Arctic Dreams, page 24
A geometry of lightning-bolt-shaped leads, of long black ponds, jagged rills, and ridges of debris that meander like eskers stretches as far as light and the atmosphere let you see. In a wide lead, small floes roll slowly off the wind to the right, on a heading of 30° to it. (All windblown ice in the North behaves this way because of the coriolis effect, the tendency of a moving body on the earth’s surface to drift sideways because of the earth’s rotation.)
Because of the constant, accordion-like adjustment of the ice surface, there is always open water in the Arctic Ocean, even in the coldest weather. Along the coast, where a band of stable, shorefast ice forms, a predictable flaw lead often separates shorefast ice from the moving pack, particularly when offshore winds are blowing. (This flaw zone is a regular highway for sea mammals and the most heavily hunted area of the sea ice by both bears and men.)
In addition to these flaw leads and the numerous leads that open and close regularly in the pack, there are relatively large areas of persistent open water called polynyas that stay open all winter. They are maintained by unique current and wind patterns and occur in the same places year after year. Depending on their size and location, polynyas can harbor significant concentrations of overwintering seabirds and marine mammals. (The whaler’s West Water in Baffin Bay was actually the southern end of the largest polynya in the North American Arctic, the North Water.)
Shorefast ice, embayed ice, or sea ice that has formed in regions where there are no appreciable currents can offer a serene and dependable surface over which to travel, even at night. Pack ice, the ice beyond the flaw lead, holds a different sort of attraction because of its constant motion, varied topography, and the access it provides to certain animals. But to venture out there on foot is, to put it simply, to court death. Pack ice moves irregularly before the wind, and the change in orientation of an individual piece of ice is unpredictable. Commonly, especially on larger pieces of ice, there is no sensation at all of movement or change. A person might discover suddenly that he was far from shore, or realize he had no idea of his position. In every coastal village from Inglefield Fiord to Saint Lawrence Island there is a story of someone who got caught out there by mistake, often pursuing a polar bear, and who was never seen again.
The crushing power of moving pack ice is not a great threat to people traveling with dogs or on foot. They can usually move nimbly enough over its surface. To be at its mercy in a boat or small ship, however, is to know an exhausting, nerve-wracking vulnerability. In May 1814, with his whaling ship beset off the east coast of Greenland, William Scoresby set out on foot to reconnoiter the final mile of maneuvering that he hoped would set him free. Like many men caught in such circumstances, Scoresby was terrified. But he was mesmerized as well by the ice, by its sheer power, its daunting scale, the inexorability of its movement. The sound of its constant adjustment before the wind was like “complicated machinery, or distant thunder,” he wrote. Even as he sought a way out, he marveled at the way it distracted him. He lost the sense of plight that spurred him, the pleading whining that came from his ship’s pinched hull; he became a mere “careless spectator.” It was as though he were walking over the back of some enormous and methodical beast.
The sea ice was a more perilous environment in the era of wood ships than it seems today from the bridge of a steel-hulled icebreaker, but no arctic sailor was or is ever at ease in it. The whalers forced their way in with poorly fitted ships and lived for months at the extreme limits of their ability to cope. To get through a stretch of ice and out to open water, or to survive in a stream of ice driven down on them in a storm, nineteenth-century sailors had to employ several operations. With a favorable wind and an ice-strengthened prow, they could “bore” their way through, following the shouted directions of a lookout in the crow’s nest. But a sail ship has no reverse, no reliable “dead slow,” no instant “hard-to-port” response. More often they had to take the ship in tow behind their whaleboats and row through the ice. Or “warp” it forward, winching from the windlass against anchors set in the ice ahead. Or “mill-doll,” by dropping a boat with three or four men from the bowsprit, to fracture ice in advance of the prow.
In the shifting pack, even a 250-ton ship could conceivably be crushed in two or three minutes, forced up in the air with an explosion of its oak ribs and driven under with a grunt, like a grand piano caught in an industrial press. To protect it during a storm in the ice front, or at night when they could not find open water, the crews sawed temporary docks in the floes. As often as not they lost that protection and had to begin all over again the wearying task of cutting and removing blocks of ice. In heavy weather the pack moved like a jigsaw puzzle; loose ice hit them repeatedly, “hard enough to knock the ship’s brains out.” Officers tried to mete out a crew’s strength over the course of a storm, or until they got out of the ice. But any situation could change instantly—ice at rest one minute was moving the next. Officers felt the strain of unceasing responsibility and vigilance. “During that time,” wrote one captain of a harrowing seventeen hours he spent running a shore lead, “I did the heaviest smoking of my life. I smoked twenty-two cigars and numerous pipes, and I had coffee brought to me every hour. I don’t know whether it was the tobacco or the coffee that brought us through, but we made it with no damage.”
Damage was routine, some of it serious. “Relays of men at the pumps and others working with buckets,” wrote a captain of his stove ship, “succeeded in raising seven to eight tons of water per minute, [but] the sea came in quicker than it could be thrown out.” And the sea was a frigid 30°F. They fothered their broken hulls with wads of sail and filled the cracks as well as they could with cordage and oakum. They sought a desperate protection up-current of icebergs.5 But the icebergs sometimes disintegrated and the ships were swamped or crushed. Once a storm passed and the menacing ice was still, they no longer had to lie in their bunks and listen to the “rending, crashing, tearing noise,” the screech and detonation of a ship’s timbers. But until they were clear of it, its capricious and unappeasable nature preyed on their imaginations.
If it got very cold, as often happened toward the end of the whaling season, ice might congeal around a ship, creating in only a few hours “a crystal pavement by the breath of Heaven cemented firm.” Then a man stood on the deck in such stillness, he could hear his watch ticking in his pocket. Men who had collapsed at the pumps or lost their appetites when ice peeled the copper sheathing off the ship’s bottom now went out on the ice for a stroll and flew kites or tossed a ball, as though they were on a commons.
When a ship was seriously beset, the crew packed their belongings, set them on deck, and waited. The slow compression of the ship could go on for weeks before the keel finally broke or the holds flooded. When a ship was lost, however, it rarely sank right away—the men had time to step overboard and walk away, if they were lucky, to another ship. In the fall of 1777, more than 350 such shipwrecked men, whalers and sealers, were to be found hiking over the ice off the southeast coast of Greenland. About 140, given food and clothing at native settlements, eventually reached Danish villages on the west coast. The others perished. In 1830, so many ships were destroyed in Melville Bay (the place they called “the breaking-up yard”) that at one point nearly 1000 men were camped on the ice. Legally under the command of no captain, they set fire to the broken ships and milled about for weeks in drunken celebration. (Not a man was lost in this weird catastrophe.)
Five years later an isolated group of British ships, fishing too late, became for the first time irrevocably beset in Baffin Bay. The men had neither proper clothing nor food enough to see them through the winter. Most died of starvation, exposure, and despair during the four months they were carried passively south in the Canadian Current. The ships’ logs are poignant. On November 11, 1835, an officer of the Viewforth wrote: “Weather milder. A great many fish have been playing around the ship to-day, amongst which we observed unicorns and white whales. We are now to the southward of Cape Searle, a sublime object. The moon has been in sight all day—it never sets—a thing I never saw before.” On November 13 a mate aboard the Jane wrote: “Strong breezes with snow; heavy press, ship suffering greatly, how she can bear it God only knows. It’s awful work; long dark nights, no hope for us if she goes. May God preserve our shelter.”
When they reached the ice front in February, the floes opened and then closed, opened and then closed on them. Each day they built up their hope from scratch. One of the whalers sank. When the others were finally released, too few men were still alive aboard some of the ships to hoist sail. They drifted aimlessly in weather so foul that for days on end they could not take a bearing or fix their position. Some were met by outwardbound whalers; miraculously, every ship eventually reached England. The following year, a dozen vessels froze in again. Half these ships sank, and the loss of life was extensive—forty-four of fifty-eight aboard the Dee, forty-two of forty-nine aboard the Advice.
Sometimes it was over very quickly. At 3:30 A.M. on the 26th of April 1832, the whaler Shannon of Hull, running before a southeast gale, slammed bow first into an iceberg. The captain ran forward in the darkness and laid his hands to the wall of ice even as it continued past them, ripping open the ship’s starboard side. They were awash in minutes. Sixteen men and three boys were swept away. The survivors clung to each other beneath a sail, on a part of the ship kept afloat by trapped air. They were without food or fresh water. They survived, with the death of but three more, by bleeding each other and drinking the blood from a shoe. A man who left their deck shelter to commit suicide spotted two Danish brigs on the 2nd of May. The survivors, save the captain, were all frostbitten. “The rescue,” writes a historian of the arctic whale fisheries, “was one of those providential affairs of which many instances could be related.”
I think of a final image of devastation: the remnant of several whaling crews found in a frozen stupor behind a sea wall of dead bodies, stacked up to protect them from the worst of the heavy seas in which their small floe rolled and pitched.
The horror and loss of life are remote from us now. Our assessment of arctic seas is today more often made from an airplane, amid the crackle of constant radio contact, or from the warm bridge of an icebreaker, guided by the lugubrious movement of a gyrocompass and the deep-space silence of satellite navigation systems. This machinery compresses time and space, and comforts us because of the authority with which it keeps danger at bay. From these quarters, its scale reduced, we appraise the landscape very differently.
Few men in northern ships today, however, are without regard for the human history that preceded their own in those waters. And no arctic ship’s master, his Lloyd’s of London Ice Class IA Super ship boring through four feet of sea ice at a steady five knots, sleeps free of the stories that have been passed down. They are ignored only by men for whom the recalcitrance of the land is but a distraction, a disturbance to be quelled by machinery. The frozen ocean itself still turns in its winter sleep like a dragon.
Max Dunbar, a pioneering arctic oceanographer, has described the Arctic Ocean with some wistfulness. Because of a paucity of seismic and magnetic research, and a lack of core samples from the seabed, the evolution of the Arctic Basin is a puzzle; and because so much of its waters are covered with ice, the Arctic Ocean remains the least understood of the world’s seas. Its waters are relatively sterile when compared with those of the highly productive subarctic seas. Their lack of productivity, however, is not due to coldness or to lack of light as much as to the water’s vertical stability. Without an upwelling of inorganic salts (phosphates, nitrates, and silicates) from the bottom, a rich life in the sunlit upper layers cannot be sustained. (The lack of any endemic genera, the low number of plankton species, and small plankton populations are all signs of the ocean’s youth as well as its sterility, in Dunbar’s view.)
Oceanographers divide the Arctic Ocean into five regions, according to the relatively few species of life to be found in each one. Farthest north is the high Arctic abyssal region, perpetually ice-covered and least known. Between there and the coasts lies a high Arctic shallow region of drifting annual ice, which enjoys periods of summer sunshine and some upwelling. Along the North American and Eurasian coasts is a brackish water region, a zone of fluctuating temperatures and salinity due to a tremendous outpouring of freshwater rivers from the northern rims of the two continents. (More meltwater flows in spring from the Lena into the Laptev Sea than from any other river in the Northern Hemisphere.)
Most of the Arctic is without tide pools and that array of life typified by the presence of sea grasses, kelp, and barnacles, because the near-shore bottom is scoured by ice every year. Some areas, however, do harbor small populations of intertidal creatures, and these constitute a fourth zone, the Boreal littoral faunal region. Soviet scientists, far and away the most experienced of arctic oceanographers, also recognize a fifth zone between brackish coastal waters and the high Arctic shallow region, which they call the low Arctic shallow region (essentially a broad shelf sea, the continental shelf north of Russia being the most extensive sea shelf in the world).
The life of the polar seas is structured around a spring bloom of epontic phytoplankton that initiates a period of active feeding by herbivorous zooplankton. Carnivorous zooplankton, various crustaceans, and a small number of fish species, principally polar and arctic cod, extend this food web, as we have seen.6 The sea ice prevents 99 percent of the sun’s light from reaching these active layers of the water, but it also insulates creatures in the food web from the extreme cold of winter, and it has profoundly shaped their evolution and development. The Arctic Ocean, in fact, cannot be explained ecologically without taking the sea ice into account. Because of this, many oceanographers have come to regard the Arctic Ocean as unique, a landscape that requires a special point of view.
The foundations of Western ecology were laid down by scientists working almost exclusively with temperate-zone ecosystems. The violent fluctuations characteristic of arctic ecosystems played no role in their original conceptions, and certain conditions that typify arctic ecosystems were treated as impediments rather than normal circumstances for the development of life. Snow and ice, for example, were at first regarded as temporary and relatively unimportant conditions in the environment, not as integral components of the ecosystem. Snow, however, proved to be as fundamental in shaping an animal’s life in the Arctic as rainfall is in the Philippines or sunlight in the Arabian Desert. It creates the stable platform from which certain animals reach browse unreachable in the summer. It forms the barrier that, more than cold temperatures, sends seed-eating birds south in the fall. It provides cover for the ermine and other weasel-like animals that plunge into snow at the approach of a predator and burrow long distances through it without surfacing. It provides insulation for ptarmigan, which dive into it in the evening to sleep. It provides the contours that conceal predators from their prey; at the same time, it founders predators and allows longer-legged and broader-footed prey to escape. It shelters a creature like the lemming, too small to grow hair long enough for insulation and still be able to walk. It creates a greenhouse effect for some plants in the spring and protects them from drying winds in the winter. It is snow that determines that a ground-dwelling squirrel that cannot migrate must hibernate, while an arboreal squirrel, living high above the ground, can remain active all winter.
Winter, not summer, is more the season of record in the Arctic for the evolutionary biologist. A northern ecologist looking at snow sees an element as integral to the landscape as soil. It is snow that cuts some animals off from their food, makes heavy energy demands on others, and insulates a third group.
Ice, to the ecologist, is but an extreme form of snow, and it alters the landscape and affects the lives of animals in ways as profound and subtle. The quality and type of sea ice are as crucial in shaping the lives of arctic marine mammals as topographic relief and the presence of plant food are in directing the movements of land animals. Seals and walrus depend on the ice to carry them passively to new feeding grounds and to function as a platform upon which they can rest, molt their hair, and give birth to their young. Ice floes also serve as temporary islands where these animals are safe from orcas and landbound predators. As a seaward extension of the land, the ice becomes as a winter highway for migrating muskoxen, caribou, polar bears, and arctic foxes. Icebergs and large remnant pieces of pressure ridges that ground in coastal bays and continue to shift in the tides all winter, can keep enough water open to maintain a herd of walrus at a new feeding ground until spring. In November, after a river has frozen over and its channel has drained (no water flows into it after the watershed above freezes), you can sometimes drop through the ice and walk around on the empty riverbed—one of the polar bear’s favorite places for a winter bivouac.
The most dramatic association between ice and arctic life, perhaps, and still largely an unexplained mystery, involves events at polynyas in winter and spring. Polynyas occur both along the coast (long, narrow shore polynyas) and at sea (more lakelike, flaw polynyas). The open water, which occurs in the same places every year, offers an overwintering refuge to some animals and a staging ground to other animals migrating north in the spring. (The consistent pattern of open water has no doubt been crucial in shaping the migratory routes of many seabirds and marine mammals.)
