RED DAWN OF THE NORTH

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Standing at the waters edge, I suspect that I’m right in saying that we all paused, just for a second or so, to reflect briefly as too where exactly on the map we now were. If ever there was a pause for thought with justification then this was it, for finally we had made it to the frozen glacial valley that seemed to mark the very end of the Earth and here we were, suited up and about to go surfing, under dancing skies of red and green.

I was hoping that this story would never need to be told or, at worst, that someone else, on some other trip, way off in the distant future, would be the one who would have to tell it, but unfortunately time itself is against us and maybe if I don’t tell it now then it will be too late and there won’t be another man left to hear it. Over the years I have told stories of wars, drugs, globalisation, AIDS and democracy, all important stories, but all easy for us to brush under the carpet, pretending that they don’t effect us. This story though is different and you must believe me when I say that this one will affect each and every one of us, more so than any other story ever has. In fact, you could say that if you were too brush this one under the carpet then, alongside everything else we hold dear to us, the very art of story telling itself will be swept away.

When winter arrives in a place such as this it’s hard not to feel as if you are standing alone, the last man left, witnessing the very end of the Earth. I know this because I was there when it came and if things don’t improve then you may be standing there next. The day in question was one that occurred just shortly after I had stood in a glacial valley at the end of the Earth. It was the day that I sat, with my friends, finishing my coffee and porridge and waiting for the first sparkles of dawn to light up the waves, but on this day the dawn never came and neither would it come tomorrow, nor the day after that. Winter had finally arrived and wrapped its frozen mittens around us. For the next two months total and permanent darkness and bone crushing cold would lie without a pause across this landscape.

At 66º 33’ north, the Arctic Circle is that dotted line running across the top of the globe that marks the point at which, for at least one twenty-four hour period each summer, the sun never sets and, conversely, the point at which, for at least one twenty-four hour period each winter, the sun never rises. We though, had passed the Arctic Circle and left it way off to our south; in fact most people and most places were to the south of us. Hammerfest, claimed to be the most northerly town in the world, was to our south. Alaska was to our south, mainland Canada was to our south, Finland and Sweden were to our south, Iceland was so far south it hardly warranted a mention, half the Greenland plateau was to our south and even to reach Arctic Russia, the coldest, bleakest part of the entire Arctic, involved spinning around and following the compass needle south.

This was a surf trip that had often drifted into my mind during the long hot days of summer, but before it could ever be put into action the leaves would start to turn golden brown and thoughts would instead turn to tropical blues. Such daydreams would probably have continued indefinitely if it weren’t for an email citing a call to action. The email came from British wetsuit manufacturers, C-Skins, asking if I’d be interested in testing out one of their new wetsuits. Not being one to turn my nose up at free stuff, and before I had taken the precaution of reading the fine print, I gleefully jumped to sign on the dotted line. It was only when a parcel of heavy 6mm wetsuits, boots, gloves, undergarments and balaclavas turned up on the doorstep that it occurred to me that if this were a trip to some tropical paradise then perhaps C-Skins might first have asked somebody who could actually surf. So it was then, that several weeks later I found myself, alongside my equally gullible friends, Antoine Touya, Jon Bowen, Nick Saal and Dan Haylock surfing at over 71º N, which is quite possibly as high up the globe as any wave has ever been ridden. Oh yes, and the other clause to getting free wetsuits? We had to go on our Arctic surf trip in the winter. And it’s at this point that my story turns into one that you can no longer ignore.

The Arctic in winter is famous for being cold. The lowest recorded temperature seen on the landmasses that fall within the Arctic’s 30 million sq km is -68ºC, which occurred in Verkhoyansk, Siberian Russia, in 1892. The week prior to our arrival in north Norway the temperatures had struggled to climb above a daytime high of -15ºC, whilst the days after our departure saw the maximum highs fail to clamber above -28ºC, neither of which are quite to the extremes of Verkhoyansk, but are still cold enough to mean that bikini clad girls are few and far between. For us, however, we had, completely by chance, picked the one week of a long winter when unseasonably warm winds had brought the mercury levels rising to the balmy highs of -4ºC. Very few people choose to make a home in the Arctic tundra and we met even less of them, but of those we did, they were all ecstatic at this unexpected return of summer, but this ecstasy was cautioned with thoughts that it might be too late and that my story may finally be coming true.

We have no real idea how many species of plants and animals we share this beautiful planet with. We have identified and named somewhere in the region of one and a half million species, but it’s thought that there could be anywhere from five to a hundred million species. Whatever the real figure is, it’s irrelevant, because it is thought that by the year 2050 we personally shall have put one million of those species at immediate risk of extinction and by 2100 half of all species on Earth will be extinct or seriously threatened. Yes, you read that correctly – half of all species of plants and animals. I’m sure that you all know already what my story is about, but do you really know what it is that we are up against? They say that life is a game and if that is so then we’re rolling the dice against forces and consequences infinitely more powerful than us and lady luck isn’t on our side. I spent some time researching this tale and by the end of each day I put down my books in a state of depression at the utter hopelessness of our situation. I came to the conclusion that if this were a game then its name is Russian roulette and we’re going to be the ones who get the loaded barrel. But just in case you don’t know why it is that we are responsible for those millions of extinctions then I shall explain to you. Today there are more people on this planet than there ever have been and the number is growing at an alarmingly fast rate. Every child who is born grows up expecting a better, more comfortable and more materialistic life than that of his or her parents, but unfortunately the world can ill afford such luxuries, because these desires almost always involve an increase in greenhouse gas emissions and that is the reason why the people we met on a surf trip to Arctic Norway were anxious with the weather.

Our surf trip didn’t begin at a glacial valley at the end of the Earth, but in the city of Tromso, on the west coast of Norway, home of the most northerly Burger King in the world. Even the temptations of such an obvious symbol of civilisation couldn’t keep us in town though, for way up above us a tight little low pressure was curling across the top of Norway and folding into the Barents Sea and with it, we hoped, it was bringing swell to the surfing worlds least known stretch of water. The Barents Sea squats across the top of Arctic Norway and Russia, but after that its boundaries are a little hard to define. To the north are the floating ice sheets of the North Pole and the Arctic Ocean. To the west is the Atlantic and the warmer currents of the Gulf Stream and to the east the Barents gradually loses its liquid form and turns to an ever shifting, crashing and changing ice pack that works its way across the top of the globe. You would think it would be impossible to surf the Barents Sea, you would expect its high latitude too keep the water totally ice bound year round, but that’s where the Gulf Stream we spoke of earlier comes into play. A branch of this warm Caribbean born current chases the tails of the low pressures along the west coast of Norway, over the top and into the Barents and in the process it keeps the waters ice free for much of the year. This same current also helps to generate a predominate wind from the southwest, which the briefest of glances at a map will show you is straight offshore for the Barents Sea coast, and that same current also encourages low pressures to follow it into the Barents and when that happens, as it does on a regular basis, north swells are created and the results break perfectly on a myriad of beaches, points and reefs that remain completely untouched by surfers.

This last fact was a point we didn’t know to be true on the day we left Tromso, but even if we hadn’t found waves and the three day journey to the Barents Sea had turned out to be futile from a surfers point of view then no normal human being with a normal love of the diversity and beauty of our planet would ever manage to call the journey itself futile. We were inside the Arctic of my imagination, a frozen desert of largely lifeless, featureless tundra coated in snow drifts that glowed ice blue in a wispy northern light. It was frighteningly barren and beautifully inspiring, but above all that blank scenery it was the sense of being on another planet altogether that sits strongest in my recollections. In the temperate zones to the south, where most of us live, we have people, features and places surrounding us in all directions of the compass and time and light govern every move in our lives. We sleep in the darkness and eat in the brightness, but up here everything we call familiar is in one direction only and time becomes irrelevant in a land of twenty-four hour nights and twenty-four hour days. To sleep at three in the afternoon is no different than playing games at three in the morning for outside the window nothing has changed.

We though were not here to sleep or to play games, we had come for waves and after three days we found a frozen glacial valley at the mouth of which sat a sandy beach full of lively waves springing up across its length. On one wave I pulled into a tube and found myself surrounded by water with a cold blue glow that left me feeling as if I were captured inside an ice-berg. When the swell grew bigger further Arctic barrels appeared at the foot of desolate headlands and rocky pinnacles and it could truly be said that, for those who are unafraid of the cold, we had stumbled across a surfer’s winter wonderland. But remember that we were lucky, we were here in an unusually warm winter period and that maybe it’s normally too cold to enjoy these waves, but could you really call it that? Was lady luck really smiling on us or were we actually being handed a loaded gun in the game of Russian roulette that the human species is playing with the environment?

With the loaded pistol pointing at our heads, we spin the barrel of the gun and reach the crux of my story. I will not try anything fancy here, I will not make any attempt to weave my tale around what I am about to tell you for that shall just diminish the power of shock. Instead read these facts in their simplicity and do not dare too brush them aside.

In the 20th century the world warmed on average by 0.6ºC with the ‘90’s being the warmest decade worldwide on record. In the entire history of humanity on our planet the average global temperature has varied by less than 1ºC, but the IPCC, (UN sponsored intergovernmental panel on climate change), predicts that by the end of this century the temperature will have risen worldwide by an average of between 1.4ºC and 5.8ºC. Never, in the entire three and a half billion years since our planet was born, have average temperatures risen so dramatically and so quickly. The Arctic and various desert regions of Africa and Asia will see the temperature rise this century faster and higher than any other region on earth. These temperature increases will melt the polar ice-caps and send ocean levels rising, this is a process that has already begun, with the Arctic sea ice having shrunk by 40% in recent decades and there are fears that by the year 2060 there may be no summer ice at all anywhere in the Arctic. During the 20th century world wide ocean levels rose by 10-20cm and are predicted to rise by up to a further 88cm this century. Average temperatures in Greenland are expected to rise by 8ºC in just three hundred and fifty years which will cause the entire Greenland ice-sheet to melt in less than a thousand years and in the process send world wide sea levels rising by a further seven metres. CO² levels in the atmosphere, one of the main causes of global warming, have always fluctuated, but since the start of the industrial revolution atmospheric CO² levels have risen by 30% and are now significantly higher, and still rising, than at any time in the past half a million years. And finally, in case you thought you could escape all the destruction on a prefect tropical island, then don’t bother packing a board, because as the temperatures rise it will destroy 97% of the world’s coral reefs and so put an end to the Indonesian wave gardens. Please believe me when I say that this is no longer a story, this is real and this is happening today.

Standing at the waters edge, I suspect that I’m right in saying that we all paused, just for a second or so, to reflect briefly as too not just where exactly on the map we now were, but what it was we had just done, what it was that was unfolding above us and what it was that the future may hold. If ever there was a pause for thought with justification then this was it, for finally we had ridden waves at the mouth of the frozen glacial valley that seemed to mark the very end of the Earth and high up above us, as the dying years light came to an end, a ghostly beam of light scuttled across the northern horizon, morphed itself into a green spirit cloud and the skies started to dance with reds and greens. Progress and science have dissected the Aurora Borealis, a Latin word which translates as the red dawn of the north, into something as banal as solar particles colliding with the gases in the Earth’s atmosphere, but in times of innocence and beauty we had other theories for their creation and meaning. The Danish believed they were due to a flock of swans flying so far north that they were caught in the ice and that each time they flapped their wings they created the reflections that are the northern lights. Native Americans believed they were the reflections of huge fires far to the north, Vikings that they were reflections of dead maidens and the Eskimos believed that they were dead friends trying to contact their living relatives. All believed the lights could be dangerous, even descending from the heavens to behead people, but, most importantly, too all they were a symbol of everything we do not understand and all that we consider beautiful. And in that sense nothing has changed.

Standing at the waters edge, at the mouth of a frozen glacial valley, tired from the waves we had just ridden and with the red dawn of the north moving across the starry sky like a salsa dancer, I suspect that I’m right in saying that we all paused, just for a second or so, to reflect briefly on all that surrounded us. We once lived in a beautiful world but yesterday much of the beauty and variety of our planet stood on the precipice and fell. There have been five mass extinctions since life first appeared on our planet. The last one occurred 65 million years ago after a meteorite slammed into the Earth and altered the climate. The result was not just the extinction of the dinosaurs, but the elimination of 60-70% of all life forms. Yesterday the beauty and variety of our own times fell over the precipice and today we have entered the sixth extinction period, but this one will be more dramatic and change the world in greater ways than the one that transformed the dinosaurs into museum pieces and what is more, it will not take place over a thousand years like the previous one, but it may well have been and gone by the close of the 21st Century. Take a look at the world around you and drink in all of its beauty and diversity for we are the last generation who will see the world as it was meant to be seen. Tomorrow our children and our grandchildren will stand in a frozen glacial valley and, under dancing skies of red and green, they shall pay witness to the end of our Earth.

Thank you to Oceansurf Publications, www.oceansurfpublications.co.uk, C-Skins Wetsuits, www.c-skins.com and Low Pressure, www.lowpressure.co.uk for banishing us to the ends of the Earth. For more information on the mess we have made of our planet see
www.iucn.org
www.zeroextinction.org
www.worldwatch.org
www.panda.org