Moby-Duck (52 page)

Slice, slice, slice—there, into baggies, went the twentieth century. Slice, slice, slice—there went the nineteenth century. Way out in the Arctic Basin, farther still from the continental shelf, a single centimeter of mud constitutes a millennium's worth of sedimentation. Out in the Arctic Basin, a slice thin as a sheet of cardboard would transport you back to the Norman conquest. Two centimeters would transport you back to the birth of Christ. A third, to the Babylonian Empire. A core as deep as the one we'd collected from Davis Strait would transport you back to the Pleistocene.

Recorded in this mud were “biomarkers,” most of which were compounds of carbon. Most evenings, I ended up talking to Macdonald, who was happy to tutor me in organic geochemistry. After dinner, scientists and sailors alike would gather in the
Louis'
s main lounge, a room as wide almost as the ship. The walls were paneled in wood. The big picture windows looked out over the bow, and over the bulwarks, toward the far horizon where icebergs drift. There was an upright piano in the main lounge, and a drum kit, and wooden card tables, and a bar well-stocked with spirits and beer. Although there was a two-drink limit, minutes after the bar opened, the place had the loud, convivial feel of a saloon. You almost forgot that you were on an icebreaker, steaming north into the Arctic. That it was nine o'clock and out on the decks the sun was so bright it looked like late afternoon.

“Where does the carbon come from? That's perhaps the most important question,” Macdonald told me one evening, while swirling a thimble of Scotch. I was inclined to attribute his bardically long mane of white hair to a romantic disposition until he confessed that for weeks he'd been meaning to visit the barbershop. He had bags under his eyes, the left one baggier than the right, and wore on his wrist a chunky, black, heavily instrumented waterproof watch. When he wasn't out on the deck in his foul-weather gear, he walked around the ship in sandals and socks.

“We can look at stories in these sediments,” he said, stories written in chemical elements. Manganese, iron, sulfur, phosphorous, and radionuclides all play supporting roles in these stories, but the protagonist is carbon. There are two kinds of carbon, organic and inorganic, Macdonald said. The ratio between them reveals a great deal about the ancient climate of the Arctic, and about how swiftly the Arctic has changed during the industrialized heyday of fossil fuels. Photosynthesizing flora, both terrestrial plants and phytoplankton, convert inorganic carbon—CO
₂
—into organic, carbon-based compounds, CHO, for instance. “Chloroplasts”—photosynthesizing cells—“are the little engines that run the biosphere,” Macdonald said.

Petroleum consists mostly of organic carbon, as does a polyethylene duck, since polyethylene is a by-product of petroleum. A polyethylene duck is in fact made of sunlight that eons ago algae converted into carbon. Some of that algae was consumed by zooplankton. Both plankton and algae died, sedimented to the ocean floor, and were eventually subsumed into the earth's mantle. There, under great pressure and great heat, over the course of eons, the planet cooked it into that primordial ooze we call oil.

To turn oil into ethylene you need one of those industrial kitchens known as a refinery, as well as a chemical plant. Here's a recipe, albeit a useless one: In something called a “crude tower,” through a process known as fractionation, skim away the ethane, the most ethereal part of crude oil, too light to use as gasoline. Ethane looks like this:

Pump your ethane to your chemical plant. Now it's time for steam cracking: Dilute your ethane with steam. Briefly heat it to over 850 degrees Celsius. Eventually you'll end up with an ethylene molecule that looks like this:

Take a bunch of ethylene molecules. Cook them. Add a polymerization catalyst, usually a chemical derived from titanium, and you get polyethylene.

String enough of these molecules together and you get plastic resin. Ship the resin from the refineries of the Gulf of Mexico to Los Angeles, mill it into nurdles, ship them to Guangzhou, add some yellow dye, throw them into the hopper of an extrusion blow-molder, melt them into parison, extrude the parison through a steel mold milled by Henry Tong's late father, hire a teenage immigrant from the Chinese interior to press a button that sends a blast of air into the mold, and primordial sunlight becomes a yellow duck. And a yellow duck is a delightful toy. But in alchemizing oil into objects and energy, we are, as Macdonald put it to me one day over lunch in the main mess, “spending down our capital,” “living on borrowed time.”

Out on the bow of the
Louis
, in the little prefabricated lab, Marie-Éve Randlett and Danielle Dubien were making progress. The place resembled a potter's studio. The steel table was splattered with gray goo. Atop the table, enclosed on three sides by the steel box, was the core of sediment. In just an hour Gobeil's graduate students had already bagged a few centuries of mud. Randlett showed me a weird prickly ball she'd exhumed—a dead sea urchin. Ascending from the high pressures of the benthic zone to the low pressures of the atmosphere, the poor thing had exploded, to Robie Macdonald's dismay. “I don't like to see anything die,” he'd tell me that night in the main lounge.

Here are the sorts of stories that can be read in a box of Arctic mud: A low level of organic carbon indicates a low level of photosynthesis, which in turn indicates a frigid, polar climate hostile to phytoplankton and plants; a high level of organic carbon indicates a high level of photosynthesis. Fifty-five million years ago the Arctic was ice-free. Trees grew along its shores. Crocodiles transited the Northwest Passage. Then the planet wobbled on its axis and a new ice age—the Pleistocene—began. The Arctic Ocean chilled. Ice formed on its surface—not the way ice forms on the surface of freshwater, as a skin; when the surface of saltwater first reaches the freezing point, it thickens into a kind of crystalline soup many inches deep. This soup has a savory name: frazil ice. Frazil ice turns into grease ice—so called because, in the memorable words of the naturalist E. C. Pielou, “as the swell passes beneath it” and as the wind blows over it, grease ice “forms ripples like those on cooling fat in a tilted frypan.” Grease ice can bear, and has borne, the weight of a man wearing snowshoes. Frazil ice can't. As frazil turns to grease it congeals around flotsam.

During the Pleistocene, snow began to fall on the mountains of Greenland, Svalbard, and Ellesmere. From that snow, glaciers formed. The glaciers began to flow down the sides of the mountains, scouring the earth as they went. By the end of the Pleistocene, ice sheets stretched all the way to Chicago. All the way to Manhattan. The crocodiles, by this point, had moved south, and so had the Arctic trees. Biomarkers in cores of mud and ice record every one of these changes.

But these changes happened over millions of years. The current pace of climatological change is unprecedented, and natural causes—solar flares, for instance—will not account for it. What happened over the course of millennia is now happening over the course of decades. “Basically what we're doing is turning the polar ocean back into a temperate one,” Macdonald said. Whether this was a good or bad thing he at first hesitated to say. “Good, bad—it depends which species we're talking about. Good for some, bad for others. Good for invasive species like the spruce beetle. Bad for the polar bear.” After a second Scotch he was less equivocal. “Basically we're going to hell in an incremental handbasket,” he said. Like most of the scientists I met, he was quick to insist that uncertainties remained—gaps in the data record, puzzles yet to solve, which is why we were here. Nevertheless he also believed that we didn't have time to wait for all the results to come in. “We've never conducted this experiment, and we only get to conduct it once; we don't have a duplicate planet.”

In the middle of Baffin Bay we encountered a diffuse flock of bergs and floes stranded at the heart of the convergent currents. The sea state had fallen to Beaufort force 0, “Calm. Flat. Smoke rises vertically.” No wind. No breezes. No waves. Not even capillary waves. The surface of the sea was silken, and the bow wrinkled it without breaking it. It seemed as though we were steaming across a reflecting pool that stretched to the horizon. “The sweet water,” Captain Rothwell called it. A captain of a ship in the age of sail would have called it purgatory, or hell. It occurred to me that the conditions here resembled those Charlie Moore had described encountering in the Garbage Patch. Here, as there, a high-pressure system dominated. If there had been anything other than ice floating in the water, you would have seen it. It was beautiful, eerily beautiful, that glassy stillness, the bergy bits and floes motionless atop their own reflections—until the waves radiating from our wake made them rise and fall.

Before making Cambridge Bay, I don't really expect to find a duck frozen into a floe, or a beaver stranded on some barren shore, or a turtle perched on some Inuit windowsill. But you never know. In the annals of drift, stranger things have happened. Consider, for instance, the strange thing that happened on March 2, 1885, to a certain C. Brainard, whose first name seems to have been lost to posterity, along with most of his biography. On March 2, 1885, Brainard was working as a “leveler” for the Mississippi River Commission, a federal entity charged with a task now carried out by the Army Corps of Engineers, that of surveying and improving the Mississippi River. A leveler's job was to operate a transit, which in the nineteenth century would have comprised a telescope and spirit level mounted on a tripod. On that March afternoon, three miles south of Point Pleasant, Missouri, two hundred miles south of St. Louis, three feet from the river's edge, at the high-water line, Brainard noticed something—not a rubber duck (in 1885 the only rubber ducks around were hunting decoys) but a sheet of parchment covered in script.

We don't know for certain the exact sentences on which Brainard's eyes first fell. Perhaps these: “Our only foods now consists of 3 ounces of shrimps daily per man. Lichens and saxifrage and reindeer moss are eaten in the stew by those who like it.” Or these: “The evening dinner consisted of sealskin soles entirely, no shrimps being on hand, and the stew was enjoyed by all and gave great satisfaction. I had a good stool in the evening.” Or these: “Although Henry has told before his death that I had eaten a lot of sealskin, yet, although I am a dying man, I deny the assertion he made against me. I only eat my own boots and a part of an old pair of pants which I received from Lieut. Kislingbury.” Or these: “Poor Gardiner died at 11 A.M. from inflammation of the bowels and starvation; he will be buried in the ice foot, as it is seen that the rest of the bodies are uncovering with every light wind, and are thus laid bare to animals.”

Onward C. Brainard trudges, urgently now, following the Mississippi's high-water line, chasing pages, shuffling them into chronological order, pausing to read, hoping to learn how this story will end. He will never record for posterity the thoughts now passing through his mind but I can imagine those that would have passed through mine:
Who was Lieut. Kislingbury? And Henry? Did they also die of inflammation of the bowels and starvation? And what the hell is saxifrage? And reindeer moss? Who wrote this? Ate his own boots! And Kislingbury's pants too!
(It is remarkable, reading histories of Arctic exploration, how often explorers were reduced to a sartorial diet. In this one respect the woolen and leathery wardrobes of Victorians were clearly superior to a neoprene survival suit, a potage of which would more likely poison than sustain.) Of all the thoughts that would have passed through my mind had I been in C. Brainard's muddy, edible shoes I suspect the most pressing one would have been this:
How in the hell did these pages turn up here? On the banks of the Mississippi, 2,313 miles south of the Arctic Circle?