In Frostlines, the National Geographic reporter goes to the Arctic to explore how climate change is transforming the region.
What did you find during your travels?
My journey went around the top of the world, from western Alaska through Canada to Greenland and all the way to Norway, right at the border with Russia. I found these places where you can look one way and see the old Arctic fading away under climate change and under the force of political pressure. And then, you turn the other way, and you see the emergent, chaotic, new Arctic coming forward, barreling toward us, the shape of which we don’t know. It feels frightening, but it’s also beautiful and awe-inspiring.
Was there a particular encounter that inspired this book?
When I went to visit wolves on Ellesmere Island, I had this mind-blowing transformation. I’d never been in the presence of an intelligent animal that was not afraid of people and sort of regarded people as equals. This really beautiful but unsettling experience made me start to think about human presence in the North. It made me realize that up at the top of the world, things were different. It showed me different ways that we could be, and it also showed me different futures that were building up out beyond mainstream human life.
You write that “the cold that binds the many Arctics together” has enabled climatic stability at lower latitudes. How so?
The cycling of warm water and cold water up through the Arctic is largely responsible for a lot of the rest of the climate that we know, particularly in the North Atlantic. Also, the Arctic, when it has been covered in ice and snow, reflects so much sunlight and has acted in the past as this solar shield. As that decreases, more sunlight is being absorbed by the black water that used to be covered with ice. Warming doubles over on itself. The snow melts, the sunlight hits the tundra, which absorbs the heat instead of bouncing it back into space. Then the ocean current changes, things warm up in other places, and the water doesn’t circulate as well.
What was a major challenge in doing fieldwork?
For an outsider working among Indigenous communities, it’s a tricky thing to do with respect and humility and the right amount of awe. How do you go into these places where you’re not only a stranger but you come from a group that is colonially responsible for a lot of problems in the North? Moving among those people was probably the thing that I worried about most and tried to do with the most care.
