On The Ice–Barrow

Hut 171 reeks. There has been another septic tank “incident,” common in Barrow

because septic tanks have to be drained regularly and that requires both competence

and luck. One or the other ran out, and the tank and the toilet in hut 171 backed up. The

mess has been cleaned up, but the aroma lingers. Where else would you put four graduate students and an unproductive journalist? We are at the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium(BASC), the Iñupiat corporation-run science center that does research on the Arctic Ocean coast of the U.S., and–along with the Iñupiat in Siberia–in Russia. We are several hundred miles above the Arctic Circle, 1,200 miles from the North Pole, all of it ice-covered Arctic Ocean–in other words, the end of the world, northern division. Point Barrow, a few miles north of the town, is the northern tip of the American continents. Except for some Canadian islands, all the Americas are behind you when you stand there. We have come to measure the ice. When you do science into climate change, you often wind up in places like this—if you are lucky.

***

Barrow’s airport is likely the only airport in the world named after victims of an air crash who were killed trying to land there: Wiley Post and Will Rogers, who died in 1935. When you fly in now you are likely to come in an Alaska Airlines 737-400 Combi, unique to the north. The front half is cargo (no windows) and the back half, passengers, usually Eskimos or oil field workers coming or going to Prudhoe Bay east of town. A bulkhead separates the cargo from the passengers. Out the window at dusk, it is grey brown. No lights. There is nothing down there.

The oil workers get off at Deadhorse, the airport nearest the oil fields. The Eskimos continue on the twenty minute flight to Post-Rogers. From there, many travel to their villages and settlements on snow machines or all terrain vehicles (ATVs). Barrow sits on the coast where the part of the Arctic Ocean called the Chukchi Sea meets the Beaufort. It has several distinctions besides really terrible weather. It is one of the two or three northernmost communities in the world, or at least northernmost communities with more than 2,000 people. It is the largest Eskimo settlement in the world, Eskimos not being inclined toward settlements, and is called Ukpeagvik in Iñupiat.Barrow is part of the North Slope Borough (county), the largest municipality in the world (86,000 acres with only 8,000 people, most of whom live in or around Barrow). Sixty-five percent of the population is Iñupiat Eskimo. The Iñupiat have lived there for 1,500 years. While winter temperatures don’t get as cold as they get in Fairbanks, 500 miles south, the position, between the two parts of the Arctic Ocean produces fierce winds which can drive the wind-chill numbers down to ninety degrees below zero (“negative ninety” to Alaskans), where any exposed skin freezes almost instantly and unprotected noses and ears can fall off. It is essentially like living through a Martian summer.

Barrow is surrounded on three sides by ocean and, to the south, flat tundra. There probably isn’t a tree within 300 miles. Most of the year, the ground is covered with snow and, combined with the frozen water at the shore, the predominant colors are white and grey. You cannot tell where ground ends and water begins. In the brief summer when everything turns to and is covered by mud, the primary color changes to brown. In mid- November, the sun goes down for three months. In mid-June it comes up for three months. That doesn’t mean it is always either dark or light; in both seasons much of the time is in a weird brown-pink twilight. Winter darkness helps account for high rates of suicide and alcoholism. Barrow can be very depressing.

Permafrost underlies all of Barrow, the reason all buildings are on stilts. If you built a house directly on the ground, heat from the house would melt the permafrost and the house would sink, sag, or tilt. That is happening in Fairbanks, where the buildings are not elevated. Utilities in the older section of town are in heated tunnels, with all the liquids constantly in motion to keep them from freezing. The tubes are called “utilidors,” as in utility corridors. Some are elevated, square wooden tubes on stilts that cross over the ground and streets. In the newer parts of town, sewage and water are stored in outdoor tanks. The sewage, hopefully, is removed daily before it freezes. Sometimes the “honey bucket” men are new to the job and instead of sucking the sewage out, they blast it back into the house, which is likely what happened in hut 171. Water also is replenished, hopefully, on a daily basis. Most of the homes are heated with natural gas from the nearby North Slope gas fields, an advantage over most Alaskan rural communities that have to rely on expensive, stored heating oil in the winter.

The schools in Alaska tend to be better funded than schools elsewhere, the result of oil revenues, and the ones in Barrow are no exception. They serve as community centers as well as schools. The local high school has a swimming pool open to the community, and thanks the gift of a woman in Florida, the Barrow Whalers, the high school football team, plays on an artificial turf field, which has to be plowed before every practice or game. Alcoholic beverages are banned, as in many Eskimo communities, but it is smuggled in regularly. A Barrow police officer told me that there were several dozen police in Barrow but if they managed to stop the smuggling of alcohol, they would only need three or four. Sober Iñupiat are a peaceful lot. Marijuana is abundant as it is in all of Alaska, most of it home grown indoors where federal authorities are unlikely to find it. It is likely the largest cash crop in the state. Owning small quantities of marijuana is legal in Alaska, a matter of personal privacy according to the state supreme court in this most-libertarian of American states.

Much of the population still depends on subsistence hunting to get through the year, even those men with steady jobs. It is part of the culture.

Nothing comes easy in Barrow. Like most of the towns and villages in rural Alaska (which is almost all of Alaska), there are no roads in or out of town. Indeed, Juneau, the state capital, is the only capital in America inaccessible by highway. Hence, everything in Barrow that does not come from fish or marine mammals is shipped in, either by ocean barge in the summer, or by air the rest of the time; everything from cars ($3,000 for shipping in C-130s) to cans of soup ($2.65 for Campbell’s condensed in the native owned small supermarket) to construction material.1 Eating out is expensive, and there are not many choices. It is sometimes possible to drive into Barrow in the winter, however, which is one of the most dangerous journeys on the planet. A single road links Fairbanks to the oil fields, the Haul Road, technically known as the Dalton Highway. It is a narrow two lane, mostly gravel road used to haul equipment and supplies to Prudhoe Bay—when it is open, which is not often outside of the brief summer. Daring tourists are allowed on the Dalton but very few rental car agencies will let you take their car on the road and you really need to know what you are doing and be well-supplied with emergency gear. Kiss your windshield goodbye: Every vehicle is followed by a cloud of flying gravel. Part of the ride is a hair-raising journey through the Brooks Range. Trucks and cars that made it to Prudhoe Bay, can drive to Barrow in convoys in the winter. Part of the ride is over the snow-covered beach, but much of it is an ice highway over the frozen Beaufort Sea. This is not done very often, and as the climate warms, it becomes even more dangerous

Then there are the bears. Barrow lives with polar bears. Almost no one leaves townwithout a rifle. Sometimes the locals have to kill a bear that gets too close to people,which is perfectly legal. The bears are as dangerous as they are beautiful. On a previous visit, a guide, Daniel Lum, described how a bear pursued his justifiably hysterical wife into their house. He chased the bear away, firing shots over its head. The bears usually congregate on the snow north of town, just beyond the end of the road where the Eskimos butcher the bowhead whales they harvest. The bears will spend months picking the bones clean. They also will wander down the beach into town, which is lined with houses. Visitors are warned—seriously—to watch out for bears whenever they go near the beach. If you see one, you are instructed to walk away slowly—never, ever run. Attacks actually are rare, but the danger is real.

The idea that polar bears a re an endangered species that needs protection from climate change is viewed differently in Barrow than it is in, say, Washington.

Climate change in Barrow has so far affected the dead as well as the living. The Eskimo cemetery at Barrow Point has been moved twice as the burial site now is flooded regularly. The families of the deceased and buried have had to dig up their ancestors and bury them anew, only to have to do it again when the new burial site floods. They likely will have to repeat the process a few more times. But the threat to the living is real. The culture and survival of the Iñupiat—and the bears—depends on the ice.

“We are the hyperboreans,” says one Iñupiat elder. “We live on the ice and snow. If we don’t have the ice and snow, who are we?”

***

Measuring the ice is what Hajo Eicken does.

Eicken, a sea-ice geophysicist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, is part of an international project to measure the recession of sea ice in the Arctic. The term “recession” implies—correctly—that no one doubts the sea ice is receding. Aerial photos, pictures from space and measurements on the ground established that thirty years ago. How much it is receding and the mechanism involved, is what the international project is measuring. Eicken, a tall, thin, bearded associate professor, born and educated in northern most Germany, is a frequent visitor to Barrow and BASC, usually with his graduate students. He has three in tow this time and the goal, as usual, is to go out onto the frozen sea and plant instruments that measure both the ice and the snow on top of the ice throughout the season. The data is then compared to data from previous years to measure the trend. He uses what he measures to gauge the effects of the recession on the local, coastal environment and, in macro, the earth’s climate.

Ice plays a disproportionate role in running climate. It restricts the amount of energy exchanged between the ocean and the atmosphere and reduces the amount of heat supplied to the water. Ice and snow reflect the sun’s radiation, a characteristic scientists call albedo. Open water is dark and absorbs the heat. The ice and snow keeps the polar regions cool by reflecting sunlight, moderating global climate. When this function is damaged, the balance is tipped. Sea ice also helps keep the conveyer belt of ocean currents moving worldwide. Sea ice is essentially salt free. The salt is pushed beneath the ice as it forms, so the water directly under sea ice is saltier and heavier than the rest of the ocean. Salt water also becomes denser as it gets colder (unlike fresh water—see floating ice bergs). Because it is heavier, the water in the Arctic sinks and the gelid, denser water flows south toward the equator and is replaced by warmer, lighter water coming up from the south. If that pattern is altered—say by a reduction in sea ice—the current system in the world’s oceans is disrupted, completely unhinging the climate balance of the planet. If you saw the movie The Day After Tomorrow, that is the premise for a fictional end of civilization. The movie was ridiculous in its conclusions, but the premise was real. Melting sea ice in the Arctic can dramatically alter the climate in the rest of the world.

The ice has been shrinking for the last twenty to forty years and there is nothing in modern records to match it. The retreat in 2007 set all records. This year came close: In the ten days from August 1, 2008, until August 10, 390,000 square miles of ice disappeared. Not only is there less ice in the summer, but less ice is growing back in the winter. In the late 1980s and 1990s, changing wind patterns from the north pushed thick sea ice from the Arctic Ocean into the North Atlantic, where it eventually melted. The thinner ice that formed to replace it melts more readily in the summer, opening up the sea to increasing amounts of radiated heat. That melts more ice and energizes the cycle.

By the end of melting season 2008, the Arctic Ocean sea ice had melted to the second lowest minimum since the use of satellite surveying began, according the National Snow and Ice Data Center. What made this even scarier was that the 2008 summer was relatively cool, yet the ice kept melting, especially in the Chukchi Sea and off Siberia. Some scientists fear that this year we have reached a “tipping point,” and it may be too late to stop the melting.

The minimum extent of the ice this year was measured at 1.74 million square miles. The record, the year before, was 1.59 million square miles.

In some coastal communities, locals depended on wind and waves pushing slush on the ocean to the shore, which would then freeze, forming “fast ice,” ice fast to the land. The ice would form a storm barrier. Warmer temperatures have diminished that process; snow has been replaced by rain, and fall storms have grown in intensity. Winds have blow the shore ice away. Last year, thousands of walruses moved onto the coast near Wainwright, which has never happened before. Apparently the ocean ice floated too far out for them to feed. Models, taken very seriously by scientists, predict an Arctic Ocean free of summer ice by 2040 or 2050. Some predict it will happen sooner. Now think of what that might do to ocean currents and to the weather.

It is not just in Alaska, of course. In Greenland, 553 billion tons of ice melted from the Greenland ice sheet, all of it entering the Atlantic. Some 965,300 square miles of annual ice—the stuff that builds during the winter and melts in the summer—has disappeared, an area one and a half times the area of Alaska, a 50 percent decrease between 2007 and 2008. That now is an area of open, dark water which until recently reflected heat. The Arctic ice has half the volume of only four years ago. The legendary Northwest Passage over Canada and the Northern Sea route over Russian, the dream of explorers for centuries, is open part of the year for the first time in half acentury if not longer. Roald Amundson barely was able to navigate through the ice and islands of the passage to get to the Pacific in the summer of 1903. Now the passage looks like it may become a common shipping lane. Last year a group of German tourists showed up at Barrow. They had sailed in on open water, something they could never do before. There were no customs or immigration officers for 500 miles and no one knew what to do with them. They stayed through a native festival and then sailed back home.

They have vowed to return and this time the government promises to have officials on hand.

This has huge geopolitical ramifications. Already, Canada, the U.S., and Russia are maneuvering to claim sovereignty over part of the world no one cared about before, and it could get nasty. For one thing, the warming climate will permit more oil and gas exploration and there likely are more resources up there. While the chances of Canada and the U.S. having a war over the Arctic is remote, the two countries are unhappy with each other’s attitude. In September, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev ordered officials to mark Russia’s Arctic borders, breaking an arrangement with other countries to let the United Nations decide on territorial claims.

Already the recession is having a global effect. Scientists believe that the drought in the American west and the increased precipitation in parts of Europe are linked to what is happening to the ice off Barrow and the rest of the Arctic. According to the University of Colorado Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Studies, the reduction in sea ice in the Arctic Ocean reduces the severity of cold fronts that drop into the American and Canadian west. That reduces snowfall, which contributes to the drought. Agriculture and the ski industries have already felt the effects. While there is no evidence that climate change has increased the number of hurricanes hitting the U.S., the evidence is growing that the intensity of the storms has increased dramatically. Hurricanes Katrina and Ike may very well be messages from the north.

BASC is the center for research in the area and has all the facilities of a modern research center, most of it coming from the wealthy Iñupiat corporation. Getting funding from the National Science Foundation was sometimes problematic so BASC is cheerfully independent, although it does get some NSF funds. Most of the visiting researchers are housed in Quonset huts, mostly left over from when the facilities were run by the U.S. Navy, or in cottages, like 171. Our cottage had four bedrooms, a full kitchen and bathroom—and on this visit—a bad smell.

Fortunately, BASC shares a large H-shaped building with Ilisagvik Community College, also Iñupiat-run, which has a decent cafeteria.

Alaska is the most-wired state in the U.S., and the facilities in Barrow are hooked by satellite to the Internet. The satellite dishes are pointed almost horizontally to connect to equatorial satellites but the facilities and all the homes in Barrow have Internet and television. Researchers at BASC are plugged in. Eicken has six hours of daylight in which to work when he arrives in Barrow in March. Three weeks earlier, he would have had none. The sun didn’t rise until January 23.

Along with an armed Iñupiat guard (you don’t leave Barrow without one), we leave shortly after 10:30 a.m. on three snow machines. Two of them are pulling long wooden sleds filled with gear. I stand on the back of one of the sleds, instructed to lean against any tilt to help keep the sled upright, which turns out to be the least of my worries. This position, the most exposed, is traditional for newcomers, particularly the nonproductive kind. The wind-chill is negative forty. We are going to plant instruments on the ice.

What does a modern Arctic explorer wear to work? The secrets to keeping warm in temperatures cold enough to alter the molecular structure of steel (minus forty, by the way) are layers and wool. After serious consultation, I am wearing two-layered woolen thermal underwear, flannel padded jeans and Carhartt canvas and fleece snow pants, a quilted woolen shirt, a polyester liner and a Siberian-made parka, certified to negative forty. The boots are Canadian-made Sorels, also certified to forty below, with woolen socks. Note all the wool. Cotton can kill you here because cotton loses the ability to keep you warm once it gets wet and perspiration (or falling through the ice) makes it wet. Wool keeps on keeping you warm. No artificial fabric is as good. I have a woolen balaclava and a wool and polyester neck warmer. I have three layers of gloves and an extra set hung on a cord around my neck I can plunge my hands into if they get cold. Everyone else is dressed approximately the same. Most of us have ski goggles. One serious problem: once you put the mask on—and you will put the mask on—eye glasses fog up and the moisture instantly freezes, rendering you effectively blind. No one has yet invented a solution to that problem so you are faced with a choices of skipping the glasses, or wearing them and looking at the world through a sheet of ice. Contact lenses are the only way to go. I have none.

And speaking of problems: what does the modern explorer (mature male) do if he has to pee? If you are a male explorer over the age of fifty, this is not an inconsequential consideration. The answer usually given is to turn your back to the wind and work as fast as you can. This is not easy with four layers, two zippers, and gloves. The real answer is not to worry: The air is so dry it sucks moisture out of your body and you will go all day without peeing. I found that to be true.

Defecation, on the other hand, is out of the question.

A problem for which I was not prepared is photography. Most batteries quit when the temperature gets below negative twenty and, unless they have spent about a half hour in a warm room, remain useless. Lithium batteries, which I didn’t have, work best in very cold weather. You can stuff the camera in your parka, but you have to be quick.

The other thing I learned is that to do anything with your hands you usually have to take your gloves off (mittens actually, because they are more efficient in keeping your hands warm) and in that cold, it hurts quickly. A few minutes in the mittens—if they are good enough mittens—will fix that, but a few minutes later, off they come again because you have to fiddle with something else, usually involving clothing. Finally, despite zippers, clasps and Velcro, the cold will find any opening between garments, including some you never suspected you had. When we started bouncing over the ice I had the feeling someone had stuck a sharp icicle up my sleeve. I chased down the opening and snapped it shut with Velcro.

The expedition followed the road east, toward Barrow Point, running on the snow that covered the Chukchi beach. Just parallel to the end of the road, we came to a halt.

Four polar bears were at the dump about 200 yards before us, a female, two cubs and what the guard thought was a young male. Perhaps the stupidest thing any sentient creature can do is get near a mother polar bear with her cubs. Bears also don’t like large groups of humans on noisy machines and were taking their time searching for snacks. (“I’m a polar bear and I’ll move when I damned well please.”) Polar bears can weigh 1,600 pounds and stand almost 10- feet tall when they rear on their rear legs, although none of these bears were near that size. They were between us and the sea iceso we waited until they moved on, about ten minutes. When they finally sauntered off, we resumed the trip, finally curving off the beach onto the frozen sea. My instructions were to not only try to keep the sled upright but to turn my face away from the direction we were traveling if the wind got too bad. With the balaclava, the goggles and the parka collar, not much wind got to my face and it was not unbearable. I needed to see where we were going to anticipate the bumps. I was told to keep my knees flexed to absorb the shocks and I did it successfully all but once. I wasn’t paying attention for one bump and felt the shock particularly where my spine meets my neck. Eicken, who was driving the snow machine pulling mysled, could see obstacles and bumps and slowed when the ice got particularly ragged.

The ice is rarely flat or smooth. There are occasional cracks, but mostly there are pressure ridges caused by the motion of the ice, in part reacting to tidal pressure and waves. Hunks, blocks and ridges glistening in the sunlight, their shadows a grey blue,were tumbled across the ice. This was fast ice. On top of the ice was several months’ accumulation of bone-dry snow. Snowball fights are impossible here; the snow will not form balls. It was not clear when we passed from the snow covering the beach and thesnow covering the ice and water.

Eicken located the site he wanted using GPS positioning. It was a relatively flat section of ice with a pressure ridge about four feet high a couple of hundred yards to the west. The bear guard put up a tent with a gas heater, and Eicken’s team began unloading the equipment and setting up their stations.

Essentially, the UAF team was studying three things: the thickness and temperature of the snow, the thickness of the ice below the snow, and the depth of the water beneath the ice. They were setting up automatic stations that would transmit readings back to Barrow and would be able to track the data from the Internet back in Fairbanks until “melt” in the end of May. The equipment was powered by two car batteries, which like all batteries, suffer in the cold. They transmitted their condition back to shore and someone from BASC would go out and recharge or replace them when they ebbed.

The main instrument was erected on a scaffold-like structure with cables leading to holes bored in the ice. The cables were protected by metal coverings because Arctic foxes love to play with scientific equipment, particularly if electricity is involved. Electricity turns them on. “If we come back tomorrow, we will probably find a fox turd on the box,” one of the grad students said. Another student walked along the pressureridge with an instrument measuring snow depth. Occasionally, a breeze would pick up and you would understand just how truly awful it could be. Soon our faces were entirely covered with frost, our eye lashes froze, and ice hung from our eyebrows. We were lucky it wasn’t much worse.

The ice was about three feet thick over twenty-two feet of almost frozen Chukchi Sea water. About six inches of snow covered the ice. The snow was weird. The sound you made walking on it was a metallic hollow sound, not what you want to hear when you are standing over twenty-two feet of really cold water. We eventually got all the instruments in (I was of no use). Eicken decided to go back before the students finished the last of the instruments, and I rode back on the backseat of his snow machine.

I quickly decided that if I was going to die on the ice, it would be on this ride. We flew. We bounced. We tilted. We roared. I held on to two handholds behind me until I lost all feelings in the hands. I could see a little through my goggles (I gave up on the glasses early on) and tried to anticipate when I needed to hold on for dear life or when I just needed to keep attached to the machine. Moreover, earlier I had been in the warm up tent adjusting my clothing and I brushed my right arm against the gas heater. This melted the outer layer of my Russian parka. I didn’t notice. When I got on the snowmobile I began to stream Siberian goose feathers behind. We eventually got back to BASC and I ran into the warm equipment room, still leaving a trail of feathers. The arm was patched with duct tape, which true Alaskans will tell you, is what really holds Alaska civilization together.

The next morning we found out that a bear had knocked over the equipment and the UAF team had to go out again.

All this was when the weather was relatively good. In April, one of the graduate students was caught in a whiteout which was potentially life-threatening. He had to wait until he could move.

Eicken’s measurements are crucial to understanding what is happening in Alaska and why it affects what will happen to the rest of the world because of it.