Letters

James Meek recognises that Trump’s ‘deep attachment to symbols of power and identity’ is probably sufficient to explain his interest in Greenland (LRB, 17 April). As he notes, two other common rationalisations – securing the Arctic frontier against Russia in a world with less or no northern sea ice, and the exploitation of rare earth elements – fall on the grounds that these things are impracticable and unnecessary. However, Greenland does stand in a unique position with regard to another increasingly valuable resource: sand.

The rapid urban expansion of the 20th century necessitated the mining of vast quantities of sand and gravel, the primary constituents of concrete. By a wide margin, sand and gravel are extracted in greater amounts than any other material (nearly thirty gigatons per year by 2010, presumably a vast underestimate considering the power of illegal sand-mining operations). Nonetheless, the global sand supply system is bracing for hard times. A global sand shortage is widely seen as inevitable, and may have arrived already. One issue is that not all sand works as aggregate for concrete. An individual grain in the Sahara has probably spent a million years experiencing mechanical abrasion, getting rounded and polished as it blows in the wind and slams into its neighbours, but for concrete the grains need to be rough and angular if they are to pack together effectively. Riverbeds are full of suitable sand. A documentary from 2023, Eat Bitter, follows a sand supply chain in the Central African Republic, from the backbreaking work of an artisanal diver filling buckets by hand in the Ubangi River to a Chinese construction foreman building a bank in the capital, Bangui. Many of these localised reserves, near the construction projects they’re intended for, are already exhausted. Others have been mined to the point of destroying ecosystems and destabilising riverbanks, threatening riparian communities.

Another ideal source of angular grains is from the bed of melting glaciers. As the Greenland ice sheet retreats, it grinds down the underlying bedrock and liberates fine-grained sediments. These are carried by river channels to the coast, forming deltas. Mining these deltas would probably involve the use of floating suction dredgers to pipe sand from the delta directly into larger tankers. This obviates the need for a skilled local labour force and carries less long-term risk than developing a mine; you can simply pull anchor and sail away.

Trump himself is more interested in turning ‘the world’s largest island’ red, white and blue on the map than in any of these considerations. But that isn’t necessarily true of some of the people around him. For example, his commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, was the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald when the firm acquired a $10 million stake in the Critical Metals Corporation, which is actively pursuing a rare-earth mine in southern Greenland (he stepped down after he was confirmed by the Senate). One wonders if the smart money might shift from the extraction of materials that would go into solar panels, turbines and EVs to the mining of materials to build gaudy skyscrapers and luxury condos. An enormous ship anchored far offshore, hauling away the island itself as it is ground to gravel under the melting ice sheet, all to build the Trump Hotel Rafah: it feels almost inevitable.

James Meek mentions Greenland’s mineral deposits. Those on the east coast were first discovered in 1964 by a British expedition of which I was a member. The mineralised veins occur in Tertiary basaltic rocks near the snout of the Kronborg glacier. Aircraft routinely patrolled the coast checking for other country’s submarines. Our expedition found grim evidence of this in the wreck and dead crew of one such aircraft that perhaps through navigational error was flying inland at night and crashed into the basalt cliffs on the north side of the glacier.

James Vincent writes that ‘magnetite found in the beaks of migratory birds is thought to act like an internal compass, enabling them to sense the strength and alignment of the Earth’s magnetism in the way humans feel the push and direction of the wind’ (LRB, 17 April). In fact, there is a growing, though inconclusive, body of evidence that migratory birds are dependent on a quantum sensing technique to guide their migrations. The hypothesis is that interactions with light cause electron transfer within cryptochrome proteins in the retina, resulting in the formation of pairs of molecules, each with an unpaired electron. These ‘radical pairs’ rapidly oscillate between two different configurations of the combined spins of the two unpaired electrons. As spin, in the language of physics, couples to the magnetic field, the birds are able to use the effect of Earth’s magnetic field on these molecules to orient themselves. This hypothesis explains why northern birds transplanted to the southern hemisphere will still migrate to the equator and why the electromagnetic noise of the city can disorient migratory birds. Aside from the beauty of this mechanism, the true wonder is that it can function at all. The birds are sensing an interaction a million times weaker than the thermal fluctuations of the molecules.

I read Miriam Dobson’s review of Alexis Peri’s Dear Unknown Friend with great interest, having corresponded with Volodya Bystrov of Leningrad from 1957 until his death about twenty years ago (LRB, 17 April). The relationships Dobson describes seem rather distant compared with the one I enjoyed with Bystrov, probably because we initially met face to face, by chance, in Moscow and became great friends from the outset. The political divide was never a problem, and our subsequent monthly correspondence proceeded unhindered by censorship, although this undoubtedly took place on the Russian side. Books of all sorts were exchanged, including Nineteen Eighty-Four, which Volodya translated into Russian and circulated as samizdat in 1958, possibly the first Russian translation. Our letters were mainly about day to day events, on his side always full of humour. He spent a year teaching German to reluctant pupils in a remote village near Arkhangelsk and his stories of life there were hilarious, as were those of his fiancée, Ena, who spent some time organising mobile libraries for nomadic reindeer herdsmen in Kamchatka. Volodya eventually became a technical translator specialising in the mining industry. I became a regular visitor to the household, where I learned all about Bystrov’s family history, including that of his grandmother Maria Doroshinskaya, whose memoir, This Was My Russia, was recently published in English by Land & Sky Press.

Patrick Cockburn notes in his account of the Iranian embassy siege in 1980 that the SAS assault was broadcast live on television (LRB, 17 April). It might be added that the coverage had so many viewers because everyone was at home watching the final of the snooker world championship. The BBC returned from Kensington to Sheffield in time to show Cliff Thorburn prevail in the ultimate clash of styles against Alex Higgins. My late father and I were not alone in considering the interruption of the game to be somewhat overextended.

Erin Maglaque mentions the use of the frog Xenopus laevis in pregnancy testing (LRB, 17 April). The introduction of this technique in London was the work of my great-uncle, the physician and herpetologist Edward Elkan (1895-1983). A refugee from Nazi Germany, he retrained as a doctor and went into practice just before the beginning of the Second World War. In his unpublished memoir, he describes reading about the discovery of this use of the frog by Lancelot Hogben in South Africa. He decided it was worth trying in England because the existing test was ‘cumbersome, expensive and needed hecatombs of young mice’. He ordered his first hundred frogs from South Africa and set them up in an aquarium on his balcony, where they thrived on emulsified liver from the butcher. But when the war broke out, he like many other Jewish refugees was interned, and the frogs were sent to other homes.

After the war, he reclaimed the frogs. In the memoir he writes that the test had become quite acceptable in medical practice, and that he had a substantial clientele. In 1970 the Department of Health took over pregnancy diagnosis and the frogs were transferred to a laboratory at what was then called Shrodell’s Hospital in Watford. Elkan took on a part-time position overseeing the laboratory; at its peak there were about five thousand frogs there.

I want to adjust one misconception in Erin Maglaque’s review of my book Conceiving Histories. My argument isn’t that people in the past were more comfortable with or calmer about the ‘not-knowing’ around conception. The possibly pregnant, their medical consultants and other invested parties were often anxious to know. Instead, I suggest that, historically, people benefited from a greater openness about not knowing. We kid ourselves that technologies have resolved all doubt, when really they only cap it.

My argument is different from, but does not contradict, the one made by feminists who remind us that the power of foetal imaging technology is not always wielded in women’s interests, and that uncertainty can be positive. I argue that, as well as thinking about what technology does in positive cases of pregnancy, we should be clearer about its benefits and limitations in negative ones. At-home kits don’t test for pregnancy but for the hormone HCG above a defined concentration. A pregnancy may be establishing but not meet the threshold or, after meeting the threshold, may not progress. A sonogram can be ambiguous early on and in negative cases. Yet, because of the greater challenge posed by negative diagnoses, when a sonogram confirms a miscarriage, it draws a line in the sand. The historical writing I explore offers insight into an experience of profound unknowing which persists even in modernity, whatever we tell ourselves.

Malcolm Gaskill’s review of Lyndal Roper’s Summer of Fire and Blood does much to bring out the best features of its fresh account of the German Peasants’ War (LRB, 17 April). But to describe Roper as having ‘risen above the weaponised historiography’ is a bit much. At least one of the targets of Roper’s pike seems clear enough: the Marxist tradition that stretches back to Friedrich Engels’s still widely read history of the war. Roper makes some strange claims, such as that German peasants in the 16th century, unlike Karl Marx, cared about ‘the environment’. Engels, she says, believed the peasants were not ‘truly revolutionary’, and that for him and for Marx it was only the rising bourgeoisie of the towns that mattered. But Engels and Marx each criticised their friend Ferdinand Lassalle for failing adequately to capture, in his play about the war, the tragic position of the peasants. They insisted the peasants’ movement was a real force, but one that had no chance of coalescing with the ‘necessarily petty’ interests of the townsfolk and lower aristocracy. Just because one doesn’t think the peasants had a prayer doesn’t mean one looks down on what they did. By examining the historical forces that constrained the rebellion, the historian does them as much, if not more, justice than by recovering the details of their lived experience. Surely the question of which types of elite rupture and cross-class co-ordination can achieve lasting results is not without interest in our own time.