EMBARK | THE BIG IDEA
PHOTOS: RICHARD JOHNSON GALLERY (ALL ABOVE)that his son wouldn’t have a chance to do the same.
I think anew of my own experiences in the cold,
and how impoverished my life would have been
without them. I think of Antarctica’s Ross Sea in
January 1993, of climbing up a cliffside with a fellow
crew member of the M.V. Greenpeace and sitting at
the top, looking down at the bay below. Ours had
been a long and arduous expedition, scouring the
ocean for whaling ships that did not want to be
found. For several days previously, Antarctica had
thrown its worst at us, bombarding our ship with
screaming gales and freezing waves until the ves-
sel was coated with a thick layer of ice. When the
storm abated and after the ice had been chipped
away, my crewmate and I took the opportunity to
set foot ashore.
The fierce wind bit angrily at the small patches of
exposed skin on our faces, and we retreated into the
scarves and hoods that cloaked our heads. And then,
suddenly, the wind died down. For a moment there
was silence. We looked at each other and grinned.
We didn’t say a word. We didn’t need to. We just
sat there, on a cliff top in Antarctica. Smiling. In
the silence.
In the cold. jcold environments presents,” Eric says. He perceives
“a level of severity in these cold environments that I
find really attractive because it’s a bigger challenge.”IT’S ALSO A CHALLENGE that fewer and fewer of us
may ultimately have the opportunity to accept. While
there’s no danger of cold places vanishing from the
planet in the foreseeable future, their extent, and
the length and depth of their coldest periods, may
be shrinking. The world is warming. And the cold
is warming most of all.
Since the turn of the 20th century, average winter
temperature in the United States has increased by
almost twice the rate of the summer temperature.
Over the past five to six decades, the Arctic has
warmed by approximately four degrees, substantially
more than the rest of the globe; annual minimum
Arctic sea ice extent is declining by about 13 percent
per decade. As I write this in the northern summer
of 2019, Greenland’s ice sheet is experiencing rates
of melt that models had not predicted until 2070.
Here I should correct what I wrote earlier about
standing at the North Pole: To be precise, I stood in
close proximity to it. When I was there in August 2017,
the area around the pole itself was mostly open water.
I think of Eric saying how different his last North
Pole trip was from others—how he kept falling
through ice thinner and more broken than he’d ever
experienced. I think of another friend, who spent
decades studying seals on Arctic sea ice, lamentingKieran Mulvaney is a wildlife and environment writer whose
books include At the Ends of the Earth: A History of the Polar
Regions. When not voyaging in the Arctic and Antarctic—his
ninth trip was this year—Mulvaney lives in the relative warmth
of Vermont.Canadian ice fishing shelters, from the series Ice Huts by Richard Johnson