Wandering and sailing from outcrop to outcrop, immersed in the grandeur of that wilderness forces daily life to become a practice in humility. Time fractures, languishing in some backwater of perception. Viewing ice, somnambulant fjord waters, rocky defiles, and tundra plains becomes a repeated experience of confronting the incomprehensible, each thing expressing a subtle essence of existence that can be known only by being present. The gulf that exists between the prejudiced expectations derived from urban life and the bedrock purity of that wild landscape is nearly unbridgeable. The feeling that I have become alienated from, and ignorant of, such purity is inescapable and devastating.
I now understand that wilderness is as much story as it is place. Untouched lands provide inspiration and nourish our imagination with mysteries and connections impossible to conceive anywhere else. The depth of their richness, the complexity of their structure are beyond common experience. Wilderness is the primordial heart of what we conceive of as soul, and as a consequence, it must be accepted as a version of home. For me, Greenland has been the landscape that embodies that lesson. Ironically, perhaps, it was the pursuit of quantitative, objective observations that exposed the emotional truths contained in wild places.
THE WORD wilderness derives from the Old English word wildēornes,* meaning “the place where only wild animals live.” Implicitly, that word also defines the place where human existence is inherently a struggle. It is the land in which it is not easy to settle, to farm, raise families, or enjoy an evening with friends. Wild places where only animals live are the frontiers, the lands through which humans may have wandered, but within which living is likely to fail. Wilderness is not welcoming. It is the place where humans may be prey.
Once, wilderness was everywhere, an ambience for wandering humanity from the time of our origins. Many languages have no word for wilderness because it simply was the context of existence—naming it was unnecessary. Now, we are no longer wanderers—over the last thousand years we have started naming wilderness because it is almost gone. We have flowed over the surface of the planet like a massive tsunami, inundating the world with more and more beings while pushing to the fringes any possibility of the experience of deep wilderness. Within thirty-five years, the population of the planet will grow from over seven billion people to more than ten. As it does so, wilderness will passively retreat, taking with it the only opportunity we have to know our true origins. Without immediate contact with the offerings of wild lands, we lose the world that is the foil for humanity. Tragically, we barely notice, even when it is obvious. I give testimony to this fact—I was an unintentional witness to a relict of this loss.
One evening, while Kai cooked and John refined his notes, I walked along the shore north of our little camp, seeking a quiet place to reflect on the day. I hiked over a low ridge and found an unexpected, modest bay. The tide was low; small waves lightly lapped far out at its mouth. I went down to the narrow beach, where the most minuscule of slow-moving ripples, descendants of the little waves farther out, migrated across the watery membrane that rested on the succulent bay muds. Icebergs floated in the fjord waters farther out. The pinkish gray light of the dappled cloud underbellies reflected off the water skin that barely submerged the sediments. What little drama there was, the mind created in imagined eyes and stalking creatures hidden in the black shadows cast by hundreds of boulders—a few inches to several feet in diameter—that were scattered on the exposed floor of the bay. For many long moments, I calmly drank in the lush scene. But slowly, something incongruous began to disturb the moment—something below the surface of what I chose to see. As I focused on the boulders, I saw one that, oddly, had a small tundra hummock, delicately balanced, resting on its top. The small layer, a few feet thick, flat-topped, with tall grasses growing from it, looked as though someone had delicately placed it there. Trying to make sense of it, I then noticed that every boulder above a certain size had an exact duplicate of that little tundra mound. The flat top of every tundra cap was at exactly the same elevation.
Stunned, I realized each tuft was an erosional remnant of a tundra plain that had, in the very recent past, reached as far out as the edge of the bay. But rising sea level had eaten away at the delicate vestiges of the plant remains and the boundary that once defined a land—tide harmony. The edge of wilderness, offering little resistance, was silently retreating into a new future we unknowingly are shaping.
When wilderness is gone, even that which is responding naturally to climate change forces, all that will remain are memories and impressions of its textures and forms, its silences and screams, its smells and tastes. We will have lost the only reference point we have for the significance of mind in the universe.
As days went by while I camped with John and Kai in the wilderness of West Greenland, the noise of cities receded into dim memories, and self became a part of the landscape. Boundaries dissolved between what is external and what is internal to the soul. Who and what we individually are became a shared question with how Earth had evolved. What we scientists went there to study and resolve melted into the background of an incandescent experience of place.
* M. Rosing, et al. 2006. The rise of continents—an essay on the geologic consequences of photosynthesis. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 232:99–113.
* The pronunciation of the word is unclear, given that the language has not been commonly spoken for nearly 900 years. It is believed by some that it would be recognizable if spoken to modern English speakers.
Greenland, ice thickness and land areas (dark gray). The boxed region encloses our research area.
Research area. The dashed line marks the edge of the inland ice sheet.
ONE OF THE MOST EXTENSIVE, continuous wilderness regions on Earth, Greenland remains largely submerged by ice. In the area not ice-covered, the landscape materializes as experience, not place. Boundaries, whether real or imagined, named or anonymous, dissolve into opportunities. Senses become remarkably acute, sharpened by the raw purity of what it means to be wild. Greenland is a place of surfaces so rich with history that simply setting foot on them seems to clarify reality.
The objective meaning of Greenland, expressed as simple facts, deserves consideration. That land of rock-fringed ice, if laid onto western North America, would extend beyond the northern and southern borders of the United States, and stretch from San Francisco nearly to Denver. More than 80 percent is buried under the only permanent ice sheet in the northern hemisphere. At its thickest, the ice is more than ten thousand feet deep and holds more than 10 percent of the world’s freshwater. The summit of the ice cap is over twelve thousand feet above sea level.
More than half of Greenland extends above the Arctic Circle. It was the last settled major landmass on the planet, its first population reaching it about 4,500 years ago. It holds the distinction of being the least-populated region in the world, and is the only nation listed in the World Bank database with a value of zero people per square kilometer (the database presents all statistics as whole numbers). That same metric for the United States is 35 people per square kilometer; for the United Kingdom it is 265. Most of its fewer than sixty thousand permanent residents identify as members of the Inuit culture. The largest town is Nuuk, with 16,500 people.