The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013

Siddhartha Mukherjee, Tim Folger, Siddhartha Mukherjee, Tim Folger

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780544003484
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Essays on Science
• Index: Biological Sciences

Twenty-seven of America's best science and nature essays of 2013, selected by the author of The Emperor of All Maladies and the #1 New York Times bestseller, The Gene. Pulitzer Prize–winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee, a leading cancer physician and researcher, selects the year's top science and nature writing from journalists who dive into their fields with curiosity and passion, delivering must-read articles from a wide array of fields. The Best American Science & Nature Writing 2013 includes: "The T-Cell Army" by Jerome Groopman
"The Artificial Leaf" by David Owen
"The Life of Pi, and Other Infinities" by Natalie Angier
"Altered States" by Oliver Sacks
"Recall of the Wild" by Elizabeth Kolbert
"Super Humanity" by Robert M. Sapolsky
"Can a Jellyfish Unlock the Secret of Immortality?" by Nathaniel Rich Contributors also include:
J.B. Mackinnon · Benjamin Hale · Tim Zimmermann · David Deutsch and Artur Ekert · Michael Moyer · Sylvia A.Earle · John Pavlus · Michelle Nijhuis · Rick Bass · Michael Specter · Alan Lightman · David Quammen · Keith Gessen · Steven Weinberg · Gareth Cook · Katherine Harmon · Stephen Marche · Mark Bowden · Kevin Dutton

KEITH GESSEN
Polar Express

FROM The New Yorker

THE ICE-CLASS BULK carrier Nordic Odyssey docked at the port of Murmansk, Russia, just after six in the morning on July 5, 2012. It had a green deck and a red hull, and was 738 feet long, 105 feet wide, and 120 feet from top to bottom; empty, it weighed 14,000 tons. It was an eighty-story building turned on its side and made to float. The Odyssey had come to pick up 65,000 tons of iron ore and take it to China via the Northern Sea Route—through the ice of the Arctic seas and then down through the Bering Strait.

Murmansk, which rises along one bank of a fjord thirty miles south of the Barents Sea, is the world’s largest city north of the Arctic Circle, and yet as soon as a visitor got past harbor security at the gate, the city disappeared. The pier was covered by huge mounds of coal and iron ore. Train cars kept pulling in with more; tall yellow cranes dipped into them and deposited the ore onto the mounds, and then the train cars pulled out again. It was as if Russia were coughing up her insides. The cranes’ grabs could barely squeeze into the railcars. The deep, rumbling sounds of steel on steel echoed in the quiet of the fjord.

The Odyssey is owned by a Danish shipping company called Nordic Bulk. In 2010 the company was asked to get a load of ore from Norway to China. The normal route would be either south through the Suez Canal or even farther south, around the Cape of Good Hope, but the Suez route would take you by the coast of Somalia, home to the world’s most enterprising pirates, and the Cape Hope route would take too long. Mads Petersen, the cochairman of Nordic Bulk, wondered if there was another way. As it happened, the shortest route from Norway to China was through the Arctic. “And I thought, Maybe the Northern Sea Route has opened up, because of global warming,” Petersen said, recounting his thought process two years later in Murmansk. He is just past thirty, gregarious, and big—six-foot-two and 260 pounds. I said, “You started going to the Arctic because you read an article about global warming?”

Petersen shook his head. “In Denmark, you do not ‘read an article’ about global warming,” he said. “You hear about it, all the time.”

Petersen contacted Rosatomflot, the state company that owns Russia’s six nuclear icebreakers (the largest such fleet in the world), and made a deal to send his cargo through the Arctic with an icebreaker escort. The price was $300,000, but the projected savings in fuel and time would make up for it and then some. Moreover, it was an adventure, and it even had a patriotic appeal. Vitus Bering, the man who in 1728 discovered the strait between Russia and America, was a Dane.

While in port, the Odyssey was less an intrepid ship and more of a floating warehouse. A metal gangway connected it to the pier and was watched at all hours by two members of the crew. It was important that nothing extra be allowed to get on board (drugs, for example, or tanks) but that all the proper things (maps, food, cigarettes) did. Most important of all was the iron ore. It had to be loaded as efficiently as possible in the ship’s seven deep cargo holds, but also as evenly as possible: nothing can take a ship down faster than its cargo, improperly loaded. There was also the depth of the water to keep in mind. Fully loaded, the Odyssey would have a draft—the plumb distance from the waterline to the keel—of 43 feet; at the pier, the water at low tide was 42 feet. Thus the ship had to load up at high tide and then leave.

Petersen spent two days in Murmansk and then flew back to Copenhagen. The responsibility for loading the Odyssey fell on its chief mate, Vadim Zakharchenko. He was a short, broad-shouldered man with red hair and freckles; in his dark jumpsuit, he resembled a small bear. A native of the old port city of Odessa, he spoke Russian with a surprising Yiddish lilt—a legacy, he said, of his many Jewish classmates. On the early morning of July 9, the Odyssey’s last day in port, he was in a foul mood. The stevedores had told him that they weren’t going to get to 65,000 tons of iron ore in time. In fact, Zakharchenko reported to Igor Shkrebko, the captain of the Odyssey, “They say we’ll be lucky to reach sixty-four.” At current shipping prices, a thousand fewer tons would put Nordic Bulk down between $20,000 and $30,000: an inauspicious start to the trip.

The captain was a tall, thin man, still youthful in his midforties, with curly, graying hair and black eyes. During the stay at Murmansk, his young wife had come up from their hometown of Sevastopol to visit; while most of the crew stayed on board, the Shkrebkos had walked around town and taken lots of photographs. In any case, cargo loading was the chief mate’s job. “Akh!” Zakharchenko finally said. “They’ll throw what they throw!”

For the rest of the morning, he scampered among the cranes and dockworkers, balancing two conflicting imperatives: that the cranes load the ship at record speed and that the hills of iron ore remain evenly distributed throughout the holds. The tall yellow cranes worked with urgency, picking up 6 or 7 tons of ore from the mounds piled on the dock, swinging over the cargo holds, then releasing the ore with a swoosh. As a light rain began to fall, Zakharchenko several times climbed down a rope ladder to the lee side of the ship to check how far it had descended into the water. Each centimeter represented 67 tons; incredibly, this was the only way to measure how much ore the Odyssey had taken on.

High tide was at noon, and the ship could not stay at the pier any longer. At eleven-thirty the cranes stopped loading, and fifteen minutes later all was done. According to an eyeball measurement of the ship’s displacement, taken by both Zakharchenko and a surveyor hired by the Russian company that was shipping the ore, and a somewhat hurried calculation of the water density in the harbor, the Odyssey was now filled with 67,519 tons of ore: 2,500 tons more than the target. The stevedores had underestimated themselves. Those stevedores now ran down to the dock and removed the ship’s thick ropes from the bollards; then three small tugboats came alongside the Odyssey, two to push and one to pull the ship into the harbor. That night, as the sun dipped toward the horizon (though it would not set), we entered the Barents Sea. You could tell it was the sea because right away our ship, despite now weighing more than 80,000 tons, started listing from side to side atop the waves.

Ahead of us, to the north and to the east, the ice was melting. This was normal. At its maximum extent, in mid-March, the ice covers the entire Arctic Ocean and most of its marginal seas for about 15 million square kilometers, twice the land area of the continental United States. During its minimum extent, around mid-September, the ice cover traditionally shrinks to about half this size.

In recent years, it has been shrinking by much more than half. In September 2007, the ice shrank to 4.3 million square kilometers, the lowest extent in recorded history. In subsequent years, it reached its second-, third-, and fourth-lowest-ever extents. The thickness of the ice—more difficult to measure but also more telling—is also decreasing, from an average thickness of 12 feet in 1980 to half that two decades later. The primary cause of this decline is warmer air temperature in the Arctic, an area that has been more affected by global warming than any other place on Earth.

The estimates vary, but scientists agree that at some point in this century the minimum extent, at the end of the summer season, will reach zero. At that point you’ll be able to cross the North Pole in a canoe. But it won’t be just you and your canoe, because the resource grabs have already begun. Denmark and Canada are engaged in a territorial dispute over Hans Island, which a recent congressional research report describes as a “tiny, barren piece of rock” between Greenland and Canada’s Ellesmere Island, because territorial claims will lead to resource rights. Similarly, Russia has filed a claim with the United Nations that the Lomonosov Ridge, which spans the Arctic underwater from the coast of Siberia to Ellesmere Island, gives Russia rights to the sea above it, including the North Pole. All this is being done in anticipation of a thaw. Oil companies, armed with new technology and lured by less menacing winter conditions, will be able to establish drilling platforms in latitudes that were previously off-limits, and shipping companies will be able to save time and money through the Arctic shortcut. Shell has already announced plans to begin drilling exploratory wells off northern Alaska. Last year, Rosneft, Russia’s biggest oil company, signed a joint-venture agreement with ExxonMobil to proceed with oil exploration in the Kara Sea—once called Mare Glaciale, the “ice sea.” Meanwhile, the Odyssey’s trip was a test case for the proposition that the Northern Sea Route, formerly known as the Northeast Passage, could be reliably traversed.

The water of the Barents was a handsome dark blue, the sky was clear, and the temperature outside, though gradually dropping, was a balmy 50 degrees. Captain Shkrebko set our heading east for the southern tip of the archipelago Novaya Zemlya; this put the ship at a better angle to the waves, and it stopped rocking. We were proceeding at an unimpressive speed, 13 knots, but then again we never stopped. Three bridge crews of two men each, an officer and an able seaman, carried out four-hour shifts throughout the day and night.

The Odyssey had a permanent complement of just twenty-three men. The senior officers—captain, chief engineer, chief mate—were Ukrainian, as were the electrician and the second engineer; the rest of the crew was Filipino. The Ukrainians spoke Russian among themselves, while the Filipinos spoke Tagalog. Across the cultures, they spoke a rudimentary marine English. Otherwise, their contacts were limited. In addition to this permanent crew, there was a Russian “ice adviser,” or pilot, named Eduard Cherepanov, who had been sailing these waters for almost twenty years.

Relations aboard the Odyssey were hierarchical and traditional. The captain, a native of the old naval city of Sevastopol, was the absolute authority. He was therefore a little isolated socially from the crew and seemed grateful for the presence of Cherepanov, who had served as a captain and was therefore his social equal and, more important, not someone with whom discipline needed to be maintained.

The chief mate, Zakharchenko, occupied an ambiguous position. On the one hand, he was in charge of much of the day-to-day operation of the ship, and he was the only one on board who knew as much about ships and the sea as the captain. On the other hand, he was entirely at the mercy of the captain, not only on the ship but professionally: because the chief mate has no independent contact with the home office, the only way he’ll ever get a captaincy is if he’s actively promoted by his captain. Zakharchenko was a soft touch. He tried to present a stern face to the crew, but he stuttered when he was nervous, and when he wasn’t nervous he couldn’t help but make a joke of some kind. As he liked to say, “Am I from Odessa or not?”

The two most senior Filipino crew members were Felimon Recana, the second mate, and Eliseo Carpon, the third mate. Both men were in their fifties, almost a decade older than Captain Shkrebko and Zakharchenko. The second mate was handsome and sarcastic, a born cynic; the third mate was gregarious and enthusiastic. I once saw him jump up and cry “Yes!” after winning a game of Spider Solitaire on the computer in the crew rec room.

Life on board the ship is mostly confined to the “accommodation,” a yellow, five-story metal building that rises from the stern. The bridge is on the top floor; the bottom floor contains locker rooms for the men as they prepare to go on deck. The men’s living quarters are spread through the second, third, and fourth floors. Each man has his own cabin, about the size of a college dorm room, with a small bathroom and shower. Everything is secured so that it doesn’t go flying around the room during a storm. This battening down takes some getting used to. It’s easy enough to understand why the mini-fridge is strapped to a hook in the wall and the back of the bathroom mirror has little compartments for your toothbrush and shaving cream, but it took me almost a week to realize that the drawers under my bed, which wouldn’t open when I tried them, were not ornamental, as I’d decided, but just extremely sticky. I was able to move my clothes out of my desk.

Most of the men were on six-month contracts, with monthly pay ranging from $1,100 for the mess boys to around $10,000 for the captain and the chief engineer—pretty good money in the Philippines and Ukraine. The contract is the standard unit of experience in the trade; one says “my last contract” rather than “my last ship.” A six-month contract may include as few as ten port calls and as many as several dozen. These reprieves are short, and growing ever shorter as improved port technology gets ships in and out faster, but the men are grateful for them and can recite the price of girls in many ports across the world. The crew members had all received phone calls from their crewing agency in early April and had taken over the ship from its previous crew at the Irish port of Aughinish in mid-May. So far they’d brought soybeans from Quebec to Hamburg and coal from Latvia to Antwerp. None of them had been through the Arctic before.

To be aboard a ship is to be constantly aware of everything that can go wrong. A ship can run into another ship—hard to believe when you look at how wide the ocean is, a little easier to believe once you consider that it takes the Odyssey almost two miles to come to a complete stop. A ship can be overtaken by pirates: Captain Shkrebko narrowly escaped pirates in the Gulf of Aden in 2007 (he was saved when an American military helicopter responded to his distress call), while the Odyssey’s fourth engineer was on a ship that was hijacked off the coast of Kenya in late 2009 and held hostage for forty-three days. A ship can be compromised by its cargo, which may shift, forcing the ship off balance, or create other problems—Zakharchenko had with him an alarming color brochure called “How to Monitor Coal Cargoes from Indonesia,” which warned that Indonesian coal had a tendency to catch on fire. The Odyssey’s electrician, Dmitry Yemalienenko, had a short cell-phone video of a ship listing very hard to starboard in the Black Sea; it was carrying plywood, which had shifted en route. “Then what happened?” I asked.

“It sank,” Yemalienenko said.

Then there was the danger of running into something beneath the waterline. To avoid this, the ship carried a full set of hydrographic charts, most of them from the British Admiralty. But the charts are never complete, and the telex machine on the bridge kept up a steady patter of warnings. When we headed out into the Barents, there was a broken signal at 69°40'N, 32°09'E, a shipwreck at 69°52', 35°16', nighttime artillery fire at 70°15', 33°38', plus some fishing nets.

Finally, there is the ice. The books on the bridge of the Odyssey—arranged on shelves behind the navigation table, with little wood braces to keep them from falling out in heavy seas—were all in agreement on the subject of the ice. “It is very easy and extremely dangerous to underestimate the hardness of ice,” The Mariner’s Handbook cautioned. “Ice fields consisting of thick broken floes, especially those that bear signs of erosion by the sea on their upper surface, should be avoided . . . Do not enter ice if a longer but ice-free route is available.” The Guide to Navigating Through the Northern Sea Route, published in English in 1996 by the Russian Ministry of Defense, put the matter more dramatically: “Any attempt at independent, at vessel’s own risk, transiting the NSR, without possessing and using full information, and without using all means of support, is doomed to failure.”

This seemed harsh. But the ice-strengthened cruise ship Explorer sank off the coast of Antarctica in 2007 after hitting ice. The shrimp trawler BCM Atlantic sank near Labrador after hitting ice in 2000. Were the Odyssey to start sinking, there was a free-fall lifeboat hanging three stories up and at a 45-degree angle from the stern, but Vadim Zakharchenko said he would rather drown; the boat is raised so far up that its impact against the water could knock out your teeth.

Seamen don’t like to talk about the things that can go wrong at sea, but they love to talk about the things that go wrong on land. As we approached Novaya Zemlya, the Ukrainians started joking about radioactivity. The Soviets had turned Novaya Zemlya into a nuclear-testing site; while they were at it, they used the coast around it as a dumping ground for reactors from decommissioned nuclear submarines. The largest nuclear bomb in history, the Tsar Bomba, had been detonated here in 1961. “Chernobyl is nothing compared to this!” Vadim announced.

On the evening of July 11, we entered a thirty-mile-wide strait between the southern end of Novaya Zemlya and Vaygach Island, at the entrance to the Kara Sea. The southern portion of the Barents that we had just been through is open to warm Gulf Stream currents, and it’s rarely frozen even in winter. The Kara Sea is a different story. For years, no one could penetrate it. In the 1590s the Dutch explorer Willem Barents was repeatedly foiled by the ice at the Kara Gates and decided at last to head north and seek a way around Novaya Zemlya. This was not a good idea. His ship became trapped in ice, and the crew was forced to abandon it and spend the winter on land. One evening in October, the sun set and did not come back up again for three months. The men battled cold, scurvy, and hungry polar bears. “In Nova Zembla,” the chronicler of the journey wrote, “there groweth neither leaves nor grasse, nor any beasts that eate grasse or leaves live therein, but such beasts as eate fleshe, as bears and foxes.” When the warm weather came, in June, the crew headed for the Russian mainland. Some survived; Barents died of scurvy on the way.

The failed Barents expedition took place during the late-sixteenth-century Dutch ascendancy on the seas. It followed failed English attempts to traverse the passage earlier in the century and preceded some failed Russian ones. To be fair to these early explorers, their boats were made of wood, their maps were wildly inaccurate, they didn’t know what a vitamin was, and they had no satellites to help them navigate the ice. Instructions from the London-based Russia Company to its early employees were notably vague: “And when you come to Vaygach, we would have you to get sight of the maine land . . . which is over against the south part of the same island, and from thence, with Gods permission, to passe eastwards alongst the same coasts, keeping it alwayes in your sight . . . untill you come to the country of Cathay, or the dominion of that mightie emperour.” This was the state of the art in 1580. The dream was to reach China and its untold riches. But after enough men had disappeared into the ice never to return, the Dutch and the English decided it would be easier to go to war with Spain and Portugal for the right to use the route around the south of Africa; the Arctic, for a while, was forgotten.

For the next 950 miles, the Russian mainland stretched upward into the Arctic, forcing us to head northeast through the Kara Sea. Only when we reached Cape Chelyuskin, at almost 78 degrees N the northernmost point in Asia, could we turn southeast. And the farther north we got, the colder it became. Out on deck, though the temperature was still above freezing, a chill northerly wind blew in our faces.

On the morning of July 13, we crossed the 75th parallel; we had passed by the Yamal Peninsula, home to most of Russia’s natural gas, and the mighty Ob and Yenisey Rivers. In recent years these rivers have been discharging more fresh water into the Arctic seas, as warmer temperatures increase overall precipitation in the Arctic water basin. Scientists anticipate that there will soon be more soil in the water, as the permafrost layer underground melts and the riverbanks begin to slide down. The Kara Sea was clear and cool, the air temperature 39 degrees, the water temperature 41; not swimming weather, but nothing to make ice from, either.

Late in the morning, we entered a stretch of fog. We could see as far as the bow of the ship and not an inch farther. The captain turned on our foghorn. It emitted a deep, loud wail every two minutes, to let anyone in front of us know that we were coming. But the ice pilot thought this precaution was goofy. “We don’t really need that thing, you know,” he said to the captain. “There’s no one else out here.” He was right. Th...