In the Empire of Ice (33 page)

BLOWING WIND and the village is quiet. The waxing moon is three-quarters full, and steam from the houses drifts with falling snow. New ice has formed. It bends with the tides and changing currents. “In a few days the moon will be full and the weather will be stronger,” Mamarut says. “Maybe wind waves will break up the ice. Maybe it will stay.”

Up the hill the edge of the ice cap is dull white. Once it shone like a gigantic diamond. It stood for the icy fastness and cultural continuum that is the polar north and seemed indestructible. Now scientists worry about the accelerated erosion of the “big ice,” as the meltwater in a glacier’s natural drainpipe, its moulin, drills down to bedrock and lubricates the base, causing great hunks of ice to slide.

People here say there is life in every part of the Earth, animate and inanimate, and maybe moving ice is one aspect of that dynamism. Only 70 years ago the coast of Greenland was thought to be inhabited by beach spirits called Ingnerssuit, who looked like humans but had no nose and tried to lure people to live with them. Giants called Sarqiserasait rose out of the rough seas. Traveling in a half kayak, they killed anyone in umiat or kayaks. Female giants had long claws on hands and feet so strong they could dig holes in granite. They lived in the solitary fastness of the coastal mountains. The Isserqat lived in the ground and winked sideways. They were known for tickling people to death. The Tarrajarssuit were invisible spirits. If their shadows fell on you, you would instantly die.

A humped cloud rises. Sun squeezes between two rumps of mist. The Earth’s veins now run with poisons, not only radiation but the more widespread industrial and agricultural organic compounds that ride the winds around the world and drop down in rain and snow onto the massive snowfields and ice sheets of the Arctic.

POPs travel vast distances, accumulating and condensing in snow, ice, and water. Insoluble and long-lived, these toxins pass through the food web quickly: from seal, walrus, beluga whale, and narwhal to polar bear, bird, caribou, musk ox, and human through breast milk and meat. Sixteen percent of the north Greenlandic population have high levels of toxins in their blood. There is transboundary pollution in all eight circumpolar nations.

A polar bear eating a ringed seal passes along the poisons of an industrial world to her tiny cubs; Greenlandic women who breast-feed their children have the highest concentrations in the world of methyl mercury in their breast milk. POPs endanger the immune system and provoke a susceptibility to diabetes and all kinds of cancers and impair hormonal and reproductive functions, which is why hermaphroditic polar bears have been found in Svalbard and Greenland and Inuit males have abnormally low sperm counts.

In earlier times one of the local shamans might have intervened. “Shamans were our scientists. Like the narwhal, they knew the environment, they could read the weather,” a hunter said. Now scientists are reading the climate and saying that surface reflectivity is at a premium because snow and ice turn 80 percent of the sun’s heat back into space, whereas the dark surface of open water absorbs 90 percent of the sunlight. “Even if there were shamans in Greenland,” a Danish scientist said, “climate models show that carbon dioxide emissions at almost 400 parts per million and getting higher are overriding Sila. And they are predicted to rise very soon to 450 ppm and higher.” It’s not just an environmental injustice but a social and spiritual one as well.

Later I walk the shoreline with Mamarut. A friend we pass along the way says the ice is getting good again, that he was able to go out at Herbert Island and saw narwhal but the ice was too broken to hunt. Narwhal in February? I ask. Are they usually this far north? “They think it’s April,” Mamarut says.

A gold bullion sun spills over fractured ice and open water. There are legends about Arctic winters when the ice never comes, but never one about endless summer. Strands of ice stretch out into golden threads. “What can we sew with that?” I ask. “Money,” Mamarut replies, grinning slyly. It’s good to see him make a joke again. But he’s serious: “We never needed money before. Now we need boats with motors to hunt when there is no ice. But we have no money to buy them.”

It begins snowing again. Snowing for no reason. It covers rotting ice, warming it, causing it to melt further. Jens joins us. The wind is noisy. We pass by the big diesel-generating plant that gives lights to the town.

I’m wearing the sealskin kamiks made for me by Jens’s wife, Ilaitsuk. Two older women stop to admire them. Extra sealskins were once sold by the hunters to Denmark. Jens says: “When the natural living took place, the prices for these skins was high. In the 1970s when I started as a full-time hunter, there was no problem. The little money we needed could be made directly from selling the skins. We kill and eat about 30,000 seals a year. That’s more skins than we can use. So we sold the surplus to Denmark.

“Then Brigitte Bardot and Greenpeace started talking about seals. She thinks we are the ones clubbing baby seals, but we are not. We would never do that. We are not commercial seal hunters. People like her don’t know who we are. She is still harming us today. We are no longer allowed to sell sealskin outside the country. She has made us poor, she has disrupted our families. We used to live all together out on the ice. Our wives, who always traveled with us, making clothes, preparing skins, working at camp, helping with the dogs, and teaching the youngsters, now have to stay in town and work at the few low-paying jobs available.”

We cross the bridge to Jens’s house, where, with the onset of increased precipitation, even in a polar desert, there have been flash floods. He looks at his dogs, pointing to the ones that have pulled our sled on various trips. He’s smiling, but when he turns to me, he looks lost, as if wondering what has happened to his world. It’s too much to take in, to understand, to accept, I want to say, but lack the words in Greenlandic.

Later Jens tells me about a cave south of Pituffik where the polar bear spirit is still “very strong.” He says he would like to take me there sometime. In the old days he might have been a shaman instead of a mayor. I ask him again about the time he was called by the polar bear spirit and he says, “I still fear it; I would still turn away from the call because we live in modern times. There is no place in society for a shaman now.”

Ilaitsuk gives Jens a look. She knows everything that he is and could have been. She feeds one of her many grandchildren a stringy piece of polar bear meat. Mamarut and Tecummeq come by. Under his parka, Mamarut is wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a baby on the front, though he, Jens, Mikele, Hans, and others who grew up in Moriusaq or Dundas are unable to have children, and no scientist, doctor, or shaman has been able to make things right.

In January 1968 a U.S. B-52 bomber carrying four nuclear weapons caught fire and crashed on the sea ice in Bylot Bay, eight miles west of the Americans’ Thule Air Base. The nuclear payload—each bomb was 1.1 megatons—ruptured on impact, and radioactive materials including uranium, plutonium, and americium from those weapons were dispersed across the ice and into the sea. The Americans had been storing nuclear weapons at their base and for use in their “Chrome Dome,” Cold War exercises—all against a Danish law that prohibited such weapons in its territory.

It took 700 men nine months to clean up the site. Only three of the four bombs were actually accounted for. The fact that one weapon was missing was only recently revealed. Many on the cleanup crew, including Inuit hunters and Danes, were not provided with protective clothing, nor were they monitored for signs of radiation sickness subsequently.

The contaminated ice and the wreckage were removed and shipped to the U.S. After that, subsistence marine mammal hunting north and south of the base resumed. The exposure to contaminated meltwater and the consumption of marine mammals that live in the region “could be” the cause of radiation illnesses, sterility, and cancer, a Danish doctor said.

I’VE MADE A SIDE TRIP south to Nuuk to visit my friend Aleqa Hammond. I haven’t seen her since our long walrus-hunting trip in 2004. I’ve known her for 17 years. Now she is married to a Danish geologist and has an adopted son, a hungry boy they found camping on their doorstep, and she’s Greenland’s minister for finance and foreign affairs.

Aleqa is tall, with a villager’s sturdy frame and a beautiful face. She is notoriously strong minded, with a mixed Inuit/English heritage, and straddles the worlds of subsistence hunters, Danish royalty, and Greenlandic politicians with ease. Her family in Uummannaq was impoverished, but it was there that she learned to handle a team of dogs and make decisions on her own, which has served her well in handling powerful politicians.

“I never keep back from anyone. I always go from the heart,” she tells me. “I got it all from my mother and grandmother. My father went through the ice when I was seven. My grandmother was an old woman then, a wise woman. She always helped people, told them out loud how to make their lives better.”

Aleqa was 12 when she was left to care for her two younger brothers after her mother went off to work in the Black Angel mine. “I only saw her a few times a year, so I had to take charge. We were poor—she is still poor. If my father had lived, I’d probably be less outspoken!”

In cabinet meetings in Greenland and Copenhagen, she is brutally frank. She’ll look a member of the Danish or Greenlandic Parliament in the eye and say, “You didn’t mean that, did you?” “That’s how I handle them when they’re trying to maneuver things their way.” Her opinion is listened to. She knows what it’s like to be from a hunter family; she knows what is happening to the ice.

“The most important thing we can do is to make the transition between old and new without losing the old ways,” Aleqa says. “We can’t avoid capitalism. It is coming at us from all directions. But what we take of the new world and how we match it to the best of the old, keeping the spirit intact, is very important. The way we have been living together is the essence of a living tradition.”

South of the Arctic Circle and the hunting life, Nuuk is a sophisticated Arctic town with a museum, a university, two newspapers, a large hospital, a publishing company, a bookstore, restaurants, and discos. The night of the lunar eclipse we’re invited to a minister’s house for a party. As the moon slips into its black envelope, someone says, “It is like what is happening to our ice,” then goes inside to eat Thai food and sip French wine. These aren’t stuffy affairs but rather vivacious and young at heart. Aleqa is spearheading a push for Greenland’s independence. “We have always wished for this, and now the time has come,” she says.

Unlike other Arctic nations, Greenland has a majority population that is Inuit. Colonized in 1721, the island was a Danish protectorate until 1978. Now Greenland has home rule, with a thoroughly Inuit Parliament, but trade and foreign affairs are still overseen by the Danes. Greenland’s economic stability is based on the infusion of 680 million Danish kroner per year by the Danish government. When I asked a politician in Copenhagen why they are so generous, he said, “Guilt. Greenland is our national treasure.”

Petrol, heating oil, lumber, building materials, and housing are heavily subsidized, making it possible to live on a hunter’s income. Medicine and education are free. What will Greenland do without these generous subsidies? What will be the consequences of this claim for independence for an island of rock and ice and a tiny population of only 57,000 souls?

As the white lid of ice comes off the top of the world, elements of temperate ecosystems will move north. Vegetables and crops of hay have been grown in south Greenland below the Arctic Circle since the Vikings landed there. Ocean fishery is thriving. Warm-water cod are repopulating Davis Strait, and pockets of lead and zinc have been uncovered near the town of Uummannaq. Gold and diamonds have been found, and oil companies predict that the northern waters may hold at least 31 billion barrels of oil and gas.

“We are now on the path to independence, and nothing can stop us,” Aleqa says defiantly, perhaps unaware of the devastating toll the extractive industries take wherever they go. “With all this mineral wealth, we won’t need the subsidy. There will be nothing that ties us. We will be economically free.” When I tell her that such freedom is a myth, she ignores me.

QAANAAQ AGAIN. The sky flames out in sun dogs, frost glitter, and zodiacal light. The wild stirring of the ice cap that is everywhere in the news is nowhere to be seen. Yet if it melts completely, sea level will rise 23 feet around the globe.

Climate is always changing, and ice is on the move. When the North American plate carried Greenland toward the Equator, Greenland was warm and lushly vegetated, and the temperature of the Arctic Ocean peaked at 73°F. Once, there were dinosaurs at the Poles.

Sea ice is ephemeral and so is the ice sheet, but on another order of geologic time. Some 125,000 years ago, in the last interglacial, the ice cap was smaller than it is today. The cyclical restraints were still in place then: An interglacial always gave way to an ice age, and ice ages were more numerous than warm times. But the sun’s cycle was such that it gave off less heat than it does now, and with anthropogenic climate forcing, the stable interglacial time we’ve been enjoying is now crumbling, with no upswing into a new ice age—where we should be headed—in sight.

Not “warming,” but deadly heat. The ice sheet is melting, breaking, surging, acting more like an ocean than a mountain of ice, as if mimicking what it is about to be.

The paradise called the Holocene is ending, and a new epoch, tentatively named the Anthropocene, is beginning—an era when climate will be forced against its cyclical “instinct” to become cold again. A warming world has all kinds of consequences. As the continental ice sheet retreats, botanical explosions will occur. Populations of terrestrial northern animals like musk ox and caribou will continue to increase, and the ice-free land will rebound and rise like bread, shaking off all vestiges of “a place called winter” and the men and women who thrived there.