"Across Greenland’s Ice Cap"

How a ski-tour engendered the English version of a book by Switzerland’s polar pioneer

The Claridenfirn is a genial altiplano of ice and snow within easy reach of Zurich. Google it, as Project Hyakumeizan once did after a ski-tour there, and you’ll find that it has yielded the longest unbroken series of yearly survey measurements of any glacier on the planet – more than a century’s worth of data.

Alfred de Quervain in Greenland, summer 1909

The first to survey the Claridenfirn, back in 1914, was Alfred de Quervain (1879-1927), an uomo universale of Belle Époque scientific circles in Switzerland. A meteorologist by trade, he helped to discover the stratosphere in his early twenties, set up his country’s first network of seismological stations, piloted balloon flights to investigate what would soon be known as cosmic rays, and established the high-altitude observatory on the Jungfraujoch.

But, in Switzerland at least, de Quervain is best remembered for his crossing of the Greenland ice cap. Leaving Zurich in the spring of 1912– around the time that Captain Scott and his crew were perishing in Antarctica – he and his companions took ship in Copenhagen, aiming to achieve the first west-to-east traverse of the central Greenland ice sheet.

Few gave much for the chances of the young and inexperienced Swiss quartet. Yet, in just 31 days that summer, they traversed 640 kilometres of snow and ice, bringing home a trove of scientific results and photographs. Nobody fell into a crevasse or suffered so much as a frost-bitten finger.

Despite this lack of drama, the expedition’s principal sponsor, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, was glad to serialise de Quervain’s expedition write-up. In 1914, these articles came out in book form, as Quer durchs Grönlandeis, making a play on the author’s name.

In the 1980s, the book was translated by de Quervain’s daughter for her children, as her family had settled in Canada. And now, in time to mark the expedition’s 110th anniversary, this English version of de Quervain’s book has recently calved majestically from the McGill-Queen’s University Press as Across Greenland’s Ice Cap.

Like many adventurers, the Swiss expeditioners had weighty debts to pay off. To raise money after their return, de Quervain and his expedition doctor Hans Hoessli toured Switzerland, giving slide lectures to the alpine clubs and anybody else with a taste for tales of polar derring-do. And for added impact, they had their black-and-white glass slides hand-tinted by a professional colourist.

Across Greenland’s Ice Cap republishes more than sixty of these plates, all in full colour – a lavishness enabled by generous support from the Swiss Polar Institute and the Swiss Committee on Polar and High Altitude Research. The book is dedicated to the eminent climatologist, the late Konrad Steffen, who helped to found the Swiss Polar Institute among his numerous other achievements.

By coincidence, the English version of de Quervain’s book came out just at the start of one of the hottest summers on record. In the introduction, two Zurich-based glaciologists, Andreas Vieli and Martin Lüthi, describe how they have used results from the de Quervain expedition to resurvey Greenland’s Eqip Sermia glacier – the starting point for de Quervain’s traverse of the ice sheet.

The melting rate for Greenland’s ice cap as a whole is shocking enough – Professors Vieli and Lüthi compare it to losing more than twice the mass of all the glaciers in the European Alps every year. But the long-baseline data from the Eqip Sermia deliver an additional sting. That is, they “support the view that the Greenland ice sheet was roughly in balance for a century or more before the onset of today’s rapid mass loss.” 

In other words, so far from wasting away gradually over the past century, Greenland has started shedding its ice on a dramatic scale only during the last few decades.

Of course, it’s not only Greenland that has had a torrid summer. Recently, we revisted the Claridenfirn. Since our last encounter, the lake at its foot has doubled in size. Fragments of ice, broken away from the glacier’s front, were drifting on the ash-gray waters. For a moment, before the morning mists cleared, we could have imagined ourselves standing rapt beside some remote Greenlandic fjord, a hundred and ten years ago …

References

Alfred de Quervain, Across Greenland's Ice Cap: The Remarkable Swiss Scientific Expedition of 1912, with an introduction by Martin Hood, Andreas Vieli and Martin Lüthi, McGill-Queen's University Press, May 2022.