Icemelt

The Weather Where We Are: the Arctic

(from this fall’s issue of Granta, by Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, who often visits the far North)

       The Arctic is an unbelievable region of the earth: strikingly beautiful if you like gigantic skies, enormous landforms, tiny flowers, amazing colors, strange light effects. It’s also a region that allows scant margins of error. Fall into the ocean and wait a few minutes, and you’re dead. Make a mistake with a walrus or a bear, same result. Make the wrong wardrobe choice, same result again. Melt the Arctic ice, and what follows? No second chances for some time.
     You could write a science fiction novel about it, except that it wouldn’t be science fiction. You could call it Icemelt. Suddenly there are no more small organisms, thus no fish up there, thus no seals. That wouldn’t affect the average urban condo dweller much. The rising water levels from–say–the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps would get attention–no more Long Island or Florida, no more Bangladesh, and quite a few islands would disappear–but people could just migrate, couldn’t they? Still no huge cause for alarm unless you own a lot of shore-front real estate.
    But wait: there’s ice under the earth, as well as on top of the sea. It’s the permafrost, under the tundra. There’s a lot of it, and a lot of tundra as well. Once the permafrost starts to melt, the peat on the tundra–thousands of years of stockpiled organic matter– will start to break down, releasing huge quantities of methane gas. Up goes the air temperature, down goes the oxygen ratio. How long will it take before we all choke and boil to death?
    it’s hard to write fiction around such scenarios. Fiction is always about people, and to some extent the form determines the outcome of the plot. We always imagine–perhaps we’re hard-wired to imagine–a survivor of any possible catastrophe, someone who lives to tell the tale, and also someone to whom the tale can be told. What kind of story would it be with the entire human race gasping to death like beached fish?
    What kind of story, indeed? And who wants to hear it?