Call of the Wild
A science writer explores a gelid island and the engineers who helped make it a bellwether for climate studies.
Review by Robin Tatu
The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey Into Greenland’s Buried Past and Our Perilous Future
By Jon Gertner.
Random House, 2019. 448 pages.
When reports emerged this summer of President Trump’s interest in purchasing Greenland, speculation was quickly quashed by Denmark, which owns the territory, as “an absurd discussion.” While Trump’s motivations were not entirely clear, his is not the first administration to inquire. Moreover, the U.S. military has maintained a presence there since World War II. During Germany’s occupation of Denmark, exiled ambassador Henrik Kaufmann signed a 1941 agreement with Washington allowing U.S. Army engineers to construct “a stealth network of airstrips, weather stations, and communications outposts.”
The story of the U.S. presence is only one of many contained in The Ice at the End of the World, a far-ranging history that stretches from 10th-century colonization by Icelander Erik the Red to the first 19th-century expeditions across the ice sheet and gradual, then burgeoning, scientific inquiry. Once dismissed as a barren wasteland, the Arctic region is now considered crucial to understanding catastrophic shifts in the global climate, while its destabilizing glaciers threaten to raise sea levels as much as 24 feet. Author Jon Gertner, who regards himself as both journalist and historian, argues the importance of recognizing the decades of work behind the “hard-won facts and observations” about Greenland so that this knowledge is not dismissed as mere ideology. ASEE members, particularly those involved in cold-regions engineering, should welcome this look into the development of ice core analysis, remote sensing, and gravity-field measurements. The text is enriched by an extensive bibliography and footnotes, augmented by discussion of Gertner’s research methodology in the sources and acknowledgments section. The result is an informative, dense, and well-crafted study.
Part I, “Explorations,” describes expeditions led by Norway’s Fridtjof Nansen in 1888, America’s Robert Peary in 1892, Denmark’s Knud Rasmussen in 1912, and Germany’s Alfred Wegener, who first encountered the ice in 1906 and lost his life to it in 1930. These men were among the first to determine how to transport themselves and their supplies across the towering ice sheet, skirting deep chasms, navigating through hail, snow, and rain, and enduring temperatures as low as minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Embracing the thrill of exploring this terra incognita, Peary spoke of fame and triumph over nature while Wegener noted “the joy of battling with white death.”
Yet, adventuring did not preclude investigation. While Peary is described as “scientifically incurious,” Nansen took readings for temperature, wind, and precipitation, and Rasmussen conducted ethnographic studies of the Polar Inuit. Wegener dug pits to study temperatures and later used TNT to take seismographic readings of the ice sheet’s depth. By 1929, he had persuaded Germany to fund a research station at the ice sheet’s center, where his team dug, set explosions, took measurements, and survived for a record-setting eight months.
Part II, “Investigations,” traces advances wrought by technology and dedicated research. Aided by trucks, amphibious tractors, and air drops of supplies and fuel, the new approach to exploration emphasized teams of experts rather than heroic adventurers—and a “fine-tuned, machine-powered system of scientific polar inquiry.” In 1949, Frenchman Paul-Emile Victor established Station Centrale as a permanent research site where the first ice-core samples were extracted. Though of poor quality, these samples helped develop the nascent technology of ice core drilling that later was refined by the U.S. Army’s Snow, Ice, and Permafrost Research Establishment (SIPRE) and remains important today for tracking Greenland’s climatic conditions up to 120,000 years in the past.
Cold War geopolitics also helped research advance. In the 1950s, the Americans constructed a massive underground base with connecting tunnel roads, housing for 250 people, research facilities, a mess hall, church—and plans for a nuclear missile arsenal aimed at the Soviet Union. Camp Century was shuttered by 1965, victim to the crush of the ice sheet above it. But its 10-year existence supported funding and opportunities for researchers, whose work often functioned as the public front of covert operations.
Closing chapters detail growing evidence of abrupt climate change. Gertner debates whether and how humans will act to avert the disasters of rising temperatures worldwide, but what remains clear is that Greenland’s melting glaciers function both as a bellwether of impending change and a serious threat to current global sea levels.
Robin Tatu is Prism‘s book editor.
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