TIME UNRAVELLING
Travelling by yacht to the small town of Tasiilaq in southeastern Greenland, Alex McMaster discovers a changing way of life and learns about the deadly mercury pollution seeping out of the melting Arctic ice
Alex McMaster travels by yacht to the small town of Tasiilaq in southeastern Greenland where he learns about mercury poisoning.
The fog lifts in the night. I come on deck with the graveyard watch still hunched in their smocks, the foredeck crew scouring the waves for growlers: small icebergs whose danger surpasses that of any of the giants nodding in the half-light. Land in sight. Rows of shark teeth against the blaze. Purple sea. Pinches of stars where the dark breaks through. Mid-morning and we’re contained by ice. I spin the helm one way, then the other, making sharp curves, slowing, then driving. The compass spins idly in its gimble. Someone calls from aloft, picking a way using binoculars. The foredeck crew are armed now with long boathooks, shoving smaller chunks of ice aside. The frozen warren shifts, opening here and closing there as we move deeper. Finally, redwalled houses appear on the shore.
Through the ice, we move into Tasiilaq Fjord, where boats are towing a berg that threatens the small harbour. Corpses of ringed seals float past, the quarry of some hunt. Stepping ashore, the red-walled houses are joined by blues, yellows and greens. I look out again and see a cruise ship steering into the fjord, cutting a swathe straight through the ice as if scoffing at our tiptoeing hopscotch.
The East Greenland Current rolls south from the Arctic. Its cargo of ice is impassable during the winter. Even now, in July, we had spent days waiting, reviewing ice reports and synoptic charts, looking for a window to cross from Ísafjörður in west Iceland. Glaciers further north are shedding more ice with every warming year, so the current carries a swelling and unseasonable blockade.
With a crew of 15, the yacht Adventure had crossed the Denmark Strait from Iceland through a fog as thick as the ice that it lifted to reveal. It was the first leg of a journey that would take us from the Arctic, across the North Atlantic and back to the British Isles. Our goals were diverse in nature, but a sense of personal challenge was prominent among them; mine lay in the story that an unknown landscape invariably offers.
Ashore, supply containers are stacked on the quay, rusting where their paint has peeled. I speak with some of the cruise passengers as they disembark in their brand-new Arctic garb. It’s difficult not to feel cheated. They’ll be in the Faroes in a couple of days, enjoying fine wines and evening lectures from marine biologists as their ship steams through the increasingly navigable seas of the Arctic.
The passengers’ attentions are diverted by a man selling supposed narwhal ivory and I set out along the wooden huts that line the shore. Their walls are less cherished than those of the painted houses, but more so than the scabby shipping containers. A sign reads ‘Tsaqqid Tasiilaq – East Greenland Kayak Club’. The fjord vanishes around a switch in the rock, reaching inland, and I’m drawn to explore.
Enquiries at the pub and the post office bring me to the home of Jan Andreassen. Jan is president of the kayak club and agrees to take me out, contingent on my paying the subscription to become a member. With Danish ancestry, Jan has paddled the fjord since childhood. He takes the nominal fee in exchange for a membership card that dissolves in my pocket during the coming weeks at sea.
Jan’s father and grandfather both hunted seals and the occasional polar bear. He still runs a traditional dog sled, but these days he carries a rifle only for protection against bears rather than for hunting. A husky, tethered outside Jan’s house, yanks on the chain upon spotting his master.
A cruise ship steers into the fjord, cutting straight through the ice as if scoffing at our tiptoeing hopscotch
‘He’s a lousy dog,’ says Jan as he pulls a red Arsenal cap over wisps of silvery hair. ‘Always sniffing around on the ice where every dog has been. The only time he runs hard is when we’re coming home!’
Jan unlocks the club shed and we drag a pair of boats across the shingle. ‘Can you roll?’ he asks.
‘Kind of, sometimes,’ I reply and it passes the grade. We skim through the harbour and past the seal carcasses. ‘You can eat a lot of seal. There are no restrictions, except on a few seals where the numbers are going down,’ Jan tells me.
‘And what about bears?’ I ask.
‘Many, many years ago I was eating it. I was with my father and grandfather when I was a child and they hunted polar bears if they found one while hunting seals. You have to boil the meat for a very long time because of the vitamin A.’ He pauses. ‘I wouldn’t eat a bear now.’
‘Why not?’
‘We are told that there is a lot of mercury coming down from the North Pole. The polar bears are living on a lot of seals and whales and whatever, and they are the top of the food chain so they will be most hurt by the pollution.’
The fjord is still and the cruise ship hasn’t even bothered to drop anchor. A helicopter wallops overhead, fast-track to an airstrip somewhere, the only way out when the sea ice closes in.
A study published in May 2020 collected and examined nearly 200 hair samples from polar bears on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. Finding
that mercury levels had doubled in many of the bears over 20 years, researchers were perplexed because emission trends of the heavy metal didn’t correspond. Their answer was mercury ‘re-emission’. Gold mining, coal incineration and medical waste are all sources of environmental mercury. Having been released, it circulates in the atmosphere before condensing and falling in the cool of the Arctic. Mingling with snowfall, it becomes bound in glacial ice and vanishes from consciousness. But today, climate change is disclosing these transgressions with terrible prematurity. The anthropogenic thaw liberates mercury. Meltwaters run with it, forming dirtied rivers on and under the ice, chiselled from the face of vast bodies once thought immoveable.
Time is bound up in ice on scales too vast for humans to really grasp. Ice is a presence in this world that resists our short view of it. When it melts ahead of schedule, time is spilled. In northwest Greenland, a Cold War missile base, entombed for 50 years beneath the ice cap, is emerging, complete with its store of hundreds of thousands of gallons of chemical contaminants. Ancient methane deposits haemorrhage from thawing permafrost and anthrax spores, released from warming reindeer corpses, rise from their frozen graves.
Climate change is disclosing these transgressions; the anthropogenic thaw liberates mercury
During a 2016 heatwave on the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia, a 12-year-old boy died, at least 20 people were hospitalised and more than 2,000 reindeer became infected with resurrected anthrax. It’s feared that smallpox might re-emerge as another so-called ‘zombie disease’. Worse still would be a deadly pathogen as yet unknown to humanity. Archaeologists, practitioners of the long view, are racing receding glaciers to salvage historical artefacts that have been bound up for centuries, collecting tools, clothing and even bodies before exposure degrades them.
Paddles taste the cold water; miniature bow waves drift astern of our kayaks. An explosion cracks the air and the fjord shudders. Every so often, an iceberg fractures and cries out like this. Offsetting its own enormous balance, we see the berg capsize in the
distance, issuing a surge of water that dissipates ahead of our tiny boats. Like an hourglass, strata of moments are turned on their heads. I glance at the blocks of ice looming around like half-sunken ships and pray that we don’t linger long enough to see them bump the time paradigm.
Once in the water column, sediment microorganisms transform mercury to methylmercury, which slowly builds up in successive stages of food chains. Phytoplankton can become a contaminant host, consumed by krill, which are in turn eaten in large numbers by fish. The concentration of methylmercury within the body of the fish may not harm them, but the seal that eats the fish, and the bear that eats the seal, will accumulate enough of the toxin to have adverse effects.
This process is known as bioaccumulation and it has been observed to happen with the pesticide DDT, strontium-90 from the fallout of atomic bombs, leaded petrol and microplastics. During the 18th and 19th centuries, mercury was employed in the stiffening of felt for hat making. The heavy metal accumulated in the brains of workers, spawning the phrase ‘mad as a hatter’.
Bioaccumulation shatters our pervasive refusal to consider ourselves a part of the cyclical ecology of this planet, striking at our heels after being cast from our hands. Before reaching us, the lethal substance must make its way through entire webs of life.
The overturned berg finds its new balance, sharp blue belly exposed. Decades trickle. The poet Elizabeth Bishop compares icebergs to the soul, ‘both being self-made from elements least visible’. Invisible threats pierce this landscape. Just over a hill behind Tasiilaq, the town garbage dump spills into the tundra. ‘Many polar bears are living nearby the garbage and eating if they can find food there,’ says Jan.
Hollow crunch of our boats on the shingle. The hulls, etched by past groundings, upturned now in the club shed. Jan padlocks the door as I pull on a dry pair of socks. Some young people loiter nearby.
Jan works at the community sports centre, organising badminton and volleyball tournaments for the town’s youth. ‘Volleyball has died now,’ he says. ‘People here don’t earn much money. It’s a small town and it’s almost a poor society. A lot of young people are moving out to find a job. And many of the people who left the town, they don’t come back.’
That evening I walk the outskirts of Tasiilaq. A fox nips between files of white crosses in the cemetery. A young person is buried here each month, a victim of suicide. The sports centre opens on paydays to protect children from sexual abuse as adults smash their wages at the bar. Joblessness, alcoholism and abuse are part of Denmark’s colonial legacy in Greenland. An influx of commercial-fishing technology and money in the mid20th century undercut traditional economies based on hunting and local trade. Generations of experience, distilled to form a collective knowledge, were erased. Support mechanisms are beginning to filter through social barricades and a youth-led theatre group recently confronted the taboo around suicide. Jan is looking to local innovation that might invigorate Greenlandic culture. ‘A lot of young people have mobile phones, so we want an app that they can download that will help them to build a kayak, a dog sled, so that they can learn about these things. It will help them to hold on to the culture.’ Little, perhaps, crystallises the value of traditional culture more than climate change. Western science has a long history of dismissing traditional knowledge, but researchers are coming to rely on local experts’ unmatched familiarity with Arctic environments and patterns. In Alaska, hunters are partnering with biologists to study bowhead whales and interpret the signs of anthropogenic climate change. Similarly, polar bear hunters in Greenland have been crucial in the collection of data that inform well-grounded conservation.
The greatest challenge, perhaps, is the haste with which change is occurring. The Arctic is warming at twice the global average rate. The poisons of a worldwide enterprise of growth are refined and amassed here. The Hann Glacier is a short sail from Tasiilaq. Running parallel with Greenlandic culture, it has been degrading. The cruise ship slips from Tasiilaq Fjord in the night. Music carries from the swing-door of the bar. Smash of glass. Barking dogs. Crack of ice in the near-distance.