Читать книгу Kingdom of Frost - Bjørn Vassnes - Страница 6

— 1 —

MELTING

HOW DOES IT feel to stand inside a vodka bottle while the world melts around you? Not too bad, if the bottle is made of ice, is human-sized, and is the same one Kate Moss once stood in for a vodka ad. Pretty good, in fact, if you’re at the ice hotel in Jukkasjärvi, northern Sweden, with its ice bar and barstools, its spectacular ice decorations and glasses (only cold drinks! says the bartender) made from blocks carved out of the frozen river and shaped by professional ice artists.

It was in the nineties that I experienced this. They let me come in and take a look around even though it was May and the hotel, actually closed for the season, was in the process of trickling back to the Torne river, only to be resurrected the following winter. Since then, around 50,000 tourists a year, many from Japan and China, have flocked to the same spot during the four winter months the ice hotel stands. Construction starts in November and it’s ready for check-in by Christmas or New Year; by May, the melt is well underway. In the years since, imitators have emerged in both Finland and Norway, although they often use slightly simpler construction materials and are therefore known as “snow hotels.” But even this isn’t so easy nowadays: when the latest addition was due to open on Kvaløya, an island off Tromsø in northern Norway, in winter 2016/17, its launch had to be postponed to the following season because it wasn’t cold enough. The thing is, winter is no longer reliable: we no longer know when it will come or go. The ice hotel in Jukkasjärvi has also faced this problem but now aims to fix it in a way that will enable the hotel to stand all year round: it will be kept cold using solar energy. After all, this is the land of the midnight sun, so in summertime, the sun can work around the clock. The tourists should certainly be happy with the combination of midnight sun and ice hotel.

The cryosphere,¹ the frozen part of our world, has become an exotic tourist destination, almost like a threatened animal species. As the cryosphere shrinks around the planet, tourists stream to the Arctic to experience these astonishing phenomena—ice and snow—while they still exist. Tourists now pay hundreds of dollars for things we used to be able to do for free as kids, like sleeping out in snow caves or having snowball fights. For most people, it’s a matter of spending just one night at the snow hotel in a reindeer hide sleeping bag after traveling halfway around the globe to get there. Better-off travelers may prefer to experience ice and snow from the increasing number of cruise ships that offer trips to Svalbard, Greenland, Patagonia, and the Antarctic. There, tourists can stroll on icebergs, greet the penguins, and chill their drinks with ice that is several thousand years old.

But for most of us who can’t afford to spend thousands of dollars on a cruise to the icebergs of Disko Bay or the Antarctic Peninsula, time is running out if we want to feel the snow beneath our feet. Norway’s most iconic celebration of its Constitution Day on May 17 involves a procession with flags and brass band from Finse up to the Hardangerjøkulen (Hardanger Glacier) in southern Norway. But according to glacier scientists, this will only be possible for a few more years. By around the middle of this century, Norway’s highest glacier will be all but gone. And the same goes for many of the other, smaller glaciers, unless the warming comes to a sudden halt. Likewise, Norway’s national sport of cross-country skiing is now under threat. Already, major ski races like the one at Holmenkollen, Oslo, can only be organized with the help of snow cannons, and cross-country skiers must make their way ever higher into the mountains if they want to feel real snow beneath their skis. Roller-skiing just isn’t the same. What does this mean to a people whose identity has been defined by the frozen world? “As white as white is the snow” and “blue gave its color to the glaciers, that’s Norway, in red, white, and blue!”—as it says in a popular song often referred to as Norway’s second national anthem.²

Some would say it doesn’t mean that much. Not all that many of us go skiing anymore. And plenty of skiing competitions now use artificial snow. Even the cross-country champion Thomas Alsgaard has said he expects the sport of cross-country skiing to die out soon owing to the lack of snow.³ If the snow and glaciers did vanish here in Norway and other northern areas, we’d still survive. Even the tourist industry would certainly cope with it, because we still have the northern lights and the midnight sun—two attractions, which, fortunately, divide the year between them. So is there really any reason to make a fuss about this? Some people probably think it’s a shame to have to abandon their skis in the basement, while others will be happy not to have to clear the snow anymore or pay for a snowplow to keep the road to their holiday cottage open. Others again will see it as a sign of the end of days or at any rate an indication of global warming. And perhaps they’ll think it may make sea level rise a bit, causing problems for people on remote Pacific islands.

But for most northerners, these are trifling matters in a world that is changing in so many other ways. Terrorism, streams of refugees, and the automation of labor are more important concerns. What does it really matter if there’s a bit less snow, a bit less ice? Even in Greenland, where people have used the ice as a hunting ground for millennia because that’s where they could trap seals, many people think it’s fine that the ice is melting, because it will open up opportunities for massive mineral wealth. And in Finnmark, the county in northern Norway where I grew up, few people will miss the road closures that can last well into May. Or the snow clearing. Just let it melt!

I used to think that way myself—I, who grew up in the Arctic, in a time of proper winters generally lasting eight or nine months of the year. For most of my childhood, I lived in Norway’s coldest region, on the Finnmarksvidda mountain plateau. However, several harsh, snowy winters in Tromsø in the 1970s when we had to dig tunnels to our houses contributed to my decision to leave the region, and I moved to the much less snowy, but consequently much wetter, area of western Norway. And since it was still possible to go skiing even there as long as you went high enough up into the mountains, I didn’t miss the white stuff.

It was only when I came to much more southerly latitudes, to places where snow never fell and temperatures never came close to freezing, that I discovered the cryosphere. It was on the populous, sunbaked, sweltering Indo-Gangetic Plain in northern India and Bangladesh that I came to understand how important the cryosphere is. Because what was it that kept people here alive during the driest and hottest parts of the year? It was the snow and ice in the mountains, far off in the Himalayas, which aren’t even visible from the plain. When the rain no longer filled up the ever-dwindling rivers in the months before the monsoon, it was meltwater from the snow and glaciers on the Roof of the World that ensured the rivers never ran totally dry.

Almost nobody was talking about that back then in the nineties when I traveled around on the banks of the Ganges and its tributaries, making TV programs about the rivers and what they meant to people. Not that I was giving so much thought myself to what would happen if the glaciers vanished. But the glacial rivers from the Himalayas, Tibet, and nearby mountain ranges such as the Karakoram and the Pamirs sustain the lives of several hundred million people, well over a billion in fact if you include the great Chinese rivers that arise in Tibet. Later, I discovered that this is not a unique phenomenon: there are other places on the planet where snow and ice are also vital for keeping people, animals, and plants alive. This is particularly true of the countries around the Andes, where many of the largest cities are dependent on meltwater. Even fertile California is at the mercy of the cryosphere, as demonstrated recently when “the snows of yesteryear” ended up falling as rain and no longer served as a natural reservoir. So the Kingdom of Frost, the cryosphere, is vital for large swaths of the Earth’s population, especially in places where most people have never even seen either snow or ice.

But it is also more than a reservoir. As I immersed myself in the cryosphere and its history, I discovered that its significance dates far back in time and is much greater than the history books tell us: the frozen world has been an absolutely determining factor in the way life has developed here on our planet. Over the ages, its fluctuations—the dance of the white caps—have shaped landscapes, life, evolution, and, to a great extent, human history. Even phenomena as diverse as our upright posture, the first fields of grain, the modern-day border between Norway and Sweden, steam engines, automobile traffic, and the skills of chess grand master Magnus Carlsen and javelin thrower Andreas Thorkildsen have all been influenced by the cryosphere and its fluctuations. Not directly, but through the decisive influence the cryosphere has upon the climate—as we are in the process of discovering today.