Free In the Empire of Ice by Gretel Ehrlich

have brought great wealth to the North Slope Borough in Barrow. Drilling on land and sending the oil south through pipelines bother the Alaskan natives less than the idea of the offshore oil drilling being proposed by Shell Oil. These people are maritime hunters, and the impact on marine mammals would be crushing. Oil spills from tankers have shown the world that petroleum extraction is environmentally perilous no matter how you move the crude oil around.
    North of Point Hope, where the Bering Sea meets the Beaufort, Shell Oil has been issued an exploration permit to look for oil using seismic testing that, in itself, endangers bowhead whales, walruses, birds, and fish in those waters. As the pace of global oil grabs accelerates, environmental impacts are seldom thoroughly assessed. Now, after a lawsuit put forward by Earth Justice on behalf of the Inuit hunters of northern Alaska, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has halted Shell Oil. But it is only a delay. It now must decide whether the potential for environmental damage was properly considered by the federal agency, the Department of Interior, when it issued the exploration permit to the oil company.
    “The climate is our biggest problem,” Winton says. He’s aware of some of the complexities of the ocean-atmosphere exchange and its effect on the warming or cooling of the planet. “Maybe whatever we do will be wrong because it’s not been going in a good way for a long time. If it gets hotter, it will be bad; if it got real cold, there would be no cracks in the ice and all the marine mammals would die.”
    He’s been keeping weekly sea-ice observations in an attempt to chart the course of global warming on the Bering Strait. He hands me a sheaf of paper with his writings:
    January 8, 2007: Winds are calm. People reported that they heard the ice piling on the pressure ridges. One resident said he heard it before midnight and it sounded like a jet engine, a continuous loud roar.
    January 10, 2007: Strong storm overnight with winds from the SE gusting to 50 mph. Snow and blowing snow.
    January 12, 2007: Winds decreased to 10 to 15 mph from the SE. The pressure ridges look as if they have been sheared off and a new row of ridges formed closer to shore. Three seals can be seen on top of the smooth ice three-quarters mile from the village.
    January 19, 2007: The winds have been from the NE for four days. There is extensive open water beyond the shore ice.
    January 22, 2007: The pressure ridges along the edge of the shore ice are about a half mile farther out than usual. We have not yet ventured out to the edge to examine their structure. They look fairly high. Hunters usually wait until they are certain that the ice is safe to travel on and will not break off and carry them away. It has changed to a near solid white color, which indicates it is safe enough for travel.
    Winton takes me for a quick drive to the shore on his snowmobile. The frigid air feels good on my face. There are cracks in the ice but no open leads. The sky has cleared, and far out I can see a white wall of pack ice and beyond a vague blue hump that is Little Diomede Island and Siberia—where Winton’s relatives originated thousands of years ago. He says his favorite sound is wind-driven pack ice piling up. I hold my hands behind my ears and listen: Blowing snow scratches, a tilted ramp of ice gives out a hollow crack as the tide goes out, but that’s all. No primordial collisions.
    Ice never sleeps. It has its own life. It is always moving. Maybe our ideas about time and consciousness come from sea ice. The way it piles up, pulls apart, melts, and freezes, spins and splinters into drifting islands carried by tidal currents to Siberia. The way its albedo drives heat away yet also sequesters black soot that causes it to melt and alters what climatologists call the surface energy budget.
    Winton, like all of us, tries to understand exactly what is happening. But if the consensus-driven climate models