Arctic Eyewitness: Back From Ellesmere Island

Photographer Ben Horton, 25, reflects on 60 days spent dogsledding across Ellesmere Island with Will Steger and five other young explorers for Global Warming 101’s second expedition.

Text and photographs by Ben Horton

The contrast of coming home from Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Artic reminds me of a light switch being thrown on in the early morning. The body recoils in sensory overload from the nonstop noise, motion, and the number of unchecked e-mails. I guess it didn’t help that our first real stop was in New York City. While on the expedition, it was normal to ski alongside the dogsleds for 25 kilometers without seeing a single sign of man for days in a row. Now we are forced to confront our “normal” lives, weaving in and out of people on busy sidewalks, crossing car choked streets, and choking on the smog that churns out of them.

I catch myself thinking back to the few times when I wished for the comforts of home. I realize now that I so much prefer to be moving steadily across the ice, chasing the horizon. I miss most the days when we would pick a distant mountain, hardly visible, and then trek steadily onward until we reached it. For me, the repetitive gliding motion of skiing was like being rocked slowly into a trance, my mind was occupied only with monitoring a few simple things, like if the dogs’ lines were tangled, whether or not we were keeping pace with the other two sleds, or pushing and pulling the sled over cracked and broken fields of rough ice churned by the changing tides.

There are a few comforts at my home in Colorado that I am glad for—the darkness that comes with night, seeing the stars, and being able to sleep without shielding my eyes from the 24 hours of sun. All together though, I learned that with a little practice, life in the Arctic soon becomes just as comfortable as life anywhere else. When we finally got our system down, once setting up and taking down camp each day took only a few minutes (and we could do it in the extreme cold without taking off our gloves), there was no real reason to wish for the “comforts” of home...not to mention all of the stresses that come with these comforts....

People constantly are welcoming me back to what they call the “real world,” and I keep wondering, which one is it that’s real? I certainly hope that this was not my last chance to explore the Arctic. Having learned so much about how the Inuit survive up there, about the animals that inhabit it, and about how our lives are so intimately connected to it, I want to keep learning more. There are so many changes taking place at the Poles and so much more to see. Our team saw the collapsed Ayles Ice Shelf, traveled across the ruins of the Polar Ocean, and witnessed a spring that came three weeks early. The Arctic cannot keep changing like this and remain a healthy, productive ecosystem for much longer. Only 20 percent of the “old ice” that has made up the Arctic for as long as we can remember even still exists!

Until recently, the Arctic seemed to be a constant feature of the planet, as immovable as the Himalaya, as much a piece of “land” as the continents themselves. But it is as fragile as it is vital to the health of our planet.

Comments

[Clorinda]

The most important photos and videos of this trip are not of the collapsed ice shelf or of a Polar Bear floating for its life, or even of the native people whose way of life is in jeopardy. The most significant videos and pictures are of the expedition team members, the peace and serenity shining through their faces providing all the proof we need that humans need a natural habitat. Proof that far from luxury and leaving no carbon footprint, these team members found the purest high and happiness from nature, common goals, clean air and water, and social bonding. As we remove ourselves more and more each day from these common needs in favor of demolition, individual success, polluted air and water, and isolation, let's hope that we learn from this trip that we all need natural surroundings to find true peace. Maybe that will inspire us to preserve and to heal our planet before the destruction we have unleashed on the Earth becomes irreversible and disastrous.

In order to prove this point, I would like to suggest that future teams undergo more thorough research and analysis than seeing how long their beards grow. I wish that each of the expedition members had undergone brain scans and neurocognitive analysis both before and immediately after the trip, as well as at 6 months, one year, and perhaps at even longer intervals after returning, also correlated to their varied lives back on separate paths, some with more abundant opportunities than others. Sure, we can all see it in their faces and eyes, but a little documented proof of dopamine, serotonin, and activity levels in various parts of the brain goes a long way. Maybe then we will all realize that we are ruining the one thing that can bring us true peace and happiness, our natural environment.

If we need to feel pain in the exact moment in order to take action, if the promise of devastation in the future is not enough to sway our collective mind, then swing by my corner of the world in Pennsylvania. I live in the sootiest city in America in a county with the highest levels of emphysema and lung disease in the population, and I can't fly away to an island for fresh air. I crave even a cubic meter of the fresh air that this team experienced in the Arctic and do not have time to wait for the final show of the slow change of global warming. Some of us live 15 miles from the largest coke plant in the United States, if not the world, wondering when someone might shut it down so we can all breathe a sigh a relief; wondering why big business has the rights to fill our air space with particles of carbon so tiny that we will never be able to get them out of our lungs. Yes, a global warming threat, but also an immediate threat for those of us living here, without a feasible solution - the particles are so small that a HEPA filter cannot remove them, and any device which could, such as an electrostatic air purifier, would also emit ozone. We sit here like frogs being boiled, not jumping off the burner. We see articles every day and newscasts describing the danger of the air we breathe.

For people on this trek, this becomes a documentary, a witness to destruction that still is not a daily fight for survival in their own lives. When I smell the sickening scent from the coke plant pouring tons of particles into the thick night air outside my window, I know that people here have a very real DEADline to save our own lives.

It doesn't seem like such a bad idea to write that song joked about in the magazine after all. Maybe even a song about my coke plant and the air pollution in this corner of the world. Something catchy that will stay in people's minds and hearts. And when everyone is sitting in their cars in stand-still traffic for 3 hours every day, twice a day to commute, and the melody slowly fades out of the forefronts of our minds while focusing just on the daily routine? Then play it again, Sam.

The sense of loss the team felt upon returning to civilization is something that each of us needs to feel vicariously through them before we have no choice but to feel it viscerally in the very harsh reality of our own lives when global warming catches up to each of us and we can no longer avoid or escape the outcome. We are going to miss it.

I think we all would have wanted to stay and watch the birds of spring as Sigrid mentioned. It certainly must have been difficult to experience the withdrawal from your natural high that comes with rejoining 'the real world'. You can't quit much more cold turkey than arriving in New York City a day after your trip, equivalent to falling off an ice shelf with a thud after being so high on top of the world. I would feel in slow motion while the world moved around me, similar to standing on the North Pole while the world rotated beneath my feet. I know I would be waking up at the first light of civil dawn, chasing down that crosstown bus to the East River to try to catch a glimpse of the sunrise, wandering in stunned disbelief around the streets, perhaps even seeing an image in my mind of a Native American returning from 300 years ago shaking his head also in disbelief at what we have done to these beautiful islands. And finally, I would end my day by watching the masses rush to the Ferries downtown at the tip of Manhattan, a glorious sunset falling on the Hudson directly behind millions of commuters who don't seem to stop and take notice of it at all. Where are they rushing to exactly? We better have the finish line in mind for this rat race because there is something a lot darker at the end than a distant mountain or the horizon. I'm surprised you didn't schedule a few days or weeks of 'rehab' in a less densely populated area. Good luck reintegrating into society after that once in a lifetime experience, my friends. Good luck to you.

[Ryan Curley]

Congrats Ben! Saw your pic in the NG mag and looked for you here. Nice photos especially. Too bad we won't be able to shoot together in the Paradise though. So many places new to explore and shoot. It's never too late...

[Jesse]

Theories and debates about Global Warming abound these days. It is beautiful to see people getting out of their comfort zones in life, to actually explore and see for themselves what our world is facing. Ben and his team members stories display a respect for their planet, and they have put their feet on ground zero of the problems facing it, not just pointed a finger at it. They really deserve respect for their actions.

[Izzi]

I have really enjoyed watching this expedition from beginning to end.
It was amazing to be able to keep updated throughout their journey (on globalwarming101.com), but i find the collection of memories and knowledge that they have now brought back to share, even more rewarding.
The pictures are incredibly beautiful and in combination with the eloquent passages, it is truly a joy to follow.