The Northern Lights, page 3
Aristotle grouped the Lights under the general heading “Comets,” and they were not clearly separated from other “heavenly bodies” until the early 1600s when Galileo Galilei described them as the boreale aurora or “the northern dawn.” In 1621 the designation was modified slightly to aurora borealis by the eminent French astronomer Pierre Gassendi, who, like Galileo and Aristotle, had witnessed a display tinged with pink. Auroras seen in lower latitudes often had a rosy hue, reminiscent of dawn. Birkeland himself preferred the Latin term lumine boreali, “the northern light,” or aurora polaris, “polar light,” as in the far north the auroras were usually white or yellowish green and bore no resemblance to dawn.
Once Birkeland was satisfied that he had chosen all the instruments he needed for outdoors, they were hauled up the wooden ladder in the tower and through the trapdoor. The observatory roof was the highest point on the mountain and free from all obstructions. The weather was clear and cold and the panorama stretched for hundreds of kilometers in every direction. In the west, the sharp blue peaks of the Kvænangen Mountains jutted out of the Earth’s crust; to the east the horizon was interrupted by the softer outlines of the Porsanger Mountains. The precipitous cliffs of Lang fjord and Stjernø Island could be glimpsed fifty kilometers to the north, while the northernmost glaciers of Norway glittered on the neighboring island of Seiland. The mountain plateau of the south stretched inland in undulating lines as far as the eye could see, toward the winter home of the mountain Lapps, and far below lay the fjord, a dark channel with numerous branches that continued into the Alten valley.
Haldde Mountain was a little known and desolate place when Birkeland came to Finnmark, the largest and most northerly of Norway’s provinces, in search of the ideal location for an aurora observatory. He had first seen it in the summer when the midnight sun illuminated the peaks with a soft radiance and the grass and moss on the slopes housed clouds of mosquitoes that made the climb to the top unpleasant. Birkeland was warned by the villagers living along the fjord that the mountain changed character after the end of autumn, when the summit could be shrouded in snow for days on end, the route to the top blocked by drifts up to nine meters high. Then the mountain was a harsh and capricious place, no one attempted to ascend it and certainly no one had spent a whole winter there. Even the Lapps abandoned the Haldde area at the first sign of snow and guided their reindeer herds to the winter grazing plateau of Kautokeino.
For a scientist, however, Haldde Peak was the perfect site from which to study the aurora. By choosing this vantage point, nearly 1,000 meters above sea level, Birkeland would be as close to the Lights as possible with a view unhindered by trees, buildings, or the electric lights and factory smoke that were beginning to pollute the skies over the capital and other cities. Several earlier reports about the Lights had suggested that they reached so close to the Earth as to touch the mountaintops. Others who witnessed them thought that the Lights were emitted from the peaks themselves, like smoke from a volcano. By siting the observatory on such a high peak Birkeland would be able to test these hypotheses and maybe stand among the Lights themselves. No one knew where the Lights originated, and no one had yet proved where in the sky they appeared. In order to reveal how near to the ground they came and how high into space they stretched, Birkeland had had another small hut built on a neighboring peak, Talvik. By sending one man there, they could measure the Lights against the stars from the two locations, nearly four kilometers apart, and determine their height with simple geometry.
From the tower the men could look toward the north, beyond Stjernø and Seiland Islands to the long, bluish silhouette of Sørø Island, the last barrier of land against the Arctic seas and the unconquered North Pole, nearly 2,000 kilometers away. Before Birkeland left Christiania, news had broken that an Italian team was trying to reach it, but nothing was yet known of their progress. It was just the latest in a string of attempts starting twenty years earlier with George de Long’s tragic expedition, during which twenty of the thirty-three crew members perished, including de Long himself. An American explorer, Adolphus Greeley, had tried the following year and only six of his team of twenty-five were alive when rescue eventually came. Birkeland’s countryman Fridtjof Nansen, who spent three years drifting in the polar ice in the ship Fram, had come the closest, missing the pole by only 400 kilometers in 1896. Other attempts, including a foolhardy scheme to fly over the pole in a hot-air balloon, had ended in failure and death. Birkeland himself had thought of becoming an explorer when he was young, although not of the Arctic but of Africa. While Birkeland was studying for his degree in physics he had been captivated by the professor of Egyptology Jens Lieblein, a mesmerizing speaker in his seventies, who recounted his journeys along the Nile and the discoveries he and his fellow archaeologists had made about the country’s pharaonic past. Egypt still held a fascination for Birkeland but otherwise Africa seemed to have been overrun by unpleasant European prospectors, the motivation of discovery having been displaced by that of greed and exploitation. He had turned his sights instead to the glittering, uncharted mysteries of the polar regions and the skies above them.
Once all the instruments were securely fastened to the roof, the little group gathered around the flagpole that Birkeland had requested be built into the supporting wall. He opened the parcel that he had carried with him from Christiania and pulled out a large flag. It was the Norwegian standard, a thin dark blue cross on a broader white cross on a red background, free of the Swedish colors that the government had decreed must appear in the upper corner nearest the flagpole. Birkeland improvised a short speech, invoking the history of their small country whose people had been great explorers since the days of the Vikings. As the old century drew to a close, Norway was enjoying a renaissance, with figures of the stature of Ibsen, Grieg, Nansen, and Munch retrieving its politics, culture, and status from the doldrums of foreign domination. The expedition to the mountain summit was to further this process and to uncover new territory—not in places where flags could be planted but in space, and in the world of ideas. Birkeland dedicated his team’s pioneering research to Norway, that it might one day be released from the shackles of Swedish supremacy to ride to independence with dignity and pride.
The others applauded the nationalism of Birkeland’s speech. Norway had lost its independence 400 years earlier and was then the frustrated partner in a union with Sweden, formed in 1814 after Carl Johan, heir apparent of Sweden, defeated the forces of Denmark and Norway. By the time Birkeland was born in 1867, a rapidly developing Norway was chafing under Swedish hegemony, and increasingly vociferous demands for autonomy were made during the last two decades of the century, focusing primarily on the inequality of the partnership: the prime minister of Norway and three principal ministers were required to reside in Sweden, the Swedish king had power of veto, and the Norwegian national flag was supposed to carry the Swedish colors—“scrambled egg” as it was known—a symbol of Norway’s inferior role that was widely resented. In matters of foreign affairs the situation was yet more galling. Norway was not allowed its own foreign office, minister, consuls, or even merchant marine flag: Sweden sought control over Norway’s shipping contacts abroad, even though Norway had become a more important sea-trading nation than Sweden. Relations between the two countries became so strained by 1895 that both sides began rearmament in preparation for possible war and Sweden ended the Scandinavian Common Market, a move that hit sections of Norway’s economy very hard.
Birkeland had always been vociferous in his view that his country should be autonomous and defended Norway’s honor at every opportunity. While studying in Leipzig a few years earlier, he had been forcibly ejected from a performance of Little Eyolf, by the great Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, for objecting loudly that a Swedish, rather than a Norwegian, flag had been raised in the second act of the play. He had gone straight to the local paper to submit a furious letter. The next day the flag was changed. Birkeland’s sentiments were shared by all standing on the observatory roof with him, particularly by Sæland, who had narrowly missed a jail sentence for hissing at the Swedish king, Oscar, and Crown Prince Gustav when they visited the capital. He had been forced to resign from the Students’ Society and a number of professors argued that he should be prevented from taking his final examinations. Sæland had opted to take a sabbatical and travel to Iceland while the debate about his future died down, and he had eventually been allowed to return to continue his studies in the mathematics and science department. Birkeland was glad to have Sæland with him. He was a capable organizer, a talented scientist, and blessed with a good sense of humor. He also possessed great musical abilities and would often start a round of singing after meals.
Once the outdoor instruments had been properly sited, Birkeland began setting up the most important machines, the magnetometers. These were designed to measure changes in the strength and direction of the Earth’s magnetic field and were housed in the interior instrument room, on pillars built into the floor. He spent many days adjusting the exquisitely made instruments with their perfectly turned brass fittings, quartz threads, and steel needles, having first removed door hinges, nails, pipes, and any other object made of iron and replaced them with brass hinges, copper nails, and ceramic pipes—materials that would not affect the magnetic readings.
It had been known for nearly 150 years that the Northern Lights disrupted compass readings and were a threat to navigation. With this in mind, a young man called Olaf Peter Hiorter, brother-in-law of the famous Swedish scientist Anders Celsius who invented the temperature scale, had spent an entire year, from 19 January 1741 until 19 January 1742, watching a compass needle, recording its position every hour. He took 6,638 readings (out of a possible 8,760), stopping only for a short trip home in August and a ten-day Christmas holiday. In his treatise he gave evidence to show that a compass needle would move, left and right of the magnetic north, when the auroras appeared. He did not know why this strange phenomenon occurred but implored travelers to be careful when using a compass in the regions where the auroras could appear. Birkeland was convinced that the relationship between the compass needle and the Lights was crucial. His sophisticated magnetometers would do the job of Hiorter’s compass, recording movements of the needle photographically, without Birkeland having to watch them night and day.
Birkeland was well read in previous explanations of the Lights, his favorite being an experiment performed in the 1740s by a Swedish man of letters, Samuel von Triewald, who shone a beam of light through a prism, over a glass of cognac and onto a screen. Von Triewald was hoping to prove that the Lights were caused by sunlight striking clouds of “vapors” in the atmosphere. The fumes from the cognac created swirling patterns in the light, and the experimenter wrote:
One was surprised to see a naturally occurring northern light on the screen that nothing could more resemble . . . Never be a man tired regardless how long he looks at this experiment, for in addition it is far the most beautiful one can produce in a dark room.
During the nineteenth century a rash of theories for the aurora had been posited. Birkeland was aware of at least two dozen competing ideas, and there were probably more. The most sophisticated concentrated either on magnetic, electric, or cosmic forces as the main causal element in the appearance of the Lights. Unlike his predecessors, Birkeland considered that all these elements were involved in the complicated processes the aurora revealed. Although Newton had written, “It is the perfection of all God’s works that they are done with the greatest simplicity,” the aurora seemed to defy that belief.
Once the magnetometers were working correctly, Sem Sæland organized a recording timetable, to come into effect on 1 November. The timetable listed all the instruments in the observatory, the intervals at which they needed to be read and which member of the team was to do so. Readings needed to be taken, indoors and out, throughout each twenty-four-hour period, although the busiest time was between six in the evening and one in the morning when the Northern Lights most frequently appeared. During auroral displays the skies would be monitored constantly and readings for the outdoor instruments entered in a ledger every few minutes and, on occasions, every thirty seconds.
As the days of preparation passed, the sun sank lower on the horizon and the hours of daylight dwindled rapidly. The Arctic winter was just over the horizon and within a few weeks there would be no daylight at all. Even now they saw the sun for only four or five hours when the clouds permitted, but this did not depress the group. A sense of urgency and excitement permeated their every action: they would be the first men to spend a whole winter in this harsh environment. As the instruments began to click and tick, whirr and swing, the hope that nature would surrender her secrets to them became palpable. No one grumbled about the cold or the long dark afternoons but all looked instead for the first glimpses of the aurora.
Sæland had accepted the unenviable task of manning the second auroral station on the neighboring peak, originally with Hansen, but no word had arrived from the injured scientist. Sæland was perhaps the best suited of the group for the task—calm, experienced with the instruments, and trusted by Birkeland to be rigorous in rising to the scientific challenges of the months ahead. He visited the Talvik building as soon as Birkeland was able to release him. It was a single tower with a sloping lean-to against one wall, hurriedly built of rock and concrete, drafty and cheerless, with one window and a thin roof. The tower would be equipped with the same instruments as the other observatory but without magnetometers. The lean-to was Sæland’s living and working area. The two observatories would be connected by telephone, but there was a tacit recognition that contact would be frequently broken during storms or large auroral displays, when huge currents in the ground often disrupted telegraph and telephone links. It would be Knudsen’s job to repair the telephone cable to maintain communication between the two buildings.
During the last two weeks of October, Knudsen and Boye frequently traveled between the two peaks, inspecting the cable that had been installed during the summer. After much deliberation, Knudsen had decided that it was better to suspend the cable from wooden poles where it was vulnerable to wind and ice but out of reach of snowdrifts and nibbling reindeer. As he moved beneath the cable, checking for faults and weak points, Boye would practice his reindeer driving skills or, as was more frequently the case, reveal his lack of them. Fortunately, after the first few trips from peak to peak, the reindeer had learned the route and trotted off without instruction. This worked well when the men were already sitting in their sleds, less well when they were inside finishing their coffee. Boye spent many frustrating hours chasing the echoes of their bells and soon realized that tethering them loosely to poles did not work as they could chew through them or undo the tether by sucking at it with their strong lips. They were masters of escape and Boye had to learn quickly in order not to lose the group’s fastest means of transport. It would be hard to replace the reindeer at this time of year as the Lapps had moved from the fjord into the hinterland of Finnmark, where they roamed over the immense high plateau with their animals, guarding them day and night from wolves. In the summer, when Birkeland had come looking for a good position for the observatory, the shores of the Alten fjord were bristling with thousands of reindeer, large herds grazing on the slopes or swimming with their magnificent spreading horns towering above the sea, appearing from a distance like a floating forest. The herders came to the coast only in summer, when they met with the Lapps who had abandoned the herding life to be fishermen. During the first week in the observatory, the scientists could see the last herders, retreating to the plateau beyond the mountains.
Birkeland and his team were not ignorant of the ways and customs of the indigenous people of Finnmark, for Norwegians had lived as neighbors with the Lapps for centuries and marriages between them were common. The Lapps belonged to a wider group called the Sabme, Sami, or Sabmeladsjak who inhabited nearly the whole of Europe north of the sixty-sixth degree of latitude, the parts of Russia, Finland, Sweden, and Norway that jutted into the Arctic Ocean—250,000 square kilometers, populated by around 30,000 Sami. During the winter they moved camp every three days or so, looking for the moss on which the reindeer fed, and avoiding wolves. Although they would hunt and fish, the nomads lived mainly on reindeer, occasionally eating their meat but mostly subsisting on frozen reindeer milk mixed with berries, reindeer milk cheese, and rye-meal cakes baked over the fire. Birkeland and his team followed their lead in terms of diet, eating mainly reindeer but supplementing the strong meat with delicacies they had brought from the city, such as biscuits, chocolate, honey, and dried fish.
By the end of October, after less than a month in the observatory, the instruments were calibrated and ready and Birkeland had time to invent contraptions designed to make their lives more comfortable. The first was a pump and a series of pipes connected to the stove that would heat their bunks through the freezing nights. On the trial night, the pump somehow slipped and instead blew freezing air into their beds, resulting in Birkeland catching a cold and the others waking with stiff necks. More successful was an alarm system that would alert the group when readings were due. Birkeland powered the alarm with a battery, wondering whether one had been used so far north before. Volta, an Italian chemist, had first made a battery in 1800, but no one, including the inventor, understood why it worked, just that it did. So Birkeland was curious to find out if the battery would perform in low temperatures, but after a few days’ trial run, it died, and the alarm, up to that point accurate and useful, had to be abandoned. Birkeland’s great triumph, however, was a mechanical cable car that could carry supplies up the final, steep section of the summit. He sent his drawings to Meyer, the engineer who had built the observatories, explaining that the cable should be 200 meters long and the car large enough to carry 100 kilos of goods, or snow for water. Five weighty, misshapen boxes arrived in Kaafjord two weeks later and Hætta struggled up the mountain to deliver the awkward load to the professor. He watched the others unpacking the cable car with deep suspicion and left worrying that these fanciful men would never survive a winter in the harsh environment of Northern Norway, particularly considering their “unholy” mission to study the Lights. When the postman arrived the following week, Birkeland was at the foot of the summit adjusting the base of the cable car. He put Hætta’s sack into it and began to turn a large wheel. Effortlessly the car started its ascent and Hætta’s cynicism turned to joy when he understood that this invention would save him, and his reindeer, many hazardous climbs up to the summit of the mountain.
