The eastern Arctic Inuit town of
Pond Inlet, on Baffin Island, in the Canadian territory of Nunavut, west of
Greenland, at 72° north latitude, experienced the unusual temperature of 72°F
during the third week of July 2009. This was about twenty-five degrees warmer
than is typical in one of the world’s northernmost towns. Many residents,
walking, or driving four-wheelers, nonetheless remained dressed in their usual
summer attire of hoodies or heavy jackets. The hot weather in “Pond” made no
sense to residents or visitors. But the change has come. Mosquitoes, once a
lesser problem, are now present in hordes and enthusiastic at the presence of
visitors. Permanent snowfields have shrunk or disappeared. Mountain glaciers on
Bylot Island, a few miles north of Pond, across Eclipse Sound, still reached
the water three years ago, but now have retreated. Small rivers emerging from
the Baffin glaciers have become raging torrents.
Most
surprising, however, is the presence of thunder – in two forms. The summer of
2009 became the first when thunderstorms became a regular feature; previously,
such storms were uncommon due to the cold conditions. Even more alarming is
thunder in a second and more ominous form. Located at the center of the island,
the Barnes Ice Cap is the largest ice feature outside Greenland and Antarctica.
From beneath its massive surface can be heard the thundering sound of the
collapse of its internal ice caves. In the central highlands where the Barnes
is located, nighttime temperatures (in what passes for night under the twenty-four
hour sun) dropped by less than 10 °F, making midnight high above the Arctic
Circle warmer than midnight in Taos, New Mexico (36° north latitude). The
Arctic, one of the world’s two massive air conditioners, is, as we know,
blowing out less frigid air now than in decades past. But it is one thing to
read about the changes, another to be roasting because of not having brought
warm weather clothes for an Arctic gone mild.
I
made these observations during the summer 2009 as part of a plant ecology
expedition titled Back to the Future (BTF). Funded by the National Science
Foundation, BTF was part of the International Polar Year, research conducted by
hundreds of scientists on changing conditions in the Polar Regions. Five
researchers (four scientists plus me as photographer and contributing botanist)
spent three weeks studying the flora of central Baffin. The group was led in
the field by Dr. Craig Tweedie of the University of Texas (El Paso), and
mentored by Dr. Patrick J. Webber, professor emeritus of plant biology at
Michigan State University. Dr. Webber, now a resident of Taos, New Mexico,
initiated the expedition. He first explored Baffin during the summers of 1963
and 1964 and over a long career has headed Arctic and alpine research
organizations. Our expedition was a follow-up to his earlier ones, comparing
current plant composition to that of forty-five years ago. I also took on “re-photography”
taking pictures from the same perspective and at the same focal length as those
taken in the 1960s.
The
expedition studied two areas, a dry, Polar Desert plateau on the edge of the
Barnes, and, near-by, one section of wetter, High Arctic habitat along the
Isortoq River canyon (pronounced ee-sore-tok) which channels runoff from the
western side of the ice cap to Foxe Basin, far to the west. The Barnes Ice Cap,
at 2300 square miles (3700 square kilometers) is a super-glacier covering an
area larger than Taos County where I live. At 70° north latitude, it is set in
the middle of the world’s fifth largest island. Baffin Island covers an area
larger than Kansas and New Mexico combined, supporting a mostly coastal
population of fewer than 12,000. The treeless interior is a rock-strewn
landscape of sparse vegetation, lichens with small patches of wildflowers,
grasses, and sedges, similar in appearance to the more stark areas of the
Rockies.
There
are no roads or man-made structures of any kind for the entire 170-mile
distance from Pond to the Barnes Ice Cap. Access over the dozens of deep
canyons, glaciers, lakes, and flooding rivers is by air. We flew out from Pond
aboard a Twin Otter – two strong engines attached to a stout body. Known as the
workhorse of the North, the Twin Otter can carry a big load and, with balloon
tires, can land in most unpromising locations. The airplane passed through
several storms before emerging from clouds above the Isortoq. The pilots swept
down low over the river several times, making sharp turns within the canyon
walls as they searched for a place to land. After several brief touchdowns to
determine surface conditions, they chose a long gravel-bar island along the
main river channel, bumping down hard and stopping abruptly, seemingly in not
much more space than a heavy truck would take to stop from similar speed.
Until
the last century, much of central Baffin was heavily glaciated, making travel
impossible. There are a few caribou, wolves, ermine, foxes, hares, and jaegers,
but overall, not many animals. With limited hunting and fishing opportunities,
human visitors have been scarce or absent. Elsewhere on the island are found
stone tent rings and, Inuksuit, stone assemblages that serve as markers
for hunting areas, overland routes and sacred sites. The only signs of human
presence near the Isortoq are abandoned camping supplies and rock cairns left
by the small number of recent explorers. I found no record of anyone having
navigated the entire length of the Isortoq by raft or kayak. Its reputed
stretches of class five rapids will no doubt someday attract the skilled and
the foolhardy.
We
twice crossed the wide Isortoq by raft, examining both sides of the river,
hiking its barren shores, then climbing above its banks to grassy valleys
spotted with glacial ponds. Higher still are endless felsenmeer (rock fields)
crossed by swift streams too large to wade, too small to raft or kayak. Along
the way we found swaths of large-blossomed purple Epilobium near drifts of
cotton-grass looking like left-over snow. Narrow canyons, whose bottoms were
entirely covered by blood red and bright green mosses, survive beneath unstable
rocky moraines as high as five story buildings. Our goal was to relocate,
re-photograph, and re-sample eighty-one plots, established in the sixties, and
not visited again until this past summer. Each plot measured 1 x 30 meters. The
scientists noted the species found in each to compare current plant composition
with what was found in decades earlier. Species composition had clearly
changed. (The analysis is still ongoing.) To do this kind of work, botanists
spend a good deal of time looking at the ground. But from many places, when we
looked up, we saw the ice cap.
Both its floodwaters and its
sheer mass make the Barnes Ice Cap a looming presence. The Pleistocene-era ice
at the base of the Barnes may go back 100,000 years, and, in places, it is more
than two thousand feet thick. The ice cap is a remnant of the Laurentide ice
sheet, which at its greatest, extended from Baffin to central Kansas. The
ghostly ice mass constantly changes color under the twenty-four hour sun. Under
clear sky, it can appear as an expected undifferentiated white, but it can also
seem yellow and textured like a desert hillside. At other times, it exhibits
what only can be described as an electric blue that to all appearances seems to
be glowing from within. As the Laurentide, the ice mass was a controlling
factor of global weather. As the Barnes, it gives gusty reminders of its past
glory by hurling forth katabatic winds, short strong bursts of down-slope
refrigerated air. Its coming death matters even to those who will never know
its winds. As melt the glaciers of Baffin, so also will melt the gigantic ice
sheet covering Greenland. The realm of ice – the cryosphere – at least on
Baffin, is in a major transition of energy loss. In any system, the end point
of energy loss is death.
The cryosphere should not look as if
it is alive. But the inescapable impression from thirty thousand feet above (as
well as on the ground) is that the ice realm of our planet demonstrates
life-like characteristics. Individual glaciers wrap over high ridges like
thrown drapery, then crowd through deep canyons, dirty white striped ribbons
whose motion is evident – like a fast stream caught in the millisecond image of
a photograph. Glaciers plunge over cliffs into the sea fog covered fiords. On
the horizon white capped mountains and hovering grayish clouds blend to obscure
the line between the ice cryosphere and the icy atmosphere.
This was nowhere more evident
than from the drained basin of Flitaway Lake where stranded, dirt-covered ice
burgs form hundred-foot pyramids, contrasting dramatically with the ice cap
that rises mountain-like behind. In 1963, Flitaway was a glacial lake covering
a thousand acres and reaching more than two hundred feet deep. Its dam was the
ice cap itself until one day within the last couple of decades (no one seems to
know just when) instability in the ice or ground caused most of the water to
drain away. Scores of rivulets run down the ice cap, splashing into what is
left of the lake. The continual sound of waterfalls is punctuated by the loud
collapse of the invisible ice caverns, giving the impression that the Barnes is
rotting from within.
A few hours south (by foot),
the ice cap pushes outward as the Lewis and Triangle glaciers. Once the two
were connected, flowing all the way to the Isortoq. By 2009, the Triangle had retreated
far back towards the ice cap. Melt water drops so fast and violently through
its steep, twin canyons that the resulting turbulence roars at a frequency
similar to that of a Twin Otter. Lewis Glacier descends a canyon of lesser
slope. Its terminus shoves downward into the earth on the south and forms tall
ice walls on its north. Over time those walls melt and collapse, sometimes
exposing ice caves. Dr. Webber photographed the revealed caves in 1964. One
photo shows a smiling scientist standing against a white wall of unknown
height, apparently unconcerned that a section of the cryosphere might well give
way to gravity at any second. Another photo bears the caption: “Large enough to
park a double-decker English bus.”
Those ice structures melted
long ago, victim of the glacier’s one-mile retreat. I crossed the now ice free
spot where they stood forty-five years ago. The melted glacier left behind a
boulder-strewn flood plain. Nearing its current end point, the land below the
glacier is unsettled into huge piles of churned-up rock rubble where even the
ever-present Baffin lichens have not yet found a foothold. The crumbling
moraines are undermined by permafrost in decay, creating the kind of trap that
wooly mammoths used to stumble into.
The ice walls of 2009 look much
like those of 1964, even though they are in a different place. But there was a
difference: Part of the Lewis River, which used to emerge from beneath the
glacier, now floods along its side. In one spot, the river has carved a tunnel
through the ice wall where it quickly disappears into complete darkness.
Although entry into the cave was not more than fifty yards away, the furious
downward slide of the river made it impossible to cross. It looked alive and very dangerous, the
dynamic nature of the scene increased still further by the arrival of a
thunderstorm with its attendant lightning – a scene that could have been taken
out of The Lord of the Rings.
The massive flow of water is
the lifeblood of the glacier. Old photos showed the Lewis as a monster of ice;
now it is much reduced in stature and in a few years will disappear back into
the edge of the ice cap itself. Walking on just-revealed earth, ground never
before touched by any human, I was watching liquid history, ice formed thousands
of years ago, now melted into the water passing swiftly by. The water level
pulsed to a higher level once each day, for about seven hours, before, in the
evening, subsiding again – the glacial heartbeat.
The hidden ice caverns must be
fantastical, the realm of ever-change. Its rivers pulse through like veins of
blood, although those sibilant streams do not bring life to the ice mass; they
are more like the hemorrhaging of a wound. The interior thunder suggests that
its many passages are growing in size causing it to bleed out – the cryosphere
equivalent of the Ebola virus. The arterial outflow from its slowly beating
heart carries an unmistakable question. When its great heart stops, what will
become of us?
Photographs © 2009
David L. Witt
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