keywords: history of science, oceanography
If you have any interest in oceanography and its history, you will have heard of the Challenger expedition. An early example of government-funded big science, it saw a crew of six scientists and more than 250 sailors and officers of the British Navy aboard HMS Challenger circumnavigate the globe during a 3½-year expedition from late 1872 to 1876. Focused on deep-sea exploration, it is considered the birth of oceanography. But given it was not the first nor the last oceangoing expedition, why has this one achieved such legendary status? Here, earth scientist Doug Macdougall discusses its many and diverse discoveries and shows how scientists have since built on them.
Endless Novelties of Extraordinary Interest: The Voyage of H.M.S. Challenger and the Birth of Modern Oceanography, written by Doug Macdougall, published by Yale University Press in August 2019 (hardback, 257 pages)
The Challenger expedition has featured multiple times on this blog already with several books briefly mentioning it or featuring it more in-depth. I have been meaning to get around to Endless Novelties of Extraordinary Interest for a while, if only because of its intriguing title; words that, we soon learn, were penned by the expedition’s scientific leader Charles Wywille Thomson. Macdougall is an emeritus earth scientist at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and seems the right person for the job, having previously written books on the history of disciplines such as glaciology and geochronology.
The aim of the Challenger expedition was to collect basic oceanographic data in oceans around the world. Every few hundred miles the ship would stop at a so-called station to measure water depth, water temperature and velocity at different depths, collect sediment samples, and catch a sample of the animals and plants living at different depths using townets and dredges. A large part of the expedition was a matter of rinse and repeat. However, oceanic islands acted as a magnet on the scientists and much space is given here to describing what they encountered there.
The book’s approach quickly becomes clear. Though it proceeds largely chronologically, the focus is less on the journey and the experiences of the people on board, and more on the science. Following some preliminary material that includes a listing of the main characters and a three-page map that shows the ship’s route, Macdougall delves straight into the first example of a scientific topic for which the Challenger expedition laid the foundations: the study of cosmic dust gathered from ocean sediments. It is a bit of an incongruous starting point, as in chapter 2 he backtracks to provide a biographic introduction to the six scientists on board and the overall aims for the expedition. After this, each chapter is written around a few observations or research questions that were particularly relevant to that leg of the journey.
“The aim of the Challenger expedition was to collect basic oceanographic data in oceans around the world […] A large part of [it] was a matter of rinse and repeat.”
There is much material Macdougall can draw on. After the expedition ended, its scientists would study the vast trove of data, samples, and specimens for 19 years with the help of a growing international network of other scholars. The results were published from 1880 to 1895 in a report series that would span 50(!) volumes. It was a show of government support that would leave many scientists today green with envy. Some examples of the many questions studied included the nature of the ocean floor. The thinking was that all of the world’s oceans were covered in layers of muddy chalk, the same material as the fossil shells making up the famous white cliffs of Dover. Soon enough, however, the scientists found different sediments, a prelude to the era of deep-sea drilling that has taught us so much. Remarkably, the seafloor sediment maps they produced for the Challenger Report have not changed much in their rough outlines since. Another open question was whether the deep sea was home to primitive organisms or even “living fossils”, but no such animals were found. They did find many bioluminescent organisms, although opinions differed as to what caused this; the pioneering work of Raphaël Dubois, who illuminated the biochemistry underlying this phenomenon, was still in the future. Finally, the scientists constantly dredged up manganese nodules. These potato-sized, black, spherical objects were rich in metals and the Challenger scientists worked out that these grew extremely slowly when dissolved manganese precipitated around objects such as shark teeth, bits of whalebone, or pieces of pumice. Though interest in them gradually waned after the expedition, the idea of mining the deep sea for metals has captured the imagination again in recent decades, much to the concern of marine biologists.
Macdougall is not content with just relating the past and continuously tells what has become of some of the locations the expedition visited, or what our current understanding is of the topics they studied. It is an approach the book shares with Richard Corfield’s The Silent Landscape from 2003, the previous book on the Challenger expedition for a general audience. One example is penguin evolution. Anatomist Morrison Watson studied the penguins that had been collected and concluded that the group must have diverged early on in bird evolution. However, in the absence of fossils, he would not speculate further on the matter. Since then, we have filled in many gaps and have a better picture of just how diverse ancient penguindom was. The scientists were also fascinated by birds of paradise but were only able to find a few species. It took until 2004 for a National Geographic expedition to find and photograph all 39 existing species. Another hotly contested topic at the time was the nature of coral reefs and how these formed and grew. A young upstart by the name of Charles Darwin had his ideas, but his views were not accepted by everyone, including Challenger scientist John Murray. Whereas Murray argued that reefs only formed where debris had built up to create shallow areas, time has proven correct Darwin’s idea of coral atolls forming around sinking underwater volcanoes.
“Macdougall is not content with just relating the past and continuously tells what has become of some of the locations the expedition visited, or what our current understanding is of the topics they studied.”
Of course, when writing about a historical episode such as the Challenger expedition today, you have to address past attitudes and ideas. Many of these are at least objectionable if not outright repugnable to us now. I feel Macdougall strikes the right balance, providing the context while neither defending nor condemning the people of the past. This plays out most visibly in the chapter on anthropology. The Challenger scientists were burdened by all the baggage and prejudices that characterised the cultural imperialism of the time: native people were considered inferior savages and European culture de facto superior—and the scientists could not help themselves constantly remarking on this. Yet, at the same time, they were genuinely fascinated by the people they encountered and by what they considered primitive roots of Western culture in native practices. Flawed? Yes, and of its time. Macdougall is similarly upfront about the attitude towards animals. Gathering specimens for museum collections meant killing animals and their journals betrayed “no hint of contrition” (p. 203) in doing so. Lastly, the mission did have ulterior motives; this was also an imperial project. The laying of underwater telegraph cables required an understanding of the seafloor and it did not hurt that the expedition projected power and prestige towards competing seafaring nations. However, Macdougall thinks that we should not be too cynical about this. This was not some thinly veiled excuse for Britain to expand its empire; this was first and foremost a scientific expedition to better understand the ocean. Even the discovery of phosphate deposits on Christmas Island, which would earn the British government more in mining royalties than the whole expedition ever cost, was a clear case of serendipity. As the author points out, the ship never visited the island and this discovery happened years later during background research for the Challenger Report.
I enjoyed Macdougall’s thematic approach to the subject and I think he successfully shows why the Challenger expedition is considered groundbreaking. That said, I do have some criticism. The presentation of biographical information in chapter 2 is a bit messy: dates of birth and death are not systematically presented and sometimes lacking, and only a few portraits are included, meaning major protagonists such as John Murray and the fascinating Henry Moseley remain faceless names. We also rather abruptly leave the expedition somewhere in the Pacific. The trip out of the Pacific, the multiple stops in southern South America, and the return trip through the Atlantic do not feature here. Readers who are new to the topic might also want to consider the National Maritime Museum’s book The Challenger Expedition. Published in 2022 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the expedition’s start, it offers a richly illustrated general introduction. I found my interest nourished but not yet sated. Early on, when reflecting on the contents of the Challenger Report, Macdougall points out that “in terms of sheer volume, biology won, hands down” (p. 59). As such, future me has reviewed the 2022 book Full Fathom 5000 as it promises to review all the strange animals the scientists found in the deep sea.
Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.
Endless Novelties of Extraordinary Interest
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Since it was coined in the year 2000 by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, the term “Anthropocene” has taken the world by storm – pretty much in the same way as the phenomenon it describes. Humanity’s impact on the planet has become so all-encompassing that it warrants giving this period a new name. As a colloquial term that is all snazzy, but are we actually leaving a tangible trace in the rock record to signal a transition to a new period?
The Anthropocene as a Geological Time Unit: A Guide to the Scientific Evidence and Current Debate, edited by Jan Zalasiewicz, Colin N Waters, Mark Williams, and Colin Peter Summerhayes, published by Cambridge University Press in March 2019 (hardback, 361 pages)
Several authors have already written thought experiments to try and answer this question. But the real answer lies in the realm of stratigraphy, the geological subdiscipline that studies rock layers. As with many other conventions, to ensure scientists around the globe all talk about the same thing and use the same names, there is an official body for that. The International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) formally decides on naming and dating of geological periods and maintains the International Chronostratigraphic Chart, better known as the Geological Time Scale (find a PDF here).
Formal acceptance of a new name means clearing a raft of bureaucratic and academic hurdles first. So, in 2009, the editors of the current book got together to form the Anthropocene Working Group to start preparing a formal submission to, ultimately, the ICS. Two large publications, a special issue of The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A and A Stratigraphical Basis for the Anthropocene, came first. Now this edited collection does what it says on the tin, providing the latest update on the evidence and the debate by summarizing a huge body of work.
The first chapter provides a short history of what I have sketched above and, for the reader not versed in stratigraphy, useful basic information on how stratigraphy works, past decisions on defining and naming geological periods, plus a very interesting and relevant section outlining why formal acceptance and definition of the Anthropocene matters. The bulk of the book consists of five chapters examining how humans have tangibly modified our planet, and whether this leaves stratigraphically suitable markers. Depending on your viewpoint, this could be taken as a catalogue of our atrocities or a celebration of our achievements.
“The bulk of the book […] examines how humans have tangibly modified our planet, and whether this leaves stratigraphically suitable markers. Depending on your viewpoint, this could be taken as a catalogue of our atrocities or a celebration of our achievements.”
The range of impacts covered is comprehensive and includes some eye-opening facts and frighteningly large numbers. We are leaving a stratigraphical legacy by changing natural patterns of sedimentation via erosion and river damming. We construct infrastructure and buildings above and below ground and create many novel types of “rocks” such as cement, asphalt, and concrete (so much so that we risk running out of suitable sand). But we also enrich soils and sediments with fly-ash and soot from burning fossil fuels. And this is before we even talk of the insane amounts of plastics that end up in our environment, now degrading into micro- and nanoplastics that are found everywhere. And then there are what Zalaziewicz and others have dubbed “technofossils”: all the objects that we discard in refuse tips, revealing a stratigraphy all of their own.
Less visible but no less influential are chemostratigraphical changes. That is to say, the release of carbon and methane from (again) fossil fuel burning, nitrogen and phosphorus from synthetic fertilisers, sulfur compounds, metals, organic (in the chemical sense) compounds such as pesticides and fire retardants (your POPs, PAHs, PCBs, PBDEs, etc.) and, lest we forget, radionuclides from atomic and hydrogen bombs. All these have left detectable accumulations in air, water (including ice), and soil. A biostratigraphical signature is detectable as both recent and ongoing extinctions (particularly the extinction of the Quaternary megafauna, though see my review of End of the Megafauna), the rapid spread of invasive species and domestic animals (with broiler chickens being one example of an expected future signal in the fossil record), and the fate of coral reefs. Finally, there is climate change, made visible in changes to ice cover and sea level.
“And then there are […] “technofossils”: all the objects that we discard in refuse tips, revealing a stratigraphy all of their own.”
What I casually summarise here in two paragraphs is presented in-depth, providing an overview of a huge body of research. And despite subchapters being contributed by many different authors, the overall flow and coherence of the text are good. Although not the first book to detail humanity’s planetary impact, the question of interest here is which of these would make suitable stratigraphic markers.
So what makes a good marker? Ideally one that is global in extent and that was laid down synchronously, i.e. very rapidly, so that the age of the marker is the same wherever measured. A volcanic ash layer is a good example, and so, of course, is the iridium spike signalling the meteorite impact at the K-Pg boundary.
Not all of the potential markers discussed in this book meet these criteria, even though they reveal humanity’s impact. So, the sudden appearance of so many new long-lasting rock-like compounds and plastics is a good marker. Another one is lead released during the burning of fossil fuels, which shows up in natural archives such as sediments, peat mires, and ice cores. (Plus, there is a precedent here: Greenland ice cores show a lead spike at the height of Greek-Phoenician and Roman mining). But the appearance of soils modified by human agriculture is an example of a signal that is too localised and too diachronous (the opposite of synchronous) to be of use. The same is true for the occurrence of stone tools, though modern technofossils such as broken iPhones could be useful.
“When did the Anthropocene start? A consensus is forming on the 1950s. This is when human population size boomed and many things basically went into overdrive “
A similar question is the when. Though some scientists favour the rise of agriculture ~10,000 years ago or the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s as the start of the Anthropocene, the editors here outline how a consensus is forming on the 1950s. This is when human population size boomed and many things basically went into overdrive. When plotted on graphs, many indicators considered here show a sharp upward inflexion right around this time.
As with other periods, it is highly likely that a combination of proxy signals will have to be used to define the Anthropocene – many natural archives are either sensitive to disturbance (lake sediments vs. burrowing animals), or record signals with a delay (e.g. isotope signals in stalagmites). For the moment this is all work in progress, and a formal submission to the ICS is still being prepared by the Anthropocene Working Group. Much like the closely-allied Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports are the go-to books on climate change (also published by Cambridge University Press), this book is the most definitive and up-to-date reference work for anyone working on or interested in the geological case for the Anthropocene.
Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.
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, Like Antarctica, Greenland is one of those places that exerts an irresistible pull on my imagination. As journalist, historian and The New York Times Magazine feature writer Jon Gertner makes clear in The Ice at the End of the World, I am not alone. This solidly researched reportage chronicles both the early explorers venturing onto Greenland’s ice sheet and shows the reasons it plays a starring role in research on climate change. Some books ought to come with a warning about how binge-read-worthy they are. This is one of them.
The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey Into Greenland’s Buried Past and Our Perilous Future, written by Jon Gertner, published in Europe by Icon Books in September 2019 (hardback, 421 pages)
Split into two parts, “Explorations” and “Investigations”, the book starts with what Gertner calls the waning days of the age of exploration. The names of those who tried to reach our planet’s poles have gone down in the annals of history, but the men who ventured onto Greenland’s ice sheet have largely been lost to memory: Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen, the first European to trek across the ice sheet below the Arctic circle from East to West in 1888. The American Robert Peary, who made a gruelling round trip at Greenland’s northernmost end in 1891-92. The Greenland-born Dane Knud Rasmussen and Norwegian Peter Freuchen who explored the same area as Peary did some two decades later, but with an eye towards ethnographical research amongst the local Inuit.
Although these men were celebrities in their time, and, like Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, wrote large books about their travels, I had not heard of them before. Some of their books were never translated into English, and there have been no biographies written about them in recent decades, if at all. Gertner has thus dug into original sources in libraries and research institutes to retell the stories of these men and the brave souls who joined them on their expeditions, for these journeys were not solitary affairs. These are amazing stories of brutal physical and mental hardships: freezing temperatures, fierce winds, snowblindness, crushing monotony and boredom, fingers and toes lost to frostbite, and sometimes death. But also stories of raw beauty and poetic rapture at the scale and grandeur of nature. Greenland does this to you, and Gertner gratefully mines their writings for inspiring words.
“These are amazing stories of brutal physical and mental hardships […] but also stories of raw beauty and poetic rapture at the scale and grandeur of nature. Greenland does this to you.”
The only name that did ring a bell was Alfred Wegener, the German meteorologist and geophysicist who fathered the idea of continental drift. But that will be my fascination with the captivating history of the reluctant acceptance of his ideas , and the fact that there are recent biographies on him (see Ending in Ice and the exceptionally thorough Alfred Wegener). Gertner nimbly side-steps the continental drift story and maintains a tight focus on Wegener and Johan Peter Koch’s first ice sheet crossing in 1913, and Wegener’s later return to set up a research base in the middle of the Greenland ice sheet in the early 1930s. A successful undertaking for which he tragically paid with his life, freezing to death on a return trip.
From here, Gertner jumps forward in time a few decades. Whereas early expeditions had scientific aims, they were as much about exploration and often sheer survival, so early findings were both exploratory and limited. Gertner highlights the role of French explorer Paul-Émile Victor who brought his experience in the US Air Force, testing and developing survival equipment, to bear on polar research. As frequently happens, technology developed by the military often finds a second life in science. The development of more reliable heavy-duty motorised vehicles removed the need for death-defying expeditions by human or dog-pulled sledges. This was the start of the drilling of ice cores and saw the discipline of glaciology bloom.
“A particularly eye-opening chapter is that of Thule Air Base […] The sheer amount of manpower, material, and money that the US threw at this project was staggering.”
A particularly eye-opening chapter is that of Thule Air Base that the US Department of Defense established in 1951 in northern Greenland at the start of the Cold War. This story was only touched upon in Cold Rush, but it explains America’s continued interest in Greenland. Trump has not been the first US president trying to purchase Greenland from Denmark. And it is a bizarre story. The sheer amount of manpower, material, and money that the US threw at this project was staggering. Victor cleverly piggy-backed on the army’s presence and funding to undertake scientific research. Their departure as the Cold War wound down complicated financing further research to understand Greenland’s role in climate change.
This second part of the book revolves primarily around the drilling for ice cores and the research that has allowed scientists to deduce past temperature, CO2 levels, and other palaeoclimatological variables. Gertner combines first-hand reportage during repeated visits to Greenland, numerous interviews, and careful reading of scientific papers to tell a thrilling narrative. Especially the shock discovery of evidence for abrupt climate change in the deep past takes centre-stage here. Initially, this was thought to be noise in the data, but then it was confirmed when subsequent ice cores showed the same signal, again and again.
“the shock discovery of evidence for abrupt climate change in the deep past [was] initially thought to be noise in the data, but then it was confirmed when subsequent ice cores showed the same signal, again and again.”
Gertner does a good job here introducing the physical basis of climate change, the long history of research on it, and some of the technical details of methods currently in use (isotope analysis, mass spectrometry, remote sensing with satellites, and the gravimetric analyses by NASA’s GRACE mission). But what he makes especially clear is that there is nothing alarmist about climate scientists’ concerns regarding melting ice sheets, calving glaciers, and the threat of tipping points beyond which changes could rapidly accelerate.
Gertner has spent years on this book, and The Ice at the End of the World stands out for the depth and thoroughness of its research. The 300-page narrative maintains a tight focus on its subject. It is accompanied by 70 pages of often very interesting notes where Gertner acknowledges which diversions are beyond the scope of this book, a section called “further sources” including a long list of interviews conducted and oral histories consulted, and a selected bibliography. But above all, the book is gripping. The memorable cast of historical characters, the pioneering research under challenging circumstances, the unusual settings – it has resulted in a book that I just could not put down.
Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.
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“Cold Rush: The Astonishing True Story of the New Quest for the Polar North“, written by Martin Breum, published by I.B. Tauris in June 2018 (hardback, 252 pages)
Danish journalist Martin Breum has been reporting on the Arctic for the last decade, both at home and abroad, and Cold Rush is based on selected and updated chapters from previous Danish books. He provides an intimate reportage of the political wheeling and dealing behind the scenes as various nations start to lay claim to the Arctic, specifically focusing on Greenland and its fraught relationship with Denmark. (For those looking for a wider picture beyond Greenland, I would also recommend The Scramble for the Arctic: Ownership, Exploitation and Conflict in the Far North, The Future History of the Arctic: How Climate, Resources and Geopolitics are Reshaping the North, and Why it Matters to the World, and The Scramble for the Poles: The Geopolitics of the Arctic and Antarctic.)
Greenland is a bit of an enigma. Geographically part of the North American landmass, it is a former colony and now autonomous country of the Kingdom of Denmark, boosting that country’s surface area more than 50-fold. But with only 57,000 or so inhabitants, it remains firmly dependent on Denmark. Through a so-called block grant, Denmark supports the Greenland government with an annual 3.4 billion kroner (roughly 500 million US dollars) that pays for things such as pensions, hospitals, and schools. And Denmark contributes vessels, aircraft, and dog sledge teams that patrol the borders and waters year-round (Breum accompanies one such patrol and reports on that here). A final fun factoid I got from this book: the UK is not the first country to exit the EU, Greenland did so back in 1985! I wonder how many people are aware of this because in two years of Brexit circus I have not heard this mentioned once.
The period covered by Cold Rush is the last decade since 2007, during which there was a lot of geopolitical shenanigans in and around the Arctic. Russian submarines planted a flag on the seabed of the North Pole in 2007, with diplomats on all sides quickly downplaying this as “not-a-claim”. That, however, has not stopped Russia and Denmark from trying anyway (Canada is expected to follow suit in the near future). Attention has centred on the Lomonosov Ridge, a long, underwater mountain range. Whoever can prove this to be an extension of their continental shelf can try and claim it as territory by applying to the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf. If granted, it would secure exploitation rights to whatever mineral and fossil fuel riches might be found there. Breum reports on one particular Danish research cruise he accompanied that was trying to determine whether the Lomonosov Ridge is an extension of Greenland’s bedrock. The findings resulted in Denmark claiming a large swathe of the seabed that overlaps with Russia’s earlier claim, setting the stage for tensions in the Arctic.
“There has been a lot of geopolitical shenanigans in and around the Arctic since 2007, with Russian submarines planting a flag on the seabed of the North Pole […]”
But is there anything of value out there? Results of seismic surveys so far are disappointing and Breum writes of the 2014 report by geologist Minik Rosing that warned of unfounded optimism regarding fuel and mineral reserves. Even so, governments are not taking risks and tensions rose when Denmark, Norway, Russia, Canada, and the US signed the Ilulissat Declaration, encouraging cooperation and the protection of their mutual Arctic interests, effectively locking the rest of the world out of further negotiations. This, of course, much to the chagrin of other countries who see this as a Machiavellian attempt to not share the Arctic pie (see also Contesting the Arctic: Politics and Imaginaries in the Circumpolar North).
Especially China is keen to shoulder its way in, which, as Breum makes clear, has more to do with mineral riches than fossil fuel. The retreating Greenland glaciers are expected to expose new mineral beds and China is particularly interested in rare earth elements, so vital in modern electronics that they produce and export in abundance. Countries are lining up to sign mining licenses, and there is much debate inside and outside of Greenland whether or not to let foreign companies in. One particularly sensitive topic is uranium ore, as Denmark is adamant that none of it is used in the production of nuclear weapons. But Greenland wants to have the final say in this matter and, worryingly, parliament abolished a national ban on uranium mining in 2014.
This last is symptomatic of the final major theme of this reportage: independence. There are influential voices in Greenland pushing for full independence from Denmark and Breum provides an intimate picture based on interviews with prominent politicians. Denmark is keen to keep its ties to Greenland as it stands much to lose. But even in Greenland the topic is divisive. Many hope that developing Greenland into a mining nation will wean it off the financial life support provided by Denmark. Opening up the country to foreign investors would be a logical first step. Others argue financial independence is decades away and are worried that, meanwhile, Greenland’s small population will be overrun by foreign labourers.
“[…] there is little interest in turning Greenland into a nature reserve. Politicians argue that Greenland has every right to exploit its natural wealth, nature be damned […]”
One thing seems for sure, there is little interest in turning Greenland into a nature reserve. Politicians argue that Greenland has every right to exploit its natural wealth – nature be damned. After all, is this not what every other nation has done so far? And this brings me to what seems like a curious omission. Although Breum seems well aware of the looming environmental problems, climate change never comes up in conversation, merely hovering in the background as the spectre yielding new opportunities. Greenpeace and environmental activism are mentioned a few times, but beyond that, all we hear are political platitudes about the desire to balance natural resource extraction with environmental protection. I cannot tell whether everyone is completely preoccupied with the promise of new riches, or whether Breum has decided to make this his exclusive focus.
The reporting in Cold Rush is thorough and impartial – where politics is concerned Breum speaks to parties pro and contra matters such as foreign investment, Greenland’s push for independence, etc. But he refrains from any personal reflection, merely acting as a dispassionate observer. Despite some of the source material having been published in various forms previously, the chapters have been rewritten such that the book flows well and does not unnecessarily repeat information. The result is a revealing and very informative insider’s account of the geopolitical manoeuvring in the Arctic. Highly recommended to be read alongside Brave New Arctic: The Untold Story of the Melting North, which will fill you in on the climatological details.
Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.
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, These three tasks, so says nature writer Robert Macfarlane, signify our relationship with the world beneath our feet, both across time and across cultures. Underland is his lyrical exploration of underground spaces where people have sought shelter from warfare or hidden valuable treasures, are extracting minerals in mines or knowledge in research facilities, or are looking to dispose of waste. It is one of two big books published only five months apart on the subterranean realm, the other being Will Hunt’s Underground: A Human History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet which I will be reviewing next. But first, Underland.
“Underland: A Deep Time Journey“, written by Robert Macfarlane, published in Europe by Hamish Hamilton in May 2019 (hardback, 496 pages)
For those who don’t know him, Macfarlane has been writing about “the relationship between landscape and the human heart”, bagging several literary prizes along the way. For him, Underland is a conclusion to a personal story-arc of exploration that started up high with his fascination with mountains (see Mountains Of The Mind: A History Of A Fascination) and descended from there (see his books The Wild Places, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, and Holloway). The book is based on more than a decade of exploration, usually in the company of experienced locals.
Think underground, and you will likely think caves, and there is plenty of caving here. Macfarlane takes the reader into the underground river Timavo in Italy, a starless river that speleologists have been exploring and mapping for decades. He is guided into the karst landscapes of the Slovenian highlands that hide a chilling legacy of ethnic cleansing dating to the second World War, when corpses were dumped down sinkholes by the thousands. He explores cave chambers in Norway’s Lofoten archipelago, whose cave paintings make it the Lascaux of the high North. And he traverses, and descends into, glaciers in Greenland. But he also ponders realms not accessible to us, such as the “wood wide web”, the symbiosis between tree roots and soil fungi. This might allow trees to exchange information with each other, even crossing species boundaries. The idea of this “underground social network” has been popularised by Peter Wohlleben in The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World.
“He joins urban explorers […] in Paris and London who roam […] under these cities, “shadow twins to the upper world””
But equally fascinating are the human subterranean landscapes he enters: prehistoric barrows (cemeteries) in Somerset, and a modern rock-salt mine in Yorkshire where excavated chambers double up as laboratories for physicists probing the universe for dark matter. He joins urban explorers, so-called cataphiles, in Paris and London who roam the crypts, catacombs, wells, bunkers, tunnels, and drains under these cities, “shadow twins to the upper world” (see e.g. Global Undergrounds: Exploring Cities Within or Subterranean London: Cracking the Capital). And he gets a tour around the subterranean waste facility in Olkiluoto in south-west Finland, currently under construction, which will store highly radioactive spent uranium fuel rods for 100,000 years. A feat which brings with it a whole new suite of considerations – how do you warn the species of the future to stay away?
What make these 400+ pages of caving, crawling, and occasional claustrophobia such a joy to read are Macfarlane’s evocative descriptions. Here is a word-smith at work, who can go from profound (“To these subatomic particles, we are the ghosts and ours the shadow-world, made at most of a diaphanous webwork”) to funny (“If you wish to listen for sounds so faint they may not exist at all, you can’t have someone playing the drums in your ear”) with but a flourish of his pen. The things he has seen have etched themselves into his memory, and he is intent on burning them into the memory of his readers in turn. From the majestic and rarely witnessed calving of a Greenland glacier (“a blue cathedral of ice, complete with towers and buttresses, all of them joined together into a single unnatural side-ways collapsing edifice”), to the surreal dumping ground in mid-Wales where locals have been pushing car wrecks down an abandoned mine shaft (“The result was an avalanche of vehicles […] a slewing slope of wrecks”). There are some truly memorable passages in this book.
Two themes run through this book, one already hinted at in the book’s subtitle. The first is that of Deep Time; the vast stretches of time in which geologists think when describing the evolution of our planet (see e.g. The Planet in a Pebble: A Journey into Earth’s Deep History). “Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses. We live on a restless Earth”, writes Macfarlane. Whether it is caves that have been hollowed out by the lapping of the sea over milennia, or the palaeoclimatological archive that we are retrieving from glacial ice cores (see The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change and Our Future), going underground brings into focus the steady grind of our planet. Although a human lifespan pales into insignificance, Macfarlane resists apathy. Much like Bjornerud (see my review of Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World), Macfarlane hopes that “deep time awareness might help us see ourselves as a part of a web of gift, inheritance and legacy stretching over millions of years”.
“[…] going underground brings into focus the steady grind of our planet.”
Tying in with this is the theme of the Anthropocene, the newly proposed geological epoch based on the detritus that humanity is leaving in the rock record (see my review of The Anthropocene as a Geological Time Unit). Like others before him, such as Alan Weisman in The World Without Us or Jan Zalasiewicz in The Earth After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks?, Macfarlane asks what legacy we are leaving behind. Nuclear waste is obviously one of the longest-lasting, but there are other revelations in this book. I was, perhaps naively, shocked to read of the mining company that simply abandons worn-out excavators, which cost £3.2 million, underground.
Each chapter opens with a black-and-white photo or illustration. I woul have loved to see more images, perhaps a colour plate section, as there are some striking photos included in this BBC interview. A book of this calibre leans on poetic language to a certain degree, but nowhere did I find Macfarlane self-indulgent or flowery. On the contrary, the book provides its own beautiful raison d’être during an interview with plant scientist Merlin Sheldrake. Macfarlane ponders how to make sense of the implications of the symbiotic interaction between fungi and trees: “Perhaps we need an entirely new language system to talk about fungi… We need to speak in spores.” To which Sheldrake enthusiastically replies: “That’s exactly what we need to be doing – and that’s your job […] the job of writers and artists and poets and all the rest of you”. I couldn’t have said it better myself.
So, how does Macfarlane’s Underland compare to Hunt’s Underground? It feels Macfarlane casts his mind outwards more, pondering deep time and the Anthropocene, while Hunt turns his gaze inwards, probing the more human side: religion, spirituality, and neurobiology. Macfarlane, as a nature writer, is more poetic in his writing, though Hunt, using a different tone, is an equally masterful storyteller. Underland is carefully annotated and referenced, but barely illustrated – Underground is the reverse. And even though both writers end up exploring under Paris and both touch on topics of biology and archaeology, it is striking how little they overlap. Clearly, the world under our feet is so vast there is space for more than one book. Why pick one? I heartily recommend them both!
Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.
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“The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future“, written by David Wallace-Wells, published in Europe by Allen Lane in February 2019 (hardback, 310 pages)
The Uninhabitable Earth expands on the essay published in New York magazine in July 2017. The piece quickly attracted criticism from climate scientists for being rather cavalier with its facts. Amidst the many responses, a useful summary is the piece published by science education NGO Climate Feedback in which 17 prominent climate scientists evaluated the essay. To its credit, New York magazine was quick to publish an annotated edition.
The near future sketched in the first half of The Uninhabitable Earth is one of a planet tortured by epic wildfires, rising sea levels, megadroughts, famines, acidifying oceans, polluted air, and rising temperatures amidst which hundreds of millions of climate refugees wander a planet in the throes of collapsing economies and emerging conflicts. In short, Wallace-Wells would like you to know that, unless urgent action is undertaken to combat climate change, we are all royally fucked.
He is not the first to sound a desperate alarm, and his book joins a budding subgenre that some critics disparagingly label “climate porn”. James Hansen, the well-known climate scientist who has chastised colleagues for not speaking up out of fear of being labeled alarmist, has done so before (see Storms of my Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity), while others have declared the fight over (see Too Late: How We Lost the Battle with Climate Change or Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed – and What It Means for Our Future). Some climate scientists are annoyed by what they perceive as scaremongering, arguing that frightening people will result in fatalism rather than galvanizing them. I guess people will respond in different ways, and recent climate protests suggest that his approach certainly works for some. Either way, Wallace-Wells does not mind being called alarmist, his (touché) defence is that he is alarmed, and you should be too.
“[…] Wallace-Wells would like you to know that, unless urgent action is undertaken to combat climate change, we are all royally fucked.”
Now, Wallace-Wells openly states he calls on predictions, on science that is in flux as new findings come to light. Even if he gets some of the details wrong, the overall pattern is pretty clear. As I have written elsewhere (see my reviews of The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions and The Oceans: A Deep History), the findings from palaeoclimatology leave little doubt as to what happens when you keep pumping carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
The author brings together many poignant observations. Global warming is not a moral and economic debt that has been accumulating since the Industrial Revolution – about half of all fossil fuels have been burned in only the last three decades. And our epoch could very well be a blip on the timeline, the result of a gigantic one-off injection of fossil fuel into our economy, allowing us to live in a temporary mirage of “endless and on-demand abundance for the world’s wealthy” (I told you he was poetic).
“[…] our epoch could very well be a blip on the timeline, the result of a gigantic one-off injection of fossil fuel into our economy”
The Uninhabitable Earth is not a book of solutions though, and Wallace-Wells spends a good part of the second half of the book railing against what he thinks will not work. Against the hallucinatory fantasies of Silicon Valley who hope to escape into a virtual reality, uploading their consciousness into computers. Against as-of-yet hypothetical technofixes such as carbon capture and storage or negative emissions technology. Against ecological nihilism by burned-out environmentalists such as Paul Kingsnorth (see Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist). If you want practical advice, you are better off reading There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years.
The Dutchman in me can appreciate his in-your-face polemic style. This is why I am surprised he overlooks one vital aspect: overpopulation. As soon as this topic comes up, Wallace-Wells seems blindsided. Part of him is excited for his daughter and the world she will inhabit, one which will be “doing battle with a genuinely existential threat”. This seems mildly perverse given the litany of terrors he lays out in this book. And those who abstain from having children over their concerns for a world ravaged by climate change “demonstrate a strain of strange ascetic pride”.
“For a book that prides itself on its fierce frankness, not addressing overpopulation feels like a serious omission.”
One problem I have with this line of argumentation, that our lifestyle and economy are wrecking the planet, is that it ignores numbers. Yes, our ancestors were not despoiling the planet, but I would argue it was not for want of trying, but for want of numbers. Now, I have no data to back this assertion up with, so I am going out on a limb here, but how much damage do you think a population of 7 billion stone age hunter-gatherers would have inflicted on the planet? Or 7 billion people trying their hand at farming some ten thousand years ago? I would not at all be surprised that if you work out the numbers, the reason our ancestors did not bring about climate change has more to do with their lack of numbers than with a lack of impact of their lifestyle.
And Wallace-Wells comes so close when he observes that most emissions have only happened in the last three decades. Could it be that the doubling of our world population has something to do with this? For a book that prides itself on its fierce frankness, not addressing overpopulation feels like a serious omission. It is a thorny topic (see my review of Should We Control World Population?), but if you want to talk solutions, addressing it should be a vital part of a multi-pronged approach he envisions to avoid the bleak future sketched here.
The Uninhabitable Earth is lyrical and stirring, but also controversial and not without its flaws. Is taking the predictions of climate change impacts to their logical extremes a valuable exercise? I am left feeling conflicted. I can sympathise with the urge to want to grab people by the scruff of the neck, but whether it ultimately is constructive is something I am not fully convinced of.
Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however. This review has been slightly edited since its publication to emphasize that I consider the author frank rather than alarmist.
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“Erebus: The Story of a Ship“, written by Michael Palin, published by Hutchinson in September 2018 (hardback, 350 pages)
The 1800s and early 1900s were a golden age of polar exploration, and small libraries of history books have been written analysing or celebrating expeditions by famous explorers such as Roald Amundsen, Ernest Shackleton or Robert Falcon Scott – their brave, perhaps foolhardy journeys often ending in tragedy. One remarkable episode in this period was the Arctic expedition led by English Royal Navy officer Sir John Franklin. It stands out both for the sheer loss of life (129 men) and the mysterious fate of the expedition.
The book starts with the completion of HMS Erebus in a Welsh boatyard in 1826. It was to be one of the two ships on Franklin’s fateful expedition (the other went by the equally cheerful name of HMS Terror). Used as a warship patrolling the Mediterranean during years of relative peace, Erebus was quickly mothballed and lay anchored for almost a decade.
As mentioned in my review of The Spinning Magnet: The Force That Created the Modern World – and Could Destroy It, this era of exploration was also when precise navigation became vital, spurring a race to study the Earth’s magnetic field (see also Earth’s Magnetism in the Age of Sail and The Illustrated Longitude: The True Story of the Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time). While Erebus lay idle in a dockyard, James Clark Ross led an expedition that successfully located the magnetic North Pole in 1831. Attention subsequently shifted to locating the magnetic South Pole and the decision was taken to convert Erebus from a warship into a reinforced ice-ship.
“The book starts with the completion of HMS Erebus in a Welsh boatyard in 1826. It was to be one of the two ships on Franklin’s fateful expedition (the other went by the equally cheerful name of HMS Terror).”
Focusing his book on the ships allows Palin to tell two connected stories. Before venturing North, Erebus and Terror first embarked on a four-year expedition led by the same James Clark Ross, approaching Antarctica three times and retreating to Tasmania and the Falkland Islands in between. Though Ross played no further role in future expeditions, he beat Franklin to this assignment. Both men had experience exploring the Arctic, but Franklin had accepted a position as governor of the new British penal colony in Hobart, Tasmania, so was not available to lead this expedition. When Ross visited him in Tasmania, it must have been hard on Franklin.
The story of the Antarctic expedition takes up a large part of Palin’s book, and he has mined archives, logbooks, and personal correspondence to sketch a lively picture of the daily grind on board, the camaraderie between sailors holed up for years on small boats, their antics during shore leave, the unforgiving Antarctic conditions, the amazing landscapes, and the thrill of exploration. Though he has numerous letters written in the lyrical style of Victorian-era England to quote from, Palin’s own writing is equally majestic at times.
The book never descends into patriotic or romantic hero-worship, however, and Palin occasionally reminds the reader that this was simultaneously a period of tyrannical expansionism and colonialism by Britain. A period in which nature, from woods to whales, was seen purely as a resource to be exploited and turned into colonial assets to further the glory of the empire. A period in which men could wax lyrically about the beauty of wild animals and then shoot them.
Though Ross never reached the magnetic South Pole, his expedition was remarkably successful and saw no loss of life, despite harrowing conditions. How different would Erebus and Terror’s next expedition turn out…
“Palin’s own writing is […] majestic at times [though] the book never descends into patriotic or romantic hero-worship […]”
The British Admiralty decided to mount a new expedition, back to the Arctic, to complete the discovery of the Northwest Passage. If sailors could find a way to navigate the Arctic ocean westwards, through the archipelago of northern Canada to reach the Bering Strait and then China, it would be a boon to commerce. With the Suez Channel not yet in existence, ships had to sail all the way south around Africa and back up north to reach Asia. Only now, with sea-ice in decline in a warming Arctic, is this route opening up and countries are scrambling to exploit this “opportunity” (see my review of Cold Rush: The Astonishing True Story of the New Quest for the Polar North – how little our attitudes have changed).
The second part of Palin’s story takes up significantly fewer pages, and with good reason. With Franklin at the helm of this expedition, Erebus and Terror sailed off into the Arctic in 1845, never to be seen again. No fewer than 36 (!) rescue expeditions were mounted over the next decade, and though tantalising clues such as personal effects and a few graves were found, both ships and the vast majority of the crew had vanished in the Arctic wilderness.
The mystery came to a resolution when the wrecks of Erebus and Terror were discovered in 2014 and 2016 respectively, some 170 years after their disappearance. Palin here chooses to only briefly narrate the highlights of this period, and I cannot blame him. From historical overviews of the hunt for the remains of the expedition (recently for example Finding Franklin: The Untold Story of a 165-Year Search and Ice Ghosts: The Epic Hunt for the Lost Franklin Expedition), to details such as the ignored role of Inuit eyewitness testimony (see the Unravelling the Franklin Mystery: Inuit Testimony), the exhumation and autopsy of some of the bodies that we did find (see Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition), or the finding of remains of perished rescue missions (see Lost Beneath the Ice: HMS Investigator and the Search for Franklin) – there is a vast literature on this topic.
Despite this, Palin manages to give his story a novel twist by instead focusing on the ships. The book has some helpful maps and two colour plate sections with some photos. If you crave more pictures I recommend Sir John Franklin’s Erebus and Terror Expedition: Lost and Found. Palin’s book instead excels in its writing. Infused with humour and heartfelt admiration, it brings to life the unbelievable challenges early explorers exposed themselves to. Sure to please history buffs, this book is hard to put down once you start it. Oh, and cover design, it matters.
Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.
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“Brave New Arctic: The Untold Story of the Melting North“, written by Mark C. Serrezek, published by Princeton University Press in May 2018 (hardback, 248 pages)
This book is part of Princeton’s Science Essentials series, which aims to inform a general audience of rapid changes in a scientific field, told in a clear manner by a prominent expert in that field. Brave New Arctic is such a smooth read that, like a Greenland glacier sliding off its bedrock due to the Zwally effect (more about that in this book), I raced through it in a mere five hours.
Starting his narrative in 1982, when he first got involved in Arctic field research as a young cub scientist, Serreze talks us through his own research over the years, as well as the findings of the wider research community. Especially his early research, which involved a lot of work out in the Arctic, is spiced up with personal anecdotes of colourful characters and adventurous conditions out on the ice. It takes a certain character to brave these cold conditions.
As I already mentioned in my review of The Oceans: A Deep History, the Earth system is fiendishly complex. However, Serreze skillfully narrates the complexities of climate science in the Arctic. And there are an awful lot of variables that can interact with each other in feedback loops: sea-ice extent, ice thickness, near-surface air temperatures, permafrost thawing, melting processes of glaciers, circulation of ocean currents, thermal stratification of both atmosphere and water layers in the ocean, reflectivity of earth’s surface to sunlight (albedo)… it is a lot to take in. Much to his credit, every time I found myself thinking “I understand what he’s saying, but an illustration would be helpful”, I turned the page to find a map or drawing explaining key mechanisms or findings.
“Brave New Arctic is such a smooth read that, like a Greenland glacier sliding off its bedrock […] I raced through it in a mere five hours.”
Unsurprisingly, as Serreze tells, the first few decades were spent in general confusion as scientists gathered data from many different sources and tried to make sense of it all. A further complication is that, yes, there are large natural cycles playing out over decades. The discovery of one such cycle, the Arctic Oscillation, is vividly described here. These make it difficult to say that climatic changes you observe are definitely due to human input. But as time passed and these natural cycles went into a phase of retreat, normally leading to a cooling Arctic, the Arctic kept on warming, with the early 2000s seeing new record-lows in the amount of remaining sea ice year upon year.
Somewhere during this time, palaeoclimatologists also got in on the research, and their combined efforts have provided a picture of Earth’s climate going back millennia. Obviously, since no written records go back this far in time, they rely on so-called proxies such as measurements on ice cores. Alley’s book The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change and Our Future provides a very well-written introduction to the study of ice cores.
The reason I bring up Alley here is that the dustjacket of Brave New Arctic features an endorsement by him that mentions Serreze’s conversion from a true sceptic to someone who accepted that humans are to blame for observed climatic changes. I just want to make the important distinction here between denialists (sticking your head in the sand) and sceptics (proper scientific conduct). Serreze belongs to the latter category. As he openly describes, despite theoretical expectations and model predictions saying that human influence will become apparent, it was initially hard to say for sure what was causing the observed changes in all of the above-mentioned variables. Natural fluctuation or human influence? For a while, the former was masking the latter. But by the early 2000s climatic changes were becoming so extreme, and so far outside of the historical values that palaeoclimatologists had described, that even Serreze became convinced that our impact on the Arctic was becoming clearly visible.
“I just want to make the important distinction here between denialists […] and sceptics […]. Serreze belongs to the latter category.”
Another thing that has bedevilled our understanding are the patchy records. Climate scientists initially had only short-term, local datasets to work with. The other major strand of the story that Serreze weaves into this book is how the research community came together, and through an ever-shifting array of international collaborations (with ever-shifting acronyms) is now gathering datasets that are more comprehensive in both their duration and spatial coverage. This depends on continued financial support by funding agencies and therefore governments, so Serreze includes the influence of politics and how it has taken an unfortunate turn in the last decade, ranging from science being ignored to being flat-out suppressed. A lot more has been written about this in books such as Powell’s The Inquisition of Climate Science and Mann’s The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines. Serreze is also not afraid to highlight how science remains a human endeavour and as such suffers from internal strife, competition, vanity, etc. Even so, the scientific process at large works, and it keeps on improving our understanding of what is happening.
Serreze masterfully explains how we now understand many things. New frontiers remain, and especially the threat of thawing permafrost, the release of methane from underwater deposits, and the melting of the Greenland ice sheet are areas where many uncertainties remain. Remember though, it is not a matter of “if”, but “when” – or rather “how soon”. It is perhaps too much to expect Serreze to provide solutions (writes this reviewer, as he mutters “addressing overpopulation, anyone?” under his breath), and Serreze rarely mentions the human dimension of this story, such as the impact on indigenous people in the Arctic. However, just the process of figuring out the complexities of climate change is enough to occupy the lifetime of a legion of scientists. Like Weart’s book The Discovery of Global Warming, Serreze provides an arresting account of the history of climate science, written by someone who saw it all unfold before his own eyes. If you thought you had heard it all, think again, and read this book.
Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.
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