Knowing the Ocean
Knowing the Arctic Ocean has to a large extent been about knowing Arctic sea ice, both in Western science and by indigenous populations. Knowing sea ice is a deeply sensory, tactile experience that cannot be treated separately from one’s life world, personal or local temporalities or from society.[799] It is an element where everyday space and time not only change but have also undergone processes of what we might call inadvertent scaling and synchrony.
Globalisation and modernity have brought a common frame; the realities of Earth system science and climate change are as well known here as anywhere else. Things happen in Arctic communities in close relationship with things happening elsewhere in the world.[800]Early scientific study was supported by the British Admiralty, as in so many other oceans. Sir John Ross and his nephew John Ross made deepsea soundings to a depth of possibly 600 fathoms in 1818.[801] A decade later, William Parry conducted his ‘crusade’ for the magnetic North Pole, and indirectly made a strong case for a science of the northern ocean. Indeed, the rise of Arctic exploration in the nineteenth century coincided with the rise of oceanography, mountaineering and meteorology; they were all linked to the scientific underpinning of Western imperial hegemony that became increasingly interested in navigation and the geographical knowledge and political control of natural resources.[802]
Glaciology belonged in the same group of sciences, and the object of its study covered most of the Arctic Ocean, and was the object of measurement and noted in logs by whaling vessels during the nineteenth century. Even longer historical records of ice cover exist from coastal seas bordering on the Arctic Ocean, for example the Barents Sea, where a record has been compiled covering four centuries.[803] Systematic records of the position of the sea-ice margin around the Arctic Ocean have been compiled for the period since 1870.[804] Although there was a widespread opinion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that the Arctic was always covered by perennial ice, both on large parts of its land mass and on the Arctic sea, it was an idea with some significant exceptions.[805]
The systematic study of sea ice in the Western science tradition is comparatively late. Observations and skilful reflection on sea ice was started as some nations, notably the United Kingdom, were searching for the Northwest Passage.
British whaler-scientist William Scoresby was a notable presence in the period after the Napoleonic wars, combining economic (whaling) and strategic (Northwest Passage) interests with methodological rigour, and making productive use of vernacular knowledge as scientific data collection had scarcely begun.[806]The Arctic ice may have its gaps and holes. There was, for example, until the 1880s still some belief in the notion of a green central Greenland, fuelled by observations of floating timber in the waters near the big island.[807] Ideas of an ice-free Arctic were presented in the leading geographical journals and magazines in the latter decades of the nineteenth century such as Petermann's Geographische Mitteilungen.The trope had been increasingly present already in the nineteenth century and became interesting again when the period of interwar Arctic warming had begun to be noticed in the 1920s and 1930s.[808]