me one evening, while swirling a thimble of Scotch. I was inclined to attribute his bardically long mane of white hair to a romantic disposition until he confessed that for weeks he’d been meaning to visit the barbershop. He had bags under his eyes, the left one baggier than the right, and wore on his wrist a chunky, black, heavily instrumented waterproof watch. When he wasn’t out on the deck in his foul-weather gear, he walked around the ship in sandals and socks.
“We can look at stories in these sediments,” he said, stories written in chemical elements. Manganese, iron, sulfur, phosphorous, and radionuclides all play supporting roles in these stories, but the protagonist is carbon. There are two kinds of carbon, organic and inorganic, Macdonald said. The ratio between them reveals a great deal about the ancient climate of the Arctic, and about how swiftly the Arctic has changed during the industrialized heyday of fossil fuels. Photosynthesizing flora, both terrestrial plants and phytoplankton, convert inorganic carbon—CO2—into organic, carbon-based compounds, CHO, for instance. “Chloroplasts”—photosynthesizing cells—“are the little engines that run the biosphere,” Macdonald said.
Petroleum consists mostly of organic carbon, as does a polyethylene duck, since polyethylene is a by-product of petroleum. A polyethylene duck is in fact made of sunlight that eons ago algae converted into carbon. Some of that algae was consumed by zooplankton. Both plankton and algae died, sedimented to the ocean floor, and were eventually subsumed into the earth’s mantle. There, under great pressure and great heat, over the course of eons, the planet cooked it into that primordial ooze we call oil.
To turn oil into ethylene you need one of those industrial kitchens known as a refinery, as well as a chemical plant. Here’s a recipe, albeit a useless one: In something called a “crude tower,” through a process known as fractionation, skim away the ethane, the most ethereal part of crude oil, too light to use as gasoline. Ethane looks like this:
Pump your ethane to your chemical plant. Now it’s time for steam cracking: Dilute your ethane with steam. Briefly heat it to over 850 degrees Celsius. Eventually you’ll end up with an ethylene molecule that looks like this:
Take a bunch of ethylene molecules. Cook them. Add a polymerization catalyst, usually a chemical derived from titanium, and you get polyethylene.
String enough of these molecules together and you get plastic resin. Ship the resin from the refineries of the Gulf of Mexico to Los Angeles, mill it into nurdles, ship them to Guangzhou, add some yellow dye, throw them into the hopper of an extrusion blow-molder, melt them into parison, extrude the parison through a steel mold milled by Henry Tong’s late father, hire a teenage immigrant from the Chinese interior to press a button that sends a blast of air into the mold, and primordial sunlight becomes a yellow duck. And a yellow duck is a delightful toy. But in alchemizing oil into objects and energy, we are, as Macdonald put it to me one day over lunch in the main mess, “spending down our capital,” “living on borrowed time.”
Out on the bow of the Louis, in the little prefabricated lab, Marie-Éve Randlett and Danielle Dubien were making progress. The place resembled a potter’s studio. The steel table was splattered with gray goo. Atop the table, enclosed on three sides by the steel box, was the core of sediment. In just an hour Gobeil’s graduate students had already bagged a few centuries of mud. Randlett showed me a weird prickly ball she’d exhumed—a dead sea urchin. Ascending from the high pressures of the benthic zone to the low pressures of the atmosphere, the poor thing had exploded, to Robie Macdonald’s dismay. “I don’t like to see anything die,” he’d tell me that night in the main lounge.
Here are the sorts of stories that can be read in a box of Arctic mud: A low level of organic carbon indicates a low level of photosynthesis, which in turn indicates a frigid, polar climate hostile to phytoplankton and plants; a high level of organic carbon indicates a high level of photosynthesis. Fifty-five million years ago the Arctic was ice-free. Trees grew along its shores. Crocodiles transited the Northwest Passage. Then the planet wobbled on its axis and a new ice age—the Pleistocene—began. The Arctic Ocean chilled. Ice formed on its surface—not the way ice forms on the surface of freshwater, as a skin; when the surface of saltwater first reaches the freezing point, it thickens into a kind