to travel 220 miles, which hardly seemed enough, considering how many of us there were aboard. Should we break out the survival suits? Would we spend weeks here in Peel Sound, eating our shoes and performing theatricals? Probably not. When we set out from Nova Scotia, the larder of the
Louis
had contained 683 pounds of bacon, 1,012 eggs, 900 pounds of coffee, and 1,900 rolls of toilet paper (this last fact makes one wonder what explorers of the past, lacking both paper and leaves, used; nothing, presumably; or perhaps lemmings, or snow). Back at the docks of Dartmouth, I personally witnessed stevedores load sixty-four crates of potatoes into a hatch in the
Louis
's hull. Surely, we hadn't eaten all of them. And so long as we had satellite reception there'd be no need for theatricals. We could instead watch nature documentaries about the Arctic.