Day 5: Entering the Arctic
Oct. 23rd, 2004 06:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lprovenOf human foibles and failures
The Arctic circle is much like the equator: a purely human boundary about which people make a considerable fuss, although it has little meaning in the real world. The equator is, of course, the globe's widest point, equidistant from the poles, delimiter of northern and southern hemispheres - but if you're actually there, and I've crossed it several times, then it actually makes no perceptible difference. Near the equator, it's always hot – it doesn't get hotter the closer you get. Daybreak and nightfall come with almost unseemly haste – twilight is a short period. There is no summer or winter here, only rainy or dry seasons, with a short, roughly one-month, intermediate season of dust-storms – at least in my part of Africa. Allegedly, the water swirling out of a plughole move in different directions according to your hemisphere, due to the Earth's Coriolis forces – but do you actually know which way the water normally spirals out of your sink? Clockwise or widdershins? I don't, I have to say.
There are differences, but they're subtle and for the most part you'd only notice them if you lived there or stayed there for a significant part of the year.
The world's real barriers are less arbitrary but more affective: they make more actual difference. The Convergence, for example. Most people don't know what or where that is – I didn't myself until a few years ago, when I was informed by an enlightened and well-read girlfriend. It's a boundary in the southern oceans, separating the cold circumpolar currents of the Antarctic sea from the warmer ones of the northern oceans – as almost everywhere is northern from there. It's a formidable nautical blockade that has sunk many ships and killed many sailors.
And yet, apart from explorers of the last continent and round-the-world yachtsmen, who has heard of it?
So, really, it was foolish of me to expect some magical instant transition when we crossed the Arctic circle. I had vague notions of polar bears, icebergs and frozen wastelands.
Needless to say, perhaps, there was none of this.
Ask yourself: what do you know of the Arctic Circle? Can you actually define what it is? I would have been hard-pushed. It is the line north of which the sun never sets in midsummer. It sinks into the west at night, but after a certain date - exactly when depends on your latitude – it never quite touches the horizon but merely circles in the sky. The Arctic is the land of the midnight sun – but not, as I tried and failed to explain to an elderly lady taking the trip on my ship, at all times; only for a month or two around June to July.
The corollary of these days of twenty-four-hour sunlight is the Arctic night… when the sun never rises. For a couple of months in midwinter, the sun never comes above the horizon and the day is dark: a night sixty days long, or more. It's not pitch black all the time: when the sun is as close as it will get to rising, there is twilight, for some hours around noon. When it returns, the day is a public holiday and children are let out of school. At first, it rises for just a couple of hours, but quickly, the days grow longer until they never end.
Endless day, endless night.
That's it. That's all that there is. The Arctic does not automatically mean frozen wastes; the effects are just those of daylength. Of course, the North is cold. These are regions relatively close to the Pole, receiving little insolation; other such latitudes encompass the largely-uninhabited wilderness of northern Canada, Greenland and Siberia. What makes Norway different is another natural feature of the oceans, little valued by we dwellers in the south. The Gulf Stream. This never-ending current of warm water comes up from equatorial oceans, bearing heat to the lands of northwestern Europe, as well as nutrients and the occasional very badly lost fish, as previously discussed, but these matters are mostly of concern to fishermen. The further north we travel, the more of the populace are fishermen, mind.
Because of the heat gradually surrendered by the seawater flowing up the coast, the margins of the land are heated. This is what really delimits Norway: it's the country whose coast is heated by the Gulf stream. It matters to Britain too, but without it, Britain would be colder and more inhospitable, but not uninhabitable. Norway would be snow, rock and ice without it; apart from the south, no-one would live here. It would belong to elk, wolves, otters, lemmings, foxes and mink – and in the waters, teeming fish and the birds, seals and cetaceans who feed on them. It now looks as if the pattern of circulation of the Gulf Stream is being disrupted by the progressive global warming of the greenhouse effect. If the Stream shuts down, Norway will die. It is as simple as that. This, home of the most northerly homes, schools, churches, factories and all the other teeming aspects of human life, this incredibly beautiful country of mountains and lakes and forests and glaciers and fjords and pale blonde people, this land of the highest standard of living in the world, will freeze and shrivel and die.
The effects have recently, as I write, been dramatized in the movie The Day After Tomorrow, but as ever, Hollywood, that home of lies, is unable to portray the simple unvarnished truth. For dramatic effect, the chilling is shown as something that happens in days, with the temperature plunging instantly to the coldness of space, freezing the avgas in aircraft's fuel tanks. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, bullshit. But what may happen is that the Stream falters and sputters and gradually shrinks, and the winters of Norway – and Sweden and Britain and Denmark and the north-eastern USA, of Iceland and the hardy Danes and Inuit on Greenland – will get colder and longer and harder, and the summers damper and shorter and bleaker. Crops will fail, garden flowers will brown and die. The only things to grow in the North will be the glaciers, creeping down from their mountain retreats and covering the land once more.
People will die, but people always do. It won't be overnight. If it happens, it will take years. They will give up their homes and their livelihoods and they will flee south. You can bet their insurance won't cover it. Norway is rich, but the people of the far north are not, mostly, and they will lose everything. But we will all lose something. This is an amazing place and we all will be poorer without it. But we are without rainforests, without remote islands with unique species, without dodos and moa and quaggas and thylacines. Most of us never notice.
And still the Americans buy more SUVs every year and refuse to sign the Kyoto protocol. Even China is embarking on a dramatic program of nuclear reactor development. Ignore the frothing so-called environmentalists: most of them are scientifically illiterate and know nothing of what they preach. It's why I left their confines and no longer support Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. Nuclear power is about the cleanest we have and is relatively cheap and plentiful. The developing world knows this, and it wants it.
But the Americans are not using it. They have oil. Would that their government had ethics to go with it.
The Arctic circle is much like the equator: a purely human boundary about which people make a considerable fuss, although it has little meaning in the real world. The equator is, of course, the globe's widest point, equidistant from the poles, delimiter of northern and southern hemispheres - but if you're actually there, and I've crossed it several times, then it actually makes no perceptible difference. Near the equator, it's always hot – it doesn't get hotter the closer you get. Daybreak and nightfall come with almost unseemly haste – twilight is a short period. There is no summer or winter here, only rainy or dry seasons, with a short, roughly one-month, intermediate season of dust-storms – at least in my part of Africa. Allegedly, the water swirling out of a plughole move in different directions according to your hemisphere, due to the Earth's Coriolis forces – but do you actually know which way the water normally spirals out of your sink? Clockwise or widdershins? I don't, I have to say.
There are differences, but they're subtle and for the most part you'd only notice them if you lived there or stayed there for a significant part of the year.
The world's real barriers are less arbitrary but more affective: they make more actual difference. The Convergence, for example. Most people don't know what or where that is – I didn't myself until a few years ago, when I was informed by an enlightened and well-read girlfriend. It's a boundary in the southern oceans, separating the cold circumpolar currents of the Antarctic sea from the warmer ones of the northern oceans – as almost everywhere is northern from there. It's a formidable nautical blockade that has sunk many ships and killed many sailors.
And yet, apart from explorers of the last continent and round-the-world yachtsmen, who has heard of it?
So, really, it was foolish of me to expect some magical instant transition when we crossed the Arctic circle. I had vague notions of polar bears, icebergs and frozen wastelands.
Needless to say, perhaps, there was none of this.
Ask yourself: what do you know of the Arctic Circle? Can you actually define what it is? I would have been hard-pushed. It is the line north of which the sun never sets in midsummer. It sinks into the west at night, but after a certain date - exactly when depends on your latitude – it never quite touches the horizon but merely circles in the sky. The Arctic is the land of the midnight sun – but not, as I tried and failed to explain to an elderly lady taking the trip on my ship, at all times; only for a month or two around June to July.
The corollary of these days of twenty-four-hour sunlight is the Arctic night… when the sun never rises. For a couple of months in midwinter, the sun never comes above the horizon and the day is dark: a night sixty days long, or more. It's not pitch black all the time: when the sun is as close as it will get to rising, there is twilight, for some hours around noon. When it returns, the day is a public holiday and children are let out of school. At first, it rises for just a couple of hours, but quickly, the days grow longer until they never end.
Endless day, endless night.
That's it. That's all that there is. The Arctic does not automatically mean frozen wastes; the effects are just those of daylength. Of course, the North is cold. These are regions relatively close to the Pole, receiving little insolation; other such latitudes encompass the largely-uninhabited wilderness of northern Canada, Greenland and Siberia. What makes Norway different is another natural feature of the oceans, little valued by we dwellers in the south. The Gulf Stream. This never-ending current of warm water comes up from equatorial oceans, bearing heat to the lands of northwestern Europe, as well as nutrients and the occasional very badly lost fish, as previously discussed, but these matters are mostly of concern to fishermen. The further north we travel, the more of the populace are fishermen, mind.
Because of the heat gradually surrendered by the seawater flowing up the coast, the margins of the land are heated. This is what really delimits Norway: it's the country whose coast is heated by the Gulf stream. It matters to Britain too, but without it, Britain would be colder and more inhospitable, but not uninhabitable. Norway would be snow, rock and ice without it; apart from the south, no-one would live here. It would belong to elk, wolves, otters, lemmings, foxes and mink – and in the waters, teeming fish and the birds, seals and cetaceans who feed on them. It now looks as if the pattern of circulation of the Gulf Stream is being disrupted by the progressive global warming of the greenhouse effect. If the Stream shuts down, Norway will die. It is as simple as that. This, home of the most northerly homes, schools, churches, factories and all the other teeming aspects of human life, this incredibly beautiful country of mountains and lakes and forests and glaciers and fjords and pale blonde people, this land of the highest standard of living in the world, will freeze and shrivel and die.
The effects have recently, as I write, been dramatized in the movie The Day After Tomorrow, but as ever, Hollywood, that home of lies, is unable to portray the simple unvarnished truth. For dramatic effect, the chilling is shown as something that happens in days, with the temperature plunging instantly to the coldness of space, freezing the avgas in aircraft's fuel tanks. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, bullshit. But what may happen is that the Stream falters and sputters and gradually shrinks, and the winters of Norway – and Sweden and Britain and Denmark and the north-eastern USA, of Iceland and the hardy Danes and Inuit on Greenland – will get colder and longer and harder, and the summers damper and shorter and bleaker. Crops will fail, garden flowers will brown and die. The only things to grow in the North will be the glaciers, creeping down from their mountain retreats and covering the land once more.
People will die, but people always do. It won't be overnight. If it happens, it will take years. They will give up their homes and their livelihoods and they will flee south. You can bet their insurance won't cover it. Norway is rich, but the people of the far north are not, mostly, and they will lose everything. But we will all lose something. This is an amazing place and we all will be poorer without it. But we are without rainforests, without remote islands with unique species, without dodos and moa and quaggas and thylacines. Most of us never notice.
And still the Americans buy more SUVs every year and refuse to sign the Kyoto protocol. Even China is embarking on a dramatic program of nuclear reactor development. Ignore the frothing so-called environmentalists: most of them are scientifically illiterate and know nothing of what they preach. It's why I left their confines and no longer support Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. Nuclear power is about the cleanest we have and is relatively cheap and plentiful. The developing world knows this, and it wants it.
But the Americans are not using it. They have oil. Would that their government had ethics to go with it.
