Heat (31 page)

While the scientists worked at the Project Chariot site, Teller moved forward with other experiments to better understand the usefulness of nuclear weapons as landscaping tools. In Nevada, at ten o’clock in the morning on July 6, 1962, Teller and his boys set off the one-hundred-kiloton Sedan shot and created the rock art crater that my companion and I visited in the Nevada desert. The blast sent earth boiling upward, creating an expanding bulge on the desert floor that grew to eight hundred feet across and three hundred feet tall. Glowing-hot gases burst forth. Bits of desert shot into the sky and outward two thousand feet. A pressure wave rolled along the desert surface to a distance of a half mile. Radioactive dust rose higher and moved faster than expected. By the time the Atomic Energy Commission reassured the public about the blast, a radioactive cloud had spread well beyond the bomb site. Within hours it had crossed two highways, dumping fallout along the way. Road workers were evacuated. Highway 25 was closed. By midafternoon the cloud traveled two hundred miles and blocked out the sun in Ely, Nevada. Within five days the radioactive cloud passed over parts of Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. Five days later, tanker trucks and fire engines washed radioactive dust off a seven-mile stretch of Highway 25. Two years later, the Atomic Energy Commission admitted that fallout had probably reached Canada.

Our plane lands on a gravel strip near the old village of Point Hope. A cold, hard wind rips in off the Chukchi Sea, the same sea that in the early 1970s ate this part of the village, flooding homes and swallowing archaeological treasures, forcing people to move several miles east along the coast. People say now that the flooding and erosion were an early expression of climate change, of a warming sea, but in the seventies it was just bad luck. Owners of wooden houses used runners to slide their homes to a new location. Owners of sod houses abandoned them in place and moved into wooden homes on the new town site.

All along the Arctic coast, erosion makes a meal of low spits of sand and feasts on seaside bluffs, taking bites of the coast here and there, slowly changing the map. Warmer temperatures mean less summertime sea ice, and with less sea ice, the water has more time each year to gnaw at the shoreline. Now the late summer winds blow across hundreds of miles of open water, building waves capable of ripping into the shore like a polar bear into the carcass of a whale.

This far north, the soil is often mostly ground ice, water frozen within the dirt, archetypal tundra. Wide gravel and sand beaches line part of the coast, along with scattered rock bluffs, but there are also long stretches where tundra and sea stand in close contact, with the tundra dropping away in bluffs that stand five or ten feet tall. During summer waves lap at the bottom of the bluffs, melting the ice in the soil to dig out sea caves, and the bluffs collapse under their own weight. Tundra bluffs have been collapsing since the end of the last ice age, but in recent years, with the sea ice so obviously disappearing, the soil collapses with startling swiftness. The coastal landscape changes as quickly as it can be mapped.

The Scotsman Joseph Black discovered something about ice. Although Black never visited the Arctic, to understand his discovery is to understand the importance of the loss of sea ice.

Black worked during the time of Antoine Lavoisier, and he knew and worked with James Watt. He was trained as a physician and as such knew of fevers, but his passion was chemistry. His scales—very accurate balances for laboratory use—were used by Faraday and Tyndall.

Like these men, Black was known for charismatic lectures. He could be seen extinguishing the flame of a candle with what he called “fixed air.” Another name for fixed air: carbon dioxide.

In a spare moment, in a break between building scales and giving lectures and extinguishing candle flames, Black discovered what would become known as latent heat. He discovered that a certain amount of heat—the latent heat of freezing—is needed to break down the organized structure of ice. A piece of very cold ice—a piece of ice at, say, five degrees—warms evenly only until it reaches thirty-two degrees, and then the warming stops until the ice melts. Apply a candle’s warmth to a block of ice, and the block of ice steadily warms, but as the ice turns to water, the warming stops. When the ice is gone and only water remains, the water steadily warms.

When the sea ice melts early in the year, when the sea ice disappears, it is expressing more than a steady, gradual warming. It has absorbed enough heat to break down the organized structure of water molecules standing in formation, the hydrogen of one water molecule locked to the oxygen of another.

And when the sea ice disappears, when the sea ice becomes liquid water, something else happens. It loses its reflective surface. It suddenly goes from a hard surface that reflects light and heat to a fluid that absorbs light and heat. It reaches a tipping point, one that is less than welcome to the animals and people who live along the coast and on the sea ice itself.

My companion and I wander around what is left of the old village. Sod houses have been reduced to mounded earth surrounding shallow depressions, rectangular hollows with sparse, windswept vegetation. Even more sod houses are now invisible, swallowed by the warming sea.

Many of the collapsed sod houses were occupied as recently as the 1960s. A few were still occupied in the 1970s. The residents were Inupiat Eskimos, the same people who live here now. But there are older remains too. There are signs of the Ipiutak, the people who predated the Inupiat. What had once been Ipiutak houses can now be described as a patchwork regularity in the tundra surface, an unnatural geometry that speaks of human activity. In the past, these Ipiutak houses might have been described as dugouts covered by sod with a tunnel entrance. There also may have been less permanent structures above ground, shacks made from driftwood or tents made from hides. The village was more than just a few families scraping out an existence. There may have been as many as eight thousand Ipiutak living here at one time. It was the largest settlement known to have existed in Alaska before the arrival of Europeans.

The Ipiutak disappeared around the time that the Inupiat arrived.

I talk to an Inupiat hunter from Point Hope. He tells me that the Ipiutak did not hunt whales. His people did and do. He takes me to the collapsed remains of the sod house where he was born. He lived here until the 1970s, when he moved to a wooden house in the new village, farther from the edge of the hungry sea. An electrical box stands outside the remains of the collapsed walls of the house of his youth. Wires run from the box into what is now a mound of sod.

A single sod house remains standing, nearly intact. This is not the sod house of settlers in the American prairies. It looks more like a hillock than a house. The doorway, framed in the bones of a whale, leans to the left. More bones shore up the walls. Earth carpets the floor. In 1970 a single bare lightbulb hung from wires buried in the sod ceiling, unpretentious but welcome in the Arctic winter. When he was a boy, the hunter tells me, the light of the bare bulb would have been supplemented by the light of a seal oil lamp, a shallow bowl or tray with a chunk of seal blubber and a wick, burning, sending out flickering light and heat against pale jawbones and dark earthen walls. A family of six may have lived here within this mound of sod, cherishing the heat of the seal oil lamp, resting through the winter while outside temperatures hovered near forty below and winds howled in off the sea ice. I cannot imagine myself living in this house.

In Point Hope, heat is life in winter. There is the outer heat of a seal oil lamp and the inner heat from digesting a meal of walrus. There would be the heat of whale oil, too, the same oil that brought the commercial whalers here in the middle of the nineteenth century. Their ships sailed from places like Nantucket and New Bedford and Long Island.

In 1848, Captain Thomas Roys pushed a thousand miles north of the rest of the New England whaling fleet and discovered the whaling grounds north of the Bering Strait. In 1849, ten years before the Drake well, fifty whale ships followed Roy’s lead. In 1852 more than two hundred whale ships headed into the northern whaling grounds. They would leave New England in autumn, round Cape Horn, overwinter in Hawaii or San Francisco, and follow the ice north in spring. Over sixty years, something like eighteen thousand whales were killed.

At this time, it was the whale oil that paid the bills. Before the bowhead population collapsed, in a summer season a single whale ship might expect to take ten whales offshore from Point Hope and Point Lay and Barrow and Wainwright and the other coastal villages of the Alaskan Arctic. A bowhead whale could yield more than a hundred barrels of oil. The record, from a whale taken in 1850, was 280 barrels of oil. At the dock in Nantucket, the oil from a single whale might sell for more than five thousand dollars, the equivalent, after a century of inflation, of close to a hundred thousand dollars.

While oil from bowhead whales did not burn as cleanly as oil from sperm whales, it burned well enough. It could also be used as a lubricant for wagon wheels and the inventory of machinery that grew with the Industrial Revolution, a lubricant to control the heat of friction.

The blubber—thick layers of fat held stiff with strings of collagen—was carved into blocks or strips and rendered into oil in onboard refineries, heat separating the good stuff from the bad, the gasoline from the tar, the oil from the blubber.

“Besides her hoisted boats,” wrote Herman Melville, “an American whaler is outwardly distinguished by her tryworks.” Melville compared the tryworks to a kiln amidships, supported by thickened beams and held to the deck by steel pins. “The intense heat of the fire,” Melville wrote, “is prevented from communicating itself to the deck, by means of a shallow reservoir extending under the entire inclosed surface of the works.” Sailors replenished the reservoir’s cooling water as it steamed away.

Huge pots sat on top of the tryworks. When not in use, the pots were big enough to hold a napping sailor. In use, fire from the tryworks heated blubber in the trypots. The blubber, tried out, would be scooped from the trypots, leaving only the oil behind. Fresh blubber would be added.

The tried-out blubber, shriveled and hardened, called “fritters” by the whalers, still held enough oil to feed the fire under the trypots. “Like a plethoric burning martyr,” Melville wrote, “or a self-consuming misanthrope, once ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body.”

The whales were not stupid. Three years after Captain Roys opened the Bering Strait whaling grounds, one captain wrote that the bowhead was “no longer the slow and sluggish beast we first found him.” The whales recognized the sounds of whaleboats. “They don’t like the cold iron,” wrote a whaler in 1850. A block of ice dropping from the ice pack would slap the water to no effect, but the whales would vanish at the sound of a whaleboat gently bumping the same block of ice.

Within a few years, the commercial whalers wiped out a quarter of Alaska’s bowheads. As early as 1851, just three years after Captain Roys had opened the Bering Strait whaling grounds, one captain wrote, “Where I whaled last voyage, now looks like a deserted village.” A year later, the first mate of the whale ship
Montreal
wrote, “No whales, the ground appears as barren as the deserts of Arabia, altho we are on the very spot where last May we saw whales in abundance.” Within twenty years, half the bowheads were gone, rendered into light and lubricant and heat for the cities and towns and farms of nineteenth-century America.