On Thin Ice (eBook)

IIntroduction It was about 6:00 a.m. on July 18, 1994. I was in my little cabin aboard the Russian icebreaker Kapitan Dranitsyn, heading for the North Pole. I was a lecturer representing the American Museum of Natural History, to talk to the paying guests about Arctic mammalian wildlife, including seals, whales, walruses, and whatever else showed up. Franois Vuilleumier, the Swiss-born AMNH curator of ornithology, would identify and discuss the various gulls, terns, jaegers, and geese that we encountered en route. Our AMNH group shared the expedition with one from Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, led by the museum's director, Jim McCarthy. An announcement came over the PA system that a 'polar bear is close to the ship.' As I rushed to get dressed--we were near the North Pole, and running out in a T-shirt and shorts was not an option--I thought about how extraordinary this was. We had already spotted a couple of polar bears, but they were so far away, and white against a backdrop of snow and ice, that it was usually a case of: 'There . . . over that little ridge . . . no, not that one, the bluish one with the pile of ice in front of it . . . see that white thing moving . . . that's the bear.' I was wearing a parka, snow pants, and boots, and I'd stuffed five rolls of film in my pockets for my Minolta 35mm camera with a 35/300 zoom lens. The cabins on the Dranitsyn were stacked below the bridge in the forward superstructure--somebody once described the 434-foot-long icebreaker as 'a block of flats on a barge'--so getting to the foredeck required hustling down five flights of stairs. I reached the foredeck level, opened the door, and got smacked in the face by the early-morning Arctic cold. As I stepped out on deck, I saw nothing but ice, a vast white landscape interrupted only by an occasional flash of pale aquamarine where the ice had broken, cracked, or melted. Where two rafts had come together, pressure ridges formed into crumbled mounds of broken ice that rose above the otherwise colorless, water-level landscape. The sky mirrored the cold, dull monochrome of the icy plain surrounding us. A large group of people were clustered at the forward port rail, obviously looking at something. I pushed my way to the rail and looked down. Standing on the ice on his hind legs, waiting for crewmen to throw him another slice of bread, was a full-grown polar bear. We had just left Franz Josef Land, an unoccupied archipelago in the northeastern Barents Sea, north of Novaya Zemlya, and 600 miles from the North Pole. In 1872, the Austrian explorers Karl Weyprecht and Julius Payer, seeking the Northeast Passage in the Admiral Tegetthoff, became trapped in the pack ice at Novaya Zemlya and drifted for a year, finally finding land in August 1873. (A replica of the Tegetthoff, built by an Austrian film crew and then abandoned, remains on the ice, a skeletal contrast to the rumbling behemoths in which we were heading for the pole.) Weyprecht and Payer had accidentally discovered a previously unknown group of islands, which they named Franz Josef Land after their emperor. After spending a year exploring the islands, they abandoned their ship and journeyed in a small boat for ninety-six days to Novaya Zemlya. Fridtjof Nansen tried to reach the pole in 1893 by drifting in the specially reinforced Fram, but when he found himself heading in the wrong direction, he left the ship with Hjalmar Johansen and attempted to reach his goal by sledge. They had to turn back, and spent the winter of 1896 in a stone hut with a walrus-skin roof on Franz Josef Land. During his three-year stay, Nansen became the first man to map this complicated...