ends, and the Anthropocene begins
Prologue
THE DANCE OF THE WHITE CAPS
WE HAVE ALL seen the famous photo taken from Apollo 17 in 1972. This picture of our planet, alone out there in endless space, taught us to think of Earth as our home, our only home, as something precarious and fragile that we needed to take care of. For the environmental movement, the photograph became almost iconic. The picture also gave us our perception of Earth as the “blue planet,” because so much of the surface is covered in blue oceans.
But there is something this picture does not tell us, something we could have seen if the image of the Earth had been filmed from out there rather than just photographed. Not for just a few minutes, either, but continuously, throughout the entire year and—if it were possible—over millions of years. If that film were then played back at high speed, we would see a different image: we would see a planet in constant flux, the white caps at either pole expanding—over land and sea—and then shrinking again, in time with the seasons. When it was winter in the north, most of the landmasses would be covered in snow, which would vanish again when summer came. And likewise the sea, in both south and north: great, white, snow-covered expanses of ice spreading and shrinking, spreading and shrinking—back and forth in an annual dance.
If the film ran a little longer, we would also see other movements, following a more extended rhythm: in certain periods, less white would be visible, in others, a little more. And if the film were really long, we would see something astonishing. On occasions, the white cap would spread out across the entire planet, turning everything white. Earth becomes like a snowball. Not a single dark or blue patch in sight.
But the opposite also happens: for periods at a time, all the white vanishes—but always returns again. Sometimes slowly, other times quickly. Now and then, it seems to happen rhythmically, in steady cycles. But then the rhythm is interrupted. The white cap goes awry, or suddenly disappears. At the end of the film, as it approaches our own era, we see the rhythm becoming quicker, more intense. And as the film stops, we see that the white is shrinking once again, faster than ever before. It is so striking that we wonder what will happen when the film continues.
To understand what is happening down there, to grasp the rhythm of this dance, we must leave Apollo 17 and zoom in to the surface of this unique planet, so different from its duller siblings, Venus and Mars. They may be beautiful enough in the night sky, but they are monotonous and dead by comparison with our spectacular, ever-changing Earth. What causes this dance, and how does it manifest itself to earthlings? Could it be that they don’t even notice it?
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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
