On a sunlit August night, atop a chunk of thousand-year-old glacial ice, bobbing aimlessly in a freezing green sea just a few hundred miles shy of the North Pole, somebody popped ”Dr. Strangelove” into a videotape player.
Across the cozy mess hall, a microwave oven zapped a cup of hot chocolate. There were steaks in the freezer and fresh-baked apple pie on the counter. A hot shower beckoned nearby.
Welcome to Canada`s floating ice island, one of the most remote polar research stations on Earth.
By rights, of course, none of this-the videotape player, the food, the scientists for whom this ice island is home each summer-should even exist in this spot, at about 79 degrees latitude, 110 degrees longitude. A glance at a map of the High Arctic indicates there is not supposed to be anything here but 1,730 feet of frigid-usually frozen-sea, 60 miles north of the nearest land mass, barren Borden Island, and 700 miles south of the North Pole.
Once in a generation, however, a huge chunk of ice the size of a suburb snaps off from the Ward Hunt ice shelf (the only such formation in North America) on the northern end of Ellesmere Island, west of Greenland in Canada`s Northwest Territories, drifts into the Arctic Ocean and floats westward for decades like a giant white raft, offering scientists the irresistible chance to clamber aboard for a free ride across the roof of the world.
This particular ice island-5 miles long, 1 1/2 miles wide, 50 yards deep and weighing a billion tons-has traveled more than 400 miles since it broke away from the ice shelf in 1982, plowing a clockwise circular route that is expected to take it through American and Soviet waters early in the 1990s and from there, after nearly completing the circle, past the east coast of Greenland and down into the North Atlantic, where it will melt and vanish.
For the moment, the red-and-white Canadian maple leaf flag flaps from the cook shack of Hobson`s Choice, named for George Hobson, former director of Canada`s Arctic research program, the Polar Continental Shelf Project. The flag, and Canada`s distinct presence here, asserts the country`s disputed claim to territorial ownership of this part of the Arctic Ocean, regarded as international waters by the United States.
A handful of Canadian scientists and technicians, whose colleagues first arrived on this bleak natural platform four summers ago, are surveying the sea bottom for likely oil and gas deposits, studying the ocean waters and climate and gleaning whatever information they can about the behavior of this rare ice island itself. It costs the Canadian government $1.6 million a year to keep them here, so the free ride isn`t really so free.
The last big Arctic ice island, known clinically as T-3, was first sighted in 1946 and was occupied intermittently by American scientists from 1952 until 1974. The Soviets are currently perched on at least one ice island of their own.
Time in this year`s research season, which began last March when daily temperatures hovered around 60 degrees below zero, is fast running out.
The temperature, as high as the low 40s in late July, lately only flirts with the freezing mark. Fog wraps the island every day, making supply flights- the only way to get on and off the island-risky and infrequent. The weak sun, still wheeling overhead for 24 hours each day, is dropping steadily toward the horizon, warning that the period of perpetual night is not far off. It is just about time for the scientists to head south for the winter-the operation will be shut down by early October.
”The Arctic is simply so delicious,” explained Robert Christie, 62, a geologist and the coordinator of the ice island research program. He meant his statement literally: As he spoke, he crunched on a clear shard of the ancient glacial ice that covers the island like the glass of a trillion shattered windshields.
”There`s just something special in the North,” seconded the ice island`s handyman, Leif Lundgaard, 62, a jovial Norwegian with a bushy beard who`s been tooling around the Canadian Arctic for 25 years and who, when he mounts a snowmobile that pulls a wooden sled, bears a striking resemblance to a high-tech Santa Claus.
”If you can make it through your second season, then you are really tied down here.”
The lure for others is decidedly less romantic.
”Money,” said Richard Brink, 29, a onetime stockbroker who is currently a blaster on the island`s seismographic crew, earning as much as $5,000 per month at this hardship post. Brink`s job involves lowering sticks of dynamite into a narrow hole that has been melted through the island, detonating a blast underwater and recording the echoes from the ocean floor, producing data that can help locate promising oil and gas fields.
A job on the ice island, entailing two or more months of near-total isolation from the rest of the world, is clearly not for everyone, as evidenced by the psychological screening would-be occupants must undergo.
”They want to find out if you`ve got too much sexual frustration, if you`re a racist, if you`re a violent person,” explained Richard Gauthier, 26, the island`s navigation and communications technician.
Calendars with the days crossed off prison-style, jigsaw puzzle scenes of alpine meadows tacked to the walls, a bookcase full of paperback thrillers, a well-worn cribbage board-all speak loud testimony to the boredom that can seep into life here.
”You can use the solitude to think,” said Brink, a man of eclectic tastes who reads Russian literature, the works of Joseph Conrad and ”a little physics” during his free time here. ”There are many people who think, `I wish I was on a deserted island.` We`re the people who do it.”
The scenery is stark, white, eerie-and monotonous. The ice forms waist-high ridges and troughs stretching to the horizon in all directions. Patches of dark, still, open ocean are visible only from the air.
Body clocks seldom seem quite right here because the sun is always up;
day and night are demarcated only by the three-times-a-day schedule of impossibly delicious full-course meals-steaks, salad, fresh bread, cake are typical offerings-served in the long clapboard mess hall. Sleeping is in a half-dozen stuffy wooden shacks perched on ice-block platforms just across a pond of melted ice.
There are no telephones or TV signals; contact with the outside world is limited to intermittent two-way radio transmissions with the Polar Shelf Project base camp in Resolute Bay, 400 miles to the south. Shortwave reception, however, is excellent: A lot of international chatter passes over the pole.
Ironically, for all its size and underpopulation-there were only a dozen researchers on the island in mid-August, down from a high of 32 earlier in the summer-there are some signs that the island may not be big enough. A minor turf battle broke out recently over who was in charge in the absence of the island`s usual captain. And each party of researchers, their stations flung out across the ice, appears not to socialize much with the others.
Although the island lies about 2,100 miles north-northwest of Chicago, there are nevertheless some familiar features of the urban landscape here:
dirty, blackened expanses of ice; smoggy brownish skies; ocean life tainted with pollutants; mounds of garbage and rusting metal.
The dirty ice and hazy skies are believed to be the result of industrial pollution originating in Europe that rides here on the prevailing winds. The toxins showing up in small bottom-dwelling crustaceans are thought to come from Soviet sources. And the local garbage comes from the ice island camp itself: The scientists joke darkly that it`s a good thing Environment Canada, the country`s environmental protection service, does not pay any visits.
The basic science that`s being done here-seismology, climatology, oceanography, ice dynamics-although indisputably important, is nevertheless
”not earthshaking,” conceded Christie, the coordinator.
”But in terms of understanding the planet,” he said, ”you aren`t going to be able to do it unless you understand these polar regions, for a start the air and ocean currents. And we still have so much to learn up here.”
The distant, mysterious, forbidding Arctic will always hold a place in the North American imagination, but in terms of scientific adventures, this region has grown a little long in the tooth. Antarctica is the sexy new polar frontier, a place even more remote and inhospitable than this one, ”the perfect place,” Christie said, ”for rich countries like the United States to frolic with all their big toys and their money.”
But if the fashionable scientific focus is elsewhere now, the Canadians betray little frustration with that fact. For they are getting more than just basic science out of this ice island.
The Canadian armed forces, long frustrated over their lack of nuclear-powered submarines and consequent inability to keep track of both the American and Soviet subs that are thought to ply their Arctic routinely, have planted a hydrophone, or underwater listening device, on the island to listen for signs of intruding subs.
More important, the Canadian occupation of the island serves a useful political purpose. It bolsters Canadian claims to sovereignty over a large part of the Arctic Ocean and the Northwest Passage, waters that for purposes of strategic navigation the United States regards as international.
”The Canadian presence on the ice island is a very clear exercise of Canadian sovereignty in Canadian sector waters,” said Pierre Lapointe, director of the Polar Continental Shelf Project in Ottawa. ”It broadens the area where we exercise our sovereignty, and it broadens our area of Arctic expertise.”
Christie casts the issue in its historical context.
”It`s part of the Canadian self-image that this area is part of Canada,” he said. ”It`s deep in the Canadian psyche that this part of the Arctic is ours.”
But a problem looms: The sovereignty claim may ultimately prove to be at cross purposes with the Canadian government`s desire to invite both American and Soviet scientists to join the Canadian researchers on the ice island.
The Canadians expect to retain territorial ownership of the ice island after it has drifted into American and Soviet waters, as if the ice island were a Canadian ship. There is even talk of stationing a Mountie on the island as a definitive Canadian signature. And they don`t expect their would-be guests to bridle at it.
The sub-spying hydrophone may prove to be an even pricklier issue, a point that the Canadians seem willing to concede.
”I would say there will have to be some agreement,” Lapointe said diplomatically, ”on what can be done on the island related to the sovereignty of other countries.”
