By the time people woke up—not, in truth, that long after some had gone to bed—the clouds had gathered, thin but insistent. The symposium, last night's opening formalities dispensed with, moved into full spate, a mostly impressive sight. There were presentations of passion, of precision, and sometimes of both. Overviews rubbed shoulders with detailed accounts of such things as the effects of black carbon (heat absorbing soot that plays a role in the warming of the planet that has yet to be fully quantified) and the manufacture of modules for holding solar cells (no one makes them as well as someone who combined best in class techniques at every stage in their manufacture would be able to).
As fits the mood of the meeting, or at least of this correspondent, what stood out most were the ideas, facts and slips of the tongue that opened up fresh perspectives: “It's time to see the arctic as a platform from which to exert pressure”; “China's per capita car ownership is currently at the same level as America's was in 1913”; “There's plenty of hydropower up in Scandinavia … I'm sorry, down in Scandinavia.”
In the late afternoon (sun west by southwest, over the airstrip) the symposium took to the water, heading to the top of the fjord to look at the glaciers under clearing skies. Bijou icebergs floated almost stationary in the still water. A flock of kittiwakes, startled, flashed up from their station at the point where meltwater and seawater meet. Scientists talked of kelp and copepods. The ice at the end of the Kongsfjord towered above us. But less so than once it did. Many of the other glaciers no longer reach the sea, retreating to their mountain lairs, folded moraines left behind them.
Studies of fjord-floor sediments show that the glaciers are further back now than they were when Vikings sailed to Iceland and Greenland (and, possibly, Svalbard, though if so they left no trace of their presence for their descendants other than disputable references in some sagas). It is possible they were this shrunken in the northern hemisphere's early post-ice-age warmth, 8,000 years ago, but that is not certain.
Kim Holmen of the Norwegian Polar Institute showed pictures of the glaciers in times gone by, reaching much farther into the fjord than now they do, surrounding islands with their ice. The most recent decade saw little by way of retreat in the King's Glacier, the largest opening on to the fjord, but measurements made by scientists at Ny Alesund show that its mass balance was strongly negative: more ice was lost than gained. Comparing a picture taken on the first day of the symposium with one taken in 2002 it's clear that the height of its calving face has more or less halved.
The water temperature is six degrees celsius. Not long ago, Ny Alesunders would have expected sea ice most of the way up the fjord at this time of year. On the forecastle, headed back to port, the early evening's unsetting sun is positively balmy.
After dinner, Kim takes a few of us up the slightly alarming cable car to Zeppelin station. Perched on top of the mountain closest to Ny Alesund, Zeppelin is named for the impressively moustachioed explorer, not his family's subsequent dirigibles (the mooring that Amundsen used for his airship Norge in the 1920s is down at sea level). Here Kim and scientists from a wide variety of other countries monitor all manner of air pollutants: carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide (both in various isotopic forms), a number of varieties of mercury, lead, particles of black carbon and other miscellaneous gunk, particles around which cloud droplets might condense (the lab is in the clouds quite a lot of the time), methane, ozone, CFCs, other organic compounds, and quite possibly more besides. Some of the air is analysed right there, right then, some shipped off to other labs around the world for further work.
Kim—tall, quiet, quite passionate and straggly of beard—is happy that the wind has kept the smoke of our dinner time barbecue on the shores below from rising to his mountain redoubt: under the right conditions, he says, some of the sensors could pick up a cigarette at two miles. Here in his observatory the world is measured in picograms and parts per trillion: from the roof, range after range of mountain, unseen from down below, ripple north and east, both utterly of the earth and utterly unearthly. The sight doesn't make the molecular accountancy in the equipment rooms below seem pettifogging; quite the reverse. It seems like a kindred form of clarity and witness.
Kim is a forceful advocate for the idea that monitoring the planet is as demanding, as disciplined and as rewarding a sort of science as trying to explain it with hypothesis and experiment. Funding agencies often disagree; like everyone in the monitoring business, Kim has stories to tell of fights lost as well as won. But thanks to conviction, good arguments and enlightened friends in places almost as high as it is, the air atop Zeppelin remains, for the moment, assiduously analysed, picked clean of its various contents in the humble service of a view that stretches beyond even this unfeasibly distant horizon.
Down below, discussions of climate continue until fogged by fatigue and perhaps, in a few cases, hard liquor. The light, which became peculiarly piercing in the stillness around midnight, changes yet again. Photosynthetic plankton, making the planktonic equivalent of hay as the sun goes on and on shining, are giving off organic sulphur compounds. In the air above the sea, those compounds are forming a haze of tiny particles on which water vapour condenses. The view towards the mouth of the fjord is now soft and faded. Above, on the mountain, faint traces of the sulphur and the haze it forms are probed, measured, recorded.