Landscape of Devon Island, the world’s largest uninhabited island, in the High Arctic.Sam Anderson/The Globe and Mail
Sam Anderson is a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Environmental Science at Simon Fraser University, and is writing a book about climate extremes in western North America.
On a Saturday in mid-July, I saw my first iceberg. The engine of the Twin Otter airplane roared even through my earplugs as it emerged: a single, shining sentinel of unknowable size floating amidst a dark navy ocean. The wind howled in our small four-seater cabin; we dipped below the clouds, and a rocky strip of earth became our make-do runway. Touchdown on Devon Island.
I was one of a dozen scientists here, in northern Nunavut on the world’s largest uninhabited island, grateful for the permission of the Inuit people of the Qikiqtaaluk region to research the ways that ice and water form landscapes in cold but rapidly warming places. The island’s geology and geography are particularly resistant to life; relative to islands further north that are even colder and even more climatologically severe, the interior of Devon Island is unique in that its surface is uncovered and unhidden by soils or grasses or shrubs. I saw a bird, once, and we talked about it at dinner.
But Devon isn’t barren – it’s an eruption of a landscape, with surface features that are complex and overlapping. Thawing permafrost slumps onto sedimentary fans that cover ancient terraces beside a riverbed that flows through the heart of a 30-million year old crater. Rome is famously a city of layers, with 3,000 years of construction and renovation and overlaid history; Devon is an island of layers, our tents pitched in a crater a thousand times older than Rome.
Devon Island's thawing permafrost slumps onto sedimentary fans that cover ancient terraces beside a riverbed that flows through the heart of a 30-million year old crater.Sam Anderson/The Globe and Mail
These layers of Devon are sliced open by long and frigid winters, when temperatures are so cold that the ground can physically contract with enough force that it simply breaks. The resulting fractures can grow into what are called polygons: like the shapes you see in dried mud, these cracks connect with one another into hexagonal or rectangular troughs that pierce permafrost and pattern the island, with some polygons the size of city buses. The average annual temperature of the nearby Inuit hamlet of Resolute, Nunavut, is approximately -15 C, but average conditions aren’t responsible for polygons. It’s the extremes that leave scars.
Though the polar desert is typically dry, we visited Devon during an unseasonably long period of wetness: clouds, rain, snow, wind. On the fourth day, I woke up to a sheet of ice that had formed on the outside of my tent, and it broke like glass when I stepped outside, ice pellets flying sideways and peppering me in the wind. On the eighth day, the sun emerged for just 15 minutes, and we stopped to take pictures of a landscape that, for the first time to our eyes, cast shadows.
The days of rain and snow changed the landscape as the moisture settled in: streams rose and braided; shores softened and turned terraces to quicksand that grabbed and pulled at our feet and then shins and then thighs. A vast network of shallow ponds emerged where water filled and spilled from the polygons’ fractures, forming a sprawling wetland across expansive plateaus. The polygon troughs became flowing, water-filled channels that were actively eroding, transporting sediment, and reshaping how the landscape functions.
A range of climate extremes can cascade to do together what neither could do alone: polygons born in extraordinary cold can then reroute remarkable rains and rewire the island’s underlying hydrological circuitry. With sensors in the ground and drones in the sky, we watched, in real time, a landscape shift, functionally altered by the vast gulf of conditions it had lived through. Like human beings, places are revealed and reshaped by the extremes they endure, and Devon Island was showing us the transformations that happen when water falls in the cold and dry polar desert.
I was thawing my hands by our propane stove when I heard the news: the town of Jasper, Alta., was burning. Being in a land of ice, on an island without trees or buildings or people, I had never been further from fire – and I couldn’t grasp it. How could Jasper burn? Jasper is where I first met mountains and began following the glacial streams that led me here, to Devon. Straddling the gulf of extremes between water and fire, with one foot sinking in a soggy bog of thawing permafrost and the other caked in ash, I felt a disorienting dissonance, which followed me home like a ringing in my ears.
The island’s geology and geography are particularly resistant to life; the interior of Devon Island is unique in that its surface is uncovered and unhidden by soils or grasses or shrubs.Sam Anderson/The Globe and Mail
Working in climate science is to be confronted by the contradiction between what societies know and what societies do, even at the best of times. But recent events – with Los Angeles still picking itself up after wildfires and the U.S. pulling out (again) from the Paris Agreement – have cut like a particularly jagged knife. In some ways I feel like I am still wandering Devon, navigating a place torn open and rewired by extremity. In our research we seek to understand where these types of landscapes will go next as climate change shifts and amplifies the extremes they endure. I wonder, too, what will happen to us. I wonder if the extremes in our politics will slash then scar and then fundamentally rewire them to be darker, more violent, more cruel.
On our 10th day on Devon Island I woke up in the middle of the night to a new sensation: sun, streaming through the walls of my tent. Its thin warmth was a welcome relief, and so I stood outside, head tilted to the sky, basking in the late-night light. My friend woke, too, and we couldn’t help but laugh. I don’t know where the chaos of today’s climate and politics will take us. But even when nothing feels quite right, I hope for respites along the way: for moments like these, when I can stand with a friend in the midnight sun.