The Northern Lights, page 2
The men lay shivering in their sleeping bags, dozing fitfully through the night but being frequently awoken by particularly violent blasts of wind and ice or by hunger and thirst. They had put a bucket of snow inside the tent in the hope that it would melt with their body heat and they would have water to drink, but it remained frozen. Birkeland felt responsible for the safety of his talented charges who had followed him on this hazardous expedition. Aware that this area sometimes experienced week-long tempests of unbroken ferocity, he worried throughout the night about how they could survive if the storm continued the next day. Lying awake listening to the air howling through the mountain pass and over their tent, he waited for the slightest sign that the gale-force winds were easing.
At ten the following morning Birkeland untied one of the leather strings holding down the tent flap but could see no more than a meter ahead. Not until midday did the wind abate sufficiently to risk venturing out. Birkeland banged on Hætta’s sled to make sure the postman was still alive. Hætta shouted in reply that he was too cold to move but Birkeland insisted that they take advantage of the lull. Camp was struck, the sleds reloaded, and a reluctant Hætta once again led the group onward. They had only a few hours of daylight left to make the ascent, and without food and water it was imperative they find the shelter.
As the six men trudged on, the snow finally stopped and only tiny ice crystals spun in the eddies of wind left behind by the fierce zephyrs now en route to central Finnmark, Kautokeino, and the Lapp reindeer camps of the plains. The clouds dispersed as quickly as they had arrived, and in the gathering twilight the Pole Star appeared, reassuring and constant. Without the cloud cover the cold intensified rapidly, and moisture frosted on their lips, while their breath trailed behind them in crystal plumes. The drifting snow made walking in boots impossible, so the men strapped small skis to their feet. The undersurface of the skis was covered in reindeer skin in such a way that gliding forward was easy but the hairs sticking in the snow prevented them from slipping backwards. Nearly two hours later they reached a gently sloping plateau at the foot of the summit. Hætta pointed to the top of the peak. In the deepening twilight the group could faintly discern the shape of a small building. The sky was almost dark and the final slope was littered with sharp, icy rocks and narrow crevices. The reindeer coughed and snorted with the effort of pulling the heavy sleds up the incline and the group stopped frequently to allow them to rest. At the steepest sections, the men put their weight behind the sleds and pushed with all their failing strength as the delicate-limbed reindeer slipped and scrabbled on the icy rocks and patchy snow. After twenty minutes of backbreaking struggle the exhausted group arrived at a small area of smooth snow, a ledge of flat ground at the base of the final peak. Above them stood their sanctuary, a black shape against an inky sky.
In the dark the men could discern a small stone building with wooden steps leading up to the doorway in a low tower. After struggling to crack away the ice that had sealed the door to the jamb, Birkeland managed to get inside. It was nearly seven o’clock by the time the stove was lit and a bucket of snow brought in to thaw. Hansen immersed his hands in it in the hope that the frostbite could still be reversed. The others unpacked the sleds and staggered up the slope with the boxes and bags.
As the last of the packages were carried in and Hætta tethered the reindeer, a crack appeared in the night. On the eastern horizon the darkness was splitting to reveal a gentle, tremulous luminescence—just a sliver, a streak. One by one the men stood still on the summit and stared at the vision appearing before them. The streamer of light began to move toward them in a huge arc across the heavens, pulsating and writhing as it advanced. The streak became a pennant with points of light coursing down in parallel lines like the strings of a harp, attached at one end to heaven and at the other to the sinuous curve of light as it crept from horizon to horizon. Then another bolt of the green-white light stretched out beside the first and both arced together. Even more wildly the strings were plucked and the shapes changed to the music—now curling, now forming great circles, then breaking again to roll away to join another arc of green-white light. No one spoke. The hairs on the backs of their necks stood up, as if awoken by static electricity. Birkeland understood for the first time why the Lights had defied neat explanation: they appeared not to belong to Earth but to space. Seemingly beyond human comprehension, they reached straight into the souls of those who witnessed them as an appearance of the angelic host or the Holy Spirit might do. The glowing banners in the sky were so entrancing that the group forgot the cold and remained outside, entering the hut occasionally to eat or drink but re-emerging to watch the breathtaking display dancing over their heads. Only Hætta did not look. He took the reins and bells off his animals and went into the hut without an upward glance.
For the Lapps, the Northern Lights were a fierce and powerful presence. They were the messengers of God, to be respected and feared. Hætta had removed the harnesses from the reindeer to avoid attracting their attention, for Lapps believed that whistling, waving handkerchiefs, or the sound of tinkling bells would provoke the Lights into attacking the offender. Stories abounded of Lapps who ignored this warning being struck down, their charred reindeer jackets remaining as a warning to others. The Lapps would chant a special rhyme repeatedly if they feared that they had angered the Lights:
The northern light, the northern light
Flickering, flickering,
Hammer in its leg
Birch bark in its hand.
The hammer signified the vengeance of the angels if God was not respected and the birch bark created the flames with which they could burn transgressors to a cinder.
The ethereal phenomenon of the Northern Lights had inspired centuries of myth and terror. In Norway they were sometimes called Blood Lights to recall the belief that they were the souls of dead warriors fighting, a portent of war and death. The Vikings thought that the magical apparitions were Valkyries, female messengers of the god Odin, riding from Valhalla to mark out those who would be killed in battle. The streaks of luminescence were their fiery spears, the flashing sparks the reflections from their shields, and the great arcs the mythical bridge, Bifrost, across which the souls of the dead passed to the next world.
Sem Sæland had noticed Hætta’s fear of the Lights; he had seen similar reactions the year before in Iceland. There, the people believed the Lights to be the spirits of those unhappy to be dead, trying to signal to their living relatives. The spirits could be vengeful, and the villagers would bring their children inside for fear that the Lights would sweep down and cut off their heads to use for ball games. An Eskimo word for aurora, arssarneq, meant “ball player.” Icelanders would never cut their hair when the Lights shone or venture outside without a cap in case their hair was singed off.
The perception of the Lights as wrathful and violent spread throughout Europe in the Middle Ages. Every fifty to a hundred years a display dramatic enough to light up the skies above Paris, Vienna, and Rome occurred, blood-red in color. The frightening sight of the sky ablaze with pulsating flames led commentators to believe they predicted war, plague, and conflagration.
When Birkeland set out on his expedition, the earliest known record of the Lights was more than 2,000 years old, written in China in 208 B.C.:
During the night luminous clouds were seen, gold and white, with long streamers, which lit up the hills. Some think it is Heaven’s Sword, but others think that it is a deep hole, with a large blazing fire in the sky.
The earliest written attempt to provide an explanation for the aurora in Scandinavia was in the epic Norse poem The King’s Mirror: “It seems to me not unlikely that the frost and the glaciers have become so powerful there that they are able to radiate forth these flames.” As generations passed, other folkloric explanations gained ground—that the Lights were reflections from the silvery shoals of herring swimming close to the water’s surface, or that they were the light bouncing off icebergs rocking in the polar sea; that they were created by sunlight reflecting off the wings of migrating geese, or off swans trapped in the polar ice flapping desperately to free themselves.
The aurora was one of the last unsolved mysteries of the natural world, puzzled over, feared, or worshipped. In an audacious plan, Birkeland intended to spend a whole winter on the mountaintop to study the Lights, which were known to appear in this region more frequently than elsewhere in the country. It was not only their beauty that compelled him and his fellow scientists to make this dangerous trip, but their challenge. He had a theory that, if he could prove it, would solve the riddle of the Lights and overturn conventional wisdom about the solar system and the Earth’s place within it. For him, the Lights marked the threshold between the visible and invisible worlds; they were the link between the planet and the vast, uncontrollable, and unseen forces that shaped the universe.
After nearly an hour of celestial entertainment, weariness overtook the explorers and they went into the hut and shut the door against the cold night. The tiny building stood proud on the summit of Europe as the Earth turned its diurnal course around the sun. As the night wore on the beautiful Lights wound their path across the heavens, retreating from the dawn. Inside, the six men lay sleeping around the dying embers of the fire.
2
Land of the Lapps
October 1899
Auroral observatory, Haldde Mountain
A Valkyrie rests
On the rock in steep,
Flickering fire
Flames about her:
With the seep-thorn Ygg
Her erst did prick:
Other heroes she felled
Than he had willed.
The Prophecy of the
Seeress, Older Edda,
A.D. 1000–1100
THE FOLLOWING morning Hætta woke first and brewed the very strong black coffee of which Lapps were extremely fond. After sharing it with the others, he went outside to slaughter four of the reindeer—they were to be the main item on the observatory’s menu for the next six months. He kept two alive for the men remaining behind and harnessed two to take himself and Helland-Hansen down the mountain. Helland-Hansen’s fingertips were still white and needed to be examined by a doctor. If lifeless, they would be amputated to avoid the risk of gangrene infection and he would have to abandon his hopes of becoming a surgeon. If they could be saved, Hansen would return to the observatory.
Hætta was anxious to leave. Already one of the group was injured and the Lapp saw this as an omen that the expedition was ill-fated. He tried to tell Birkeland of his disquiet, but the professor disliked superstition and dismissed his warning. The postman untied the reindeer and they skidded and lurched down the steep slope until they reached the shallow basin at the foot of the summit. In the deep snow that had gathered in the hollow the animals leapt in great bounds toward the head of the trail that would lead them to Kaafjord. From there, Hansen would catch the steamer to Hammerfest, the nearest town with a hospital—a journey that might take two days if they had to wait for the steamer. Hansen’s departure was a stark reminder for the others of their isolation and vulnerability. Hansen had been the only one with any medical training and they were now reliant on the tiny printed instructions in their first aid box.
After a quick breakfast, the four remaining men inspected the observatory in the deep gloom of early morning. Birkeland was immensely proud of the sturdy little observatory, which was capable of withstanding some of the most extreme weather conditions to be found anywhere on Earth. Commissioned in the spring by Birkeland and built during the mild months of summer by men and horses, dragging over forty tons of building material from the valley to the peak, it should have been finished by September. A freak snowstorm in August had caused delays, forcing the observers to climb to the peak three weeks later than planned, when the weather was worse and the task of equipping and preparing the observatory more difficult. The four men had to pick their way carefully around the base of the walls as the building was perched on the rocky mountain tip, with sheer cliffs plummeting several hundred meters on two sides and steep, rocky inclines on the others. The stone and concrete walls were nearly thirty centimeters thick. The roof was of sturdy Norwegian design, layers of timbers covered in gravel, bark, earth, and more wood, with steel guy ropes added to keep it fixed to the house during the gales that ripped through the mountains. The house itself was probably solid enough, although the ground was too hard for foundations to be dug. On the south wall was a short, flat-roofed observing tower with the entrance set into it, a meter off the ground, reached by climbing ten wooden steps. Birkeland had insisted on raising the level of the doorway to prevent large snowdrifts blocking the entrance and trapping the men inside the hut, or worse, outside. In these parts the wind was so strong that even hard compacted drifts could be blasted away and reformed in minutes.
Inside the observatory were four rooms, all lined with pine and wallpapered in the workroom and kitchen. The ground floor of the tower provided a buffer between the outside world and the kitchen and contained the wood, coke, coal, and paraffin that had been delivered in the late summer. Once the men had unpacked, it would also house their outdoor clothes, boots, spades, skis, and snow-shoes. A wooden ladder led to a trapdoor that gave on to the roof. The kitchen was the warmest room in the building, containing the only stove and, at one end, bunks and a small window. A door led to the workroom—depository of the forty trunks and boxes hurriedly stacked there the previous night—and beyond that was the window-less instrument room.
A sheet was strung across the kitchen to separate the bunks from the cooking area. The kitchen table was placed near the fire and domestic utensils hung on nails in the walls. A wooden partition was built to divide the workroom into two sections, the smaller of which became a darkroom for developing their photographs of the Lights. A larder for the dead reindeer was fashioned out of packing cases filled with ice and roped to the exterior of the building along the south wall. The far side of a rocky outcrop was designated as the latrine; when it was too windy, a chamber pot in the vestibule would have to suffice.
As the weather that morning was good, Birkeland decided to start with the instruments designed to be fixed onto the roof of the observatory tower. He checked the boxes, trunks, cases, and bags of instruments he had brought with him from Christiania University. Most of them had been shipped from overseas—Germany, France, Russia, Britain—their postmarks testimony to the breadth of his knowledge of the latest scientific advances occurring throughout Europe. Birkeland had chosen the very best he could afford, and no previous expedition to study the Northern Lights had been as well equipped. Here, on top of a mountain in Northern Norway, the fruits of centuries of scientific research and experimentation were being harnessed to study the Lights.
First he picked out a strong anemometer, built to survive hurricane-strength winds up to seventy-five knots or one hundred forty kilometers an hour. By recording wind speeds he could determine whether the appearance of the auroras was linked to any particular weather conditions. For this purpose he also chose a sturdy electrometer for the roof, to record the electric condition of the atmosphere, which was known to vary during thunderstorms but had not been studied in connection with the aurora. An alcohol thermometer that could withstand temperatures as low as −117° Celsius was unpacked to verify numerous anecdotal reports that auroras looked brighter the colder the temperature. The lowest recorded temperature in Finnmark was −51.4°C on 1 January 1886, a temperature at which it would be impossible to be outside observing the aurora for more than a few minutes. In the vestibule Birkeland also fixed a mercury thermometer that would work down to −38° Celsius. Norway was, in fact, the best place on Earth to study the Northern Lights because the Gulf Stream that ran along its western coast mitigated the worst of the Arctic cold. Although the storms across Finnmark could be fierce, the temperature tended to be a few degrees higher than in other Arctic regions where the Lights appeared. A barometer would tell whether air pressure changed during auroral displays, and a hygrometer measured air humidity. The photographic equipment was stored in the darkroom until needed, and wind kites, to record wind velocities up to 2,000 meters above the ground, were left in the vestibule until official recordings began on 1 November.
These instruments, Birkeland hoped, would give him the evidence he needed for his theory of how the auroras were formed, and the observations would provide answers to some contentious minor questions, such as were auroras accompanied by a crackling noise? Could they make hair stand on end, burn flesh, or cause headaches in the way thunderstorms could? Did they touch the ground? Did they occur during “daytime”? By the end of the winter Birkeland hoped to have definitive answers to all these questions, ending centuries of speculation.
There were also numerous ledgers into which records and descriptions of the auroras would be entered, including their shapes, longevity, brightness, position in the sky, movement, and related weather phenomena. Auroras were generally divided into four basic forms—bands, arcs, crowns, and rays—but during a display, the luminous threads of light rarely remained in a single shape but swayed from one form to the next, frequently defying categorization. Trying to describe and explain the Northern Lights had taxed the world’s greatest minds, their beauty and inconsistency snubbing even the most poetic and daring attempts. Around 450 B.C., the Greek Anaxagoras put forward the idea that auroras were caused by fiery vapors that poured down from the sky and accumulated in the clouds until they burst into flames. These explosions gave rise to the auroras, comets, and lightning, a vaguely heretical idea that challenged the presumed perfection of the heavens but might have been overlooked had Anaxagoras not also asserted that the sun was a large ball of fire. For this outrageous impiety he was exiled in disgrace. A century later, Aristotle contradicted Anaxagoras’s heresy and denied that there could be any interaction between the heavens and the Earth because the heavens were perfect and unchanging—an erroneous belief that persisted to Birkeland’s day. In a letter to Alexander the Great in 349 B.C., Aristotle described a rare occurrence of the auroras as blood-red, some remaining stationary while others shot out at great speed, some flickering up and dying out while others lingered. He categorized them as “torches,” “small rays,” “round vessels,” “chasms,” and, in his more scholarly work Meteorologica, as “jumping goats.”
