Nervous awe, apprehension...and enthusiasm

It is wrong to think of hunting cultures like the Eskimo's as living in perfect harmony or balance with nature. Their regard for animals and their attentiveness to nuance in the landscape were not as rigorous or complete enough to approach an idealized harmony. No one knew that much. No one would say that they knew that much. They faced nature with fear, with ilira (nervous awe) and kappia (apprehension). And with enthusiasm.

-- Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez (1986)

Quviannikumut

Helen Silverman, whose graduate work included a study of the social organization and behavior of narwhals, describes as typical the following scene, from her observations in Lancaster Sound. "On one occasion a group of five narwhals consisting of two adult males, one adult female, one [calf] and one juvenile were moving west with the males in the lead. The group stopped and remained on the surface for about 30 [seconds]. One male turned, moved under the [calf], and lifted it out of the water twice. There was no apparent reaction from the mother. The male then touched the side of the female with the tip of its tusk and the group continued westward."

-- from Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez (1986). I've had the good fortune to reread parts of this book over the last couple of days.

Uunartoq Qeqertaq

One here for the Nuvvuagittuq Eidouranion (a phrase to be explained another time):

According to the Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World, Greenland lost around 15% of its ice cover between the 10th edition (1999) (left) and 13th edition (2011) (right).

Uunartoq Qeqertaq – translated from Inuit as Warming Island – joins Southern Sudan and nearly 7,000 other countries and places added or changed since the last edition of the Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World.

The Greenland ice sheet is said to have shrunk by about 15% in 20 years. Update 19 Sep: the 15% figure is said to be an exaggeration. [1] (See This is what global warming looks like.) Where, exactly things go from here, and when, is hard to predict. The ice sheet may not disappear as quickly as some previous models have suggested. (The precise impacts of fresh and seawater ice melting are also unpredictable.)

But in the absence of dramatic changes in the nature and pattern of human activity, the likely trend is towards complete disappearance of the ice sheet. In a review of Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth by Curt Stager, Scott L. Wing writes:

Relying on simulations of the effects of high partial pressure of carbon dioxide by Richard Alley, Jeff Ridley, and others, Stager lays out the development of Greenland's landscape and economy as its ice cap melts. He even playfully proposes a name, Ny Fjord (New Fjord), for the giant tongue of ocean that could come to occupy central Greenland by 5000 CE. He envisions a thriving Arctic-fishing industry lining the shores of the 400-m-deep fjord, then explains how the fjord would (to the shock of most nongeologists) empty over the succeeding 50,000 years as isostatic rebound following deglaciation raises the crust of central Greenland. 

Footnote

[1] (added 21 Sep): see Greenland Meltdown at Realclimate.

Tales from the Crysophere

For literally centuries, polar explorers have been aware that in the springtime the bottom of seasonal sea ice becomes visible discolored. Today we know that what they were seeing is a photosynthesis-based biofilm of grand proportions. By March, when the sun spends enough time above the horizon to initiate the ice-algal bloom, the sea ice cover over the Arctic Ocean alone (sea ice also surrounds Antarctica, of course) extends more than 14 million square kilometers, even in this era of climate-driven reductions in the cryosphere. Only in the last decade, however, have we realized that this highly porous sea ice, flushed at its ice-water interface with seawater from below, is also filled with EPS, the sticky exudates of microscopic algae and bacteria that partially account for their entrapment in the ice as it forms in autumn and through winter. These compounds, which partition into the brine phase of the ice along with the microbes and other “impurities” of seawater, are now understood to serve a myriad of biological functions within the ice, from cryo- and osmoprotection to possible viral defense.

-- from Frost Flowers Come to Life by Jody Deming

'Gaia likes it cold,' said James Lovelock.

Licorne des Glaces

BBC Earth News features photos of narwhals credited to Marie Auger-Méthé.

The 'unicorn' resonance is of course an old one, [1] but for more recent observers such as Wentworth D'Arcy Thompson the way in which the tusk grows in helix was also fascinating.

But until a few years ago little was known about the function of the tusk. Sexual display and male-male competition seemed likely explanations. [2] Martin Nweeia of Harvard School of Dental Medicine has discovered that the tusk has hydrodynamic sensor capabilities:

Ten million tiny nerve connections tunnel their way from the central nerve of the narwhal tusk to its outer surface. Though seemingly rigid and hard, the tusk is like a membrane with an extremely sensitive surface, capable of detecting changes in water temperature, pressure, and particle gradients. Because these whales can detect particle gradients in water, they are capable of discerning the salinity of the water, which could help them survive in their Arctic ice environment. It also allows the whales to detect water particles characteristic of the fish that constitute their diet. There is no comparison in nature and certainly none more unique in tooth form, expression, and functional adaptation.

Narwhals are thought to be among the marine mammals most sensitive to rapid change in the Arctic environment. IUCN lists them as 'near threatened'.

The unicorn is a fierce beast that can only be captured by a maiden.

Footnotes

1. The Natural History of Unicorns by Chris Lavers (reviewed here) is a good place to start. Wild speculations by cryptozoologists suggest a connection to the Elasmotherium, citing this account by Ahmad ibn Fadlan:

There is nearby a wide steppe, and there dwells, it is told, an animal smaller than a camel, but taller than a bull. Its head is the head of a ram, and its tail is a bull’s tail. Its body is that of a mule and its hooves are like those of a bull. In the middle of its head it has a horn, thick and round, and as the horn goes higher, it narrows (to an end), until it is like a spearhead. Some of these horns grow to three or five ells, depending on the size of the animal. It thrives on the leaves of trees, which are excellent greenery. Whenever it sees a rider, it approaches and if the rider has a fast horse, the horse tries to escape by running fast, and if the beast overtakes them, it picks the rider out of the saddle with its horn, and tosses him in the air, and meets him with the point of the horn, and continues doing so until the rider dies. But it will not harm or hurt the horse in any way or manner.

2. Thompson noted the hypothesis that the tusk might facilitate faster motion through the water.

Ice singers

This clip brings to mind a similar experience in Svaalbard in 2003.

Through a hydrophone in the sea comes a series of long whistles that start high and descend, very gradually – ever so slowly – right down the scale. They sound like a cross between The Clangers and fireworks or artillery, but more gentle and sweet. It is bearded seals. This sound is suspended in a deep, vast, echoing underwater world, where crustaceans rustle and click in the far distance.

The sounds made by 'our' seals -- (Arctic) bearded seals rather than (Antarctic) Weddell seals -- were more fluted and song-like.

(Herzog clip via Zooillogix)

Names

There are terms [in Inuktitut] to mean arctic char, arctic char that are running upstream, arctic char that are moving down to the sea and arctic char that remain all year in the lake, as well as words for lake trout, salmon and so on. There is no word that means “fish”. Similarly, there are Inuktitut words for ringed seal, one-year-old ringed seal, adult male ringed seal, harp seal, bearded seal and so on. There is not word that means “seal”. Speakers of Inuktitut have to have precise information about the seals to which they refer. These are ways, perhaps, in which hunter-gatherer languages express, celebrate and enforce the importance of detailed knowledge of the natural world.

-- Hugh Brody (2000)

After the ice

The Bowhead has survived a lot. [1] Could it survive a 15 C rise in the Arctic? [2]


Footnotes

[1] On the Bowhead, or Greenland Right Whale see also Thin Ice and Hunters and hunted.

[2] See Richard Betts here. The signs are already bad for Walruses. See: Walruses Suffer Substantial Losses as Sea Ice Erodes

P.S. (added Oct 5): Could Gray whales be one of the species to move into Arctic waters in place of the Bowheads (assuming there to be sufficient food available for them in the newly warming waters)? In Watching whales watching us, Charles Siebert reports the biologist Steven Swartz saying, "they’re expanding their feeding grounds all along their migration route and in the north, and some are even staying in Arctic water over the winter..."

P.P.S (added Oct 6): 'Arctic seas turn to acid, putting vital food chain at risk.'

Green Arctic

This blog has speculated vaguely on life in Antarctica in the Anthropocene, but with a mind to hundreds of years or millennia hence. Now this:

A study of what the Arctic looked like just before dinosaurs were wiped off the planet has provided a glimpse of what could be to come within decades.

The Rough-legged hawk of Minerva flies at dusk.

Hunters and hunted

This post follows a few traces from traditional aboriginal whaling and its echoes. [1]

Bowheads are among the longest lived animals: Nalutaliq, a white-headed bowhead, has been sighted off Baffin Island for more than a hundred years. In 1995 a crew of Iñupiat whalers from Wainwright, Alaska, found two stone harpoon blades in the blubber of a whale they were butchering. Stone points had not been used for more than a century -- not since commercial whalers brought metal tools to the Arctic and traded them to the natives. [2]

A favoured hunting craft was the Baidarka, "a living vessel whose skin caressed the shape of the waves." [3] But in the hunt for the whale, the bodies of smaller animals could become vessels of death:

In some hunts, the bladders of narwhals, walruses and seals were used as floats to the harpoon. Sometimes entire seals, skinned through the mouth with all orifices and wounds sewn shut, were used as drogues. Inflated through a bone tube, each seal float created a drag of about 100kg, exhausting the whale and reducing its chance of escape.

In Inuit mythology, Agloolik, a spirit that lives underneath the ice, gives aid to fishermen and hunters.

Another spirit, Wentshukumishiteu, sometimes terrifies the hunters away:

The Innu say [this] evil creature...is able to travel anywhere on the water and under the water and it is able to break through the ice. It can also travel under the ground and through rocks.

Joe Roman continues:

After the whale was killed, the biggest challenge was the tiresome chore of towing the enormous quarry ashore. Nuu-chah-nulth whalers employed charms...; some tied hummingbirds to the line, others turtles.

A chant from south-west Alaska contains this:

You are dying but your death will no be forgotten.
We will strip your bones of flesh, but we will send them back to the sea
that you may live again, so fear not. [4]

Following a sucessful hunt, writes Roman, communities from Kamchatka to Vancouver Island had a period of ritual mourning of about three days, as long as that for a man.

Footnotes

[1] Aboriginal whaling continues today, but with modern tools. This post follows an earlier one which refers to early modern European hunting of the bowhead.

[2] Joe Roman, citing John J. Burns in the Encyclopedia of Marine Mammals (2002)

[3] The anthropologist Margaret Lantis, notes Roman, suggested that a whale hunting cult extended from Kamchatka to Hudson Bay, and from Point Barrow, Alaska to the coast of Washington State. The cult may even have extended as far as Japan and Greenland (The Alaskan Whale Cult and its Affinities, 1938). According to T. T. Waterman (1920), the Makah whalers of the Olympic Peninsula in what is now Washington State imitated the grey whale quarry before each hunt, diving down deep into the water and staying down as long as possible. Each time they surfaced, the hunter would spout a mouthful of water towards the center of the lake, trying to sound like a whale. The most determined were reported to surface with blood trickling from their ears.

[4] Recorded by Vinson Brown in Peoples of the Sea Wind (1977), and cited by Roman.

A global stomach

Chiasmodon niger, or the black swallower -- a deep-sea fish that can extend its stomach to three times its size to swallow fish that are larger than itself -- is one of hundreds "bipolar" species spanning between the polar regions.

A BBC report has more detail. One possible explanation may be that:

the deep ocean at the poles falls as low as -1C (30F), but the deep ocean at the equator might not get above 4C (39F).

There is continuity in the ocean as a result of the major current systems...; a lot of these animals have egg and larvae stages that can get transferred in this water.

Thin ice

It's reported that the Wilkins Ice Shelf is on the brink of collapse and a paper in Nature [1] offers clear evidence that Antactica is warming in step with the rest of the world (BBC, NYT) [2].

Wally Broecker's climate "monster" may be stirring [3].

Barry Lopez wrote Arctic Dreams before present rapid changes in the Polar climates were well understood. [4] But Lopez was haunted by unease at the role of industrial man, alluding to the Eskimo terms ilira, fear that accompanies awe, and kappia, fear in the face of unpredictable violence.

As late as the early industrial period (the early nineteenth century), creatures such as the Greenland right or Bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus) still resonated with something of the monstrous that had fascinated and appalled earlier Europeans.

A month before she entered Lancaster Sound in 1823, the [British whaler] Cumbrian killed a huge Greenland right [whale], a 57 foot female, in Davis Strait. They came upon her while she was asleep in light ice. Awakened by their approach, she swam slowly once around the ship and then put her head calmly to its bow and began to push. She pushed the ship backward for two minutes before the transfixed crew reacted with harpoons. The incident left the men unsettled. They flinched against such occasional eeriness in their work. [5]

But, Lopez shows, when you pay attention to the remarkable nature of this animal it is men's actions towards them that now seem monstrous:

The skin of [the Greenland right whale] is slightly furrowed to the touch, like coarse-laid paper, and is a velvet black color softened by gray. Under the chin and on the belly the skin turns white. Its dark brown eyes, the size of an ox's, are nearly lost in the huge head. Its blowhole rises prominently, with the shape of a volcano, allowing the whale to surface in narrow cracks in the sea ice to breathe. It is so sensitive to touch that at a bird's footfall a whale asleep at the surface will start wildly. The fiery pain of a harpoon strike can hardly be imagined. (In 1856, a harpooner on the Truelove reported a whale that dived so furiously it took out 1200 yards of line in three and a half minutes before crashing into the ocean floor, breaking is neck and burying its head eight feet deep in the blue black mud.) [6]

Today our "monsters" lurk elsewhere. Ilira kappia stabs us not from behind but from within our own shadows.

Footnotes

1. Warming of the Antarctic ice-sheet surface since the 1957 by Eric Steig et al (doi:10.1038/nature07669). In State of Antarctica: red or blue? at Realclimate, two of the authors try to pre-empt misinterpretation.

2. (Added 27 Jan) Melting ice could push Emperor penguins to extinction

3. See also Attribution of polar warming to human influence by Nathan P. Gillett et al (doi:10.1038/ngeo338).

4. The discovery in 1985 of the "ozone hole" above Antarctica shocked many people into increased awareness of the potential of human activity to substantially affect whole earth systems on a short time scale. It helped pave the way for greater acceptance of the case for anthropogenic global warming. (See Breaking into politics 1980-88 in The Discovery of Global Warming by Spencer Weart). Arctic Dreams was published in 1986. I have recently gone back to if for the first time in many years thanks, in part, to a prompt by JML.

5. From the prologue of Arctic Dreams. In Waiting for Salmon (2006), Lopez writes of the fury of many of his compatriots at the idea that nature is anything but a warehouse to be emptied prior to a rapturous departure:

To speak of large-scale changes in the natural world that might be traced to human activity is anathema to people still furious at Darwin for suggesting that 'nature' included man...[In] America, mainstream politics is uninformed by, event hostile to, biology.

6. Lopez quotes the Canadian historian W. Gillies Ross as 'cautiously' suggesting that as many as 38,000 Greenland right whales may have been killed in the Davis Strait fishery, largely by the British fleet. 'A sound estimate of the size of the population today [1986] is 200.' 90% of the indigenous human population may also have died as a result of European incursion and infectious diseases.

Between the ice and a hard place

500 trapped narwhals culled in Canada, noted the blogs last week. But it's not just the ice that gets them; they are also hunted legally in Nunavut. The photographer Paul Nicklen says, "the replacement of traditional weapons by rifles means that many more narwhal are killed or wounded than are retrieved. Figures vary, but it is estimated that from 30 to 70 percent of those shot are lost".

Soundtracks

There are few personal notes in this sketchbook, but here's one. I am looking forward to The Magic Hour, an OCM event. We will even take our little daughter, Lara, whose perceptions may still be open in ways we don't quite understand.

I am interested by what the musicians and artists are doing with ambient sound in projects like Botanic Bats and Bamboo DNA . And it will be good to see Max Eastley, who found amazing noises in the Arctic when we travelled there in 2003.

I was struck by the following extract from Gretel Ehrlich's The Future of Ice (see part three of this), included in Cape Farewell's Strategic Plan 2008 - 2011 that arrived on the same day:

Cycles and circles enclose us. They are all fixed paths, closed circuits, and we have to live with what we've created within them. Beauty and pollution ride the same trails. The aurora is beaded with lead and cadmium. Snowbanks drift hard with heavy metals, rain is toxic, drift ice is radioactive, roaring rivers are pollution highways, the oceans are mercury sinks, the midnight-sun-filled days are cluttered with smoke and dust motes, and earth and its atmosphere are becoming a hot cauldron where disease and contamination are stirred.

On first reading this I had doubts as to its cognitive precision. Do, for example, heavy metals like lead and cadmium released as a result of human activity really make it up into the ionosphere, more than 85km above the earth's surface? Well yes they do, if I understand this, this and this correctly.

Art that pays attention to science and nature and "struggles for exactitude" [1] probably has a future. How far would this be from exploding fertility symbols and marionettes? [2]



Footnotes

1. The phrase is appears in Jason Cowley's introduction to Granta 102.

2. See also A bestiary of 25,000 years.

Hybrids and 'Nature 2.0'

Einstein's 'God' may not play dice, but Man certainly does:

Genetic mixing between eastern wolves and coyotes [in Canada] began more than a century ago after settlers cut down forests to plant crops. Coyotes, which like open spaces, arrived in traditional wolf territory just as wolf populations were plummeting thanks to gun-toting settlers and deforestation. With so few of their own kind left to mate with, eastern wolves turned to the next best thing - coyotes.

More recent human-induced change is sure to create new hybrids too, as species change their habits in attempts to adapt. Some wildlife experts, for example, suggest that warmer temperatures in northern Canada could be prompting grizzlies to spend less time hibernating and more time roaming outside their traditional range, so coming into contact with polar bears more often. In April 2006, an American sports hunter shot the first documented cross of a polar bear and a grizzly in the Northwest Territories. Though bear hybrids are not nearly as common as wolf/coyote crosses, the discovery of this "grizzlar" has prompted discussion among members of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, who have to come up with a recommendation for dealing with hybrids...Marco Festa-Bianchet, a biologist at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec, who heads the group, describes the task as "godawfully complicated". [Richard] Hobbs [a restoration ecologist in Western Australia] agrees, but adds: "To say you shouldn't think about it is like putting your head in the sand."

-- from Nature 2.0: Redefining Conservation by Sharon Oosthoek. It's a good article but can only go so far in the space available. What, for example, about the jack pines of the boreal forest, which are reported to lack the natural defences of the lodgepole pine?

The tropical forests, including Amazonia (see, for example Royal Society B: Climate change and the fate of the Amazon), probably present at least as large and complex a set of challenges as the boreal forests (and drylands) mentioned by Oosthoek.

In 1984, before ideas like 'Nature 2.0' or 'adaptive conservation' developed, things looked probably different. But it's unlikely that what E.O. Wilson wrote then is altogether irrelevant now:

The forest [in Suriname into which I had wandered] was a tangled bank tumbling down to the grassland's border. Inside it was like a living sea through which I moved like a diver groping across a littered floor. But I knew that all around me bit and pieces, the individual organisms and their populations, were working with extreme precision. A few of the species were locked together in forms of symbiosis so intricate that to pull out one would bring others spiraling to extinction. Such is the consequence of adaptation by coevolution, the reciprocal genetic change of species that interact with each other through many life cycles. Eliminate just one kind of tree out of hundreds in such a forest, and some of its pollinators, leaf eaters, and wood-borers will disappear with it, then various parasites and key predators, and perhaps a species of bat or bird that depends on its fruit -- and when will the reverberation end? Perhaps not until a large part of the diversity of the forest collapses like an arch crumbling as the keystone is pulled away. More likely the effect will remain local, ending with a minor shift in the overall pattern of abundance among the numerous living species. In either case the effects are beyond the power of present day ecologists to predict. It is enough to work on the assumption that all of the details matter in the end, in some unknown by vital way.