Scoresby Sound, Greenland – We are at anchor in a deep little bowl near a passing flotilla of icebergs in Scoresby Sound, East Greenland. The expedition vessel, TURMOIL, is on her sixth voyage into Arctic and sub-Arctic waters since being launched in 1996 by its owner, Island Institute member Gary Comer of Somes Sound, Mount Desert Island, by way of Chicago.
In addition to an expert crew to manage the vessel under Captain Philip Walsh, a pair of paleo-climatologists are aboard, George Denton of the Univ-ersity of Maine and Richard Alley of Penn State. Alley’s specialty is reconstructing past climates from intensive study of the Greenland ice core that he helped drill a decade or so ago. Denton’s specialty is reconstructing the history of the warming and cooling of the earth from studying glacial features in the field in both polar regions and from New Zealand to Argentina.
Both Denton and Alley have helped pioneer the new theory of abrupt climate change that says the earth has repeatedly warmed and cooled not gradually but very quickly when the earth was either entering a new Ice Age or coming out of an old one. In other words, according to this new school of climatic thinkers, the earth’s climate acts like some huge switch that gets turned on and off – where the globe rapidly heats up or cools off, not gradually, as previously believed over long periods of geologic time, but very quickly, sometimes in a matter of a few years or a few decades.
Both Denton and Alley and their like-minded colleagues passionately want to understand climate change in order to contribute to the debate over whether the earth is actually beginning to warm up quickly as many believe, as greenhouse gases continue to build in the atmosphere trapping heat. Or, wonder others like Bob Gagosian, head of Woods Hole Oceanographic, is the earth about to be thrust into a new Ice Age, because the circulation of the North Atlantic could slow down from fresh water melting at the pole and change the direction of the Gulf Stream? A debate with mutually opposed outcomes might seem less like science to some and more like science fiction – especially considering its chief adherents are no more certain than Robert Frost whether we are at greater risk of perishing by fire or ice. Nevertheless, the disturbing recent information from the Greenland ice cores, as well as now a host of corroborating scientific evidence from tree rings, sediment cores, geological mapping and isotopic analysis, all appear to show stark new evidence of repeated spiking in the climatic record, both up and down, as the earth changes phases from a warm state to a cold state.
Gary Comer’s role in all of this is to provide an exquisite but highly utilitarian platform for scientific exploration in remote Arctic regions and to be an attentive student at his own University of TURMOIL. The University is a 151-foot ship equipped with a pair of small inflatable boats on the foredeck for field investigations ashore and a Cessna 208 Caravan on amphibious floats that can survey a 10,000-foot-high East Greenland glacier and then land at its base to examine one of its progeny of massive icebergs, just calved from an active face in the fjord below.
An entrepreneurial business leader who recently sold his company, Lands End, Gary Comer is unquestionably the leading private investor in climate change research. For most of his life when he wasn’t selling clothing or other outdoor products to people like you and me, Gary Comer has been a sailor. First from dinghies in parks on the South Side of Chicago where he grew up, then from a public landing at the foot of Lake Michigan, and later in the Atlantic and Pacific in increasingly larger and more seaworthy vessels all named TURMOIL. Comer’s present iteration of TURMOIL has a cruising range of 10,000 miles and fresh water making capability and thus can voyage to any ocean of the world and remain almost totally self contained.
In August of 2001 when the Arctic ice sheet melted and temporarily retreated to a distant northern limit, Comer became one of the few mariners to cross the Northwest Passage from Greenland to Alaska, in TURMOIL. There he witnessed the staggering changes the sudden warming of the Arctic has wrought in the landscape and in small communities around its margins. And the very next month along with all the rest of us, Comer witnessed one of the most tragic corollaries of our dependence on fossil fuels from the Middle East. Ever since, he began to think seriously about how he might help raise public interest in understanding climate change, just as our national policy appeared to be headed in the opposite direction. He has established a program to fund a team of 24 leading inter-disciplinary scientists, each of whom acts as a mentor for two fellowships funded for doctoral and post-doctoral students in the emerging field of climate change across the globe, thereby almost single handedly revolutionizing the prospect for those entering this new discipline.
My role in all this is to contribute general natural history observations, and to hunt and peck through the expedition in order to provide something of a narrative record of this and previous expeditions in which I have been privileged to participate. What these voyages will do for remaking national policy is too desperate a guess to know, but whatever happens, I keep learning how the small island communities of Maine are integrally interconnected with the currents of the North Atlantic, which are integrally connected to global ocean currents, which are also integrally connected to atmospheric circulation over the world’s oceans. And I bring back word to the Maine coast and its islands of how our northern cousins are trying to weather the abrupt changes in their world and whether we, too, will have to adapt.
– Philip W. Conkling
August 19, 2003