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Terminal Ice (Cont.)

I WANTED TO SEE AN ICEBERG myself. Like Judy Shaffier, I had never seen one live. I took a cab from my house in New Jersey to Newark Airport and flew to Halifax, Nova Scotia, one of those far northern airports where connecting passengers half-sleepwalk in a twilight of individual time zones. From Halifax I flew to St. John's, Newfoundland, on an uncrowded plane over the coastline and then across ocean that was mailbox blue. I had my face close to the window, craning my neck to scan. A finger of Newfoundland appeared directly below the plane. In the other direction, on the ocean far to the east, I saw a blip of white. It got bigger as the plane approached, and I could make out what seemed to be two white oil-storage tanks rising from the ocean's surface. They looked so plausible, I was sure that was what they were. At slightly closer range, the deception fell away, and I saw they were both parts of a single iceberg; and moreover, one of the dry-dock kind I'd read about. This sighting excited me beyond all measure. From home to iceberg was about two hours of flying time.

The plane banked to the west and descended to land at St. John's, and at about a thousand feet it came over a high bluff above a fjordlike little bay, and in the middle of it was a large, tent-shaped iceberg. The plane passed over the iceberg in a second, and five minutes later was at the gate. I hurried to the luggage claim, got my bag, picked up my rental car, and drove back to the bay where the iceberg was. At a turnout by the road skirting the bay, I got out. The berg rode there, rotating slightly back and forth, about 200 yards away. Its top had a sort of spinal effect, with knobs in a curving row like vertebrae. Small waves broke around it, and it seemed to give off a mist.

Icebergs are really white. Usually you don't see this kind of white unless you've just been born or are about to die. It's a hazmat-suit, medical-lab, hospital white. There are some antiseptic-blue overtones to it, too, and a whole spectrum of greens where the berg descends into the depths out of sight. In these latitudes, sea and land and sky wear the colors of hand-knit Scottish sweaters: the taupes, the teals, the tans, the oyster grays. Surrounded by these muted shades, icebergs stand out like sore thumbs, if a sore thumb could gleam white and rise five stories above the ocean and float.

I drove hundreds of miles up and down the Newfoundland coast looking for icebergs. When I spotted an iceberg in close, run aground on a point or in a cove, I went toward it in the car as far as I could and then hiked the rest of the way. One such hike led through meadows, down forest trails, and across slippery shoreline rocks all inclined in the same direction. Finally I got to the iceberg, which looked somewhat like a jawbone. It even had tooth-shaped serrations in the right place as it seesawed chewingly in the waves. Gulls on fixed wings shot past the headland entanglements of weather-killed trees, clouds turned in huge pinwheels above, waves crashed, the iceberg chewed. I had forgotten to bring water and my mouth was dry.

Among the small channels and troughs in the rocks, iceberg fragments were washing back and forth. I leaned down and scooped out a flat, oval piece about ten inches long. The sea had rounded and smoothed the hard, clear ice like a sea-smoothed stone. In it were tiny bubbles of air that had been trapped among fallen snowflakes millennia ago; the air had eventually become bubbles as later snowfalls compressed the snow to ice. Bubbles in icebergs are what cause them to reflect white light. Almost certainly, this piece of ice originally was part of the Greenland ice cap. A glacier like the Jakobshavn Glacier on Greenland's western coast probably calved this ice into Baffin Bay, where it may have remained for a year or more until currents took it north and then south into the Labrador Current, which brought it here.

I licked the ice, bit off a piece. It broke sharply and satisfyingly, like good peanut brittle. At places the Greenland ice cap is two miles thick. Climatologists have taken core samples clear through it. Chemical analysis of the ice and the air bubbles in these cores provide a picture of climate and atmosphere during the past 110,000 years. For a period covering all of recorded human history, the Greenland ice timeline is so exact that scientists can identify specific events with strata in the core sample—the year Vesuvius buried Pompeii, say, marked by chemical remnants of the Vesuvian eruption. In ice core samples dating from the Golden Age of Greece, they've found trace amounts of lead, dispersed into the atmosphere by early smelting processes and carried to Greenland on the winds. Lead traces in the ice increase slowly from Greek and Roman times, stay at about the same level during the Middle Ages, go up a lot after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, crest during the 20th century, with its leaded automobile fuels, and drop way off after the introduction of unleaded gasoline. Chemicals and other residues in the Greenland ice cores told scientists about temperatures, droughts, the coming and going of ice ages—more about paleoclimates than they had ever known. In particular, they showed how unstable global climate has been, how abruptly it sometimes changed, and how oddly mild and temperate were the recent few thousand years in which people developed civilization.

Scientifically useful concentrations of chemicals don't affect the purity of Greenland ice. Devices that measure impurities in parts per million usually register none in iceberg ice; to find substances other than air and water in it, measurement must be in smaller concentrations, like parts per billion or per trillion. As I sucked the iceberg piece, contemplating its ancientness, trying to taste the armor of Caesar or the ash of Krakatoa in infinitesimal traces, the pristine cold water seemed to evaporate through my membranes with no intervening stage. Before I finished the fragment, my thirst was gone.

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