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Terminal Ice (Cont.) IN A BOOKLET written for iceberg enthusiasts, a St. John's engineer and history buff named Stephen E. Bruneau mentions a locally famous iceberg called the Virgin Berg. It was an iceberg "hundreds of feet high and bearing an undeniable likeness to the Blessed Virgin Mary" (as one account described it) that appeared off St. John's harbor in June of 1905. Thousands of people went to a high hill above St. John's to watch it drift by, and the fishing boats that came out to follow it became a flotilla as it continued on its way south along the coast. Catholic and Protestant Newfoundlanders took it as a sign—generally, as a mark of divine favor for the Catholic side. Probably there were also a few skeptics who saw it as just a big piece of ice in the water. My own mild fanaticism for icebergs can sometimes be hard to explain to unconvinced acquaintances. I notice the bewilderment in their eyes, and it infects me: Why, exactly, should anyone get so worked up about a piece of ice? Like the Newfoundland faithful of a hundred years ago, each of us sees in an iceberg what we are disposed to see. And yet...if icebergs have no significance other than the fanciful notions we project, why do they look as they do? A white iceberg lit by the sun in a field of blue ocean simply looks annunciatory. It might as well have those little lines radiating from it—the ones cartoonists draw to show something shining with meaning. In its barefaced obviousness, an iceberg seems the broadest hint imaginable; but what is it a hint of? When I went to the Ice Center, Judy Schaffier gave me a list of ice-watch Web sites run by government agencies in a dozen countries. All across the United States and Canada are institutes and university departments that devote some or all of their resources to studying the world's ice. From the earth and the sky, ever more sophisticated instruments constantly record tiny changes in the ice. A satellite that measures global sea levels, a key part of ice studies, takes 500,000 sea-level readings a day. Laser altimeters deployed on satellites can detect the minutest shifts of ice position with essentially no error. And yet with all this information flooding in, broad conclusions are hard to come by. Science is specialization, and almost no expert in a particular area wants to step out into summary or generalizing. The experts tend to approach big ideas like global warming with the greatest hesitancy. Apparently, nobody wants to be the one to tell us (for example) that our SUVs have got to go. What science will hazard instead of conclusions is a series of ifs. Ten thousand or 20,000 square miles of ice broken off Antarctica hardly diminishes that continent's total ice area of five million square miles, but if the shedding of ice continues at an increasing rate, and if the ice loss causes the glaciers inland to move faster toward the sea, and if seawater flows in where glacial ice used to be and reaches certain sub-sea-level parts of the continent and melts the ice there, and if as a consequence the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet goes—well, then we would have the schnitzel, to speak plainly. That much ice added to the ocean might raise world sea levels anywhere from 13 to 20 feet. Such a rise would submerge parts of the island of Manhattan and of the Florida peninsula, not to mention many other coastal areas worldwide where about half the planet's population lives. News stories in the months following the Titanic disaster examined the preceding few years' weather conditions in the Arctic and North Atlantic and concluded that a number of meteorological features had been "unusual." The winter of 1910-11 had been "unusually" snowy and severe, the summer of '11 and the spring of '12 had been "unusually" warm, the icebergs had drifted "unusually" far south. Such descriptions bring to mind the TV weather forecasters who still speak of temperatures as being "unseasonably" warm; most of the years in the last two decades have been warmer than any recorded in decades previous, so what does "unseasonable" mean nowadays? In fact, from an expanded perspective of time, there is nothing unusual about so many icebergs being as far south as the place where the Titanic went down. Over the past millennia, as climatic events came and went, icebergs invaded the Atlantic in armadas. Stones dropped from melting Canadian icebergs have been found in sea sediments off the coast of Portugal. The North Atlantic climate over the last tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of years has been characterized by periods of continent-wide glaciation, massive melting, and the intermittent huge discharge of icebergs. As easily as The Iceberg fits a morality tale about human pride, it fits a climatologist's possible scenario of global-warming ifs. If increased moisture held in the warmer atmosphere results in more precipitation in the North Atlantic region, and if that precipitation leads to more runoff into the ocean, and if warmer summers result in a greater melting of glacial ice in Greenland, and if lots more icebergs set sail, and if all that leads to a greatly increased amount of fresh water poured every year into the North Atlantic—then, possibly, the complicated process of tropical warm water rising, flowing north, giving off its heat, and cooling and sinking (the process that creates the great ocean currents) will be disrupted. And if those currents stop, and the heat they bring to Northern Europe and parts of the United States and Canada no longer arrives, those regions will very likely become colder, like other places at similar latitudes that ocean currents don't warm. Of course no one imagined any such scenarios back in 1912. Most people knew little or nothing about climatology. Yet it might turn out that a foreshadowing of major climate change in that part of the world was the real message The Iceberg carried for us out of the North Atlantic night. And then again, maybe not. Discussions of global warming always deal in elaborate scary possibilities, while always including enough disclaimers and unknowns to blunt the fear. Considering all that's at stake, I want to tell us what we should do immediately to change our lives and avert environmental catastrophe. But I can't bring myself to, somehow. All I can do is put in a good word for the sweeping conclusion and broad generalization. There aren't enough of them around—enough high-quality ones, I mean. I think we have yielded the sweeping-conclusion field to the wackier minds among us. Scenarios based on the Mothman Prophecies are colorful, but not a lot of help in the long run. Sensibly, most of us fort up behind our ever-growing heaps of information. But eventually, and maybe soon, we should draw a conclusion or two about where the globe is heading; and after that, maybe even act. A lot of what is exciting about being alive can't be felt, because it's beyond the power of the senses. Just being on the planet, we are moving around the sun at 67,000 miles an hour; it would be great if somehow we could climb up to an impossible vantage point and just for a moment actually feel that speed. All this data we've got piling up is interesting, but short on thrills. Time, which we have only so much of, runs out on us, and as we get older we learn that anything and everything will go by. And since it will all go by anyway, why doesn't it all go right now, in a flash, and get it over with? For mysterious reasons, it doesn't, and the pace at which it proceeds instead reveals itself in icebergs. In the passing of the seconds, in the one-thing-after-another, I take comfort in icebergs. They are time solidified and time erased again. They pass by and vanish, quickly or slowly, regular inhabitants of a world we just happened to end up on. The glow that comes from them is the glow of more truth than we can stand.
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