With Speed and Violence Fred Pearce - Global Commons Institute

and birds. But the very highest concentrations occur in a lake on Bear Island,
in the south of the Svalbard archipelago, beneath a huge auk colony. The
chemicals that have become concentrated in the Arctic air, and then
concentrated again in the Arctic food web, are concentrated one more time
in the urine of the auks. What at first sight might seem to be just about the
least polluted place on Earth turns out to be a toxic sump.
Ny-Alesund is the most northerly permanent settlement on Earth. And
the summit of Mount Zeppelin, 1,600 feet above the settlement, is the top of
the top of the world—the ultimate watchtower for the world's climate. I went
to the summit in the world's most northerly cable car with Carl Petter Niesen,
who was taking his daily journey to tend the huge array of instruments
designed to sniff every molecule of passing Arctic air. Recently, he says,
carbon dioxide levels in the air on Mount Zeppelin have increased more
sharply than at other monitoring stations around the world. Some days he
measures levels approaching 390 ppm—fully 10 ppm above the global
average. There is always some scatter in the readings. But it seems, he says,
as if fast-rising emissions from power plants and cars in China and India are
traveling north on the winds with the mercury and the pesticides and the
acid haze. Not for the first time, he has caught a whiff of the future here at
the top of the world.