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Fridtjof Nansen was only 21 when he hitched a ride on a Norwegian sealing expedition in 1882 for the first of the many Arctic voyages that made him famous. While trekking on ice floes off Greenland, he puzzled over "the dirty, graying or even brownish hue" he observed on the ice.
University of Utah researchers re-examined writings by Nansen (1861-1930) and other 19th century Arctic explorers and determined these men probably had documented industrial pollution nearly a century before scientists had confirmed smokestack emissions from the U.S. and other nations were changing the Arctic.
"The reaction from some colleagues - when we first mentioned that people had seen haze in the late 1800s - was that it was crazy," said Tim Garrett, a U. meteorology professor. "Our instinctive reaction is to believe the world was a cleaner place 130 years ago."
Garrett suspects his findings, published in the March edition of Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, may help explain why climatic warming has been more pronounced in the Arctic.
He said early coal-burning industries were far dirtier than today, spewing massive clouds of soot and ash. But it was not until the 1970s that meteorologists measured industrial pollution in the Arctic, prompting Garrett to comb the writings of the first to chart the frozen territory north of the 66th parallel.
Garrett enlisted the help of undergraduate Lisa Verzella, who has since graduated. Verzella dug through old historical records left by Scandinavian explorers such as Nansen and Swedish geologist Adolf Erik Nordenski�ld (1832-1901), the first to navigate the Northeast Passage from Asia to the Atlantic Ocean. The youthful Nansen would go on to become one of the most revered figures in Norwegian history.
"It is impossible to know exactly what [early explorers] were seeing. Their primary tool was their eye, and their analytical tools were quite crude compared with today's," Garrett said. "Combined with other observations and other writings of Nordenski�ld where he found nickel in the pollution, they are suggestive, not proof of pollution from that time."
Regardless, in an 1883 report in the journal Science, Nordenski�ld described a haze obscuring the horizon during an expedition to Greenland, "through which the sun shone warmly, at times even scorchingly."
In an earlier voyage to Greenland, the Swede observed a fine gray dust, which he called kryokonite, on the ice. He noted that the dust-darkened ice absorbed solar heat faster, leaving deep cavities that frustrated his party's movements. Deploying a magnet, Nordenski�ld discovered the sooty material contained iron particles that could be drawn out.
Garrett believes the Swedish explorer may have documented fly-ash, a pollution from smelting and coal combustion that had blown north from Europe. Inefficient burning technologies of the 19th century generated vast quantities of metal-rich pollution known as soot. Last year, scientists reported that ice-core samples from Greenland revealed that highest concentrations of soot settled on the ice between 1906 to 1910 - dates that correspond with the height of Europe's coal binge.
"The most polluted time for Greenland aren't recent times, but a century ago," Garrett said. "These anecdotal measurements are an intriguing complement. These explorers were seeing with their own eyes what we are seeing with sophisticated equipment today."
He believes early pollution may help explain climate change because of pollution's effect on clouds. "Most argue that pollution affects clouds in a way that cools the surface. That is true for the rest of the world, but not for the Arctic where it is dark when it is most polluted because it's winter," Garrett said. "The effect is to change clouds in such a way that they act as a better blanket. Emissions do make clouds more reflective, which would have a cooling effect if the sun was out."
Air pollution is more concentrated in the Arctic during the winter due to thermal inversions and calm winds - the same factors that clog the Salt Lake Valley with pollutants in winter. Arctic air pollution may have been warming the planet's northern reaches for a lot longer than is generally believed, Garrett said, but data remains too misty to draw solid conclusions.
What explorers saw off Greenland: Haze and dust
"The sky was covered with thin veil of clouds, through which the sun shone warmly, at times even scorchingly. From time to time this veil of clouds, or haze, descended to the surface of the ice, and hid the view over the expanse; but it was, remarkably enough, not wet, but dry - yes, so dry that our wet clothes absolutely dried in it."
Adolf Erik Nordenski�ld, July 22, 1883
"Something which hit me as especially peculiar was that the surface of the larger sheets of this gigantic chunk of ice were not completely clean and white, but often had a dirty, grayish, or even brownish hue. How could this be explained? Was it dust? But only a very small number of these ice floes could have been so close to a coastline that dust could have been blown out onto them. Or is it more likely that everywhere, even across the Arctic Sea, there is dust in the air, and that it is taken down onto the ice with every snowfall?"
- Fridtjof Nansen, July 5, 1882