The Ice Museum (40 page)

The settlement was in a state of shock from the near loss of a scientist to the elements. No one talked much, and Jeremy was nowhere to be found. I sat in the hotel, leafing through information packs and rule-books, and then I walked along frosted train tracks towards the edge of the fjord.

 
 
Later I went out on the fjord with Alice. I was slightly nervous because of what had happened to Olav, but Alice put me in a luminous survival suit and told me to blow a whistle if anything happened. Alice was small and compact, wearing jeans and a large sweater, with grey-blonde hair and an expression of rapturous calm. She didn't want to be adamant, she said, but some things looked very worrying indeed, and it was hard to know what to say. She had not found so many signs of good news, she said, vaguely, deliberately vaguely. But things might change, she added, lending me a hand as I climbed into the small boat.

The boat was a nautical midget under the towering bergs. The sludge-ice massed around the hull; the pancake-ice scratched at the paintwork. Under a twilight sky Alice steered the boat into the icy centre of Kongsfjorden, past the icebergs drifting from the glacier, swaying on the waves. A bearded seal yawned on its iceberg and flopped into the water. From a distance, the glacier looked serene, edging towards the fjord, a gentle slope of clear white and blue ice, the mist romantically encircling its base, softening its fall towards the water, and the icebergs looked pure white and blue. Out in the middle of the fjord, the boat hit the waves and lurched sideways as Alice swerved to avoid an iceberg.

Alice steered the small boat through the massing chunks of ice to the bottom of the glacier, stopping at a stretch of ice-littered sea twenty metres away. The glacier chilled the air around it, adding further depths of coldness to the evening. It was a squat glacier, dribbling ice into the fjord. The ice in the bergs was muddy, greased with dirt. For a few minutes, we sat in the boat and listened to the roar of the glacier, the groaning of the ice. As we listened, a loud boom came from the glacier and a great chunk of ice dropped into the sea before us, shaking the boat. Then everything was calm again, except for the lapping of the waves, causing the bergs to sway and rock in the water.

Sitting in the boat, staring at the glacier, Alice explained to me that it was sometimes difficult to be happy, knowing what she did about the ice-plains and their coming doom. She was not a mystic, or a novelist, she wanted to emphasise, but she thought some things were so worrying and probable that it was worth talking about them. In recent years, there had been bad tidings from the archipelago, from the scientific researchers on Svalbard. Chemicals from Russia, from North America, from Europe had circled in the air and water and moved towards Svalbard. The ice might melt, at some stage, and no one was predicting a sudden improvement in conditions.

‘Let us just say,' Alice said, dropping the tiller and sitting upright in her survival suit, ‘that there are man-made chemical compounds found in high concentrations on Svalbard, and they seem to cause damage to those animals in which they accumulate. They come by air, they come by water, and they are changing the wildlife on Svalbard. The Arctic wilderness,' Alice continued, after a long pause, ‘might be under threat from the chemicals of more southerly civilizations, chemicals carried by air from Europe and North America, or by water across the oceans—from Siberia to Spitsbergen.'

Alice stopped talking while she manoeuvred the boat backwards, because we were being lapped towards the glacier, drawn into its coldness. I sat quietly, shivering violently, waiting for her to resume. Alice said: ‘This business of drift, the Arctic drift, you mentioned it earlier. Since the 1980s there have been systematic changes in the ice around the North Pole. Nearly all scientists now agree that this is very unlikely to be caused just by nature,' she continued. ‘It is the speed which makes the change different from before. There have been very low sea ice measurements and these yearly lows have strangely coincided with years when there has been an unusually large transport of ice from the Siberian Ocean towards Canada.

‘Many of the travelling chemicals are carried westwards by the current that Nansen hoped would take him to the Pole,' said Alice. ‘They come from the Ob, the Lena and the Yenisey, as the torrent pours into the Arctic Ocean. There are ships operating in the Barents Sea, and there is prospecting for oil and gas in the region. The Russian military installations also present a source of pollution. There is nuclear waste; there are chemical and biological weapons and other military equipment,' said Alice bleakly.

And I thought of Nansen's
Fram
, drifting towards the infinite shadows of the North Pole, prow held high, drifting into darkness. Sailing towards the pure ice-plains, untouched by humans. I thought of Nansen, standing among the rocks, obscured by the mist. His journey prophetically outlined some of the future problems that areas such as Svalbard would later be confronted by. Alice told me that Nansen's Arctic drift theory was now the basis of modern research into the passage of pollutants from Siberia across the Arctic region. Now this current moved chemicals around the far north, dragging the overspill of Russian rivers into the ice. A torrent of waste, drifting across the silent ice. It was a distressed version of Nansen's theory of polar drift—the Arctic Ocean dragging polluted waters towards a formerly unknown region around the Pole.

‘And now,' Alice resumed, ‘the ice is warmed by polluting currents and melts into the ocean. No ice, no polar bears,' she added, firmly. ‘This is already happening in North America. Polar bears are specialists, they specialize in killing seals, and of course we know where seals live. The polar bear lives and hunts and eats on the ice. The female bears only stay on land to give birth. If the ice were to melt,' said Alice, ‘then the polar bears would lose their habitat, they would lose the seals. They wouldn't survive.'

Alice paused to listen to the glacier. The rumblings were heavy and ponderous now, promising a minor explosion of ice, a swell in the waves. We moved away from the ice wall, back towards the bird colonies, where Alice paused to glance up at the spiralling guillemots. She nodded, scarcely perceptibly, at a crowd of squealing birds.

‘And these chemicals I told you about,' Alice said, ‘they are drifting in the seawater from the Russian coast, and they are carried by air from Europe and North America. They come from so many places—but there are persistent organic pollutants—we call them POPs—which end up in Svalbard in high quantities, and they are stored in the fat in an animal's body. The more fat you eat, the more pollutants you get. So, a polar bear, at the top of the food chain, receives the highest quantity of these pollutants. Some of the polar bears—the females—are growing male organs. Whether this change in hormone balance also changes their behaviour, we are not yet sure. Perhaps it will.'

The hermaphrodites of Thule. The victims of an unplanned experiment, the introduction of man-made chemicals into an Arctic wilderness. The animals were changing, becoming grotesque and outlandish, more like the mythical beasts once thought to stalk across the northern lands.

‘And it's not just the animals, of course. The Inuit have a far higher level of POPs than other humans, because they eat seals,' Alice said slowly.

There was another long pause, as we listened to the noise of the birds swelling around us. ‘I assume this is not a good thing,' said Alice. ‘And then there is global warming, which might cause the melting of the ice around the Poles. Well, we have already seen parts of the ice shelf breaking off, drifting into the sea, and lower levels of sea ice than usual. We don't know,' she was saying, ‘we don't know what will happen. But we can guess at some things. As the earth loses its white surfaces, its ice, then it gains more dark areas, and the dark areas absorb more of the sun's radiation, so this makes the earth hotter. So it might get worse still, if it gets worse.'

‘None of this is a crazy fantasy,' she said. ‘None of it is science fiction, or outlandish. It's now respectable science, performed by trusted scientists, by cautious people. I think it is completely possible that the ice around the North Pole would one day melt. It might be possible to avert this, but we don't seem to be trying very hard.'

There was a final pause, as I shook with the cold, and then Alice said: ‘I think we should return to the shore,' and she gripped the tiller with resolution, speeding us past the muddy icebergs, back towards the lights of Ny-Ålesund. Alice lived in suspense, in the northern scientific base. Scientists were usually cautious, and Alice was as cautious as any. Her conclusions were partial. Some things had been improving in recent years, she said, they might continue to improve. At the same time, Alice discerned something she couldn't control, a creeping threat to the natural world she observed.

At the harbour we kicked off our luminous suits, and shook hands.

The past and the future lurked at the edges of the daytime dusk. Walking back to my room I passed a bust of Roald Amundsen, his head cloaked in a hood. It was one more Arctic shrine, and I stood for a few minutes in the freezing wind, reading the inscription. Behind him, there was an orange wooden building, now housing the small sanatorium, which had once been Amundsen's house. I found that I didn't want to go back to the hotel. I walked from the circle of buildings across the tundra, where a rusting mast stood at the edge of the fjord. I wasn't sure if I needed a gun, so I watched the surrounding hillsides nervously, imagining each pale rock was a bear. The mast looked like an electricity pylon, but a sign had been hammered to the metal:

The airship had been anchored to this mast, and it stood as a memorial. Amundsen had flown in an airship above the ice fjord, above the glinting whiteness of the glacier, and across the North Pole, hurling flags onto the ice. It was his last great piece of exploration.

The mast stood, surrounded by the vastness of the mountains.

 
 
In some of the stories, Thule lay between the earth and the world of the gods, somewhere beyond the reach of mortals. Past and future lurked at the edges of vision in Svalbard. The future was an untouched continent; like Nansen in the ice we were drifting towards it, on a temporal boat called
Forward
, perfectly passive, waiting to arrive. When all these formerly mysterious places were mapped, the future seemed to me as the blanks on the map must have seemed to the explorers: out of reach, impossible precisely to imagine however much we might speculate. Anyone might guess, but absolute certainty was impossible. As the scientists, experts, explorers of earlier centuries threw out ideas about what might lie in the remote north, so the scientists on Svalbard were trying to calculate the future.

Svalbard looked like a dream of a perfect place—an idyllic empty land, with the ice gleaming like diamonds and the sky a perpetual dusk-dark blue. Without these scientists, I could have slipped into the silence of the mountains, admiring the metallic waters of the fjord and the mottled bergs, watching the sun dying across the mountains. In Svalbard the quest for knowledge lurked behind every drifting cloud of mist, every soft sound of the waves lapping on the shore. The scientists could have packed up and gone home, with a scientific
Que sera, sera
, accepting that their predictions would fall on deaf ears, that their tentative conclusions would be used to argue for inaction. Instead they kept churning out their charts, stacking up statistics and scenarios. They kept working in sub-zero winds, in forgotten outposts, as determined as the explorers had been, trying to shine a light into the darkness ahead.

I was standing on the edge of the frozen fjord, thinking of the writers and explorers and cartographers, with all their theories and their certainty. Each in their own way had been certain; each had stood at the transmillennial debate with a glass firmly in their hand, toasting their version of Thule. ‘Peace,' ‘Ice,' ‘Scotland,' ‘Iceland,' ‘Norway,' ‘A retreat,' ‘The last land of the world,' ‘An interim land between humanity and the gods,' ‘Home of the Hyperboreans' ‘Gothic fantasy,' ‘A wild, weird clime' they had all toasted, convinced of their rightness.

I had found no single answer, no grail glinting on the rocks. But I understood what Thule might mean to me. For me, Thule was about the northern lands, the clouds drifting across the northern sky, the flickering green of the Northern Lights, the whiteness of the ice creeping across the mountains, the pale lakes and semi-frozen seas, the mountains like cathedrals, baroquely patterned. Thule was an ancient fragment, representing thousands of years of discovery in the north. It was an ancient human fragment, a piece of story-telling about the far north. It expressed the ambivalence of the human relationship to nature, as I felt it—the desire for space, the appreciation of grandeur and beauty, the sense of unease in hostile, uninhabitable nature, the need to make use of nature to survive, the perilous balance between survival and exploitation. It expressed the ambivalence of the human relationship to perfection: a desirable but impossible state, a state glimpsed and occasionally seized, for a fleeting moment, but doomed to transience. Thule was ambiguous, available for use or corruption. Thule represented all the explorers and writers imagining and travelling and trying to understand. They knew the worst, they knew the desperate struggle and the terrible cold, but they had watched the play of colours across the ice, they had been struck by the beauty and silence around them.