David Shukman - An Iceberg As Big As Manhattan

An iceberg as big as Manhattan

REPORTING FROM SCIENCES NEW FRONTLINES

David Shukman has been a BBC television reporter for nearly three decades. He reported from East Berlin during the fall of the Wall and from conflicts in Bosnia, the Caucasus and Africa. He has broadcast from more than ninety countries and became Environment and Science Correspondent in 2003.

REPORTING FROM SCIENCES NEW FRONTLINES

DAVID SHUKMAN

Environment and Science Correspondent, BBC News

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by
PROFILE BOOKS LTD
3A Exmouth House
Pine Street
London EC1R 0JH
www.profilebooks.com

Copyright David Shukman, 2010, 2011
(an earlier version of this book, entitled Reporting Live
From the End of the World, was published in 2010)

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Bookmarque Ltd, Croydon, Surrey

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 84668 888 1
eISBN 978 1 84765 787 9

To Jess, Jack, Harry and Kitty

An iceberg as big as Manhattan

A sharp wind flicks my legs as I climb out of a helicopter and stumble into my first discovery about reporting on global warming: that the Arctic can still feel miserably cold. For some reason Id convinced myself that chinos would be robust enough; they arent. Im in Greenland in July and, although the forecast was mild, something known as a katabatic wind descends from the heights inland, gathering chill over a thousand miles of ice, and successfully targets a poorly protected spot just above my ankles. I wrestle with the idea of tucking my trousers into my socks but know how that kind of thing can look ruinous on television. Vanity wins.

I then discover that those crystal-clean, chocolate-box pictures you often find in coffee-table books of the Arctic dont exactly tell the whole truth. In fact the scene Ive entered is startlingly ugly, a mess of ice and rock, a giants dump for oversized rubble. From the air, glancing at Greenland out of the window on flights between Europe and America, there isnt much to see except a beautiful, rather restful white. Close-up, this bit couldnt seem more disturbed.

I didnt arrive wholly ignorant; I knew that Greenland was covered by an ice sheet, its just that I now realise how I never understood what that meant. Standing here, I learn that the so-called ice sheet isnt a sheet at all, and that the phrase is misleadingly genteel. Sheets are thin and delicate, soft enough to lie between. This gargantuan mass of ice is incredibly thick sometimes nearly two miles thick and rock-hard. Ludicrous that anyone would call it a sheet. Its more like a monstrous mountain of ice thats lying sideways on the land. Its edges are some of the biggest cliffs Ive ever seen, numbingly sharp, skyscraper-tall. There are lurid blue fissures the size of urban canyons, chunks of ice as big as office buildings, a jumbled frozen version of a ruined Manhattan.

Until now my closest encounters with snow and mountains have been in the benign surroundings of the European Alps and in fact, in the rush to get ready for this trip, the chinos arent my only failing because I have managed to bring nothing more robust than my usual anorak, a bright red thing better suited to a hike in the hills. Not quite the gear for this raw, unforgiving spot. I also cant help thinking that if you get into trouble in the Alps youre rescued in minutes while, if we get stuck here, theres only one other helicopter within a days flying of us.

I look down and get another shock. The ice Im scrunching over is not pristine. Instead this jagged, shattered surface, a blasted wilderness stretching towards the North Pole, is actually grey or even black in patches. A bit like a building site littered with dirt. A landscape that ought to be unsullied is menacingly dark.

I shuffle about, testing the ground because all around me the ice is scarred with deep crevasses. My mind keeps churning over the thought that the Arctic ought to be white, that somethings not quite right up here. I bend down to look at the surface more closely. I can actually see thousands of little black flecks in the ice. It looks like it must be possible to scoop them up so I take off a glove and reach out but my fingertips meet solid ice, clear, incredibly smooth and unyielding. The dark particles are locked inside. I picture one of those tourist ornaments where plastic snowflakes tumble around a landmark except that in this case the snowflakes would be a sinister black and frozen in place.

As the giant white island at the top of the Atlantic, Greenland should be one of the purest corners of the planet. Im on whats called the Sermilik glacier at its southern tip and the nearest settlement is the little town of Narsarsuaq, not a place many have heard of. In fact its so out of sight that this corner of the country has an eerie history: the Americans chose it as the site for a vast, discreet hospital to treat their wounded from the Korean War. Of the secret wards that housed hundreds of injured soldiers beyond the gaze of the US public, only the foundations remain.

Now, from where Im standing on the ice, there are only pockets of people for thousands of miles around. So where did the dark dust come from? Theres no industry here, hardly a power station.

I call out to the scientist who has brought us along, a Danish polar expert called Carl Boggild. He doesnt reply at first. Hes a short distance away, with his anorak pulled over his head to keep the sunshine off the screen of his laptop. Hes focused on his work.

Carl does not look like the stereotypical scientist. In fact hed pass for someone big in mountain rescue, his hair cropped short and his face burnished. A hands-on, outdoors type, hes trying to get hard facts about Greenland and its fate, which is why weve joined him, to bypass what campaigners are saying about the Arctic and see what frontline field researchers are actually measuring.

With a series of automatic monitoring devices, spindly tripods like stick insects, his instruments record the weather and the height of the ice. Usually the evidence from these fragile robots is transmitted by satellite back to Copenhagen but, whenever he can, Carl visits them and downloads the data directly into his laptop. Not the sort of person to trust technology, hes also very cautious about jumping to conclusions: he wants his own figures to help form his own judgement about whats happening in the Arctic, which is just the kind of approach Im after.

Job done, Carl stands up, data downloaded, and pulls his anorak back on. Its not just me thats feeling the cold.

Its probably from China, he calls back.