Dust by Jay Owens

Author:Jay Owens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2023-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

The Ice Record

Greenland – known by its inhabitants as Kalaallit Nunaat – might seem a country on the edge of a void. It is said that the Inughuit who live in the far northwest once believed themselves the only people in the world.1 The largest island on the planet, it supports a population of just 56,000 people clustered in a handful of towns and sixty-odd small settlements on the narrow fringe of habitable land around its jagged, fjord-sliced coastline. Ever since it was first settled 4,500 years ago, the country has looked out to sea. The sea is Greenland’s roadway, its larder, its mythos, its economy. The Atlantic waterways brought first Vikings in the medieval warm period around 984 CE, then whaling boats, then Danish colonists. Here, as in the most arid of deserts, water is life – it is the world.

Yet at the heart of the Greenland landmass lies not liquid water, but ice. The ice sheet in the centre, a 1.7 million square-kilometre expanse second only in scale to Antarctica, supports no plants or animals, and no human life either. Inuit legend holds that it is the home of erqigdlit, monstrous beings with dogs’ heads but human bodies who were banished inland and viciously attack visitors to their terrain – a tale likely used to keep children from wandering too far from home.2 The only visitors to the ice sheet are ephemeral: the occasional wandering polar bear or a kite-skiing expedition, plus half a dozen scientific research camps so isolated they might as well be space stations.

It’s the ice sheet where we will be spending time in this chapter. I want to persuade you that all human history and more is contained within. Dust in the ice is how we come to understand how climate has changed in the past, and how it may change again – but dust is not just a yardstick, it is also an agent. Scientific research is revealing how dust on the ice will shape our planet in the centuries to come, as it accelerates the deluge as ice sheets melt.

Through its tiniest emissary, the modern world gets everywhere.

***

Flying from London to San Francisco or Seattle, your route will cross over Greenland, and if the clouds collaborate (they often don’t), you may be lucky enough to glimpse it through the window. The first sign of land ahead is fragments of coastal sea ice dispersing into navy blue sea, the patterns fractal and fascinating. Next, you fly over the coastal mountains, glaciers carving impossibly slow, fluid curves into the land as they flow into fjords and the sea. Then, you will pass over the ice sheet itself.

It may look dazzling white – a pristine and sterile landscape, alien in its inhospitability. It’s not. Look closely and you’ll see other colours. First, a deep cobalt blue, perhaps from glacial lakes melting the top layer of snow, or perhaps from the piteraq, a wind that roars at over 100 miles per hour and strips the snow from the surface, revealing the older, compressed ice beneath.

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