The Ragged Edge of the World (24 page)

Three days later I was in the Pribilofs, shivering on St. Paul Island, directly in the middle of the frigid Bering Sea. “Forlorn” does not begin to describe this windswept landscape, where the sun may shine one day out of every two weeks. The vegetation is sparse and low, a result of the harsh climate and winds. Decades earlier the Coast Guard had planted a “national forest” as a joke in front of its station, and the scraggly evergreens were still just a few feet tall.

But take a trip to the island's cliffs, and an entirely different world unfolds, as I discovered when I rented a bicycle and rode out one day. (The island is only five miles long.) The islands are volcanic, and St. Paul's basalt cliffs rise over 1,000 feet from its rocky shores. There are no guardrails, of course, and you are on your own to trust that the crumbly soil and rock won't give way as you peer out over the edge, but your judgment, or luck, will be rewarded with one of the most spectacular sights you've ever seen.

Before getting to that, it's important to set the context. The Far North is very different from the Antarctic, and it is different in ways that leave its adjacent landmasses very sensitive to change. Antarctica has land on which to build an ice sheet, and a strong vortex that makes it easier to store cold. The North Pole is situated on an ocean, and there is water under and around it for 10 degrees latitude in all directions. This makes it easier for the north polar regions to shed cold, and also for heat from the south to penetrate northward. Sea ice and permafrost amplify and broadcast these heat transfers, giving the northern polar regions a disproportionate influence on the adjacent latitudes.

It all adds up to making the Far North something of a first responder to global changes. Over the years, I've witnessed these changes during several trips to Alaska and the Inside Passage (the island-sheltered seaway between Washington State and Alaska), visits to the Arctic coastland of Yakutia in Russia, and sailing trips in the seas north of Iceland, as well as trips to various points on Hudson Bay. Most of my trips, however, took place on either side of the Bering Sea, an area called Beringia.

Beringia's most noteworthy feature is the Bering Strait, a vital passage that now divides continents and connects oceans, but that once connected continents and divided oceans. This watery corridor separates the landmasses of Eurasia and North America and connects the vast waters of the Pacific basin with the frigid world of the Arctic seas. Beringia froths with life, as birds, whales, fish and other creatures are funneled by the converging continents through one narrow gateway during their seasonal migrations. In bygone times, however, so much of the world's water was locked up in continent-sized ice sheets that sea levels dropped and the strait became a land bridge that enabled the ancestors of the Amerindians and great herds of mammoths and other beasts to trek from Eurasia to the Americas.

If the cold of the Antarctic preserves time and mummifies the dead, the remoteness of the north preserves life. Long after mammoths died out in the lower latitudes, they persisted in places like Wrangel Island, which lies about 90 miles north of the Russian Far East at about 71 degrees North latitude. In the 1990s paleontologists found bones of a dwarf mammoth that dated as recently as 3,600 years ago, several thousand years after other species of mammoths disappeared from the continent. Dwarf species like this raise profoundly intriguing questions in biogeography, a topic I'll address in a later chapter.

The southern border of Beringia is formed by the necklace of the Aleutian Islands, which extend so far to the west that the International Dateline has an indentation to accommodate them so that adjacent islands within eyeshot of one another aren't living simultaneously on different days. The Pribilofs lie in the middle of the sextant-shaped Bering Sea, 600 miles south of the Bering Strait, about 200 miles north of the Aleutians. The archipelago is so remote that the seafaring Aleut Indians never colonized it, despite their 10,000-year history in the area. Not until the eighteenth century, when Russian sealing vessels brought Aleuts to the islands to help them hunt the world's largest fur seal haul-out, did these natives first settle in the Pribilofs. Once sealers found the Pribilofs, they hunted the animals to within an inch of extermination. The decline of seal numbers became so alarming that an artist and Treasury Department special agent named Henry Wood Elliott began a campaign for protection that ultimately led to the 1911 North Pacific Fur Seal Treaty, the first international agreement to protect marine mammals.

While the Pribilofs are home to hare and arctic foxes (introduced, not native), life really begins at the water's edge. The cliffs are a birder's paradise, with horned puffins, murres, murrelets, auklets, cormorants, and other diving birds contributing to a 2.5-million-strong population of seabirds, one of the largest in the North Atlantic. While I watched from the cliffs, every few seconds a bird would take off and I'd be treated to a hunt, during which a puffin or murre would dive into the water far below and whirr like a torpedo after its prey. Once, as I was looking down, a Stellar sea lion, looking as big as a white whale, glided by. On the other side of the island, the largest fur seal colony in the Bering Sea was in full mating session, with unchivalrous 660-pound males tossing 110-pound females around as if they were beach balls.

As has been mostly the case during my career, I came to the Pribilofs not because everything there was going well, but because the region was under threat. At that time the Bering Sea was earth's only great fishery that was not in some stage of collapse, but there were troublesome portents, including a dramatic decline among Stellar sea lions—an 80 percent drop in their numbers since the 1970s—that suggested that all was not well. The fishery was and is huge, producing about 4 billion tons of bottom-dwelling pollock a year—the largest whitefish fishery in the world. Much of that catch ends up in frozen fish sticks or in meals served at Long John Silver's or Burger King.

Suspicion fell on overfishing because Stellar sea lion populations fared much better in places in southeast Alaska where there was no commercial fishing for pollock. Moreover, even if the total amount of fishing could be sustained relative to reproduction, conservationists were concerned that commercial fishing near the nurseries where the sea lions raised their young might still devastate populations.

The decline in numbers was a crisis for the Stellar sea lions of course, but equally bad news for every other creature in the food chain, starting with the orcas that feed on them. Orcas are very adaptable and resourceful creatures. With the disappearance of 2,500-pound male and 770-pound female sea lions, the orcas needed to find a substitute and began catching and killing sea otters to fill out their diet. Since the otters only weigh between 50 and 75 pounds, the orcas would have to eat a great number of them to keep up their weight. This may explain why otter numbers, too, have dropped (by 90 percent) in the past decade.

Since my visit in 1999, a number of scientists have filled out this picture. Jim Estes of the University of California, Santa Cruz argued that by reducing sea otter numbers, the orcas indirectly contributed to an explosion of sea urchins (the otters' primary food). That in turn led to the devastation of kelp forests, which serve as nurseries and protection for myriad fish and crustaceans.

Subsequently, other scientists explored this web of connections even further. Alan Springer, one of the scientists I spoke with during my trip to the Pribilofs, wondered whether orcas had shifted to Stellar sea lions because an even larger potential food source—whales—had been depleted by whaling in the decades before a moratorium was put in place. This chain of logic is a hot topic for debate, in part because whale populations have since recovered, but there is not a lot of evidence that orcas have shifted back to hunting them.

And then there is the question of the role of global warming, which has dramatically shifted northward the southern edge of the sea ice, as well as the duration of the ice during the winter. This has had an entirely separate set of repercussions. It retards the blooming of the algae that form one pillar of the Arctic food chain; it deprives walruses, seals and seabirds of platforms to give birth and rest; and the warming waters penalize some of the sea creatures while rewarding others. In attempting to describe how these various forces have weighed on the Bering Sea, Alan Springer used an analogy: Imagine that a puppy is swimming across a river with a knapsack on its back. As it makes its way people keep dropping pebbles into the knapsack until, weighted down, the puppy drowns. “Which stone killed the puppy?” asked Springer.

The western border of Beringia is formed by the Russian Far East. In the summer of 1995, I spent several weeks traveling by plane, helicopter, boat and truck over 8,000 miles through this vast territory while reporting for my
Time
cover story “The Tortured Land.” This was Russia just past the peak of its post-Soviet, outlaw days. Traveling was not easy, and every day brought a surreal experience, whether it involved an otherwise sensible scientist telling me that the neighboring Chinese were sending in infiltrators who had been taught to make themselves virtually invisible as they darted from tree to tree, or hiring a large Russian military helicopter in Kamchatka to convey me and the photographer, Tony Suau, up to the Valley of the Geysers—only to discover that the pilot had invited thirty friends and relatives along (and probably charged them, too). In the course of my travels, I encountered gorgeous lakes with floating boulders, and a perfectly preserved baby mammoth, frozen in the (fast-melting) permafrost. The most memorable part of this trip, however, was my journey to the mouth of the Kolyma River, where it flows into the Arctic Ocean.

Tony; Andrei, Tony's longtime in-country facilitator in Russia (formerly in Russian army intelligence); and I flew from Yakutsk, the capital of Yakutia, up to Cherski, a small port town about 100 miles upstream from the mouth of the Kolyma. I'd already done a series of interviews with various Russian scientists and environmentalists, and Cherski and the extreme Far North played into my story in a number of respects. For one thing it offered the chance to meet with some of the Far East's indigenous peoples, such as the Yukagirs and the Chutskis, but I was also intrigued by the possible impacts of the opening of the Northern Sea Route as global warming dealt with the traditional barrier of sea ice.

Yakutia is vast, empty, yet still grievously polluted. Imagine a republic seven times the size of California, with a population of only about 1 million, most of them residents of the capital, and many of them suffering from environmentally caused illnesses characteristic of unregulated industrial centers. The pollution comes from near and far. When I had earlier met with Vasili Alekseev, then Yakutia's minister of ecology, he matter-of-factly ticked off the astounding array of insults visited by air, water and land on this otherwise empty landscape.

For years diamond and other mines simply dumped toxic wastes in rivers. When the authorities flooded a wooded area as part of a plan to build an electrical-power-generating plant, they left behind a million cubic meters of wood to rot, which released phenol into the water during decomposition. Agricultural contaminants are released as well, and because all of Yakutia is covered by permafrost, pollutants stay on the surface and accumulate.