1. Flags FLAGS YEARS ACCRUE OVER TWO seasons, never four. Dark days and bright nights are shared experiences in the circumpolar north, the arctic, where time is accounted differently, the midnight sun a warning flare slung into the sky before disappearing into darkness each and every winter. Darkness, then light, then darkness once more, a land of infinite extremes. More than this, though, one is struck by the elastic distances, landscapes over which the radical whims and decisions--of individuals, of nations--vacillate. Geopolitical instability like that occurring in Greenland, or in the North Atlantic, or on the isolated Svalbard archipelago north of mainland Norway and reverberating elsewhere does not necessarily lead to war, but it has happened before, even in a place as strange as this, even in a place where any war might seem improbable. After all, wars take many shapes. Yawning below the tiny twelve-seater, a histogram of white, an eerie topographic menace.
Jagged shapes, shadowy splinters, and ice claws with no end in sight. It is midday in December, in the cockpit of a Dash 8 somewhere over western Greenland, and only a thin line of pale red, evidence of the sun to the south, segments sky from earth. We pass below 75 degrees north and the digital compass display, dormant for the past hour, blinks to life as the pilot switches from manual to computer-assisted navigation. The experience of transiting the arctic''s vastness has changed dramatically. Once it took courage; today it requires only time and cash. Sparsely populated and not permanently settled until recently, the ice and snow and formidable cold below were once a proving ground. Men and women on missions to chart uncharted land were met not by hostile Indigenous tribes, but by beasts of weather and fur. Some foolishly wanted fame, others glory for their nation, still more were merely curious about what lay north.
They were tested. Many failed. Now, to get from Greenland''s northernmost village to its southernmost enclave, a trip of some 990 miles over ice and snow and glaciers in various phases of collapse, takes a few hours by plane; the same historically spectacular views, none of the agony. The pilot reaches for a knob to recalibrate our position. From the flight deck, he and his co-pilot had been navigating by true north until this moment, never magnetic north at those latitudes. So close to the Magnetic North Pole, and at a lower altitude, the readings cannot be trusted. I shudder at the blinking lights, of what I imagine to be the failure of the plane''s directional bearing. I later speak to Claus Kongsgaard Jensen, who flies the same route.
He tells me with the confidence of a military veteran, "You just reset it." Jensen, by his own count, had flown 50,000 hours across the arctic. He joined the Royal Danish Air Force and began his tour in Greenland in 1988. He was also a veteran of a little-known arctic skirmish known as the Whisky War. Because of that war, and those that would inevitably follow, he knew intimately that the arctic, like the flight deck''s compass, was always in a state of geopolitical and ecological recalibration. The Whisky War, if you find utility in the kind of declaratives and certainties that the arctic is never sure to grant, began during the polar expedition of Charles Francis Hall in 1871, when he discovered a spit of land--a large rock, really, slightly longer than a half mile--somewhere north of Baffin Bay and south of the Lincoln Sea, between the northern reaches of western Greenland and Canada''s Nunavut territory on a tassel of water stretching into the Arctic Ocean. Hall named the island Hans Island after Hans Hendrik, a Greenlandic guide with the expedition who had skirted the island two decades before with the American explorer Elisha Kent Kane. More than a century and two world wars later, the border between Canada and Greenland was officially drawn in 1973, and the island fell once more into the international spotlight.
The low-tide levels on the northern and southern edges of Hans Island marked where one nation ended and the other began, a boulder snug between them. The matter seemed settled. A provision in this border agreement allowed for future negotiations over the entire island, not just its circumference. Then, a decade later, a Canadian scientist from Dome Petroleum arrived on Hans Island in 1983 to research the impact of multi-year ice in an effort to learn how best to construct oil-drilling rigs in the Beaufort Sea. Learning of this expedition and believing it to be an assertion of Canadian sovereignty over the rock, Tom Høyem, the Kingdom of Denmark''s Minister of Greenlandic Affairs, set out on his own mission to assert his country''s sovereignty over the rock and the adjacent island nation it claims as its own. Høyem chartered a helicopter from an American military base outside Qaanaaq, 217 miles south of Hans Island, and arrived on the island in 1984 to deposit a Danish flag, a bottle of aquavit, and a note reading: "Welcome to the Danish Island." Soon the Canadians arrived and replaced the Dannebrog flag with a Maple Leaf flag, the aquavit with Canadian Club whisky. The bottle and flag swapping threatened to become the battle of the bottles.
The fusillade carried on for nearly four decades, bottles for bottles, flags for flags. Never mind both nations'' territorial claims were spurious at best. Canadian Indigenous people never used the island; no residents of Denmark''s realm--including Greenland and the Faroe Islands--had ever permanently resided on the island known as Hans. The rock, as with many things in the arctic, stood for something much more. Neither country wanted to appear like it was yielding their stances on arctic sovereignty. But saber rattling and chest thumping were the instruments of those seeking assertion in the arctic, and besides, at least a few transient residents in the region benefited as the liquor bottles went to good use. At least one Danish pilot returned to Hans Island to snatch the bottles and later drink them among friends at the American air base on Greenland''s western shores. Airmen like Jensen battled over this insignificant and practically useless swath of territory in the north throughout the Cold War, this political spat eclipsed by nuclear threats and missile crises beyond the Iron Curtain.
Nevertheless, Jensen flew often within the Arctic Circle while defending that rock, playing a small role in the war fought upon and in the skies above Hans Island. There were no trees, no streams, no landmarks of any kind, not a trace of civilization there save for the flags and bottles. There were no untapped natural resources, not a thing beyond the niggling tenterhooks of national pride. Yet the campaign ensued religiously for nearly fifty years. The arctic has this effect. It is called polar madness. There was perhaps at one time a reason for the island''s significance to both nations. The Canadians operated a scientific station on Hans Island during the Second World War, ostensibly to gather weather data in support of a secret Allied invasion of France, and the Canadian military occasionally conducted exercises in the region around the island.
Though it possesses no usable mineral reserves, and though it is barren and cold and surrounded by impossible currents, Hans Island might someday be an ideal staging ground for offshore oil drilling as the arctic sea ice retreats and disappears more every year. Which is also a trope of the arctic and the war: the very ice the Canadian scientist from Dome Petroleum had first come to study, the research which propelled two nations into conflict, would soon thereafter vanish. In its place were uncertainty, a reexamination of purpose, visions, and both commercial and political calculations. To finally decide who was entitled to Hans Island, politics ensued in a region where politicking is like nature itself: enduring and untamable. It is here that settling such territorial or inter-governmental disputes requires no less than a joint working group, representatives from Inuit communities in Greenland and Canada''s Nunavut region, environmental organizations, and a wealth of speculations feeding excitable press coverage. The process of deliberation and settlement took roughly five years. The final agreement, reached on June 14, 2022, was celebrated with one last exchange of liquor bottles, resolving a dispute over an island the Inuits unironically call Tartupaluk, or "kidney," for its shape and not for its mess of liquor bottles. Though the Whisky War may seem absurd, it would be difficult to downplay the undertones of the conflict that persist in the context of today''s changing arctic, a region where Russia frequently exerts pressure on North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies'' critical infrastructure, like submarine telecommunication cables.
As Rear Admiral Rune Andersen, the commander of the Norwegian Navy, told me, "What happens here impacts everywhere." THERE ARE FEW THINGS held in the popular imagination beyond polar bears, snow, ice, and "Eskimos" when calling to mind the arctic. Anyone who has lived in Alaska, as I once did, or anywhere in the far north, knows that there is much more than that when it comes to the vast circumpolar cosmos crowning the Northern Hemisphere. Each year the planet permanently loses a section of sea ice the size of Nebraska, along with it the reflective properties of that snow and ice, which will no longer return heat to the atmosphere. Every year the Arctic Ocean sees new summer minimum-ice-extent records, advancing a downward trend of 12.5 percent per decade since 1979. When the Arctic Ocean sea ice, which one can imagine as a gyrating glacier at the top of the world, melts, this does not increase sea levels any more than a meltin.