The Magnetic North: Notes from the Arctic Circle

Read an Excerpt

Magnetic North

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC

Chapter One

Herds of reindeer moved across ice and snow. Slim-shouldered Lapps squatting on Ski-Doos nosed their animals toward an arc of stockades. A man in a corral held a pair of velvet antlers while another jabbed a needle into a damp haunch. I made my way toward the outer palisades, where Lapps beyond working age stoked beechwood fires and gulped from bowls of reindeer broth, their faces masked in musky steam. The first new snow had fallen, and the Harrå Sámi were herding reindeer down to the winter grazing. A livid sun hung on the horizon. Sámi, or Lapps, were the last nomadic people in Europe, and until recently they castrated reindeer at this place by biting off their balls. In the stockade I took my baby son from his wooden sledge, prowed like a miniature Viking ship, and wrapped him closer in his calf pelts.

The Lapps divided the corralled herd, each smaller group husbanded by an association of families (sijdda) in pastures close to home. Down at the end of summer, up at the end of winter—the cycle of life above the Arctic Circle. At half past three the sun vanished. It was the season between white nights and darkness at noon, the period in which the Arctic turns inside out. The thunderous pounding stopped. Below the corral, people who had come to recover stray reindeer struggled to load them into stumpy horse boxes. In the distance, the lights of Harrá shimmered through a dark haze. The silence of the winter forest settled over the corral, fractured only by the cry of a nightjar. When I came to unwrap Reggie from his pelt, the soft green and orange beams of the northern lights swept the sky.

Fifteen years earlier I had spent some time in Antarctica. Its geographical unity and unownedness attracted the younger me, as did the lack of an indigenous human presence, and the inability to sustain terrestrial life. It was a metaphor for a terra incognita, an image of an alternate and better world. I was prejudiced against the complicated, life-infested North. Time passed, and in 2002 I traveled briefly with the Sámi and their reindeer. I started thinking about the collar of lands around the Arctic Ocean. Fragmentation, disputed ownership, indigenous populations immobilized on the threshold of change—those very things Antarctica lacked appealed to the older me. Especially fragmentation. When I thought about the Arctic, in my mind's eye I glimpsed an elegy for the uncertainties and doubts that are the chaperones of age. Was the Arctic a counterweight to the Antarctic? (The Greeks called it arktos, the Great Bear, or northern pole star, and the Antarctic was the antiarktos—the opposite.) Or was it just a frozen mirror image, and I who had changed?

The Arctic is our neighbor, part of us. What could be less romantic? And the world seems a wearier place than it did a decade and a half ago. It is the Arctic that captures the spirit of the times. The Arctic is the lead player in the drama of climate change, and polar bears are its poster boys. So I went. On a speck of land in the northern reaches of the Arctic Ocean, the encircling water chaotic with floes, I heard a snow bunting sing. Not a single songbird breeds on the Antarctic continent. The sweet trill of the small black-and-white bird brought the Arctic to life.

Where is the Arctic? An ocean surrounded by continents, and an indistinct geographical zone. The top part—the High Arctic—is a dazzling hinterland where myth and history fuse, a white Mars. The Haughton Crater on Devon Island in the Canadian High Arctic hosts camps of Martian aficionados testing potential housing in preparation for man's arrival on the red planet ("This is as close to Mars as we can get," one of them told me). The southern limits of the Arctic are movable feasts. Some people—such as the farmers in northern Sweden and Finland who wish to claim EU Arctic farming subsidies—consider that the Arctic Circle at 66°33' constitutes the frontier. In Canada the definition fails, as swaths of typical Arctic territory (permafrost, permanent ice cover, absence of topsoil and significant vegetation, polar bears, all of these) lie well south of the Arctic Circle. Sixty-six degrees simply marks the point at which the sun fails to set at the summer solstice (June 21) or to rise at the winter solstice (December 21); climatological and other factors produce divergent conditions at different points on the Circle. The Gulf Stream warms the oceans and the surrounding air to create clement conditions for the subsidy-claiming Scandinavian farmers, and in Finland the viviparous lizard thrives north of the Arctic Circle, whereas parts of the sub-Arctic are colder than anywhere else on earth. The residents of Oymyakon in the Sakha Republic three degrees outside the Arctic Circle once recorded a temperature of –97.8°F, a level at which trees explode with a sound like gunfire and exhaled breath falls to the ground in a tinkle of crystals. In addition, some cartographers and politicians use the isothermal line to define the Arctic, thus including all the places where the long-term mean temperature of the warmest month is below 14°F. And in the biggest gerrymandered constituency on the planet, there are four North Poles.

I think the southern boundary of the Arctic is most appropriately defined by a combination of the tree line and the southern limit of continuous permafrost on land, and by the average extent of winter pack ice at sea.

Since 1900 the mean global temperature has risen by 1.08°F. In the Arctic, the figure is 3.6-5.4°. But there is still a lot of ice. In July 2008 I took a Russian icebreaker across the Arctic Ocean and stood day after day on the bridge with the captain (a saturnine figure who talked too fast, like so many natives of Vladivostok) and we watched the cutaway prow smashing through thousands of tons of it. The extent of the ice is not the only critical issue. Unlike the Southern Ocean, which swirls around the Antarctic, the Arctic Ocean is more or less enclosed—what marine geographers call a mediterranean sea. Most of the water that leaves flows through a deep channel southwest of the Faroe Islands (it carves through a row of transatlantic sills). In this gap, cold, salty water from the Arctic moves south beneath warm, fresher water traveling north from the tropics. Various "pump" sites in the Greenland Sea shift these warm and cold currents around the planet. As glaciers melt and water flowing from the Arctic becomes less salty, the pumps could lose power, and a growing body of data indicates that they will turn off altogether. Or will the Siberian permafrost break down first and release tides of carbon dioxide and methane as well as baby mammoths still sporting their ginger hair? Either way, the survival of civilization as we know it hangs on what happens in the Arctic. Anxiety, panic, concern, and skepticism have inflamed the public imagination. As we powered through the ice, I asked the captain what he thought about the Big Melt. He looked out over the splitting white, took a deep drag on his Troika cigarette, and yelled over the racket of six engines, "I not know."

Scientists, for the most part, don't know either. I spent many weeks hunched over holes in the Greenland ice sheet or hauling samples from the slimy bottom of an Alaskan lake. As far as possible, I tried to enter the minds of individual researchers to see what made them creative. My own mind was open. History reveals many periods of cooling and warming, and I learned that the science is more dramatic than media headlines indicate, as well as a million times more complicated, nuanced, and uncertain. In many respects, we do not know how ecosystems will respond to climate change. The Arctic has been the locus for Armageddon two generations in a row now. It was the front line of the Cold War, with both sides pouring money into long-range nuclear bomber installations and lone figures crouching on floes straining to hear enemy subs (or was that a ringed seal scratching its back?). Nuclear holocaust, then apocalyptic climate change: something about the region attracts millennial anxiety. I picked up a scent among the Lappish reindeer and pursued it through the journeys described here. What does the Arctic tell us about our past? What does it reveal of the future?

Besides climate panic, the emergence of the Arctic as an energy frontier has similarly shunted the region into public consciousness. The Arctic already produces about a tenth of the world's oil and a quarter of its gas. As you read this, geologists and paleontologists from many nations are chipping indicator fossils from bedrock to locate more. Hydrocarbon extraction is set to remain an economic driver across the polar regions, and issues around the exploitation of natural resources recur throughout these pages: hard-rock mining as well as oil and gas (a hard-rock mine excavates ores from which metals are extracted). Everybody wants what the Arctic has, and as a result, shortly after I started working on this book, a simmering international row about ownership boiled over onto the front pages. All five polar nations—Denmark, Norway, Russia, Canada, and the United States—set about proving that their continental shelves extend far to the north under the waters of the Arctic Ocean. This, they hope, will secure navigation rights over mineral reserves beneath the seabed. In July 2007 a Russian nuclear submarine sent a diver to drill a titanium flag into the bedrock under the North Pole itself, a gesture that made the Pole as Russian as gold teeth. The Canadian prime minister rushed up to his bit of the Arctic to express comparable views. In Chukotka, the back end of Siberia and a region the size of Turkey that Russia had forgotten, President Medvedev stepped out of his helicopter onto the tundra in 2008 to pat a reindeer and listen to some pleasant Chukchi folk songs in a local school. (I was there!) He was the first Russian head of state to bother; no czar had ever come within a thousand miles of Chukotka. Five days previously, in a speech on Arctic policy to the Security Council in Moscow, Medvedev had flagged the reason for his visit. "This region," he said, "accounts for around 20 percent of Russia's gross domestic product and 22 percent of our national exports ... Experts estimate that the Arctic continental shelf could contain around a quarter of the world's hydrocarbon resources." The main issue, Medvedev insisted, "is that of reliably protecting our national interests in the region." Like the diver who planted the flag, Mr. President was showing how very Russian it was in the North. That night's television news followed him touring the new supermarket, the first in the region, where he peered into freezers while a supervisor gave a running commentary on cylinders of Arctic Roll made in a factory on the outskirts of Petersburg.

The burst of political concern highlights the transitional state of the inhabited Arctic. In Nuuk I saw a pair of nylon panties pegged on a washing line next to a row of curing seal ribs. Something mysterious and indefinable has outlived cultural collapse. There was the twenty-year-old Inupiat woman with two children; almost everyone in her family was drunk almost all the time, she had never been out hunting, she ate Western junk food and watched The Simpsons. "I sense where I come from," she said, "when I see the milky ice on the creek split in the spring." Inuit art has expressed a spiritual connection between man and nature for three thousand years, and in the myths and beliefs of the Far North, humanity and the world give each other meaning. The Magnetic North describes the semi-inhabited fringes of the Arctic: the transition zone. "It's not about polar bears," says Mary Simon, head of the Tapiriit Kanatami, which represents Canada's forty-five thousand Inuit. "It's about people."

Although the beauties and intractable problems of the contemporary Arctic framed my journeys, I could not ignore generations of explorers. Like the scientists who succeeded them, they went north to unlock secrets. Their adventures frequently descended into a tragic farce of shoe-eating (when they ran out of food) and poetic death, but still, heroic individual struggle is a theme of this book. Who can resist David squaring up to a Goliath army of towering bergs? In America, Arctic mania persisted from the Civil War to World War I. Even at a time when Americans were going west, the North Pole and its whaling waters cast a spell, luring Pole-seekers in little wooden ships, balloons, zeppelins, planes, icebreakers, and submarines. A hundred years ago, in 1909, two Americans on separate expeditions claimed to have stood at the North Pole. Over in the Old World, even Pope Pius XI was not immune to worldly longing. As a young priest, Achille Ratti, as he was called then, applied to join one of the Duke of Abruzzi's expeditions. Ratti was a keen alpinista, but the duke judged that a priest would be bad for morale.

That said, this is not a comprehensive history. I have picked out stories illustrative of themes—such as the drama of pioneering polar aviation or the heroism of the Norwegian Resistance—or so legendary it would be perverse to ignore them, such as Sir John Franklin, shoe consumer to beat them all. I included others because I liked them too much to leave them out—though in this last category a superfluity of candidates did oblige me to ditch some favorites. I was sorry that Valerian Albanov failed to make the last cut. He was a gifted navigator whose ship froze into the Kara, most dreaded of Arctic seas. Fed by four of the great Siberian rivers, the Kara is frozen for nine months of the year, an annihilating wilderness spread over hundreds of thousands of square miles. In 1912 Albanov set off from the Murman Coast on a projected seven-thousand-mile voyage to Vladivostok in search of fresh marine hunting grounds. When the Kara ice closed in, twenty-five men and one woman drifted twenty-four hundred miles in eighteen months, during which time they ran out of fuel and had to chop up the wooden walls of the cabins to keep the samovar going. In April 1914 Albanov and thirteen others set off by sledge for an uninhabited archipelago using a hopeless map and a faulty chronometer. Three men quickly returned to the vessel, but the rest marched on for ninety-two days. They were weak and dreaming of peaches, but Albanov got them there carrying an icon of Saint Nikolas under his parka. He couldn't keep them alive, though. I stood on the headland where nine of them lie in unmarked graves. A passing Russian boat rescued the other two, Albanov one of them. Those stranded on the ship were never seen again.

When I left the Sámi to their herds back in 2002, my Lappish host presented me with a bracelet made from the base of an antler. More bangle than bracelet, as the two ends didn't quite meet, it was a handsome object that I liked very much—I fancied that it smelled of smoke and beechwood—and it sat on my desk for many months as I mapped out my journeys. One day, as I fingered the bangle, I hit on the idea for a structure for my upcoming voyage. I would make a circular, counterclockwise journey—Siberia to Alaska to Canada to Greenland to Spitsbergen to Lapland and back to Russia, to the White Sea. The ends would not quite meet up. This would be a series of small journeys spread over two years, each planned to shed some dim light on the enigmas of the Arctic. Russia was a natural starting point, as it has more Arctic territory than any other country—five thousand miles of coastline that unspools from Europe to the Pacific, and a wilderness of tundra in which everything has evolved in response to cold. The southern boundary of Russian permafrost coincides with the tree line, the unguarded frontier that loops from the Finnish border, south of Murmansk, across the White Sea, and chops off the top of the Urals before proceeding through the Noril'sk nitrate fields and dipping into a U-turn on the central Siberian plateau. The coniferous forest below, a wide and monotonous sub-Arctic sash known as taiga, is the salient ecological feature of all northern Russia, a little-known region haunted by mythical spirits and gulag ghosts. Chekhov said that only migratory birds know where the taiga ends.

"Excerpted from THE MAGNETIC NORTH: Notes from the Arctic Circle by Sara Wheeler, published in February 2011 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2011 by Sara Wheeler. All rights reserved." (Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Magnetic North by Sara Wheeler Copyright © 2011 by Sara Wheeler . Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---