On the Edge of the World

Sitting at 78ºN, beyond the Arctic circle, is the archipelago of Svalbard. It is one of the northernmost human settlements, in terms of geographic locations. It is also a place sitting at the forefront of climate change.

In the summer of 2019 I had the opportunity to travel to Svalbard for a research trip to scope out an ambitious research project I was working on – setting up an array of remote monitoring sensors of ground temperatures and thermal conductivity. Partly due to the pandemic and shifts in my life's priorities, the project never came to fruition. But what I saw and experienced in this stark landscape felt like a microcosm of our technological civilization and its aftermath on the environment, our global shared commons.

Permafrost

My research was on the accelerating changes in the thawing of the permafrost, the permanent ice-rock-soil composite that covers large spans of the northern landmasses, estimated to be more than 10% of the total land-mass globally. In recent years, the Arctic has seen the greatest change in climate, a phenomena known as 'Arctic amplification'. This is why climate scientists from around the world, in the words of my former colleague, have placed sensors all over the island chain like 'a patient on life-support'.

The increasing permafrost thaw is observable from year-to-year. Each year more and more heat penetrates the top layers of the soil and the deeper layers steadily get warmer. If this trend continues, as seems to be the case, the system will reach a tipping point where a large fraction of the permafrost will thaw out within a short period of time. There is ample evidence of such changes occurring in the past, albeit due to natural cycles of climate. But this time it would be due to the 2.5 trillion tons of CO₂ humans have put in the atmosphere since the start of the industrial era.

The Tipping Point

Like many complex systems in nature, the permafrost interacts with the environment in feedback loops, both being affected by and affecting the environment. There are two basic kinds of feedbacks - stabilizing and destabilizing. As the surface of the planet warms, the heat penetrates the ground thawing more permafrost, which releases stored carbon dioxide and methane, which further exacerbates the warming. This means the rate of warming would be expected to accelerate with time.

Historically, climate models have been somewhat deficient in capturing these positive/amplifying feedbacks. Partly because they are hard to model, and partly because they are not always well understood. Clues of past climate change from sedimentary deposits in caves and ice sheets have however provided some hints – that the permafrost has in the past experienced rapid and large scale changes.

The borehole temperature data from Svalbard shows a steady increase in deep ground temperatures. Continuing this trend, we can foresee a scenario where entire permafrost layers can undergo sudden abrupt thaw. How far into the future this will happen is hard to model, but we can expect that it might faster than a linear extrapolation of the current trend, because of the amplifying feedbacks.

Climate systems are not the only ones to undergo abrupt changes. The same is true for human systems.

There used to be a Soviet coal mining operation on the island chain. In fact the town of Pyramiden still remains and has a hotel run by Russian civilians, mainly serving as a historical showcase of what used to be there. I spent some time on this city, located about 50 miles from Longyearbyen - the administrative center of Svalbard, about a 2 hour boat ride around the Fjord. The town is abandoned. Hospitals, school buildings, residential flats, playgrounds, and a looming bust of Lenin looking over the town square. Broken bridges, equipment, and dilapidated mining trains are strewn over the island. Mining operations ceased here with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but also due to the logistics and harshness of life out there on the edge of the world. Ultimately it was unviable, humans stood defeated by nature, and they left the evidence behind.

I wonder if and how much, this is also the story of our modern technological civilization. At some point we will likely have to throw up our arms to rising sea levels, increasing severity and frequencies of weather, declining ground water, and all socio-political aftermath of all that. If you think these are potential events due in the future, take note that these changes are already happening - the droughts in Darfur and Syria in the early 2010s, the ongoing floods in Bangladesh and the resulting displacement of millions, Haiti, Yemen, Indonesia, to name a few.

Technology is a tool. How do we use it wisely, not for "saving the planet" as is often said, but to save ourselves from giving up and fleeing.

Acknowledgements: This research trip was supported by the Bates Faculty Development Grant. The author is also grateful to Dr. Mike Retelle and staff at UNIS in Svalbard. Borehole temperature data uses for visualization in was obtained through the GTNP database.

And Werner Herzog for inspiration. Particularly for his documentary, 'Encounters at the End of the World'.

Generative AI: The time lapse animation was made using a combination of photographs taken by the author and generative AI tools.