Underland: A Deep Time Journey

by Robert Macfarlane

Much of Paris was built from its own underland, hewn block by block from the bedrock and hauled up for dressing and placing. Underground stone-quarrying began in earnest towards the end of the twelfth century, and Parisian limestone grew in demand not just locally but across France. Lutetian limestone built parts of Notre-Dame and the Louvre; shipped on Seine barges into the river network, it became a major regional export.

a network of more than 200 miles of galleries, rooms and chambers, organized into three main regions that together spread beneath nine arrondissements. This network is the vides de carrières – the ‘quarry voids’, the catacombs.

When the Germans were closing in on Odessa during the Second World War, the Soviets left behind Ukrainian rebel groups hidden under the city in the catacombs. Some of these stay-behinds remained below ground for over a year, suffering from malnutrition, malaria and vitamin deficiencies, occasionally surfacing to seek information or make attacks.

Karst – from the Slovenian kras – is a topography formed by the dissolving of soluble rocks and minerals: principally limestone, but also dolomite, gypsum and others. Karst is vastly rich in its underlands – and it is also a terrain where water refuses to obey its usual courses of action. Karst hydrology is fabulously complex and imperfectly understood. In karst, springs rise from barren rock. Valleys are blind.

Sinkholes and shafts pock karst landscapes like gaping mouths, making karst dangerous to traverse by night or in snow. Below the surface – if karst can be said to have a surface – aquifers fill and empty over centuries, there are labyrinths through which water circulates over millennia, there are caverns big as stadia, and there are buried rivers with cataracts, rapids and slow pools.

the Roman Empire from the first to fourth centuries CE, standing as a provocative counterpoint to early Christianity, which perceived in it a ‘diabolical counterfeit’ to their own emerging rituals.

Mythologically, the underland is often a place in which women are silenced or pay brutal prices for the mistakes of men.

Only a few dozen people have ever dived below a depth of 790 feet using scuba equipment. Such ultra-diving exerts an awful toll on the bodies of those who survive, including lung damage and hearing loss, and the fatality rate among those attempting such depths is high.

But the lead diver on the retrieval dive, a British man called Dave Shaw, became tangled in his own safety cord while seeking to place Dreyer’s body in the silk bag he had brought down with him for that purpose. Shaw’s breathing and heart rate increased as his anxiety rose. Dreyer’s neck had become softened by his decade in the water, and when Shaw sought to move Dreyer’s head, it loosened from his body, then detached completely and floated past Shaw, turning to gaze at him through blackened goggles – the moment caught on Shaw’s head camera. Shortly afterwards Shaw himself succumbed to asphyxiation brought about by carbon dioxide build-up. Four days after Shaw’s death, divers returned to the cave. To their amazement, they found Shaw’s body floating near the roof of the chamber, with his torch hanging beneath him, still on. Illuminated in its beam was Dreyer’s headless corpse. Shaw had – after death – achieved what he set out to do and retrieved the body of his predecessor from the blackness.

‘I have perceived non-existence,’ Molchanova wrote in a poem called ‘The Depth’: The silence of eternal dark, And the infinity. I went beyond the time, Time poured into me And we became Immovable. I lost my body in the waves . . . Becoming like its blue abyss And touching on the oceanic secret.

The main reason for this scarcity of painted art at higher latitudes is that much of this landscape was buried under glaciers until the end of the last Ice Age. Twenty thousand years ago, when the seventeen-foot-long red aurochs was being painted in the Hall of the Bulls at Lascaux, in what is now the Dordogne, all of Scandinavia and most of Britain and Ireland were still glaciated.

Northern Europe is sparser in limestone than Spain and France, though, and richer in igneous and metamorphic rocks. Where caves or overhangs form in such rock types, they do so by the erosive forces of ice or seawater and as such tend to be shallower and rougher-sided. Their interiors lack the inviting canvases of water-smoothed limestone.

Of all archaeological specialisms, the study of prehistoric rock and cave art is among the most speculative. These acts of marking are irrefutable – but the immediate circumstances of their making are scarcely retrievable. It is hard to locate with confidence the intent or significance of individual artworks in wider webs of cultural practice.

These ghostly prints – made by beings who are not present in any form other than the impress of their feet – seem therefore to record the passage of walkers from the barrow cemeteries on higher ground, down to the sea itself – as if spirits were leaving their tombs to make a final foot-journey to the domain of the deceased.

The discovery, Bjerck will say later, is like ‘a shooting star’ – unexpected, undeserved and magnificent – and it leaves him with a desperate longing to experience such a moment again, once more to be the first person in thousands of years to set eyes on these figures dancing in the dark.

And he does find more figures, enough to feed his addiction. Red figures, always red, almost always the same simple form, leaping and dancing in the darkness of caves up and down the coasts, familiar in their shape now and yet still utterly mysterious in their making. Each time he finds them his heart leaps too and there is a collapse of time, or a coexistence of multiple kinds of time, as the figures dance and flicker in the low light.

All this way, all these miles, and the dancers have vanished. Were they ever there at all?

The dangers of the journey to reach the dancers ebb from me, the joy of their movement ebbs into me and I cry there, surprised and helpless, deep in granite and darkness, weeping for feelings I cannot name.

The hands of the dead press through the stone from the other side, meeting those of the living palm to palm, finger to finger . . . Time proceeds according to its usual rhythms beyond the threshold, but not here in this thin place.

Wave-water moves between big shore boulders, surging up around my feet as if upwelling from within the earth, and there rises in me a longing to hold again those people I have loved who are dead.

The petroleum sector accounts for almost a quarter of value-creation in the country as a whole; almost a third of the country’s total real investments are oil-based.

Norway

The issue of whether to drill for oil off Lofoten and Vesterålen has, over the past fifteen years, become a battle for the soul of Norway. The stakes are high and the forces are powerful. On the one side is a state machinery lubricated by oil money, and a population indebted to and embedded in oil culture. On the other are Norway’s perception of itself as a green nation – devoted to a secular religion of nature, committed to reducing global temperature rise and to fighting climate change – and its ancient identity as a fishing nation. Point 112 of Norway’s constitution declares that ‘natural resources should be managed based on long-term considerations, safeguarded for future generations’, and this is seen by many in the country to countermand the opening of new oilfields, especially in fragile northern waters.

Seismic mapping is a means of seeing the marine underland. A specialist ship carrying a low-frequency, high-volume air gun fires sound pulses into the water. These pulses are powerful enough to penetrate some distance into the sea floor, before reflecting back upwards to where they are recorded by seismic sensors dragged on long cables behind the ship. The blasts can occur at intervals of under a minute, for weeks or months at a time. Barely audible above the surface, they fathom the seabed. But the sound blasts also travel for hundreds of miles laterally below water, sending thunderclaps sideways through the ocean. Seismic surveys are used not only by the oil industry, but also to target deep-sea sedimentary sections that are suitable for unravelling the nature and causes of past climate change, so that models for future climate change can be tested and refined.

The Deepwater Horizon catastrophe of 2010 was partly a consequence of pushing deep drilling to its limits in an effort to open new territories. On 20 April that year, forty-one miles off the southeast coast of Louisiana, the borehole of a semi-submersible oil rig burst. The ensuing blowout at rig-level killed eleven crewmen and ignited a fireball that could be seen onshore. Two days later the rig sank, leaving the well gushing from the seabed at a water depth of around 5,000 feet. Two hundred and ten million gallons of oil escaped into the Gulf of Mexico, rising on the ocean as a slick that was visible from space. At sea level the oil devastated marine life. Tar-balls, rolled by the waves, gathered in their thousands on the coastline. Striped dolphins leaped through floating slicks. It would take until the autumn to cap and seal the well successfully, such that it could be declared ‘effectively dead’, but the consequences for the ecosystems and communities of the Gulf persist today.

The heat in the Arctic that summer was record-breaking, and so was the melt. New lows were set for the extent of Arctic sea-ice coverage. In Nuuk, the Greenlandic capital, the temperature hit 24°C. Meteorologists in Denmark rechecked their measurements. No mistake. For the past decade, the ice cap had been losing mass at twice the rate of the previous century. That year it also began melting a month earlier than usual, and the flow rates on the meltwater rivers of the glaciers reached exceptional speeds. The glaciologists checked their models. No mistake.

The increased amounts of meltwater on the ice cap helped shift the albedo: more sunshine was being absorbed, increasing the temperature, resulting in more melt, and therefore more absorption – a classic feedback loop which winter would only pause.

Like many of the smaller Greenlandic settlements, Kulusuk is a society ruptured by transition – a previously part-nomadic subsistence-hunting culture, into which modernity has intruded in the forms of stasis and alcohol.

The sea ice is thinning to a degree that makes sailing easy for incomers, but hunting impossible for the native Greenlanders. The intricate stages of hardening through which sea ice annually cycles – frazil, grease, nilas, grey – are no longer being fulfilled in many places, for the temperature of the seawater is spiking above the key freeze-point of 28.6°F. When the men cannot travel safely over the sea ice, hunting becomes difficult. Seals haul out further offshore. Bears die of starvation rather than bullets.

The melting of the ice, together with forced settlement and other factors, has had severe effects upon the mental and physical health of native Greenlanders, causing rates of depression, alcoholism, obesity and suicide to rise, especially in small communities.

And on the southern tip of Greenland, close to a small town with high unemployment called Narsaq, lies one of the world’s largest uranium deposits.

Mountaineers speak of ‘dry’ zones and ‘wet’ zones on a glacier. In the wet parts of a glacier, the ice is covered by a layer of lying snow; in dry parts, there is no such covering. Wet zones are often easier to move on, but more perilous, as the dangers of crevasse and berg-schrund are concealed, and it is hard to predict the weight-bearing qualities of the snow.

Moulins have become increasingly of interest to glaciologists and climate scientists for two reasons. Firstly because they are signs of rising surface melt-rates on glaciers and ice caps. And secondly because the deepest moulins duct water directly to the bed of the glacier. Because the meltwater is warmer than the ice, it transports thermal energy deep into the glaciers and melts more ice – so-called cryo-hydrologic warming. It is now also understood that the water can sometimes act as a lubricant, hastening the rate at which the ice slides over the rock beneath it, such that glaciers ride their own melting.

Around Greenland, some glaciers are retreating as they melt, while the flow rate of others is increasing, causing the upper ice to diminish. The softening ice cap is estimated to have lost around a trillion net tons in only four recent years.

It is clear that, once inside the moulin, communication by voice will be almost impossible. We agree a simple sign-system: up, down, pause, and – forearms crossed to make an upheld X – get me the fuck out of here.

have come to see a burial site and to bury something of my own. It will be dark when I reach the end of the world and it will be dark when I return to the surface.

Uranium is mined as ore in Canada, Russia, Australia, Kazakhstan and perhaps soon in the south of Greenland. The ore is crushed and milled; the uranium is leached out with acid, converted to a gas, enriched, consolidated and then processed into pellets. A single pellet of enriched uranium one centimetre in diameter and one centimetre long will typically release the same amount of energy as a ton of coal. Those pellets are sealed within gleaming fuel rods, usually made of zirconium alloy, which are bundled together in their thousands and then placed in the reactor core, where fission is initiated. Fission produces heat which is used to raise steam; the steam is ducted to turbines, turning their blades and producing electricity.

The best solution we have devised for securing such waste is burial. The tombs that we have constructed to receive these remains are known as geological repositories, and they are the Cloaca Maxima – the Great Sewer – of our species.