Cold (34 page)

In 1999, a frozen cube of permafrost with a mammoth inside was excavated from the Russian tundra. They named this one Jarkov,
after the father of the boy who found the carcass. By the time scientists showed up, the tusks had been sawed off and sold.
Excavation trenches filled with meltwater. Fuel shortages delayed the arrival of jackhammers. Eventually, the cube of permafrost
containing Jarkov was fitted with a metal lifting frame. For the sake of television, new tusks were bolted to the frozen cube.
The twenty-three-ton block of permafrost was coaxed into the air by a helicopter rated for twenty tons. The metal frame bent,
but the mammoth flew, bolted tusks grandly protruding from the ice. It landed in its new home — a temperature-controlled room,
a glorified ice cellar dug into the permafrost. French scientists slowly thawed parts of the cube with a hair dryer. They
found Jarkov’s flesh and hair. They also found bones out of place, suggesting that the mammoth was less than perfectly intact.
Perhaps in part for the sake of drama, the scientists, in matching overalls, stopped short of disinterring Jarkov. The mammoth
remains exhumed but frozen, preserved until the right scientists with the right amount of funding and the right questions
come along to thaw it out. Jarkov lies in state — like Lenin, but perhaps colder and less famous.

Frozen mammoths carry with them frozen stomach contents. They have buttercups frozen between their teeth. They may have frozen
clues to their extinction, too. If a plague killed the mammoth, saber-toothed tiger, and North American camel, freeze-dried
evidence may persist. Certain scientists build careers around looking for the kind of species-jumping virus that might be
responsible for the Pleistocene extinctions. They look for something like the AIDS virus, which jumped from monkeys to humans;
elephant herpes, which jumps between Asian and African elephants; or rinderpest, which jumps between buffalo, wildebeests,
hartebeests, and bongos, causing fever, infection around the mouth, tissue necrosis, and death.

In some cases, the people living among the frozen remains can claim ancestors who lived among the unfrozen reality of living
mammoths. These people often believe that the frozen flesh is dangerous, that it brings fatally bad luck. At one time, certain
Siberian natives believed that the creatures were large rats that lived underground but died when exposed to the sun. Others
believed that they lived in the mountains but came down to feed on human corpses. Until Victorian times, European scientists
argued that the remains were nothing more than African elephants swept to the Arctic by the biblical Flood. Thomas Jefferson,
believing stories from Native American tribes in the West, suggested that mammoths might still survive in the American interior.
Jefferson tasked Lewis and Clark with confirming these stories.

In 1796, based on his comparison of mammoth bones with those of existing elephants, Georges Cuvier suggested that the mammoth
might in fact be extinct, gone forever. The mammoth, he believed, was adapted to cold climates. The African elephant and the
Asian elephant were not. Cuvier was among the first to articulate the possibility of extinction. “All of these facts,” he
wrote, “consistent among themselves, and not opposed by any report, seem to me to prove the existence of a world previous
to ours, destroyed by some kind of catastrophe.” In 1887, the paleontologist William Berryman Scott, who somehow mistakenly
believed that the mammoth was carnivorous, considered the extinction a blessing: “The world is a much pleasanter place without
them, and we can heartily thank heaven that the whole generation is extinct.”

Not everyone would agree. Certain scientists, serious men who publish articles in prestigious scholarly journals, hope to
clone a mammoth. The plan is to use DNA salvaged from frozen flesh. One vision involves removing a viable nucleus from a frozen
mammoth and inserting it into a single egg cell from an elephant. The fertilized egg would be implanted in an elephant. Some
two years later, if all went well, a baby mammoth would appear, brought back to life — an extreme survivor of hypothermia,
superior to a seasonally thawed caterpillar, superior to the frozen human sperm that have been thawed and put to work after
only a few years below zero, superior to James Bedford, even assuming that he is ever successfully resurrected from his bath
of liquid nitrogen.

But to date, viable cells and viable researchers have not connected. Instead, the meat has gone to museums or foxes or wolves
or dogs. Or it has rotted on the tundra, or been tasted by field scientists. “It was awful,” said one man who tasted a specimen
believed to have died more than twenty thousand years ago. “It tasted like meat left too long in a freezer.”

It is May sixteenth and eighteen degrees on a man-made island in the Beaufort Sea. The island is six acres of gravel piled
on the seabed, surrounded by steel sheet pilings and concrete blocks and cramped with oil wells, heavy equipment, and metal
buildings full of pipes and tanks and gauges. To the north, six-foot-thick ice stretches to the horizon. To the south, ice
stretches to the shore and then gives way to snow and the industrial complex of Prudhoe Bay. An ice road stretches across
the sea ice from the shore. Sun glares off the ice.

I stand around watching a dive crew work. With an excavator, they have cut a moat in the ice to reach concrete blocks that
form the island’s first line of defense. In winter, the ice wreaks havoc with the concrete blocks. In summer, when the ice
pulls away from the island, wind rips off the pack ice farther north and kicks up waves that slam into the island, wreaking
more havoc. The divers will replace the blocks. For now, as a preliminary step, one of the divers is clearing ice that the
excavator missed. He wears a yellow helmet attached to an umbilical that comes to the surface. The umbilical includes a hose
that sends air to the diver’s helmet and another hose that sends hot water to the diver’s suit. The diver stands on the bottom,
surrounded by ice water but soaked by a never-ending hot shower from the surface. The diver blasts away with a fire hose connected
to a boiler on the surface, pumping hot water against ice-coated concrete blocks five feet below. A typical dive runs several
hours.

One of the divers tells me that a polar bear wandered in last year, forcing them to end a dive on short notice. On the surface
of the moat, piles of slush and blocks of ice bump the diver’s umbilical. When the sun drops low in the sky, the temperature
drops with it, and a thin film of new ice forms.

Despite all of this ice, it is spring. The sun, though it dips close to the horizon, will not set for another two months.
Seals bask on the ice like plump tourists on a white sand beach. A pair of ravens guard a nest built high up in a pipe rack.
Melting snow drips from the roofs of buildings. I talk to a worker who does two-week stints on the island every month. These
six acres of gravel and machinery and oil wells are his home twenty-five weeks each year, half the year minus two weeks for
an extended vacation. This is his sixth year. “I love the sound of dripping water,” he tells me, watching meltwater trickling
down from metal roofing.

As the world warms, more remains pop out of the permafrost. With some regularity, mammoth hunters in Siberia stumble on human
carcasses. Some are said to be victims of the Stalin years. Others may have died during smallpox epidemics. Permafrost is
no place to dig a grave. Shallow graves would be the norm for those in a hurry. Stalin’s executioners would not have made
time to chisel down into the permafrost. Survivors disposing of plague-ridden corpses would have been equally harried, eager
to be done with the dead and impatient with the hard ground.

In 1845, the entire Franklin expedition, 129 men, vanished in the snow and ice of the American Arctic. The disappearance prompted
years of search parties, serving the dual purpose of looking for Sir John Franklin and looking for new scientific and geographic
information. The search parties added scattered frozen corpses of their own to those of Franklin and his men. For several
years after Franklin’s disappearance, there was real hope of finding survivors. Elisha Kent Kane’s expedition, mounted in
part to find Franklin, survived three years in the Arctic. Likewise, a few members of the later Greely expedition survived
three years. In Franklin’s case, hope was misguided. Franklin and all of his men died north of the Arctic Circle. Some became
food for the others. In 1984, a team of anthropologists disinterred a few of the bodies. These were the early victims, who
were buried properly, in marked graves on Beechey Island, before the expedition fell apart and the remaining men understood
how desperate the situation would become. The graves of these early victims had been found in 1850, during the search for
Franklin and his crew, when hope remained that Franklin and some of his men still might be found alive. The anthropologists
opened the graves to find the skin and clothes of the properly buried men intact, preserved by ice. Their hair was intact.
Their eyes were frozen open. Their lips were pulled back, exposing bad teeth and signs of scurvy.

The Iceman of the Alps, found in 1991, had been frozen in the Tyrolean mountains for five thousand years. Two hikers spotted
the carcass. At first it was thought to be just another dead climber. At least five or six dead climbers had already surfaced
that year, some after spending as much as fifty years in the ice. But as the Iceman’s body was hacked from the ice with picks
and a ski pole and a jack-hammer, it became apparent that he was somewhat more ancient than originally expected. It became
apparent that he was a frozen chunk of the Neolithic. He was five feet two inches tall and in his late forties. When found,
he was freeze-dried, drained of the moisture of life, and weighed 30 pounds. In life, he would have weighed something like
140 pounds. He had an arrow wound in his left shoulder. His arteries were clogged. His last meal had been ibex and red deer
meat with bread baked from an early form of wheat. He wore a fur hat, a cape of woven grass, a fur wrap, leather leggings,
and leather boots. The boots were insulated with grass. He carried a longbow, a stone knife, and a birch-bark cylinder that
probably held live embers for starting a fire.

More recently, in 2005, the frozen body of Leo Mustonen was found at the bottom of a glacier in the Sierra Nevada. He had
been missing for sixty-three years, along with three others who never returned to Mather Field in Sacramento after a training
flight. Leo wore a parachute with the word army stenciled across it. He wore a torn sweater and a badly corroded metal name
tag. He carried a comb, fifty-one cents in change, a Sheaffer pen, and an address book. An otherwise illegible note in his
address book said, “All the girls know.”

Franklin’s disinterred men — the only complete remains known from the Franklin expedition — were reburied in place on Beechey
Island, overlooking the sea. The Iceman lies frozen in an Italian museum. Leo Mustonen was cremated and his ashes were buried
next to his departed mother in Minnesota. Leo’s niece was quoted as saying that it was “nice to know he won’t be left alone
up in the mountains in a pile of snow.”