planet crisscrossed with longitudinal and latitudinal lines. Orbiting this planet is an alphanumerical caption: INTERNATIONAL POLAR YEAR 2007-2008.
The series of improbable events that would eventually deliver the pages of Private Schneider’s diary to the banks of the Mississippi and me to the shores of the Northwest Passage began in Vienna in 1875, when, addressing a meeting of the Austro-Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Lieutenant Karl Weyprecht (naval officer, scientist, dreamer) laid forth a scheme as inspirational as it was implausible. For more than a century, ever since Captain Cook sailed to 70 degrees south and then to 70 degrees north, European explorers had been exploring the earth’s two poles, or trying to. But to what end?
Yes, they’d charted previously uncharted coasts, and planted flags on previously unclaimed land, and pushed the point of farthest north farther and farther north, and that of farthest south farther and farther south. Yes, they’d performed heroic feats of derring-do, attaining glory and fame, but they’d also performed many disastrous feats of gothic folly ending in a diet of sled dog and lichen and boiled boot. But from that data what had been learned? Not much, Weyprecht believed. “Immense sums were being spent and much hardship endured for the privilege of placing names in different languages on ice-covered promontories,” he once wrote, but “the increase in human knowledge played a very secondary role.”
He knew whereof he spoke: From 1872 to 1874, Weyprecht and another naval officer, Julius von Payer, had led an Austro-Hungarian expedition to the Arctic. The objective was to reach the North Pole by ship, or, falling short, to transit the Northeast Passage, from Norway to the Bering Sea. Payer, Weyprecht, and the men under their joint command made it as far as Novaya Zemlya, an island due north of the Ural Mountains, before the ice closed in on their three-masted schooner. The Arctic currents carried them, fortuitously, to an archipelago of ice-covered promontories on which Weyprecht and Payer bestowed the name Franz Josef Land, in honor of their emperor. From there, all had made it home alive. Weyprecht was a hero. He’d earned his place in history books. Nevertheless, he considered the expedition a failure.
The two “forces of Nature” Weyprecht wished most urgently to illuminate were terrestrial magnetism and the aurora borealis. What was needed, Weyprecht told the scientists assembled in Vienna, was a coordinated, synchronous series of expeditions that would set up a ring of research stations around the poles and, using standardized instruments, carry out meteorological observations for at least one year. No single nation could accomplish a project of this scale. For the plan to work, the scientists and governments and militaries of many nations would have to set aside their rivalries and join in common cause.
Six years later, in 1881, just forty-two years old, a man of his time, Weyprecht died of tuberculosis. By then his plan had gained prominent adherents, and a year after Weyprecht’s death, scientists from eleven nations put it into action. This first International Polar Year, like subsequent International Polar Years, would last longer than a year. Germany established an Arctic research station on Baffin Island, and another at the Antarctic island of South Georgia. The Austro-Hungarian empire established one on Jan Mayen Island, off the east coast of Greenland, Sweden another on Svalbard. The Dutch sent a ship into the Kara Sea. The French, Danish, Norwegians, Finns, and Brits also participated, as did the Russians. In all, fourteen polar expeditions took place between 1882 and 1884. The one that was the most ambitious turned out also to be the most disastrous and, historically, the most notorious—the Greely expedition to Ellesmere Island.
The scientists of the first IPY didn’t manage to solve the mysteries Weyprecht set out to investigate, but they did manage to collect meteorological data thanks to which we now know just how much the Arctic has warmed in the past century—up to 4 degrees centigrade on average, 5 degrees on land, two to three times faster than the rest of the planet. Climatologists predicted this accelerated Arctic warming years ago. Its primary cause? The ice-albedo effect. Albedo is the amount of sunlight that the planet reflects back out into space. As anyone who’s walked barefoot across a parking lot on a hot summer’s day knows, white surfaces reflect the sun’s rays; black surfaces absorb them. In the Arctic, when the ice retreats and the snow melts, earth and ocean absorb more heat, thereby melting more ice and snow, thereby absorbing more heat.