Kingdom of Frost. Bjørn Vassnes
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snow settles on the ground, the albedo increases. New, dry snow reflects between 80 and 90 percent of the radiation. We say that new snow has an albedo of 0.8 to 0.9, where 1 indicates full (100 percent) reflection. When snow has been on the ground for some time and has become compacted and dirty, the effect diminishes but will still be considerable.
Sea ice has an albedo of 0.5 to 0.7, while open sea has an extremely low albedo of around 0.06. This means that when ice forms on the sea, the albedo increases dramatically, even more so if it is then covered in snow. While open sea absorbs almost all the energy from the sun and is warmed up, snow-covered sea ice reflects almost all the energy. With less ice and more open sea, the ocean will absorb more solar energy, which will cause even more ice to vanish, leading to more heat absorption, and so on.
Vegetation also influences albedo. Coniferous forests have almost no albedo, between 0.08 and 0.15. Deciduous trees have between 0.15 and 0.18, while green grass has an albedo of around 0.25. Generally speaking, the more forest and shrubs there are, the weaker the albedo effect; the more grass, the higher the albedo.
How important is the albedo effect? Today, Earth’s mean temperature is 59 degrees Fahrenheit. Calculations have shown that if Earth were entirely covered in sea, which has a pretty low albedo (0.06), the mean temperature would be just below 80 degrees, which would make large swaths of the planet uninhabitable. On the other hand, if Earth were totally white, with an albedo of close to 1, the mean temperature would fall to around −40 degrees.
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IN THE REALM OF THE SNOW QUEEN
SNOW IS QUIET. Not just when it falls, but also when it has settled and covers the landscape as far as the eye can see. Like on Finnmarksvidda on a winter’s day, far away from all the houses, roads, and traffic—the way it could be on the plateau when I grew up there in the sixties. There was a silence that was more than the mere absence of sound. Because there was sound: the sound of silence, but most of all the sound of endless space. And of endless time, as if the snow had always lain there peacefully. Which, of course, it hadn’t. Because snow also has another face.
At dawn, as we reached Bæskades, a storm came blowing up. A flaying rush of driving snow whined on the mountaintop. Heavily leaned we into the storm, forced to rest a while, Our reindeer too were weary after many a long mile.10
It isn’t so long since people traveling in northern Norway in midwinter had to go by reindeer over the Bæskades plateau, just like Nordahl Grieg. As depicted in his poem, idyllically entitled “Morning on Finnmarksvidda,” it could be a grueling experience if the weather gods didn’t smile upon you. A journey that takes two hours by car today in summer conditions could well take one or two days, so it was a good thing there were plenty of mountain lodges en route.
When I traveled over Bæskades in winter as a lad, it wasn’t by reindeer but by a peculiar weasel-like vehicle known as a snowmobil (not to be confused with modern snowmobiles). It was a sort of tracked vehicle in which around ten passengers sat huddled together in a circle, barely catching a glimpse of the white landscape speeding past on the other side of a few tiny round windows, like the portholes on a boat. The snowmobil traveled faster than the reindeer and didn’t tire as easily; it was usually the passengers who had to stop for a break and a drop of coffee. I don’t remember how long the trip took, but it was the better part of a day. And why did I spend two days—there and back—on a trip like that? To stand shivering for hours on end watching somebody go around and around on a skating rink, that’s why.
I was ten years old and lived in Kautokeino, Norway’s most isolated municipal center, especially in winter. It was also the coldest—in competition with Karasjok—with winter temperatures sometimes falling toward −58 degrees Fahrenheit. That was fine by me: when it fell below minus 40, we were given the day off school. We moved to Kautokeino at the end of the 1950s, before the coastal town of Alta could be reached by a road that was open all year round, and when our community could still be isolated for weeks in spring. Then it was impossible to drive either car or snowmobil owing to the spring thaw. The snow grew wet and impassable, rivers and lakes could no longer be crossed, and even the reindeer had to throw in the towel. Today, a situation like that would merit helicopter airdrops and a news feature on TV, and the parliamentary public safety committee would be hauled in for a hearing to find out who was to blame. In those days, it was just the way the world was. The seasons had their rhythm: the snow came in autumn, the water froze, and later, in spring, everything started to thaw again and you just had to stay where you were, hoping you had enough of the bare necessities. It was what we were used to.
Young as I was, I knew no better and thought this was quite normal. As a child, I also got out of doing the most unpleasant chores, like going outside to fetch water from the ice-covered tarns or brooks when the water pipes froze. This was the kind of thing my father often had to do, and once he lost his footing and fell into the water. He ended up under the ice and spent a good while lying there flailing about before hauling himself out, soaking wet in the bitter cold. That he got home without freezing to death and didn’t fall ill tells you something about how hardy his generation was up there in the north. The same must be said of the young woman who set off to give birth at the clinic in Kautokeino one cold winter’s day—alone, on foot, in the snow. She didn’t make it in time and had to deliver the child herself by the side of the road, before carrying it onward to the clinic. Mother and child were doing fine, we were told.
I escaped any such experiences. Even being out in temperatures below minus fifty was actually fine, as long as it wasn’t windy, you were wrapped up warmly, and you took care not to walk too quickly. My most extreme experiences of cold were probably those times I went to Alta to spend hours freezing by a skating rink. The skaters were our biggest idols in the 1960s. Ice—or snow in the case of the cross-country skiers—was where it was all happening in those days. Norway was a winter nation—the winter nation. “There lies a land of eternal snow,” we would sing as we paraded, flags aloft, amid flurries of snow on May 17.
But the hero of heroes was Fridtjof Nansen, who hadn’t just crossed Greenland on skis—without any certainty that it was actually possible, since there were no aerial or satellite photographs then—but spent several winters in the Arctic Ocean, also something of a hit-or-miss affair. When I went cross-country skiing on the endless Finnmarksvidda, as I often did since we only had school three days a week some years, I’d daydream I was Nansen on his way across the Greenland ice. True, I wasn’t hauling any baggage, I knew the weather would hold for the few hours my trip lasted, and Mom was waiting for me back home with hot cocoa, but I was Nansen all the same. Far ahead of me the west coast of Greenland awaited, along with fame and glory.
It was an almost ecstatic experience to ski across the plateau: nothing but white in all directions as far as the eye could see, just small dwarf and mountain birches dotting the white surface like tiny apostrophes, and here and there the track of a ptarmigan or hare. A view that the Danish scientist Sophus Tromholt, who studied the northern lights and lived in Kautokeino in 1883, described as follows:
Below a white shroud of snow the Land of the Lapps slumbers in its winter sleep. The poor flowers, which a little while ago basked gaily in the sun, have been scattered to the winds, and only the seed remains, buried in the hard frozen earth, longing for far-away Spring, whose gentle breath shall call them into life. The thin birch copses, which used to contribute their share to relieve the desolate landscape with a faint tinge of the colour of Hope, stand enveloped in Nature’s common white garb, woven with the fine threads of filagree hoar frost and glittering ice crystals. The river, too, which spoke so cheeringly in the autumn, is silent, and bound in the iron grasp of King Ice.
Everything slumbers after the short, bright summer’s day; even the wind durst not play with the snow-white cover of Nature’s couch, the very air seems to sleep. Nothing breaks the silence. You may wander for miles over the wastes, but never a sound, save the creak of your foot in the snow, breaks the silence either from heaven or earth.11
This was before snowmobiles shattered the peace of the plateau, and you could hear every tiniest sound in a radius of miles—in