• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2939 0

of coal—was stealing away the glacial ice fields of Alaska. Nevertheless, big oil companies such as Shell, Exxon-Mobil, and BP still put climate change and greenhouse gases in scare quotes, as if the hard science were a myth conceived by tree huggers. Fossil fuel merchants were determined to keep Americans hooked on petroleum-based products until they choked. The Swedish physical chemist Svante Arrhenius was worried, in 1896, as the automobile revolution was just taking hold, that widespread fossil fuel combustion could someday cause enhanced global warming. Arrhenius, now considered the “father” of climate change, understood that the doubling of carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration would lead to a temperature rise of five degrees Celsius; glaciers would melt, seas would rise, and the Arctic would slowly vanish.2

John Muir—the naturalist whom Ralph Waldo Emerson called “more wonderful than Thoreau”—had erected a tiny observation cabin near a thirty-mile-long glacier that was one of Alaska’s stunning heirlooms.3 Born in Dunbar, Scotland, in 1838, Muir had immigrated to America in 1849, just after Mr. James K. Polk won the Mexican-American War. When Muir turned twenty-nine, following an industrial accident in Indianapolis that had caused temporary blindness, he made a far-reaching personal decision to dedicate his life to the natural world and to enduring wilderness. Although he was a talented machinist, nature was his muse. Solitary and on foot he roamed through America’s wide valleys, towering mountains, pristine woodlands, sublime deserts, and flower-filled meadows, filling his voluminous notebooks with vivid descriptions of plants, animals, and trees. Recording his scientific observations along the way, the peripatetic Muir tramped through the primordial forests and smoky ridges of the Appalachian Mountains, then headed south to survey the humid swamplands of Georgia’s Okefenokee and the golden beaches of Florida’s Gulf Coast. Shedding the dictates of his strict Presbyterian upbringing (his father was a fundamentalist minister), in 1867 Muir scrawled his home address on a weathered journal cover as “John Muir, Earth-Planet-Universe.”4 Eventually making wild California his North Star, Muir, a pioneer ecologist, began climbing the peaks of his beloved Sierra Nevada, camping under the stars, memorizing botanical details through the timeless art of sitting still. “The more savage and chilly and storm-chafed the mountains,” Muir wrote, “the finer the glow of their faces.”5

Despite all of Muir’s cross-country tramps, nothing prepared him for the sheer poetic depth of the Alaskan wilderness. Muir considered himself a student of Louis Agassiz, an internationally celebrated Harvard zoologist and geologist, whose Études sur les glaciers (1840) was the definitive word on glaciers in the 1870s. Agassiz had explored live glaciers, studying their origins in the Piedmont and Tidewater regions. Glaciers could be snow-white like typing paper or a brazen virtual blue, as gray as a gravel pit or as clear as H2O. Some extended over twenty square miles and could be as smooth as velvet or as wrinkled as a bull walrus’s neck. They had blotches, slashes, stripes, and swirls. Other cirque glacier remnants covered less than a square mile. When calving, a glacier rumbled and roared, then as the ice sank or floated a strange vibration, like wind chimes, curled the air as if a tuning fork had been bonked. Unbeknownst to most Americans of the late nineteenth century, glaciers constituted the biggest freshwater reservoir on Earth.6

Muir was frustrated that in Yosemite he could analyze only the effects glaciers had on mountains; it was all the geological past. For his professional glaciology career to advance, he needed to see the real deal—to experience glaciers themselves, in raw action. Alaska was, to Muir, the ideal laboratory for studying “frozen motion” as it flowed downhill as if icy blue lava. All glaciers were cold, solid, scalloped, and slippery. But besides those four basic features, each glacier had a distinct personality of its own. Muir,