The first to draw attention to the haze apparently was Adolf Erik Nordenskiold, says the study. In an 1883 report, published in Science Magazine, he described the sky covered with a thin veil of clouds, and that sometimes the haze descended to the surface of the ice. Unlike water haze, the material was dry, "yes, so dry that our wet clothes absolutely dried in it," the study quotes Nordenskiold.

That geologist also noted that in an expedition to Greenland in 1870 he had found fine, gray dust wherever the recent snow had melted. When the dust was set, it was black or dark brown. He found the soot contained "metallic iron, which could be drawn out by the magnet, and which, under the blowpipe, gave a reaction of cobalt and nickel," Nordenskiold wrote.

He speculated that the dust may have come from space. But Garrett doesn't believe in the cosmic dust theory.

The samples had "the sort of metals in them that we would associate with industrial activity," he said. "There was nothing in the way of pollution controls back then, and people didn't know how to burn efficiently." The metals were markers of fly ash from smelting and from burning coal.

Fridtjof Nansen, who sailed with a sealing expedition in 1882, "observed dark stains on the ice sheet that he hypothesized were from dust transported by air from more southern lands," says the study.

A book by Nansen was translated into English for the study, with that work carried out by a student from Brigham Young University.

With the great quantities of coal that were burned in those days, he said, the Arctic of the 1880s may have been "much more polluted than it is now," Garrett said.

What does this tell us about global warming?

"That's one of the interesting things here," Garrett said. "When we do studies of global warming of the Arctic, which is a very hot topic now because the Arctic has changed so quickly, we think of the warming by man-made activities as a very recent phenomenon."

The sharp rise of carbon dioxide pollution levels is a recent change. But "there is a considerable amount of research that suggests that particulate matter from industrial pollution may also contribute to warming of the arctic."

When snow is darkened and clouds are affected, the warmth can increase.

"If pollution was possibly higher back in the 1800s than it is today, I don't want to say that warming of the Arctic by human activities was greater back then, but I think we should strongly consider that it was not zero."

In order to estimate effects of current activities on the Arctic's warming, "we need to have a baseline," he said. "And if this baseline is set at a few decades ago, rather than a few centuries ago, then perhaps we're not setting the baseline in the right place."

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E-mail: bau@desnews.com