The New York Times North Pole Was Here Puzzles and Perils at the Top of the World

by Revkin, Andrew C.

• ISBN13: 9780753461389
• ISBN10: 0753461382
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-10-15
• Publisher: Kingfisher

Summary

Now in paperback, current events get in-depth treatment in this exciting series produced in collaboration with the New York Times. First-person narratives world-renowned newspaper's award-winning journalists tell the stories behind headlines. Beginning with a white-knuckle airplane landing, Andrew C. Revkin leads readers through a land of ice and water, describing the stark beauty of the North Pole, the scientists who endure the Arctic chill, the adventurers who are drawn to the north, and the not-so-pretty realities of camping in the Arctic. Years of research, interviews, and science coverage come together to explain the phenomenon of global warming, the different perspectives on its causes and potential effects, and the implications that it holds for the frozen north.

Author Biography

Andrew Revkin has been reporting on the environment for The New York Times since 1995. His coverage of climate change won the inaugural National Academies Communication Award for print journalism.

He is also the author of The Burning Season and Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast. He lives in New York's Hudson River valley.

Table of Contents

Where All Is South	p. 8
The Imagined Pole	p. 24
Cold Reality	p. 36
The Polar Puzzle	p. 58
Glimpsing the Future	p. 76
Three Broken Bolts	p. 88
The Once and Future Pole	p. 100
Source Notes	p. 114
Further Reading	p. 117
Internet Resources	p. 120
Acknowledgments	p. 121
Picture Credits	p. 122
Index	p. 123
Metric Conversion Chart	p. 128
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Chapter One

Where All Is South

For nearly two hours, I have been staring out a small window on a droning
propeller-driven airplane. The low, unsetting sun casts the plane's shadow off
to the side, where it slides over what looks like an endless crinkled white
landscape. But there is no land below us. There is only an ocean—a frozen
one. We are flying out across a cap of floating, drifting ice that's the size of
the United States. As far as the eye can see, colliding plates of ice raise
jumbled miles-long ridges, some as high as houses. Here and there, the ice
is split by cracks that expose the black depths of the Arctic Ocean
underneath.

The plane is jammed with instruments and survival gear and scientists
heading to the top of the world to study climate changes at the pole. Nearly
five hundred miles ago, we left the most northern spot where people can live
year-round, a Canadian military base called Alert, and headed farther north—
as far north as you can go before you suddenly find yourself pointed south
again.

Researchers have long been measuring a global warming trend, but it is in
the Arctic that temperatures have risen the most. This research team is
trying to understand why conditions are changing and what the changes may
mean for people and the environment.

Finally, the pilot says we are nearing our destination. The plane's shadow
grows as we descend. We are all overheated and sweating, stuffed into puffy
layers of clothing and huge insulated boots. But no one else seems quite as
nervous as I am about what is coming. In a few moments, the pilot is going to
set this fifteen-ton rubber-tired airplane down on a rough runway scraped
across the eight-foot-thick sea ice. The crew and scientists around me, who
have done this for several years in a row, are munching peanut butter
sandwiches and apples, reading books, chatting. I tighten my seatbelt. The
Arctic has claimed the lives of many of the people who have been brave
enough, or crazy enough, to press north. I wonder if the ice will hold, or if it
will crack open and swallow the plane.

We finally touch down. There is a quick series of thumps and bumps and the
rising roar of engines thrown into reverse. The propellers raise clouds of
sparkling whiteness called "diamond dust"—crystals of flash-frozen sea mist
far finer than snowflakes. A hatch opens and we climb down aluminum steps.
Quite suddenly, I am standing on top of the world, about sixty miles from the
spot around which the earth spins. The frigid air bites at my cheeks. The
bright sun forces me to squint. My boots scrunch on what feels like snow-
covered ground. It takes a few moments before I remember I am walking on
floating ice that is drifting about four hundred yards an hour over an ocean two
miles deep—deep enough that ten Empire State Buildings could be stacked
beneath us without breaking the surface. I am standing at the earth's last real
edge, the last place where people cannot get very comfortable for very long.
Unlike the planet's South Pole—where a continent is home to permanent
research stations and dozens of scientists, engineers, cooks, doctors, and
other staff—at the North Pole nothing is permanent except the seabed far
below. The ice that is here today will be somewhere else tomorrow. In a few
years, much of what I am walking on, what our airplane landed on, will break
up and slide out of the Arctic Ocean altogether through passages around
Greenland, replaced by newly formed ice. A visitor once left a message in a
container on the ice near this spot. It was found on a beach in Ireland a few
years later.

A couple of weeks ago, Russian workers flew here from Siberia to plow the
runway into ice that had frozen solid through the long Arctic night. Six weeks
after we leave, that same ice will pool with slushy meltwater and crack in
pieces.

Welcome to life around the North Pole. The air is fifteen degrees below zero.
The sun is circling in low, twenty-four-hour loops. If you define a day as the
stretch between sunrise and sunset, today began on March 21 and will end
on September 21. We are at one of the two places on the earth's surface
where time loses all meaning. The only reason anyone here has any idea
whether we should be asleep or eating lunch or breakfast is because the
Russian crew running operations on the ice have set their watches to
Moscow time. The only food I will eat in the next eight hours is a shared half-
frozen salmon sandwich. And I am in love with this place.

This is a strange feeling for me. I never liked the cold much. When I was a
kid, I was drawn to sun-baked regions, either real or imagined, preferring The
Swiss Family Robinson to White Fang. I loved nothing more than pulling on a
diving mask and snorkel in summertime to swim in warm bays and sneak up
on fish and hermit crabs. I once spent more than a year on a sailboat
journeying from the sunny South Pacific across the Indian Ocean and up the
Red Sea.

Now I am at sea again, but this time I am standing on top of it. The sun is
blinding, but the air is painfully cold. I feel like a mummy, stiffly stuffed into
four layers of clothing. (I will end up smelling a bit like a mummy, too,
because we will not be able to wash for three days.) My toes tingle from the
cold despite the giant insulated "bunny boots" I am wearing, but I am totally
uninterested in fleeing to the small red tents nearby—the only hints of color
in this blindingly bright ice world. I have somehow been captured by the
magnetic pull of the Arctic, a tug that I have read about but never
experienced.

For thousands of years, philosophers and navigators puzzled over what might
be found at the world's northernmost spot. On one expedition after another,
explorers died trying to reach this place. And now we have flown here in two
hours from Canada.

Each year between mid-March and the end of April, after the single Arctic
day has dawned and before the ice gets too soggy, dozens of people come
here—and not just scientists. There are tourists popping champagne corks,
skydivers from Moscow, and ski trekkers from South Korea. There are
extreme athletes from Manchester, England, who trained for their treks here
by jogging around their neighborhoods dragging heavy truck tires from ropes
tied around their waists. There are even marathon runners, including one man
from Rhode Island who prepared for the first North Pole marathon, run here in
2003, by jogging in place in a dairy's walk-in ice cream freezer. Technology
has invaded as well, and it helps make life here possible. We know our
position within a few feet thanks to cell phone–size GPS navigational
devices. From the ice, I call my ninety-eight-year-old grandmother on a
satellite telephone. She tells me she hopes I am wearing a hat.

Most visitors stay in a Russian-run base camp called Borneo, which is a
strange mix of comforts and rugged simplicity. It has heated tents,
electricity, a DVD player and TV, and four microwave ovens. But the toilet for
men is nothing more than a waist-high igloo-style wall of ice blocks.

The scientists and I are using Camp Borneo only as a stepping-stone. Our
final destination is an unnamed group of tents thirty miles closer to the pole—
tents with no heaters, no DVDs, no champagne. The scientists are part of a
small international army of dedicated researchers undertaking a host of
inventive, and sometimes dangerous, projects aimed at understanding the
changing face of the North Pole.

As I'm marveling at this frozen floating icescape, I am struck by the idea that
later in this century the Arctic Ocean could well be uncloaked in the summer,
no longer crusted in ice but instead mainly open water, as wave-tossed and
blue as the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

The global warming trend that raised the earth's average temperature one
degree Fahrenheit in the twentieth century has had a stronger effect here.
Average temperatures in some parts of the Arctic have risen as much as
eight degrees since the 1970s. The sea-ice cover, which always shrinks a bit
in summer, has for decades been pulling back more and more, exposing
great stretches of open water. Computer simulations show that it may
disappear altogether late in this century.

Most scientists have concluded that people are probably causing most of the
recent global warming trend and some of the changes in the Arctic climate
and ice by adding to the atmosphere long-lived gases that trap the sun's
heat, somewhat as a greenhouse roof does. But, as always in science,
questions follow answers. No one can be sure exactly how much of the
recent warming is human-caused and how much is the result of natural
fluctuations in the climate system. Indeed, there is little information on how
temperatures in the high Arctic varied in centuries past. Until recently, the
forbidding nature of the vast icy seascape has prevented all but a few bold
explorers from traveling here.

The planet has for millions of years seen great cycles of ice ages and warm
periods. The changes under way around the North Pole could at least partly
reflect natural flickers in climate, which is full of ups and downs.
But each year brings more signs that recent environmental shifts around the
Arctic are extraordinary. Dragonflies are showing up for the first time in
memory in Eskimo villages, causing children to run to their parents, startled
by these unfamiliar insects. Robins are pecking at the tundra. The Arctic's
native peoples have no name for this bird.

In a few decades, if the warming continues, it may also be harder to find a
safe site to set up camp here. Perhaps there will come a time when the new
North Pole will be a place that is easier to sail to than stand on.

In the meantime, though, the best option for studying the pole is to camp on
the ice. Much science these days is done in laboratories, on computers, or
using long-distance probes like orbiting satellites. But some science still
must be done up close and personal. On this floating, shifting, melting ice,
there is no place to stick a thermometer or other device and expect to find it
again. So the team must come here, study the atmosphere, ice, and sea
below, and return year after year to create a picture of what is going on.

They call their project the North Pole Environmental Observatory, but that
name gives the impression that it's some exotic domed facility. The reality is
clear to me soon enough. After a quick ride in a Russian helicopter with
black soot stains on its orange sides and a fabric strap holding the cargo
doors shut, we arrive at the science camp. It consists of two tentlike huts,
each about the size of a garden shed, and a scattering of buoys, tools, and
boxes. At this spot, instruments recording sea currents and temperature
were dropped to the sea floor one year ago on a two-mile-long line. Now they
have to be retrieved from beneath that shifting ice. The procedure will require
several of the researchers to get into diving suits and drop through a small
opening melted through ice. And I thought that I was being adventurous.
To celebrate getting here, one scientist who arrived a couple of days before
us, Jim Johnson, erected a red-and-white-striped barber pole and a sign that
said north pole is here.

But after a day or so, Johnson changed the wording, so that the sign now
reads north pole was here.

The past tense is meant as a joke. The drift of the ice guarantees that
anyone who is at the North Pole at one moment is not there a few minutes
later.

But the sign also reflects the broader and much more profound idea that
confronts everyone up here: that the unreachable, unchanging North Pole of
our imagination, history, maps, and lore no longer exists.

How to Get to the North Pole

July 2003: My trip to the North Pole started with a car ride from my home in
New York State to Newark, New Jersey. From Newark International Airport, I
took a short evening flight to Ottawa, Canada, and then the fun began. On
each leg of my trip, the planes and airports got smaller and the temperature
colder. The runways switched from asphalt to packed snow.

A Boeing 737 carried me north to Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut, Canada's
newest territory. With some scientists and a reporter from the Dallas Morning
News, Alexandra Witze, I boarded a twin-engine Beechcraft, which is the
local equivalent of a Greyhound bus, stopping at ever-smaller outposts on the
long route north until it reached the end of the line, Resolute.

Resolute lies on a winding passage through a maze of islands about nine
hundred miles south of the pole, right near the place where the nineteenth-
century British explorer Lord Franklin and his crew lost their way, went
insane, and—dragging themselves over the frozen landscape—died.
After a night at the metal-roofed Narwhal Inn, it was time for the four-hour
flight to the pole, including one last stop—at Alert, a Canadian military
outpost and the northernmost place permanently occupied by people—to top
off the fuel tanks.

Finally, four days and 2,900 miles from New York, the fifteen-ton plane
lurched heavily as it landed on a runway carved by a Russian bulldozer on
the drifting ice sixty miles from the pole.

Reporting from the North Pole

The North Pole, June 5, 2003: Notebook computers, digital cameras, and
satellite telephones are enabling journalists to do what seemed impossible
just a few years ago: transmit stories and images from the world's last
untamed edges. But technology still has limits, and they may be most
obvious on the floating ice near the North Pole. During my stay there, I
learned the art of practicing journalism at fifteen degrees below zero.

First, the basics: Bring pencils, not pens. Ink freezes. Bring lots of pocket
warmers, little yellow packets that heat up for hours when exposed to air.
These are not just for fending off frostbite, but also for keeping your batteries
warm.

And of course bring tape, every kind—electrical, duct, and the like—to fix the
things that break (they will break) and to attach those pocket warmers to the
back of a camera, the side of a microphone, the bottom of a laptop computer.
Satellite telephones have significant limitations. The signals travel in a
straight line, so getting the antenna right is essential. There are sometimes
painful gaps in conversations while the transmission jumps from one satellite
to the next. Things can get tense if you are in the habit of watching the rise
and fall of the little glowing bars on your laptop screen that show the data
flow when you e-mail a big file. Halfway through the thirty- or forty-minute
process of sending a picture, it is not uncommon to see the bars disappear
altogether.

Despite the limitations, I am still amazed at the ability to link the last
frontiers on a fast-shrinking planet.

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Excerpted from The North Pole Was Here: Puzzles and Perils at the Top of the World by Andrew C. Revkin
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