(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Have you ever heard glacial ice melt? It does so in front of the tidal glaciers on Svalbard now. Small and medium sized ice cubes that form a blue-and-white blanket on the calm sea escape myriad pockets of millennia-old air. The sound cannot be compared to anything else: an ocean of intense popping and snapping, like thousands of soft-spoken radios. The sound tells us that the glacier is melting, I think. At the bottom of the steep, partly dirty glacier front – where soil and gravel run down into long fields – we see a black slip. A biologist tells us that the void between the lower edge of the glacier front and the sea surface is a sure sign that the glacier is melting. The glaziologist says yes, the glaciers are retreating due to climate change, but we only see that by registering changes in thickness. They have always calved, always popped.
Still: We know that the environment in Svalbard and in the Arctic is changing dramatically. Some of the changes can be seen with the naked eye. Several landslides in Svalbard over the past two months are linked to increased rainfall and melting permafrost. The ice fjord outside Longyearbyen has been ice-free since 2004, and the last two years we have observed blue whales there. Mussels and mackerel are two other heat-loving species that have established themselves. Species disappear, others migrate. Some changes cannot be seen: The waters off Svalbard have a microplastics content that is as high as in the North Atlantic and the North Pacific, according to researcher Amy L. Lusher and her colleagues. The ice, which covers 80 percent of the archipelago, contains volcanic ash from thousands of years back, by-products of carbon combustion, soot from burnt forests, radioactive impacts, and black carbon particles (BC). The concentration of BC in the atmosphere is not soaring, but has a clear effect on the warming of the Arctic. Most of the black carbon comes from gas flaring in southwest Russia – something from Scandinavian wood burning. The increasing methane content in the air cannot be seen either, but we know it is there.
Dark ecology. American philosopher Timothy Morton argues in his latest book Dark Ecology (2016) for a "dark ecology" – a thinking that has taken on an awareness that man as a species has affected the globe so radically that it has altered natural systems and the chemical balance of the globe – from the atmosphere down to the depths of constant acidic sea depths. The dark ecology is strange (Weird). Quite simply, it means that the world has taken a new turn. It now appears as something that cannot be separated from us humans. The earth's surface and our bodies are permeated by anthropogenic (man-made) substances. The dark ecology is therefore also intimate. The world is not something "out there" – it is in us, and we in it.
Morton uses, among other things, the Russian mining town of Nikel near the Norwegian border as an example. The small town is extremely polluted, its life expectancy is barely 50 years, and yet people live in a intimate relationship with the "nature" around them, in other words with one of our civilization's worst substances, sulfur dioxide, from the smelter in the middle of the city. Another example could be Monschegorsk, a town further down the Kola Peninsula, which is one of the most polluted in Russia. A short walk will leave you with boots covered in dust that contain both gold, palladium and sulfur dioxide. In the 1980s and 90s, $ 300-000 tons of sulfur dioxide went up the chimneys each year, along with gold and palladium worth $ 600 million a year – nickel and copper by-products that are not profitable to separate before processing. It all now lies as a new man-made deposit in the abused landscape where the locals pick mushrooms and berries. I who observe know that I have a kitchen full of kitchen appliances, a car full of stainless steel, and that the camera I use to take pictures of this landscape has nickel in it. I stand in an intimate relationship with it.
It is about what we do not see in what we see. Industrial dust deposits are found in everything around us – both on the obviously polluted Kola Peninsula and on the seemingly clean and white Svalbard, something you know if you make the effort to study the ice archive of particles. It testifies that we live in a time where we can no longer regard a single piece of nature as independent of human activity.
It is almost impossible to understand that the beautiful fucking comes from air that has been trapped in ice for millions of years.
The untouched Arctic? Since Svalbard was discovered by a Dutch vessel in 1596, the archipelago has been the scene of various nations' predatory hunts for walruses, polar bears and polar foxes – Norway as one of the most recent. It has been explored for coal, gypsum and other minerals, not surprisingly as these are located in the steep and beautifully eroded mountain slopes along the fjords on West Spitsbergen. Like large parts of the Arctic, the archipelago is now exposed to an intense presence policy. Longyearbyen will have a new port, it will certainly also be considered as a possible transhipment port for the new transport routes that will be opened in the Arctic Ocean when the sea ice is gone. Tourism is growing explosively, and new industries are being encouraged by government. The landscape protection area is threatened in proportion with the relocation of the northern boundary for Statoil's test wells. On this scale, it is perhaps insignificant that some airborne art tourists and scientists are privileged to hear many thousands of years old oxygen come to the surface in a place that has historically been visited by relatively few people.
The Arctic sublime. In 1827, the geologist Balthazar Mathias Keilhau describes the beauty of Svalbard as "terrible". The English seafarer George Shelvocke describes Svalbard in the early 1700th century as deeply frightening, because the seafarers in Arctic waters were lost if something went wrong. This is a description of an object-related sublime, as Edmund Burke described; the sublime evokes fear, and fear is felt towards something outside us that threatens us physically – an abyss or other deadly danger. It differs from Kant's definition of the mathematically sublime as something that challenges our comprehension and formulation ability. The feeling of facing something sublime is linked to the impossibility of grasping the reach and extent of what one is facing at all.
So what is it possibly sublime for a researcher or artist who gets the opportunity to drift in a boat on the fjord in front of one of Svalbard's glacier arms? I hear a sound I did not know existed. It is almost impossible to understand that the beautiful fucking comes from air that has been trapped in ice for millions of years – and that the bubbles that escape the ice, are touched for the first time by a man-made atmosphere. Once I have been overtaken by a dark ecological consciousness, it is impossible not to also think about this: that everything I look at is about to change because of us.
