Kingdom of Frost. Bjørn Vassnes
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that has stopped quite abruptly. The worst precipitation is sleet, slabttse. This is problematic because it can’t be brushed off like dry snow but sticks to clothes and other places, making people wet.
A lot also happens to snow when it has settled, and then its name changes. Thin and slightly icy snow on the ground is called skártta. Tjalssa is soft snow that is trampled solid and freezes to the earth. Nearest the ground, the snow gradually turns into sänásj, large, coarse, icy grains that look like coarse-ground salt. It can also become tsievve, hard snow where the reindeer don’t dig. This kind of snow can almost bear the weight of a person without skis and the reindeer float on top of it, whereas åbådahka, or simply åbåt, is thick winter snow that is very soft and loose. Åbåt creates extremely difficult conditions. In the old days, people hunted wolves when there was åbåt, because then the wolves would become exhausted. Dáhapádahka means that conditions are so poor it is impossible to travel at all, while siebla is snow that has thawed and is wet all the way through to the ground, a typical spring phenomenon. Siebla cannot bear any weight: the skis sink straight through it. When siebla freezes it becomes tjarvva, a proper snow crust.
But the navigability of terrain is not the only important thing. For hunters—and hunting was (and remains) an important part of the mountain Sami livelihood—it is important for skis to move silently across the snow. So conditions that allow skis to glide quietly and softly, what we call “silk conditions” in Norwegian, are known in Lule Sami as linádahka.
The mountain Sami also had a rich vocabulary for ice, because in their world it was vitally important to be able to move over streams, rivers, and other water, so people needed to have words that told them whether the ice could bear the weight of people and animals. The first very thin ice to form on the lakes in autumn is called gabdda. It is barely one twenty-fifth of an inch thick. Álmasjjiegŋa is “people ice,” which can bear the weight of a person on foot, while hässtajiegŋa is ice that can bear a horse.
As with so much other traditional knowledge, this Sami snow terminology is disappearing. Fewer people are involved in reindeer husbandry, and since reindeer herders use snowmobiles rather than draft reindeer these days, perhaps they think they don’t need this “old-fashioned” knowledge. But the many snowmobile accidents, not least those where avalanches are triggered, may well suggest that modern-day reindeer herders could also benefit from a bit of knowledge of snow. Would it help to have a special word for ice that can bear the weight of a snowmobile? Perhaps the technicians waxing skis for the Norwegian cross-country team would also find it helpful to have a course in Sami snow terminology to avoid waxing blunders.
But this is about a lot more than an advanced vocabulary, rich in tradition, that is on the point of extinction. What we are now seeing vanish is also a lifeworld—the world of the Snow Queen—to which this language belongs and which it describes.
— 7 —
TRACES OF ICE: THE DISCOVERY OF OUR FROZEN PAST
I NEVER LEARNED THE three hundred Sami words for snow. I had to leave Finnmarksvidda early in my teenage years to go to school and I never went back. My first stop was the Arctic Ocean town of Tromsø, where I experienced a slightly different side of the cryosphere: severe snowstorms and endless snowfall. Some winters, so much snow fell that you just had to give up trying to keep the path clear and simply dig a tunnel to your door instead. It could stay like that until late April. On the other hand, Tromsø had fantastic skiing possibilities, offering the unbeatable combination of skiing and sea views. Here you got to experience the cryosphere at its best and worst. Sometimes there could be a bit much of both, but if you loved snow, it was fine. If you didn’t, you moved away.
Eventually, I ended up in western Norway, where snow and ice were things you only experienced once in a while, mostly as unforeseen problems—like suddenly waking up to find ice and snow on the roads, which came as just as much of a surprise every single time. Fortunately, this happened only a few days a year, so instead of bothering to change to winter tires, people tended to leave their cars at home. Snow and ice were mostly irrelevant there on the west coast. They were curiosities, of interest mainly to skiing enthusiasts—only a small minority there—not to mention tourists, who came in their thousands on cruise ships to visit Nordfjord and see the Briksdal Glacier close up.
Since I was neither a skier nor a tourist, snow and ice didn’t concern me. I thought I was done with the Kingdom of Frost and didn’t even realize that I was still wandering around in the midst of it. I didn’t see that the whole landscape in Norway had been shaped by the ice. The distinctive, world-famous fjords and valleys, the huge erratic boulders you could see in the most peculiar places—all of this was the work of the ice. And I was far from the only person who was blind to it. People had walked around here for hundreds, thousands of years without realizing it. They just took for granted that the landscape was the way it was and didn’t ask why.
Indeed, it wasn’t until the mid-1800s that people learned that the glaciers had carved out these U-shaped valleys, leaving fertile earth in the valley bed. People had no idea that there had once been glaciers here. There was nothing about it in the Bible, which was the most important history book until the 1800s. Most people then believed the world had existed for only 6,000 years. And the term “ice age” was totally unknown.
It took a Danish immigrant to discover that there was something strange about this, something that demanded an explanation. The huge stones that often stood balanced on top of a hill couldn’t have ended up there all by themselves. Stones don’t roll uphill. And the huge, continuous ridges of rock and gravel down in the valley: who or what had created them?
It must have been questions like these that Jens Esmark (1763–1839) pondered during his many journeys around Norway. Esmark was a trained “mineralogist,” as geologists were called in the late 1700s when he arrived in Norway, initially to work in Kongsberg. At that time, it was an important mining town and also had an institution called the Bergverkseminar, known in English as the Kongsberg School of Mines, which is where Esmark taught. After the company in Kongsberg went bankrupt in 1805, Esmark moved to nearby Christiania, modern-day Oslo. There, he became the first professor of mineralogy at Norway’s first university, which opened in 1811.25
While he was living in Kongsberg, Esmark had already managed to travel around and familiarize himself with the Norwegian mountain regions. He was probably the first person to climb mountains like Snøhetta and Gaustatoppen, and he also undertook height measurements of both using barometers, which measure air pressure. This enabled him to prove—to many people’s surprise—that Gaustatoppen, hitherto considered the “roof of Norway,” was not Norway’s highest mountain but was actually lower than Snøhetta.
On his journeys to map the geology of the Norwegian landscape, Esmark traveled to places such as Lysefjorden in western Norway. There, at the end of the lake called Haukalivatnet, lies a terminal moraine, which we now know was deposited by a glacier. Before Esmark proposed this theory in 1823, nobody had guessed that this formation was created by a glacier that had long since disappeared.
Eventually, he discovered similar traces in many places and wrote an article in which he set out his theory that there must once have been glaciers across the whole of Scandinavia, which had created the characteristic formations for which the Norwegian landscape is so famous.
Esmark also had his ideas published in English in 1826 but failed to attract much attention. However, the renowned professor Robert Jameson, who was at one time Darwin’s teacher in Edinburgh, gave lectures about Esmark’s ideas and it is quite possible that they spread further from there. One of Jameson’s contacts was the Swiss natural scientist Louis Agassiz (1807–1873). We have no proof that Agassiz became aware of Esmark’s ice age theory through Jameson, but it is highly unlikely that Jameson would not have told Agassiz about it; Jameson was Agassiz’s English publisher.
At any rate, it was Agassiz who won all the glory for introducing the theory of the ice age, while Esmark vanished into oblivion. That is often the way with science: it isn’t necessarily the person