The Great White Bear (9 page)

But as the seasons pass and the sky darkens, the ice floes thicken and multiply, the amount of open water steadily diminishes, and the tenor of the surroundings becomes altogether more threatening.

By the time the sea surface is predominantly frozen, the summer silence has given way to the thunderous pounding of ice floes grinding together, a sound that Frederick Cook, who claimed to have been the first to the North Pole in 1909, described as "terrifyingly like a distant thunder of guns."

When a snowstorm drove ice against the hull of a vessel on a 1569 Dutch voyage of Arctic exploration, Gerrit de Veer, the ship's second mate, wrote that it was "most fearfull both to see and heare, and made all the haire of our heads to rise upright with feare."

De Veer's ship was ultimately destroyed by the ice, but it was neither the first nor the last to meet its end that way. More than thirty vessels were crushed during the long search for the Northwest Passage before the completion of its first traversal in 1906, and those that were not wrecked were frequently trapped. In 1829, the
Victory,
under the command of John Ross, was seized by ice west of Baffin Island and was not released for almost four years.

"Driven by the power of winds and currents sweeping across the pole, ice as hard as concrete and as high as a house is broken, tilted, piled, ground and refrozen into an impassable chaos, booming and groaning as if it were alive and suffering," writes Robert McGhee in his book
The Last Imaginary Place.
"The wooden ships of the age of exploration had no chance against such a force."

"It's like a wonderful time-lapse version of plate tectonics," explains Brendan Kelly of the University of Alaska, a biologist who was among those we were about to welcome on board the
Arctic Sunrise
when we were so rudely interrupted by the ice floe off Barrow. "You watch these ice floes come together, these massive plates, and one will subduct, one will layer over another, mountains result, and it all happens in frighteningly real time. It's pretty dramatic to see. I've watched ridges that are five, six meters high forming in front of my eyes. It's pretty intense."

Polar explorers Rune Gjeldnes and Torry Larsen, who in 2001 completed the first and so far only unsupported crossing of the Arctic Ocean, referred to the sea ice across which they labored as the "devil's dance floor." Eric Larsen, who with Lonnie Dupre twice (in 2005 and 2006) attempted to become the first to cross the Arctic Ocean in summer, and on the second attempt succeeded in reaching the North Pole, recalls, "For me, what I realized was that conditions were always getting worse. Just when I thought I had a handle on how the ice was behaving, there would always be some new way in which it was mashed, crumpled, rafted, pressured. Trying to cross it was crazy, just full-on crazy."

In such an environment, it is hard to imagine that anything could possibly live.

"There are pieces of ice that are heaved upward, there are pieces of ice that are ground up into smaller chunks and then heaved up again. There were times when it might take us two hours to go a quarter of a mile. It felt more like mountaineering at times. Then there are sections of open water that are newly frozen, so the ice is so thin that, for example, it was bending underneath our skis," Larsen says. "It's an environment to travel in that is only stress for any organism that is traveling across it by its own power, because there is never a moment to relax. It's always changing."

And yet, incredibly, in the midst of this grinding and churning, amid the desolate icy plains and the imposing mountain ranges composed of car-size chunks of ice, suddenly, out of nowhere, there will emerge not only life, but life at its largest and most majestic, a silent yet powerful predator supremely adapted to surroundings that would rapidly visit death upon any unprepared human.

"We had a bear come into our camp one day," Larsen recalls. "We scared it away by firing flares, and I followed its tracks for a ways. I could see how it had come up to a lead that was newly frozen, hopped on it, walked on the ice a little bit, fallen through, swum across, and I could see where it got out on the other side. For Lonnie and me to have done that, it would have meant stop, take our skis off, catamaran our boats together, put them in, chop ice, claw our way through that, get to the open water, and paddle a little way through that, then one of us would have got out, held the boat so the other person could get out, hauled the boats out ... it would have taken us fifteen minutes.

"I would say that bear was able to make that trip in less than a minute."

Approximately 10 percent of the land's surface, and 7 percent of the ocean's, is at any one time covered with ice. The former consists of so-called alpine glaciers that squeeze through mountain valleys, inching forward at a speed that originated and defines the term
glacial
; and of ice sheets that at times have covered large swaths of the globe but are now confined to Greenland and, especially, Antarctica (the latter containing 90 percent of all fresh water on Earth). Ice sheets and tidewater glaciers calve icebergs, great chunks of ice that have built up year by year, century by century, often containing frozen water hundreds or even thousands of years old.

Icebergs, particularly Antarctic icebergs, can be truly massive. I have seen bergs that have stretched more than a mile in length, but such apparent giants are but mosquitoes compared to the largest ever recorded, which was more than seventy-five miles long and boasted a total surface area approximately equivalent to that of the country of Luxembourg.

Icebergs may be twisted or curved, upright or lengthy, small chunks the size of pianos, or grand islands of ice. They may have holes carved into them or even arches worn right through them as a result of months or years of impact from crashing waves. They may be white; they may contain straight stripes of brown, black, or green from sediment or algae that became entrapped during the bergs' formation; they may have patches of remarkable iridescent blue.

For mariners in polar seas, they may be welcome visitors in what can at times be a monotonous vista.

They are often extraordinarily beautiful.

They are also, in the context of this discussion, essentially irrelevant.

Caricatures and imaginings to the contrary notwithstanding, icebergs are not polar bear habitat. While it is not beyond the realm of possibility that a bear might clamber onto an especially low-lying, highly weathered berg, the energy required for an 800-pound animal, weighed down with sodden fur, to haul itself out of the water and up several feet of smoothly weathered ice would be considerable, even assuming it were able to secure an adequate grip. A weathered iceberg may be a last-gasp life raft for an exhausted swimming bear, or it could conceivably be a vantage point for a bear walking across the sea ice when a berg has become grounded and surrounded by closely packed floes. But in the latter scenario, icebergs are not truly members of the polar bear's environment but interlopers into it.

The ice that forms the realm of the polar bear is altogether more ephemeral than that found in glaciers and icebergs. Although some sea ice, especially in the Arctic, persists for several years, it is never, unlike glacier ice, centuries or millennia old. It is not created from the steady accumulation of precipitation over hundreds and thousands of years. It is not, in fact, fresh water at all. It is the frozen surface of the sea, a surface that freezes and melts in an annual cycle, its extent waxing and waning so that, in time-lapse satellite images, it looks almost like a lung expanding and contracting.

And like a lung, sea ice—its formation and melting—breathes life into the Arctic.

As the ice forms, it traps a multitude of microscopic creatures in the water, including unicellular algae called diatoms. More than 200 species of diatoms have been found living in Arctic sea ice and have become specially adapted to this most unlikely environment. Diatoms are plants; they must photosynthesize to survive, and they reproduce by dividing into two. And yet they can move, and move they do, taking advantage of channels in the ice to crawl toward the bottom of a floe. That may seem counterintuitive, given that in so doing they move farther away from the surface of the ice and thus any hope of receiving the sun's nurturing rays, but there is method to their movement. There is anyway little or no sunlight during the winter months; it is for spring that the diatoms wait.

As ice freezes, it expels much of the salt that was in the water from which it forms, so that a fl oe is less saline—"fresher"—than the sea in which it floats. When the sun returns, its rays penetrate the ice and warm the water beneath, melting the ice at the bottom of the floes—which, being fresher, is lighter than salt water and thus floats at the surface, diatoms included. Bathed in sunlight, the diatoms bloom, setting in motion an avalanche of feeding and breeding that makes spring in the Arctic an eruption of life of such force that it sustains much of the region's marine ecosystem for the rest of the year. (Arctic marine mammals have layers of blubber not just for warmth and buoyancy but for storage, so that they can stock up during the season of plenty and live off their reserves as necessary when harder times return and endure.) The focus of this explosion in productivity is the ice edge, where diatom blooms attract the attention of copepods and other phytoplankton, which are eaten by small fish, which in turn are eaten by arctic cod, which in turn are eaten by seals.

And the seals, finally, are eaten by polar bears.

Patience.

That is what their mother had taught them, what they had picked up on those occasions when they had watched her intently, before their attention had wavered and they had begun to roll around in the snow, a disturbance that was evidently enough to disturb the seal their mother had been intently eyeing and that resulted in a sharp reprimand, a rebuking hiss that once more sharpened their focus.

It had been difficult then to fully grasp the urgency of their education. Their mother's disapproval was discomfort enough to prompt greater dedication to the task for as long as their concentration held, but there was always the reassurance that, even if they failed in the task she had set them or even if occasionally their youthful shenanigans had interfered with her own efforts, her experience could almost always be relied upon to ensure a more successful conclusion the next time. And even if they did not dine daily on seal blubber, they were guaranteed the warm, calorie-rich nutrition of her milk. Every day for almost two years after their emergence from the den, even as they grew and became progressively more successful at killing seals for themselves, she would nourish them, leaning back against a snowdrift, cradling them to her as they nursed.

Now that security had been ripped away from them, its absence made all the more acute by the hunger pangs that, after several days in which they had failed to secure the food they needed, reminded them reproachfully of every occasion on which they had not followed sufficiently closely the lessons their mother had tried to impart.

Even now, even having survived their first orbit alone, bountiful spring yielding to barren summer and brutally cold winter, even as their hunting skills had sharpened and their success rate climbed, there were still periods during which that hunger gnawed away once more at their insides. And so, when they could not find seals or could not catch the ones they did find, they would do what they were about to do now, once they had caught the scent on the breeze, the unmistakable odor of a fresh kill and the enticing promise it carried with it.

They lifted their noses high into the air, their acute sense of smell establishing distance and direction, and they set off to find what they hoped still lay ahead of them. They padded swiftly enough to be at their destination as soon as possible, before other bears—perhaps much larger than themselves—descended upon the scene, as surely soon enough they would. But they dared not move so fast as to use up too much energy, and their approach required caution, too, for they did not dare to interrupt the meal that was still in progress.

Soon enough they found it, rounding a drift and seeing on the ice ahead of them the adult male, rounded and muscular, his heft and outline signaling clearly that he was a mature and successful hunter. They crouched down, retreated slowly and slightly, anxious but also wary. They would wait here, hopefully, and when he had taken his fill and left his kill, they would move in and gratefully help themselves to what he had left.

In her excellent book
Ice: The Nature, the History, and the Uses of an Astonishing Substance,
Mariana Gosnell lists a variety of words used by the Inupiat of northern Alaska to describe sea ice in its many forms, such as
sikuliagruaq
("thick ice," defined as more than three feet or so thick),
agiuppak
("a smooth wall of ice along the edge of landfast ice formed by other moving ice"),
aluksraq
("young ice punched by seals forming a seal blowhole"), and
sagrat
("ice floes of random sizes, beltways of ice with water on both sides"). Richard K. Nelson, in his book
Hunters of the Northern Ice,
adds such terms as
apuktak
("ice coming together or hitting together"),
kaighechuk
("rough ice"), and
napaiuk
("one large piece of ice that has been washed up vertically to form a conspicuous landmark").

English can't quite keep pace with Inupiaq in terms of its nuanced definitions of sea ice, but neither is there a paucity of clarifiers, from frazil ice to slush ice, grease ice to pancake ice, ice floe, pack ice, fast ice, fresh ice, multiyear ice, and many others.

The reason that there exists such a multiplicity of descriptors for sea ice is that there is much to describe—not only the numerous forms that sea ice takes as it hardens, thickens, crashes, and splits apart, but also the way stations at which it pauses during its progression from liquid water to solid surface.

That journey begins, of course, as the temperature drops, steadily at first and then often precipitously, a sharp fall that presages the changes that lie ahead. The first identifiable sign that those changes are imminent is hard to define or even to describe other than as an apparent heaviness in the ocean. The sea seems sluggish, its swells dampened, as if the ocean is slowing down, resting in readiness for the transformation that is about to take place.