IV: IN WHICH GEORGE IMPERSONATES A
GUILLEMOT
Unlike Antarctica, a continent surrounded by ocean,
the Arctic is mostly ocean ringed by land -- the
frozen, inhospitable fringes of Alaska, Canada, Greenland,
Iceland, Scandinavia and Russia. And therein lies the
simple reason for its crucial climatic role. For as long as
human memory can recall, the majority of the Arctic
Ocean has been covered, year-round, with a
nine-foot-thick mosaic of sea ice as vast as the continental
United States. Constantly moving, buckling, melting and
refreezing, this blindingly white pack ice is remarkably
efficient in reflecting solar radiation back into space
before the sun's rays can overheat the region. The Arctic
Ocean also serves as a kind of heat vent for the entire
planet, taking the solar radiation that gets absorbed by
the tropics and the temperate zones and, once it has
moved poleward, releasing it to the atmosphere. But every
year, as the 24-hour polar night shifts to 24-hour summer
sunlight, more than half the pack ice melts, and when
that white ice changes to dark, open water, the exposed
ocean, instead of reflecting the sunlight, absorbs it and
begins to warm the overlying air. And if, as a result of
ever-increasing fossil-fuel emissions, the Arctic climate
became too warm, it would create a ''positive feedback
loop'': as the ice receded, the ocean would absorb more
heat, potentially melting more ice until a cycle of heating
and melting eliminated the permanent pack ice. Some
computer models show that if atmospheric carbon dioxide
were to double, the planet would heat up enough to melt
the Arctic's summer sea ice by 2050. And if that forecast
were to come true, extreme changes in the temperature
and salinity of the Arctic and Nordic Seas would follow. In
fact, the Arctic sea ice plays a crucial role in the
circulation of ocean water for the entire planet; according
to one theory, if the pack ice were to melt away
completely, the fresh, frigid water cascading out of the
Arctic and into the North Atlantic would stop the transport
of warm water from the tropics to the high latitudes,
shutting down the Gulf Stream and changing climate
patterns throughout the Northern Hemisphere.
With those facts, figures and drop-dead predictions in the
forefront of their minds, the scientists associated with the
Barrow Arctic Science Consortium work with a special
sense of mission. Walt Oechel, from San Diego State
University, heads a team that flies a one-man airplane
over much of Alaska's North Slope in order to measure
how much carbon dioxide is produced and absorbed by
the thousands of square miles of tundra -- he was the first
to discover that the tundra, once thought to be an
absorbing sink for atmospheric carbon dioxide, had, at
some point in the 1980's, become a source, in effect
pumping vast new amounts of the gas into the
atmosphere. Bernie Zak, from the Sandia National
Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., runs the Barrow site
of a Department of Energy project that, along with sites in
the Great Plains and the tropical western Pacific, seeks to
measure the role that clouds play in Earth's
heat-exchange processes. Dan Endres, living year-round
in Barrow, runs the Climate Monitoring and Diagnostics
Laboratory station here, the government agency that,
along with stations in Hawaii, American Samoa and
Antarctica, produced perhaps the most famous and
persuasive piece of global-warming data: the graph
showing 20th-century global temperatures running -- and
jumping -- in tandem with worldwide emissions of carbon
dioxide. And 25 miles away, there's George in his hat and
gloves, huddled over his Coleman stove, with a week's
growth of beard, breath pluming from his nostrils and lips
starting to crack from the cold.
Within a week of our arrival, Cooper Island has lost much
of its snow cover, the shoreline is beginning to emerge
from its nine-month encasement in the sea ice and the
mass of birds is back -- some 235 black guillemots set to
breed in the dark cavities of the rusted 55-gallon drums
and destroyed ammunition boxes littered across the flank
of Cooper Island. To lower the risk of predation, and to
save the brightest daylight hours for fishing out on the
sea ice, the birds show up on Cooper only at night,
usually sometime after 12, and roost on the north side of
the island's main pond, calling to each other with a
high-pitched, melancholy whistle. Then, once they've
achieved the safety of numbers, they disperse to their
nest sites and commence their breeding activities:
courting and head-bobbing, strutting and exploring their
nest cavities and, of course, copulating wildly. By day,
without the guillemots in attendance, the island looks like
what it is -- a gravel beach with trash on it. At night,
however, with the birds teeming at their nest sites, the
place is transformed by a hundred scenes of carnal bliss:
Cooper Island, 90210.
Now that the birds are back, George picks up his pace,
walking all night in the wind and rain, taking detailed
notes of which birds have returned, which nest sites are
occupied, who is mating with whom -- all written into one
of his yellow field journals with a pen taped to a footlong
tent stake, the better to manipulate it while wearing two
pairs of gloves. Because the birds are gone by day and
here by night, George reverses his sleeping habits so that
he can observe the birds from midnight until noon, then
rest in the afternoon. And so that I can observe George, I
do, too. But whereas the 24-hour light, the day-for-night
sleep schedule and the ceaseless wind and cold all leave
me disoriented -- a victim of what scientists here call
Arctic brain fuzz, in which higher brain functions seem to
shut down as the body works to stay warm -- George slips
easily out of the diurnal rhythms of civilization and into
the surreal, Cooper-driven universe, waking up cheerful
and energetic after six hours of afternoon sleep. Since the
sun never sets -- and won't for more than a month -- long,
undifferentiated stretches of time pass on Cooper, marked
only by golden, low-angle light as the sun approaches the
ocean at midnight and then, some five hours later, by a
gradual brightening of the sky, followed by the snow
buntings' chimelike music -- a dawn chorus in a place
with no dawn.
We do what we can to domesticate and structure the
endlessly unspooling days. Waking at 10 p.m. to a
breakfast of oatmeal or pancakes, we tune the shortwave
radio to NPR's ''All Things Considered.'' Then, after
working through the night, we sit down to a dinner of
Dinty Moore beef stew at 8 a.m., accompanied by
''Morning Edition.'' At 12, not quite certain whether it's
noon or midnight, we call it a day, wish each other good
night and head off to our wind-blasted tents. There, we
crawl inside two sleeping bags apiece and, truly warm for
the first time in 18 hours, fall instantly to sleep. Many
animals that live in or migrate to the Arctic each summer
have special adaptive features. Polar bears have their eight
inches of blubber, ankle-high willows possess scores of
extra leaves to soak up the constant light, certain birds
shut down their adrenal glands for the season so that
their stress response does not become the death of them.
Meanwhile, George, living like a large, flightless guillemot
in his own low-lying cavity, seems to manage just fine
without those adaptations.
After three days alone on the island, we are joined by
George's field assistant, Tamara Enz. Extravagantly
competent, no less hardy than George, Tamara
immediately sets out to fix all of his half-baked projects --
remounting the radio antenna to improve our
communication with Barrow, shoveling snow into trash
bags to avoid a late-summer drought of drinking water.
Refusing to work all summer crawling in and out of a
three-foot-high cook tent, she also builds a structure
called a weatherport -- essentially a piece of canvas
stretched over an arched metal frame. The weatherport
affords us a place to retreat from the wind and permits the
luxury of cooking in a standing position. But because it's
larger than the old cook tent, we can't seem to heat it with
the propane stove; when the outside temperature is 28
degrees, the weatherport's temperature rarely reaches
above 32 -- it's like entering a walk-in meat freezer with
the uncomfortable sensation that we are its meat. Sitting
beneath the flickering light of the propane lantern while
the weatherport creaks in the wind like a ship on high
seas, we huddle around the radio, listening eagerly for the
weather report, and the report is always the same: highs
in the upper 20's, chance of rain, flurries and fog, wind
out of the northeast at 15 to 20 miles per hour. Tamara,
who at 35 has spent most of her working life in field
camps from Maine to Alaska, tries to put the Cooper
experience in perspective for me. ''Here there's no camp
cook, there's no place to go and you're on call all the
time,'' she says. ''You spend all day in the rain, the wind
and the cold. And to warm up, you walk around in the
rain, the wind and the cold.'' George smiles at the
description and says: ''I've been doing this for so long, I've
lost the ability to assess what's uncomfortable. I mean, it's
32 degrees in here, and I'm working in gloves, but
basically I feel good. Sure, my feet feel a little funny, and
I'm losing sensation in my lower lip, and for dinner I'm
drinking hot Jell-O and eating Wheat Chex melted in
chicken bouillon'' -- he toasts the air with his cup -- but at
32 degrees, it tastes like mother's milk!''
Over the many years George has studied his guillemots,
he has developed what he refers to as the Cooper culture
-- the practice of surviving on the fewest resources
possible. For the most part, poverty has been the mother
of invention. Though George now gets financing from the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and
has income from his off-season work as a seabird
consultant for the council investigating the Valdez oil
spill, for many years he had to cobble together his
field-season budget from a half-dozen sources or, when
his funds dried up completely, raise the money himself.
During much of the 1980's, he had no funds, no
assistant, no radio, and he lived on a diet of oatmeal and
rice. To minimize his resupply costs, he'd cache his
unused cans of food and fuel in the permafrost, then draw
himself a map so that he could dig them up the following
year. And he has taught himself time-honored survival
techniques used by the Inupiats, like supplying himself
with drinking water by melting multiyear sea ice, or
waiting for freshwater to float to the top of the lagoon
during breakup.
But even now, when he has the money to prosecute his
research with less day-to-day hardship, and at a time in
life when many of his friends are complaining of their
aches and pains, George chooses the ascetic path. ''People
are always saying to me, 'Why don't you build a shack?'
But I need to have a personal relationship with the birds. I
need to be in their environment, to experience what the
guillemots do, to know what it feels like to leave your
cavity in the wind and the rain.'' Among Arctic scientists,
many of whom have their data relayed to them by
computer, George is an anomaly, and when he attends
conferences on polar science, he sometimes gets miffed. ''I
once heard someone give a paper on trace metals in Arctic
water,'' he says, ''and it was clear the guy had never even
been to the Arctic. I thought, I've passed more Arctic water
through my bladder than you'll see in a lifetime!''
George looks out the weatherport door into a swirl of fog
and freezing rain. ''Do you think it's strange that I've left a
series of beautiful women in April and May -- one of whom
wanted me to spend the summer at her mother's Long
Island summer house -- to come up here?'' He shakes his
head. ''Basically it all comes down to the yellow field
books at the end of the year. I mean, I actually broke up
with someone here in 1980, but I look at the field books
and think: 1980, now that was a good year!''
In the field of ornithology, you can find other examples of
scientists who have kept long-term studies going, year
after year. In Great Britain, starting in the 1930's, the
naturalist Ronald Lockley studied shearwaters and puffins
for 20 years. In New Brunswick, Charles Huntington, a
professor from Bowdoin College, has kept a study of
Leach's storm petrels going since the 1950's. But in the
nascent field of climatology, rare is the scientist with
anything longer than a 5- or 10-year data set. That the
guillemots come back year after year is, on the whole, less
surprising than the fact that George does, too. In the 27
years that have elapsed since he first began his study, the
dead walrus by our campsite has lost all its skin, fat and
muscle; the young boy who once brought out supplies to
Cooper grew up to become the mayor of the North Slope
Borough; and Cooper Island itself has eroded a quarter of
a mile to the northwest -- George's old campsite and
airstrip on the east end are now completely underwater.
When George wanders the beach, strange,
ancient-seeming objects catch his eye, and he picks them
up, marveling at how they could have reached Cooper
Island -- before he remembers bringing them out himself
more than two decades before. All of which has put him in
a unique position to track changes in the Arctic climate
and to make sense of large, seemingly random events that
take years to figure out, like the one that began 10 years
ago when the population of his guillemot colony gradually
and mysteriously began to drop.
Throughout the 1980's, almost 650 birds were coming to
Cooper Island each summer, and with 85 percent
over-winter survival, competition for the 200 or so nest
sites was fierce -- one bird came back 11 years in a row
before it could breed. ''It was like rent control in New
York,'' George says. ''They were all waiting for someone to
die.'' Then in 1995, he passed by two nest sites and saw
the same male going back and forth, pairing with two
females. ''I didn't believe my eyes,'' he recalls. ''I'd never
seen a female without a male, I'd never seen bigamy, and
as all males know, you can't keep one female happy. . . . ''
Looking around his colony that year, he saw 10 more
females who owned a nest site, but couldn't attract a
mate. Something, apparently, was decreasing adult
survival.
A second clue came four years later, when George noticed
a lot of sibling aggression among chicks -- a sign that food
was scarce. And at several nest sites, he saw something
else he'd never seen before: orphaned chicks, not yet able
to fledge, starving and walking away from their nests
toward shore in search of foster parents and food. ''It was
pretty disturbing. I picked up one chick, and it was more
stress than he could take -- he died right in my hands.''
Something was decreasing adult survival, and something,
apparently, was killing off chicks.
If George's colony had consisted of any bird besides a
black guillemot, his investigation of this gradual
population drop might never have led him to look for
answers in the Arctic environment. Arctic terns, for
example, winter in Antarctica and fly 25,000 miles each
year -- through the tropics, through the temperate zones
-- before arriving in the Arctic to breed; anything between
the earth's two poles could cause them to die off.
Similarly, glaucous gulls, though not particularly
migratory, feed on human sources of food like dumps and
carrion, and therefore pick up anthropogenic
contaminants that could confound interpretation.
George's guillemots, on the other hand, spend their whole
annual cycle in the Arctic -- wintering from September to
May in the pack ice of the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas,
then coming to Cooper Island to breed. As George puts it,
''They're not temperate-zone birds just slumming it in the
Arctic.'' The guillemots feed at the ice edge all year long,
where prey is most plentiful; they feed only on other
Arctic organisms like cod and zooplankton; and they have
a long, 80-day breeding cycle that they must wedge into
the brief Arctic summer, which starts with the snow melt
in June and goes right up to the first snowfall of the year
in September. They are creatures, in other words, wholly
dependent on snow and ice habitats sustained by them,
restricted by them and adapted to them -- they are captive
to the Arctic environment and thus the first to reflect a
change.
And George, no less captive to the snow and ice of Cooper
Island, began to see a correlation: when the polar pack ice
remained up against the shores of Cooper Island, as it did
in the 1970's and 1980's, his guillemots -- able to feed
easily from the nearby ice edge with its great density of
prey -- had fabulous breeding success. When warmer
summer temperatures caused the pack ice to pull offshore
and retreat northward out of sight, as it did through the
1990's, his birds were unable to reach the ice edge and
began to die off. By 1999, when a series of papers came
out describing a major retreat and thinning of the Arctic
pack ice due not only to gradually warmer temperatures,
but also to a decadelong upper atmospheric shift called
the Arctic Oscillation, George was in a position to put the
pieces together. His colony was not merely tracking the
advancement of snow melt and the earlier arrival of
summer; it was also articulating a change in the very
makeup of the Arctic itself -- the shrinking of the polar ice
cap -- with all its potentially drastic worldwide
consequences.
George, of course, is not the only scientist tracking the
physical and biological affects of a warmer climate --
permafrost melting, coastlines eroding, moose expanding
northward, walruses losing ice habitat on which to pup
and hunt. But when it comes to relating such
observations to the larger, slow-moving story of climate
change, those data sets are useful only in direct
proportion to their longevity and depth. And whereas
some scientists find the long-distance work of climatology
tedious and lacking in the kinds of signal events that grab
people's attention, George is undeterred, married as he is
to the year-to-year process.
It's interesting to consider: if George had begun his study
five years ago, he would have missed the advancement in
snow melt, the advancement of summer. If he'd begun his
work as far back as 1990, he could never have connected
the colony's population drop with the retreat of the pack
ice. Having amassed a continuous, eyewitness data set for
27 years, however, he was watching the climate change
not only in year-to-year increments but also in shifts from
decade to decade, which has enabled him to see through
the static of natural climatic cycles like the Arctic
Oscillation, which may warm the region one decade, then
cool it the next.
''I sometimes forget that there's no other island in the
Arctic where someone has gone back for 27 years,'' he
says, cinching his hood and drawing up his face mask,
preparing to leave the weatherport. ''Now I feel totally
obligated to keep the study going. People say, 'Couldn't
you just take a year off?' But if I skip a year, then it's lost.
I only have one chance.'' He opens the weatherport door,
and the wind nearly snaps it off its hinges. ''I don't want
to sound like the Old Man of the Arctic, but I can
remember the year the ice did this, the year the snow did
that. I have the data set, I've got the numbers. It may be
that I came back to Cooper all these years simply because
I have minor attention deficit disorder, or all this summer
sunlight has given me an addiction to high serotonin
levels. But it meant something to me in a way that wasn't
abstract. I was there. I saw it. And I saw it because I was
there, living in my tent.''
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