Polar history and climate change books
reviewed by Bernadette Hince
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'Don't go looking for Antarctica without this book.' - Susan Solomon
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Into the Ice: The History of Norway and the Polar Regions
Edited by Einar-Arne Drivenes and Harald Dag Jølle
Picture editor Ketil Zachariassen
Translated by Bruce Bawer, Deborah Dawkin, Joan S Rongen and Erik Skuggevik
Gyldendal akademisk
ISBN: 82-05-36185-1
Price: Nkr 499.00 hardback
The Ferocious Summer: Palmer’s Penguins and the Warming of Antarctica
by Meredith Hooper
Profile Books
ISBN: 9781846680083 hardback / 9781846680236 paperback
Price: £20.00 hbk / £9.99 pbk
Winner of the 2008 Nettie Palmer Prize for Non-fiction (Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards)
We read for many different reasons. Reading books to write a review both sharpens the mind and narrows it, if my own experience is anything to go by. (And I must begin by declaring a partiality. The world of polar studies is a relatively small one, and I have met and liked the authors or editors of both books reviewed here.)Into the Ice is a magnificent achievement which stems from an even greater one. The book is a condensation of the three-volume Norsk Polarhistorie edited by Einar-Arne Drivenes and Harald Dag Jølle and published (in Norwegian only) in 2004. For publication in English the same editors have reduced the text of the three volume work to a single volume, a formidable task. The result is a well-presented and readable reference which follows the layout of the three original volumes. It contains useful general summaries of many aspects of polar history in which Norway — one of the 12 original signatories to the Antarctic Treaty — has been prominent.
Norway’s possession of Svalbard means that its maritime territory there is twice as big as the land area of Norway. The book explores large themes — polar history and exploration, science, and resources — using stories of lesser known people as well as the famous, and details of daily life as well as those of the classic expeditions. We find out, for example, about conditions of work for the ‘skimming lads’ of Antarctic whaling, or the personal circumstances of whaler Bernhard Eilertsen, who wrote “I am not able to take part in my children’s celebrations. Edit and Martha were confirmed while I was away. Elsie will probably get married this year, and in the meantime I have volunteered to go into exile for two years” (p. 188).
Norway as a polar nation is seen today as being more concerned with the harvesting of resources than with the cultivation of heroes. But polar heroes will always be a large part of Norway’s story. On his 1893–96 Arctic expedition, Fridtjof Nansen left captain Otto Sverdrup with the beset Fram and tried to reach the North Pole overland — or rather, over ice. His sole companion was a young man called Hjalmar Johansen. During 15 months together alone, each man was vital for the other’s survival. Marooned in a freezing hut in Franz Josef Land, the two men’s celebration of Christmas consisted of turning their clothes inside-out and changing the order in which they put them back on. A week later Dr Nansen suggested to his companion, Reserve Lieutenant Johansen, that the two might now address each other informally (with du), rather than the formal mode of address they had used until then — an offer whose latter-day significance is apparent only when one discovers that the two men had been sharing a sleeping bag for nine months. Johansen later accompanied Roald Amundsen on his South Pole expedition. After criticising Amundsen’s leadership at their ice-shelf base, Johansen found himself marginalised by Amundsen, and he was not included in the South Pole party. Soon after returning to Norway from the expedition, Johansen took his own life.
Inevitably, minor details of the translation of the 559-page book could be sharpened (the settlement of Grytviken on South Georgia, for example, is rendered here as ‘Grytvika’, p. 171, which is slightly confusing to any English speaker who knows the island). But in general presentation is scholarly, simple and clear. The amount of work in its making is evident from the annotated chronology of Arctic and then Antarctic expeditions, and from its 33 pages of close-set bibliography, as well as in the body of the text. Among the well reproduced pictures, my favourite (on p. 450) shows a couple in shirt-sleeves at a table, with a polar bear striding to the left-hand side of the photograph, and open blue water behind the couple. It takes a minute to realise that this whole scene is taking place within a museum. For what is essentially a reference book covering such a wide history, it is beautifully easy to read.
Meredith Hooper’s The Ferocious Summer is set at the US Palmer Station on Anvers Island in Antarctica, where the colder Antarctic Peninsula region meets the warmer, moist maritime environment of the northern Peninsula. Hooper combines the story of her own time there in 2002 with that of scientist W.R. (Bill) Fraser, who has worked in Antarctica since 1975. Both accounts unfold as she explores the nature of climate change. This is not a uniform phenomenon. ‘Climate change isn’t a blanket thrown evenly over the surface of the Earth,’ she says. ‘Its impacts are variable. They can be specific, local’ (p. xvii).
Hooper’s time at Palmer station in 2002 was her second visit with the support of the US National Science Foundation’s Artists and Writers Programs. Her book is written for non-specialists but the discussion on climate change includes abundant detail on scientific work in Antarctica. One thing which emerges clearly is the role played by long-term scientific studies, such as the Adelie penguin work of Fraser and others, in contributing to the understanding of issues like climate change.
Hooper’s earlier visit was made during a season when the sun shone day after day. In January–March 2002, the time of The Ferocious Summer, the weather at Palmer station was vile. Snow and rainfalls were the heaviest ever recorded. Hooper spent her three months with scientists who censused, weighed and surveyed Adelie penguins, skuas and giant petrels, as well as recording data on other species including gentoo penguins. It was the warmest summer on record — that year, the huge Larsen B ice shelf 100 miles to the east in the Weddell Sea disintegrated in spectacular and rapid fashion. Instead of the previous year’s 7,000-odd Adelie chicks, there were about 1,500. At the same time, other species such as fur seals (unknown in 1955 at one site Hooper visits) and gentoo penguins were increasing in number.
Hooper’s prose is a treat to read (though I occasionally wilt under her use of the present tense). She tells us of her growing sense of possessiveness about particular places, describing them so that they cannot fail to catch our imagination:
'The sky is an indefinable, high-latitude light, pale green with delicate indigo. Water laps gently. It could be the highlands of Scotland, the old world of the north, touching the barely known south.' (p. 86)
Her image of melted ice as a wasted repository is equally compelling. ‘All ice is a library of primary sources,’ she writes, ‘and we’ve only managed a few scattered volumes. Ice, once melted, is like manuscripts burned. Records irretrievably lost’ (p. 92), an image which brings to my mind the 24 columns of water, each from a different glacier, in Roni Horn’s installation Vatnasafn/Library of Water at Stykkishólmur in Iceland.
Daily life at Palmer involves long-term projects in huge, remote and empty places with a changing cast of scientists, support staff and the occasional outsider, and little or no privacy for individuals. By its nature, the extent of the work of both writers and scientists is sometimes far from obvious to others. As Bill Fraser remarks, ‘we are criticised if we’re ever late for breakfast’. Friction between people — often invisible in official or scientific accounts — is part of daily life and Hooper includes it in her evocation of this life. In a region where science has become the rationale for a human presence, she describes the ‘old, constant Antarctic equation, science versus the enablers, tussles first played out on board nineteenth-century ships’ (p. 236). For anyone who has worked for any length of time in the polar regions, this may sound familiar.
Although Hooper writes that ‘here is climate change in action, Antarctica as a living experiment’ (p. 153), she also acknowledges that our whole Earth is a living experiment, and that our struggle to understand it will always hold a paradox: the timing is almost impossible. Even while we gather the information we need, the world we are struggling to understand sweeps past us. ‘Increasingly,’ she says, ‘I’m discovering ways in which recording and interpreting today and yesterday is writing history; and comprehending the importance of the disciplines of history in understanding climate change … The past is an essential context for the present. But accumulating and processing, and the desire to write, are in conflict’ (p. 215). Perhaps, she concludes (p. 272), ‘history and science are not that far apart’. I can only agree.
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