Cold Read online

  As for snow, the School Children’s Blizzard of 1888 was somewhat unusual with its sudden brutality, but it was hardly freakish. Two years earlier, a blizzard hit the western Texas Panhandle, Indian territory that became Oklahoma, and Kansas. Afterward, dead cattle littered the land. In 1887, another blizzard hit ranching country, this time in the Dakota Badlands. Thereafter, ranching changed forever, featuring smaller herds of higher-quality animals that were more tightly controlled. And just after the School Children’s Blizzard, also in 1888, a low-pressure system moved into New York City from the Atlantic, dumping snow and pushing winds to seventy miles per hour. Greely’s team of weather forecasters missed the call again, predicting rain and “colder fresh to brisk westerly winds, fair weather.” The storm surprised the city, and more than two hundred people died. From the New York Evening Sun:

  The streets were littered with blown down signs, tops of fancy lamps, and all the wreck and debris of projections, ornaments, and moveables. Everywhere horse cars were lying on their sides, entrenched in deep snow, lying across the tracks, jammed together and in every conceivable position. The city’s surface was like a wreck-strewn battlefield.

  From the New York Tribune: “The city was left to run itself, chaos reigned, and the proud boastful metropolis was reduced to the condition of a primitive settlement.” And from the New York Times:

  In looking back on the events of yesterday, the most amazing thing to the residents of this great city must be the ease with which the elements were able to overcome the boasted triumph of civilization, particularly in those respects which philosophers and statesmen have contended permanently marked our civilization and distinguished it from the civilization of the old world — our superior means of intercommunication.

  Ice falls on people and airplanes, snowstorms seize cities, and cold snaps win and lose wars. Snow stopped Alexander the Great’s eastward march into India three centuries before the birth of Christ, and it blocked the Moors’ invasion of France in the thirteenth century. It added to the suffering of George Washington’s twelve thousand ill-prepared Continental soldiers at Valley Forge, prompting Gouverneur Morris of New York to describe the men as “an army of skeletons.” In yet another conflict, Napoleon’s soldiers reached Moscow in mid-September 1812, a year rendered somewhat colder than normal by an atmosphere laced with volcanic dust. By early November, temperatures were below zero, and by early December the French were retreating at thirty-five degrees below zero. Still later, during World War I, Italian and Austrian soldiers used avalanches as weapons, killing an estimated sixty thousand enemy troops. Bodies were still turning up as late as 1952.

  Hitler’s 1941 invasion of Russia faced snow in October. German land mines failed because of snow and ice. Russian artillery troops used lubricants suited for low temperatures, while German soldiers had to warm their artillery with campfires. The Russians used ponies acclimated to winter, and many of the Russian soldiers knew how to ski. German tanks bogged down in the snow. At temperatures of forty-nine degrees below zero, the German soldiers awaited winter clothes. It is said that a quarter of a million German soldiers died of frostbite and hypothermia. Cold was an ally of the Russians.

  Superimposed on cold weather and its freak events, on all of the difficulties of prediction and the dreams of solving unsolvable equations and on the beating of a butterfly’s chaotic wings, discernible patterns remain. Air moves irrevocably from areas of high pressure to areas of low pressure. It is easy enough to predict the weather a day or two out by plotting the motion of fronts and knowing, more or less, how one will interact with another. In more general terms, there are Hadley cells and trade winds. There is the Coriolis effect shifting air to the right and left as wind moves across the rotating earth. There is El Niño. In the north, there is the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, shifting phases every twenty years or so. During its positive phase, the western Pacific becomes cool, and part of the eastern ocean warms. During its negative phase, the western Pacific warms, and the eastern ocean cools. Farther north, there is the Arctic Oscillation. In its negative phase, counterclockwise winds blowing in the stratosphere weaken, and high pressure stands over the Arctic, pushing frigid winter air farther south, generating rain in the western United States and the Mediterranean, and weakening trade winds. In its positive phase — the phase in which we have been stuck more on than off for the past twenty years — the stratospheric winds blowing counterclockwise above the pole strengthen, middle America stays warmer, and California and Spain dry out.

  And there is the most basic pattern of all: polar regions are cold, and tropical regions are hot. The sun is spread out across the polar regions, its light and heat striking at an angle. Most of the energy that reaches a polar surface bounces back, reflected by snow and ice back up into space. In the tropics, the light and heat hit head-on. The ground absorbs the heat. Leaves absorb the heat. Water absorbs the heat. And then the polar and equatorial regions interact. On a global scale, seen from a distance, it might be said that the polar regions suck in the heat of the tropics, swallowing the world’s warmth. The equatorial regions shed heat south and north, like a Weddell seal steaming as it lies on the Antarctic ice, or like a moose panting, overheated and uncomfortable, its hot breath projecting vaporous shadows against the snow.

  It is January twenty-fifth in Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost community in the United States. The forecasters’ prediction of a few days of warm weather has proved true. At fifteen below, it is a mild January afternoon. Two days ago, the sun rose for the first time this year, but today is the first day with clear skies, and the first visible sunrise since mid-November. The sun eases upward, then hovers, moving in a shallow, graceful arc from east to west, never more than one or two degrees over the horizon. We are on snowmobiles, and we ride for some time into the sun. I leave a hundred feet between me and my companion’s profile, his hunched form on the machine’s saddle. I see his parka hood framed against the Arctic sun, the silhouette of a shotgun strapped to his back, and a light cloud of condensation and fumes from his exhaust pipe, all riding ahead of his long, stretched-out shadow on the snow. Around him, the flat white snow and ice, devoid of contrast, confuses the eye. I scan occasionally for arctic foxes, but see none. There are fewer foxes here, in Barrow, than in the oil fields southeast of here. Although we travel armed, it is more from habit than from need. The time to see polar bears is spring, summer, and autumn, not January. Now they are scattered on the sea ice or denned up to give birth and suckle their young, and in any case their reality is less ferocious than their reputation.

  The tundra in panoramic view appears flat, but on the machines we feel every bump. On occasion, we dip down a few feet or ride over a shallow hill. With each dip we see the sun set, and with each hill we see the sun rise. It is an orange orb, angling in through low haze on the horizon, the sky above it open and deep blue. We are riding into the wind. The cold nibbles and then chews at exposed flesh around my cheeks and temples. At twenty-five miles per hour, the windchill equivalent is minus forty-four. Any warmth from the rising sun is more psychological than real.

  We intercept an ice road and ride along its smooth surface, picking up speed and occasionally fishtailing on the ice. Ice roads, built by dumping water onto the snow covering the tundra, or right on the tundra itself, then scarifying the ice for traction, are used throughout the far north for winter travel. This particular ice road heads far off into the tundra to an exploration well. Someone hopes to find natural gas there. It will provide a backup supply for Barrow, a gas-rich community. A water truck drives by, and we have to dodge momentarily into the tundra, then come back onto the road. The truck looks ludicrously small against the ice road itself, and the ice road, disappearing toward the rising sun, looks ludicrously small against the expanse of snow-covered tundra.

  We cut off from the road, ride across a frozen lake, and intercept the coast. Although my face stings with cold, my body is overheating, like that of a running moose or an agitated bowhead whale. I un
zip the top few inches of my parka. The early exhilaration of the ride has given way to irritation with the bumpiness and the cold wind and the restricted vision of goggles and a parka hood. We stop at the coast and turn off our machines. Immediately, the exhilaration returns. My companion has ice on his beard and collar. To our right, we can see Barrow, its five thousand residents scattered in village sprawl, picturesque against the frozen sea. Closer, between here and Barrow, someone has stored a boat on the tundra. It is upside down, standing on four steel fuel drums, frozen in place and masked with frost. It is a skin boat, an umiaq, built from the stitched hides of bearded seals and used to hunt bowhead whales in the open-water leads during spring, when the whales are swimming east between ice floes and snorkeling from pool to pool. To our left, we see the coastline, empty but for ice rubble, bulldozed into piles by the slow but powerful movements of a frozen ocean. The Inupiat call the piled ice rubble ivuniq. This rubble, standing no more than fifteen feet tall, might be called an ivunibauraq, a little ice ridge. Ivuniq forms when sheets of sea ice, miles across, pushed by wind and current, slowly collide. The leading edge crumbles against the shore or against another sheet of ice, piling up into a ridge, like drifting tec-tonic plates forming frozen models of the Himalayas and the Andes and the Rockies in fast-forward. At times, the thunder of ice collisions can be heard for miles through the still, cold air.

  Barrow, like most communities in Alaska, looks temporary, like a pioneer settlement. It is not. Barrow is among the oldest permanent settlements in the United States. Hundreds of years before the European Arctic explorers showed up, starving and freezing and succumbing to hardship, Barrow was more or less where it is now, a natural hunting place at the base of a peninsula that pokes out into the Beaufort Sea. It was called Ukpeagvik, literally “a place for hunting snowy owls.” Yankee whalers sailed here, learning about the bowhead whale from Inupiat hunters, but also bringing new harpoons, steel, and guns. A weather station of sorts was established in 1881. Later, the military came, setting up a radar station, and in 1947 a science center was founded at Barrow. Men raised as subsistence hunters showed scientists how to function in the Arctic. They shared traditional knowledge. They corrected the misconceptions of what has come to be known regionally as “Western science.” Today Barrow has the coldest average yearly temperature of any community in the United States, at just under ten degrees.

  We look out over the frozen ocean and see nothing but wind-sculpted waves of snow and ice. Though invisible, there are also seals and bears and arctic foxes, and farther out, the North Pole. Soft light comes in low and angles across the ice. We stare at the northern ice cap, a reflector the size of a continent that bounces what little sunlight it receives back into space, an ice cube proportioned to cool the entire globe. There is nothing more to see than a rough white surface disappearing into the horizon, yet we stand silently for some time, concerned that in turning away we might miss something very important, something crucial to our well-being and somehow central to our lives.

  FEBRUARY

  It is February second, Candlemas Day, and a sweltering forty-eight degrees here in Anchorage. It is eleven degrees in Kansas City, thirty-seven degrees in Washington, D.C., and twenty-six degrees in Denver. New Orleans hit only forty-nine, and the low in Los Angeles was colder than the high in Anchorage. My beautiful snow is melting again, filling the streets with slush and water. Across town, a creek thawed and flooded the basement of an office building, ruining computers. Roofers are busy fixing leaks of suddenly liquid water. At the Alaska Zoo in Anchorage, Jake the brown bear woke up, groggy, and staggered outside to lie in the sun.

  As the snow melts, it grows gritty with a few months’ accrual of dirt and dust, previously scattered through three feet of snowpack but now accumulating right on the surface. With a darker surface, the snow absorbs heat and melts that much faster. I ski in a T-shirt, moving along a trail on the edge of Cook Inlet, watching thousands of blocks of dirty ice float past with the tide. Hot air blows in from the south, stripping away the cold or, closer to the truth, pumping in heat. Right on the edge of the inlet, slushy puddles that tug at my skis are interspersed with the sort of crusty snow that comes from freezing and warming and freezing again. My dog, running along behind me, breaks through the crust and looks at me quizzically, head tilted and ears up, seeming to wonder when we might turn around. But under trees, in the protection of windbreaks, the snow remains firm.

  I take heart. “It’s definitely a warm event,” Sam Albanese of the National Weather Service tells reporters, “but it’s certainly not out of the realm of what happens most winters here.” In February, in Anchorage, one can be certain that the cold will return. Mary Anderson, who has lived in the area since 1945, tells a reporter, “I’ve seen every kind of weather you can imagine. This isn’t unusual.”

  It is in fact somewhat unusual. It is a record high for this date, another record high in the annals of global warming. The previous high was forty-six degrees in 1977. On this same date in 1947, the city enjoyed a record low. It was thirty-three degrees below zero.

  Candlemas Day marks the halfway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox — the halfway point between the shortest day of the year and the day with twelve hours between sunrise and sunset. It was once considered the last day of Christmas. Although now thought of as a Catholic holiday, it may have its roots in the Gaelic festival of Imbolc, celebrated long before Christ to mark the birth of spring lambs and the first stirrings of spring. The Catholic Encyclopedia, first published in 1907, denies this possibility so wholeheartedly that one is left convinced of its truth. The name Candlemas Day refers to the blessing of the candles to be used at Mass, but the day is also marked by the burning of candles in windows. The day has other names, including the Presentation of Christ in the Temple and the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary. And Groundhog Day.

  In Anchorage, the sky is clear one minute and overcast the next. The groundhog, known in Alaska as the marmot, might or might not see its shadow. One might or might not think of the day as clear and bright. Certainly, the shadows are not thick, and there is no rain. If the proverbs hold true, winter will be around for a while longer. Marmots, if any have broken hibernation, will waddle back into their holes, curl up, and drift back into their winter stupor. Their chubby little bodies will drop to within nine or ten degrees of freezing.

  Coming down a small hill, I round a corner and am suddenly exposed to the wind from Cook Inlet. Icy snow turns to slush under my feet, ripping my skis out from under me. I go down on my hands and knees in the slush, my skis akimbo. Annoyed, I curse El Niño and chinook winds and Hadley cells. I curse global warming. I long for the cold of 1947.

  Young Frederic Tudor had a penchant for losing money. In February 1806, in his midtwenties, he filled a sailing vessel with ice from a Massachusetts pond and sent it to the island of Martinique. The Boston Gazette covered the story: “Loading ice — No joke. A vessel with a cargo of 80 tons of ice has cleared out from this port for Martinique. We hope this will not prove to be a slippery speculation.” It did in fact prove slippery. Island people had no experience with ice. In a letter to his brother-in-law, Tudor wrote of customers who left their ice in the sun or in a tub of water and then complained when the ice melted. By 1812, Tudor was in debtors prison.

  Three years later, out of jail and with more borrowed money, Tudor invested in an icehouse in Cuba. Pursued by sheriffs because of his debts, he set sail from New England on November 1, 1815. He spent the next ten years building the trade and learning how to preserve ice. He built icehouses throughout the Caribbean. He experimented with rice chaff, wood shavings, and sawdust as insulation. He created a demand for cold drinks in the tropics, which in turn created a demand for more and cheaper ice, which in turn inspired one of his suppliers to harness a horse to an ice saw, creating what would be called the ice plow and tripling production. By 1833, he was shipping ice to India, sixteen thousand miles and four months away from Massachusetts. T
his was at a time when many Indians had never seen ice. By 1855, Tudor would make more than two hundred thousand dollars from the Calcutta ice trade. He became known as “the Ice King.”

  None of this happened in a vacuum. The Inuit of the far north had been using ice cellars for thousands of years to preserve meat through the short Arctic summer. The Chinese had cut and stored winter ice since at least 1000 b.c. By about 500 b.c., the Egyptians were making ice in earthenware pots left out on cold nights. Ice, harvested in winter and stored in ice cellars or pits, had been used since at least Roman times to cool wine. In 755, Khalif Madhi used snow to refrigerate items that he carried across the desert. Giambattista della Porta made ice sculptures and served iced drinks in sixteenth-century Florence. By Tudor’s time, every temperate zone town or village in the United States had at least one icehouse to store frozen pond water through the summer. In 1803, three years before Tudor sailed for Martinique with his load of ice, a man named Thomas Moore patented an icebox, a tight sheet-metal affair surrounding a cedar tub lined with rabbit fur and filled with pond ice. Moore called his icebox a refrigerator. He used it to transport butter to Washington, D.C. Where others were selling soggy gobs of butter in the swampy heat, he could sell attractive chunks of solid chilled butter for top dollar. He wrote An Essay on the Most Eligible Construction of Ice-Houses; also, A Description of the Newly Invented Machine Called the Refrigerator.

  Three decades later, another inventor, Jacob Perkins, made the first practical device that we would think of as a refrigerator today. Different models were developed and marketed, but they all used the same principle. A liquid running through tubes was allowed to vaporize inside of an insulated box, and in vaporizing it absorbed heat. The hot vapor was recompressed outside the box, turning the vapor back into liquid and dumping the heat of compression away from the box’s innards. The liquid was then pumped through the tubes back into the insulated box, where it vaporized again. In effect, the heat was pumped from the confines of the insulated box. In the early years, ammonia was used as the refrigerant, turning from liquid to gas and gas to liquid and back again in an endless cycle of compression and vaporization. Methyl chloride, sulfur dioxide, and carbon dioxide were also used. All of these were dangerous. As late as the 1920s, homeowners were killed by methyl chloride leaks. In 1928, General Motors asked a man named Thomas Midgley to find a better refrigerant, something nontoxic, nonflammable, and stable. It took Midgley and his team three days to come up with Freon, which is still used today in refrigerators built before the mid-1990s. Though slow to dominate the market, the refrigerator eventually killed the ice trade. And it was this principle — the vaporization of liquids to remove heat — that allowed very rapid but dangerous progress in the scientific exploration of absolute zero.