Bjørn Vassnes - Kingdom of Frost: How the Cryosphere Shapes Life on Earth

Copyright 2020 by Bjrn Vassnes

Originally published in Norway in 2017 as Frostens rike: Kryosfren og livet

English translation copyright 2020 by Lucy Moffatt

First published in English by Greystone Books in 2020

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Greystone Books Ltd.

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Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada

ISBN 978-1-77164-454-9 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-77164-455-6 (epub)

Editing by Dawn Loewen

Proofreading by Jennifer Stewart

Jacket and text design by Nayeli Jimenez

Jacket photograph by istockphoto.com

Greystone Books gratefully acknowledges the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples on whose land our office is located.

Greystone Books thanks the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit, and the Government of Canada for supporting our publishing activities.

This translation has been published with the financial support of NORLA.

CONTENTS

TIMELINE

Earths History

4,500 MILLION YEARS AGO (MYA): The Earth is formed

4,280 MYA: Water begins to condense in the atmosphere

3,600 MYA: The first supercontinent (Vaalbara) is formed

3,500 MYA: The first single-celled organisms, prokaryotes, appear; also, the first oxygen-producing bacteria

2,900 MYA: First glaciation (Pongola) occurs; possibly first snowball Earth event

2,400 MYA: The oxygen catastrophe; oxygen forms in earnest

2,400 TO 2,100 MYA: The Huronian ice age (with at least two snowball Earth events)

CA. 2,000 MYA: The first eukaryotes appear (first complex organisms with cell nuclei)

850 TO 635 MYA: Ice age (Sturtian-Varangian), with two more snowball Earth events

600 MYA: The first multicellular organisms appear

542 MYA: The Cambrian explosion; many new species appear

443 MYA: The supercontinent Gondwana becomes covered in ice; mass extinction of marine animals

420 MYA: First land plants appear, along with first fish with jaws (sharks), insects on land

252 MYA: Volcanic period; carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases to 2,000 ppm; oxygen falls from 30 percent to 12 percent

251 MYA: Mass extinction; 90 percent of marine animals and 70 percent of land animals die out

199.6 MYA: The Jurassic (age of dinosaurs) begins

55.5 MYA: Episode of warming (PETM, PaleoceneEocene Thermal Maximum); North Pole at 73 degrees Fahrenheit

50 MYA: India collides with Asia; the Himalayas are formed

35.6 MYA: Temperature falls 18 degrees Fahrenheit in the Eocene epoch

34 MYA: Ice forms on Antarctica

30 MYA: Australia and South America separate from Antarctica

3.9 MYA:Australopithecus appears

3.0 MYA: Ice cap in the Arctic forms

2.58 MYA: The Pleistocene, the most recent ice age epoch, begins

2.4 MYA:Homo habilis appears

CA. 200,000 YEARS AGO:Homo sapiens appears

125,000 YEARS AGO: Interglacial period

116,000 YEARS AGO: The last ice age begins

CA. 21,000 YEARS AGO: The last ice age peaks

11,600 YEARS AGO: The ice age (and Younger Dryas) ends; the Holocene begins

CA. 1350 TO 1850: Little Ice Age

CA. 1950: The Holocene ends, and the Anthropocene begins

Prologue

THE DANCE OF THE WHITE CAPS

WE HAVE ALL seen the famous photo taken from Apollo 17 in 1972. This picture of our planet, alone out there in endless space, taught us to think of Earth as our home, our only home, as something precarious and fragile that we needed to take care of. For the environmental movement, the photograph became almost iconic. The picture also gave us our perception of Earth as the blue planet, because so much of the surface is covered in blue oceans.

But there is something this picture does not tell us, something we could have seen if the image of the Earth had been filmed from out there rather than just photographed. Not for just a few minutes, either, but continuously, throughout the entire year andif it were possibleover millions of years. If that film were then played back at high speed, we would see a different image: we would see a planet in constant flux, the white caps at either pole expandingover land and seaand then shrinking again, in time with the seasons. When it was winter in the north, most of the landmasses would be covered in snow, which would vanish again when summer came. And likewise the sea, in both south and north: great, white, snow-covered expanses of ice spreading and shrinking, spreading and shrinkingback and forth in an annual dance.

If the film ran a little longer, we would also see other movements, following a more extended rhythm: in certain periods, less white would be visible, in others, a little more. And if the film were really long, we would see something astonishing. On occasions, the white cap would spread out across the entire planet, turning everything white. Earth becomes like a snowball. Not a single dark or blue patch in sight.

But the opposite also happens: for periods at a time, all the white vanishesbut always returns again. Sometimes slowly, other times quickly. Now and then, it seems to happen rhythmically, in steady cycles. But then the rhythm is interrupted. The white cap goes awry, or suddenly disappears. At the end of the film, as it approaches our own era, we see the rhythm becoming quicker, more intense. And as the film stops, we see that the white is shrinking once again, faster than ever before. It is so striking that we wonder what will happen when the film continues.

To understand what is happening down there, to grasp the rhythm of this dance, we must leave Apollo 17 and zoom in to the surface of this unique planet, so different from its duller siblings, Venus and Mars. They may be beautiful enough in the night sky, but they are monotonous and dead by comparison with our spectacular, ever-changing Earth. What causes this dance, and how does it manifest itself to earthlings? Could it be that they dont even notice it?

MELTING

HOW DOES IT feel to stand inside a vodka bottle while the world melts around you? Not too bad, if the bottle is made of ice, is human-sized, and is the same one Kate Moss once stood in for a vodka ad. Pretty good, in fact, if youre at the ice hotel in Jukkasjrvi, northern Sweden, with its ice bar and barstools, its spectacular ice decorations and glasses (only cold drinks! says the bartender) made from blocks carved out of the frozen river and shaped by professional ice artists.