To bury their time capsule, the passengers of a Russian ship chose a slab of ice that seemed set to last for decades. But they had not reckoned with global warming.
It was 2018 when the Russian icebreaker 50 years of victory reached the North Pole. The crew and passengers were keen to mark the expedition and came up with an idea: leave a time capsule. They took a simple metal cylinder and filled it with letters, poems, photographs, badges, coasters, a menu, and a few cork stoppers. They buried the container inside a thick slab of ice and set off again on their journey home.
In their imagination, entire decades would pass before some stranger stumbled upon these twenty-first-century mementos. Yet the future that seemed so distant became reality very quickly.
Just two years later, surfers Conor McClory and Sophie Curran were checking the sea conditions from the headland of Bloody Foreland, on the northernmost tip of Ireland. When they spotted a strange floating object, it took them a while to work out what it was: at first they had mistaken it for a pipe that had broken off a ship, an explosive device, or a funeral urn. Driven by curiosity, they retrieved it and asked a friend to translate the external inscription from Russian. That was how they discovered they had found a time capsule buried just two years earlier, which had travelled 3,700 kilometres.
Among the messages inside was one in particular, written in English and dated 4 August 2018: "Everything around here is covered in ice. We think that when this letter is found, unfortunately there will no longer be any ice in the Arctic."
This anecdote, reported by the Guardian, reveals a great deal about what is happening in the Arctic. Due to certain specific characteristics of the region, its average temperatures are rising at rates even faster than global averages. Over the past century they have increased by almost one degree Celsius.
On 15 September this year, Arctic sea ice extent fell to its seasonal minimum of 3.74 million square kilometres. According to Nasa and the US National Snow & Ice Data Center, which have been carrying out these measurements since 1979, it is only the second time it has been recorded below 4 million square kilometres. A worrying trend, set to worsen further in the near future. According to a study published in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change, as early as 2035 we could witness the first ice-free Arctic summer.
