Into Thin Ice

To track changes in sea ice, the Norwegian research vessel Lance drifted along with it for five months in 2015, on a rare voyage from Arctic winter into spring. Photo: Andy Isaacson

FIRST PUBLISHED IN NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, JANUARY 2016

THE SEA ICE THAT BLANKETS THE ARCTIC OCEAN isn’t the unbroken white mantle depicted in maps. It’s a jigsaw puzzle of restless floes that are constantly colliding, deforming, and fracturing from the force of wind and ocean currents. Last February I stood shivering on the deck of the Lance, an old Norwegian research vessel, as it picked a path through a labyrinth of navigable fractures. A barren white plain of ice and snow extended to the horizon in every direction. The ship’s steel hull shuddered and screeched as it plowed through floating chunks of jagged ice. The Lance was seeking a solid patch of ice to attach to—the last one had shattered—so that it could resume its erratic drift across the frozen sea, charting the fate of Arctic sea ice by going with the floe.

The Norwegians have done this before, more than a century ago, when polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen and the Fram were locked in pack ice for nearly three years during a vain attempt to drift across the North Pole. But the Arctic is a different ocean now. The air above it has warmed on average about 5 degrees Fahrenheit in the past century, more than twice the global average. Much less of the ocean is covered by ice, and much more of that ice is thinner, seasonal ice rather than thick, old floes. A feedback loop with far-reaching consequences has taken effect: As white ice is replaced in summer by dark ocean water, which absorbs more sunlight, the water and air heat further—amplifying the ongoing thaw.

“The Arctic warms first, most, and fastest,” explains Kim Holmén, the long-bearded international director of the Norwegian Polar Institute (NPI), which operates theLance. Climate models predict that by as early as 2040 it will be possible in summer to sail across open water to the North Pole.

Arctic sea ice helps cool the whole planet by reflecting sunlight back into space. So its loss inevitably will affect the climate and weather beyond the Arctic, but precisely how remains unclear. Better forecasts require better data on sea ice and its shifting, uneven distribution. “Most scientific cruises to the Arctic are conducted in summer, and this is where we have the most field data,” says Gunnar Spreen, an NPI sea-ice physicist I met on board the Lance. “The continuous changes that occur from winter into spring are a huge gap in our understanding.”

On the Lance’s five-month mission its rotating crew of international scientists would investigate the causes and effects of ice loss by monitoring the ice across its entire seasonal life cycle—from the time when it formed in winter until it melted in summer.

A few days after photographer Nick Cobbing and I joined the ship by icebreaker and helicopter from Longyearbyen, on the island of Spitsbergen in the Svalbard archipelago—the base for NPI’s Arctic operations—the Lance steamed to 83 degrees north, just west of Russian territory. The scientists singled out a half-mile-wide floe of predominantly seasonal ice that they hoped to study. The crew tethered the vessel to the floe with nylon ropes attached to thick metal poles driven into the ice. They shut off the main engine. Isolated and in near darkness, we began our wayward drift and our month-long shift in the ice desert.

Like homesteaders, the scientists established camps on the floe, pitching tents and laying electric cables. Physicists like Spreen mapped the ice topography with lasers and recorded the thickness and temperature of the snow on top. Oceanographers bored a hole through the ice to gather data about the water and the currents. Meteorologists erected masts carrying instruments to collect weather data and measure greenhouse gases. Biologists searched for ice algae, which look like dirt and live on the underside of the ice and in the channels of trapped brine left after newly formed sea ice expels salt. In a few weeks, after the returning sun cast aside the cloak of polar night and began filtering through the melting floe, the scientists would watch the ecosystem awaken.

Temperatures regularly plunged to 30 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Scientists had to contend with numb fingers, snapped cables, and crippled electronic instruments, along with the danger of roving polar bears. “This is really extreme science,” one researcher said.

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Photo: Andy Isaacson

IN 2007 THE UN INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL ON CLIMATE CHANGE (IPCC) warned that the impacts of climate change in the Arctic over the next century “will exceed the impacts forecast for many other regions and will produce feedbacks that will have globally significant consequences.” Nearly a decade later this grim forecast is already being borne out. Probably no region has been more affected by climate change than the Arctic. Permafrost is thawing, and the land is greening, as tree lines creep north and shrubs and grasses invade the tundra. Certain populations of polar bears, walruses, and caribou have suffered significant declines. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) oceanographer James Overland says, “The Arctic really is the canary showing that climate change is real.”

Since 1979, when satellite records began, the Arctic has lost more than half its volume of ice, which has diminished in both overall area and thickness. The frozen area shrinks to its annual minimum in September, at summer’s end. In September 2012 its extent was just half the average during the 1980s and ’90s. The maximum ice extent in winter, usually reached in March, also is declining, though at a slower rate; its average thickness has decreased by half. What was once mostly a layer of 10- to 13-foot-thick ice floes that lingered for years—perennial ice—has given way to large tracts of thinner, less reflective ice that forms and melts during a single year. Sea-ice coverage has always fluctuated naturally, but there’s little doubt among scientists that man-made greenhouse gases are now accelerating its decline. “Old, thick sea ice was a global reservoir for cold, but that is now changing,” Overland says.

An entire ecosystem is melting away. The loss of sea ice may take a toll on some of the photosynthesizing organisms that fuel the marine food chain—single-celled algae that live under the ice and bloom in the spring when the light returns. Changes in the magnitude and timing of these blooms, as winter ice retreats faster and earlier, may throw off the life cycle of tiny, fatty zooplankton called copepods, which eat the algae and are in turn eaten by arctic cod, seabirds, and bowhead whales. For marine mammals such as the polar bear, Pacific walrus, and ringed seal, the loss of hundreds of thousands of square miles of sea ice has already been devastating. “It’s like someone took the floor out from under you,” says Kristin Laidre, a polar scientist at the University of Washington.

The assumption is that later this century, without a home field, these animals will simply lose all competitive advantage. Killer whales, for example, are likely to replace polar bears as the top marine predators, as bears retreat to the dwindling remnants of summer sea ice. Though polar bears sometimes spend time on land, where lately a few have been hybridizing with grizzlies, Ian Stirling of the University of Alberta, a leading polar bear expert, dismisses any notion that they could survive long-term on land as “wishful thinking.” Ice-free conditions are likely to draw in other competitors—zooplankton (maybe less fatty and nutritious ones), fish, seals—from more temperate waters.

Ice loss is also making the Arctic even more vulnerable to ocean acidification, another effect of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide. Cold water absorbs more CO₂ than warm water does, and more cold water is now open to the air. As the water acidifies, it loses carbonate. Within the next 15 years it may no longer contain enough for animals such as sea snails and Alaska king crabs to construct and maintain their calcium-carbonate shells.

The upshot of all this, as Stirling bluntly puts it: “The Arctic marine ecosystem as we know it now will no longer exist.”

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Photo: Andy Isaacson

WARMER AIR ABOVE THE OCEAN BASIN IS PROJECTED TO SPILL DOWN over the surrounding coasts of Russia, Alaska, and Canada, causing feedback effects as far as 900 miles inland, including accelerated melting of the Greenland ice sheet and large emissions of carbon dioxide and methane from thawing tundra. IPCC models forecast that the total loss of summer sea ice may in itself cause one-third of the warming of the Northern Hemisphere and 14 percent of total global warming by the end of the century.

How a rapidly warming Arctic will influence weather across the hemisphere is a bit hazier. Atmospheric scientists Jennifer Francis at Rutgers University and Steve Vavrus at the University of Wisconsin have suggested that people in the continental United States already may be feeling the effects of melting Arctic sea ice—especially in the past two winters in the east, which made “polar vortex” household words.

The polar vortex is the mass of cold air that’s normally confined over the Pole by the polar jet stream—the high-altitude, fast-moving torrent of air that snakes around the Pole from west to east. The jet stream draws most of its energy from the contrast in temperature and pressure between the frigid air to its north and the warmer air to the south. As sea-ice loss amplifies the warming in the Arctic, the Francis theory goes, that contrast is reduced, weakening the jet stream’s westerly winds. It becomes a lazier, more sinuous river, with large meanders that extend far to the south and north. Because the meanders advance slowly across the map, whatever weather they enfold persists for a long time. During the past two winters the wavier pattern allowed Arctic air and extreme snow to beset New England and drought to linger over California. The melting Arctic may be affecting weather elsewhere too. Korean researchers have linked extreme winters in East Asia to air-circulation changes caused specifically by ice loss in the Barents-Kara Sea.

It’s a neat theory, but parts of it remain “fuzzy,” Francis admits. Also, many researchers who study atmospheric dynamics aren’t buying it. A more plausible explanation for the wavier jet stream and the southward excursions of the polar vortex, some of them argue, is the influence of the tropical Pacific, which is a far more powerful source of heat than the Arctic. It will take years of data gathering and modeling to settle the debate.

In any case, as the warming of the planet continues, cold spells of any kind will become less common. Even if sharp limits on greenhouse gas emissions are adopted over the next 20 years, the decline of sea ice will continue for decades. “We’re on a one-way trip and not going back,” says Overland. A further rise of 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) in the Arctic is all but assured by mid-century, he says, enough to keep the ocean ice free for at least two months of the year, enough to change the seasons there—“enough to affect everything.”

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Photo: Andy Isaacson

IN LATE JUNE, DURING THE FINAL PHASE OF THEIR EXPEDITION, the scientists aboard theLance awoke to discover that the latest ice floe they’d attached to was disintegrating too. They scrambled to salvage their gear before it became flotsam. It was time to pack up anyway. The vessel by that point had spent 111 days in the ice, tethered to different floes for several weeks at a time—logging altogether some 4,000 nautical miles across the Arctic. Polar bears had crossed its path, sometimes pausing to play with the scientists’ strange-looking electronic instruments. Storms had bulldozed huge blocks of ice high against the ship, elevating it above the surface. The Lance’s crew had bested the researchers in a soccer match on the floe. Over the next couple of years the 68 scientists involved will be hunkered in their warm labs, making sense of all the data they gathered.

One morning in March, under a dusky blue sky, I had joined Gunnar Spreen and another NPI researcher, Anja Rösel, on one of their periodic forays to measure changes in the ice floe’s thickness. We each wore insulated armor—jumpsuit, balaclava, goggles, gloves, mittens over the gloves. The scientists brought along a snow-depth probe, a GPS device, and an orange plastic sled carrying the ice-thickness instrument, which works by inducing an electric current in the seawater below. I carried a flare gun and a .30-06-caliber rifle: bear protection. Following a mile-long path staked by bamboo poles, we trudged over dunelike snowdrifts and pressure ridges—slabs of sea ice pushed up by colliding floes—that looked like crumbling stone walls. Every few feet Spreen stopped and plunged the depth gauge into the snowpack until it beeped to indicate that the measurement was complete.

Arctic warming seemed an abstract concept that day—I couldn’t really feel my toes—but across the icescape, Spreen saw evidence of change. “This is an unusual amount of snow,” he noted. Two feet of it lay beneath our moon boots, twice the amount in a typical year. One data point doesn’t make a trend, but this one was consistent with model forecasts: As sea ice shrinks, the extra heat and water vapor released from the open water into the lower atmosphere should generate more precipitation.

More snow falling on a glacier on land would be a good thing, because that’s how glaciers grow—by accumulating layers of snow so thick that the stuff at the bottom gets compressed into ice. But sea ice forms when cold air freezes seawater, and snow falling on top of it acts as an insulating blanket that slows the growth of the ice. As it happened, two weeks after my walk with Spreen, the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado announced that Arctic sea ice had already reached its maximum extent for the winter in late February—much earlier than usual. It was the lowest maximum the satellites had ever recorded.

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Photo: Andy Isaacson

The Incubator

In Droege's lab at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, pizza boxes provide storage to thousands of pinned bee specimens. Volunteers Gene Scarpulla (in green) and Tim McMahon peer through microscopes to ID the insects. Credit: Robert Wright

FIRST PUBLISHED IN AUDUBON, NOV-DEC 2014

IT WAS A BRIGHT, BREEZY DAY in late April, the flowering azaleas having finally shrugged off the winter that overstayed its welcome, when Sam Droege sailed onto the grounds of the U.S. National Arboretum in Washington, D.C., behind the wheel of a pterodactyl. It was actually a '98 forest-green Saturn, which Droege had painted with yellow wings and a red-and-yellow beak that tapered to a point down the center of the hood. A piece of wood, lined with a rusty crosscut saw, had been bolted to the roof: the crest. Little jingle bells, inspired by richly adorned buses in Pakistan, dangled from chains screwed into the rear bumper. Droege still had designs for neon undercarriage lights, and a mosaic of mirror shards to line the car's ceiling—"but why stop there?" he wondered. It was a work in progress.

Droege, 56, is a biologist at the U.S. Geological Survey's Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, in Maryland. He's an expert on both birds and pollinator species, though he doesn't fit the mold of a government scientist. His spectacular macro portraits of bees, shot using a camera rig he devised by modifying one used by the U.S. Army, have several hundred thousand online admirers, yet he doesn't consider himself a photographer. Relentlessly creative, he has produced a spate of grassroots programs with names like Bioblitz, Frogwatch USA, and Cricket Crawl that enlist volunteers to inventory local flora and fauna. Droege is the Johnny Appleseed of citizen science.

Four years ago Droege launched a pilot program that, if funded, would become the first survey of North America's wild bee population. It's another volunteer effort, supercharged by an army of biologists from the U.S. Forest Service and other land protection agencies who send Droege little plastic baggies filled with bees plucked from the deserts, dunes, sagebrush plains, and prairies where they work. Honey-bee decline is now a well-documented phenomenon, even if its precise cause remains uncertain, but data are scant about the relative status of the 4,000 known species of native bees. Droege aims to change that, although "when you have these extensive surveys all based on volunteers, if I get 50 percent [participation], that's really high."

On the day we met, Droege was doing his rounds, checking up on volunteers and constantly netting bees. He parked the pterodactyl by a trail that meandered into the arboretum's native plant collection. He wore black Levi's, hiking boots, and a vintage cardigan ski sweater. His graying blond hair lay in a skinny braid at the back of his neck.

Ever upbeat, Droege grabbed a few vials and his butterfly net from the car, and began creeping slowly down the trail. "You're looking for a motion that's not in sync with blowing leaves," he said. Upon reaching a cluster of wild geraniums, he stopped. A bee darted busily among the flowers. Droege hovered closely with the net poised—the "swing ready" position. Giving it a quick snap, he scooped up the bee and cradled the net rapidly back and forth like a lacrosse stick. He then continued on. The most efficient method of bee collecting, he explained, was to accumulate several bees before transferring them into the vials. "I talk about this a lot in my lab: How does doing something increase your 'bees per hour'?"

Droege has been obsessively counting and collecting since he was a young boy traipsing through the woods near his childhood home in suburban Maryland. He started off gathering rocks. He and a friend would crack them open with their dads' hammers, pronouncing each one to be as valuable as the rose amethyst they'd seen in a book. He had various other hobbies—stamps, old bottles—but his first true love was birds. There weren't any ornithology role models in the blue-collar neighborhood where he grew up, so he equipped himself with Boy Scout binoculars and set off into the forest. Because his father wouldn't let him take his grandfather's dated bird guide out of the house, Droege was forced to assign identification to memory.

Eventually he discovered the Birds of Maryland and the District of Columbia at the local library. The book was coauthored by Chandler Robbins, a USGS biologist in Patuxent. Using the phonebook, Droege tracked down Robbins, who invited the teenager into his bird club. "It was over then," Droege recalled. "I was surrounded by my people."

While his high school peers smoked pot under the bleachers, Droege cut class to find birds with the grown-ups. Even then he could deftly switch between animal families. His idea of spring break in Florida during college was hunting elusive Zoraptera insects in the Everglades; he compiled the second-largest collection of insects at the University of Maryland-College Park. Droege was a regular on Audubon's annual Christmas Bird Counts, often alongside his mentor Robbins, once clocking 12 counts in a single season.

"There's a certain component of people I completely resonate with," Droege said, "people who obsess with the details, who don't have off switches. They walk outside, hear the pink of the bobolink, and wonder, 'Why is there a flock at this time of day? The 'birdhead' brain hears this obscure sound, and the whole database thing clicks in. It's almost drug-like. It's not the way the average person floats through the universe."

Droege first began hanging around Patuxent in college, working there as a part-time lab tech. He then pursued a drawn-out master's degree in wildlife management at SUNY Syracuse. It was the Reagan era, which Droege says caused his student stipend to evaporate, consigning him to a life of ad hoc survivalism: One year, he lived in an attic and later in his office, sleeping on cardboard under an old Army blanket. He worked out a deal with the crew team to use its showers, raided undergrad parties for beer, and made lists of school functions where there might be leftover food. His office abutted an old cemetery that had maple trees; Droege convinced the caretaker to let him tap the trees, then boiled down the sap in pans in his lab, using Bunsen burners to make his own syrup. He became notorious for trapping squirrels outside his office window; one year he ate a hundred of them. He also acquired the nickname "Roadkill Droege" (raccoon was his favorite). "It was a Turkey Vulture lifestyle," Droege told me. "Whatever was dead and free was mine."

After graduate school, in 1985, he was floating around Northern California, doing fieldwork, but found the area way too mellow. He was seeking more of an "eastern edge." One of the researchers from Patuxent called to ask if he'd like to take over the Breeding Bird Survey, a model citizen science program that Robbins himself had initiated at Patuxent in the 1960s. Droege coordinated the survey for six years, during which time he reversed its flagging participation rates, recruited state coordinators, and "schmoozed people into running more [survey] routes," before moving on to fill a new post at the USGS, unofficially titled the Nongame Bird Czar.

"He's not the usual image of a federal lab scientist," his supervisor, John French, said. "Sam is a very imaginative guy, and he's got all sorts of excellent ideas. For someone like that, you want to allow those ideas to come up and be explored and find out which ones work and which ones don't."

Meanwhile, Droege also took over what became the agency's Bird Phenology Program. Phenology is the study of periodic biological phenomena, such as plant flowering. Droege hired a young biologist named Jessica Zelt to mine a century-old collection of bird migration data that had been gathering dust. She has since recruited several thousand volunteers to digitize the archive, and those data are now being analyzed for links between climate change and bird migration.

Many of Droege's citizen science projects are designed to dive into the kind of habitats—backyards, regional parks, wetlands—that the average research scientist would pass over for, say, Papua New Guinea or Madagascar. "If you're a university person, this isn't going to give you tenure," he said. Monitoring long-term population trends with an eye for impending crisis is Bureau of Census stuff—"dreadfully boring." The North American Amphibian Monitoring Program, for example, another Droege endeavor, involves volunteers counting the frog and toad calls that they hear at designated survey locations across the country three times each spring.

Yet Droege seems inclined to database work, to counting and taking stock. He often leaves the analysis to others. "What characterizes Sam is that he's not at all proprietary about his data," French says. Droege explains that he enjoys setting up projects and troubleshooting the kinks. "Then I'm looking for someone to pick it up so I can work on the thousand million other cool things sitting out there as ideas waiting to be implemented. I'm always attracted to over-the-horizon, and thinking about how I can make this better, bigger, faster."

Though Droege considers himself a good generalist naturalist, he currently wears the hat of a bee specialist—and he collects them every chance he gets. "I love the minutiae of learning how to identify things," he said. "I'll go to weddings, do my face time, and then go off" gathering specimens. He's attracted to the urban margins, which harbor pockets of feral habitat. "If you want to have safe passage in a nasty part of a city," he said, "just carry a butterfly net. You're considered to be completely harmless. Kind of pathetic, but clearly not a threat."

Above his desk droege keeps a photo of George Washington Carver, who was an early childhood hero and remains his scientific role model. Droege read his biography several times in grade school. He relates to Carver's connection to plants and nature despite a hardscrabble upbringing, how he bootstrapped his way to a Ph.D. while pursuing art, and how he created a science program at Tuskegee University from scratch, with whatever equipment he had available. "He was his own man, remained quirky, worked his entire life, and died at his job," Droege said.

Droege is proudly carrying on that spirit. Much of the equipment in his lab, in an 80-year-old brick building on the USDA's Beltsville Agricultural Research Center campus, is hacked together from disused labs on the property. "If other people are not doing something, it becomes attractive to me," Droege told me. "I tell the interns: In this lab, we're all about failure. If you're not failing, you're not really doing anything."

In that low-tech, citizen-friendly way, Droege has developed all manner of one-offs and oddball techniques. He's found that you can obtain "beautifully coiffed hair" on even the longest-haired bumblebees if you shake them around in a paper towel. Or you can use a hair dryer. (He'd previously tried drying bees using a hotdog turner, but "it was mostly a failure.") Lately Droege has been experimenting with digital photography, which led to another inspired bit of technological improvisation: By suspending his bees in a cuvette (the transparent vessel chemists use for spectroscopic analysis) filled with hand sanitizer, he could obtain fine-art-worthy close-ups. In fact, one day after posting the portraits on Flickr, his daughter said, "Dad, I think these are your pictures on Reddit." The bee images had made their way to a Reddit forum called WoahDude ("The BEST links to click while you're STONED!")—not exactly the intended target, but they received 200,000 views in two days. "None of these people would ever go to one of my lectures," Droege told me. "This is a completely new doorway to engage people in bugs."

Droege is also leveraging digital photography and social networks to crowdsource images taken from designated "photo stations" around the country in order to monitor long-term changes in landscapes. "We have satellites collecting broad information, but we're lacking detailed information," he explained. "Like, what's going on in terms of this dune that's in front of my house? Lichens have a relationship with air quality: Take regular pictures of the same rock and you can measure the colonies." He figures the Fish and Wildlife Service might want a camera station in a refuge to document how the land is changing. A national park might be interested in the status of a remote trail. As with all of his initiatives, Droege intends to incubate the idea, develop techniques and protocols, build a database, and then hand the program over to someone else, such as a nonprofit group, to administer. For now, though, Droege is too indispensable to walk away from the bee survey. "I can't really extract from the bee community until there are more like me out there," he said.

That evening, I drove with Droege back to his house in Maryland, which sits on an acre of land beside state woods. Droege often runs in the area—for years barefoot, after reading about its benefits in a Science Daily article, but now wearing modified sandals for skin protection ("something Jesus might wear if he were modern"). A pickup was parked on the grass; it had been stippled all over with sponge paint. Droege built his turquoise home out of straw bales; a smaller annex nearby, which had originally been constructed as a natural-building demonstration on the Washington Mall, housed his friend Eric—"a vagabond"—and served as a therapy room for his wife, Kappy, a breathwork practitioner. The inside of the main home had uneven plaster walls, unmilled timbers, a composting toilet, and tiered rooms, giving it the look of an insect dwelling. "I really like flowy things," Droege explained. "All of this in a way is a reaction against uniform anything. I won't put drywall in my house. I don't like the whole mentality that even likes drywall."

Droege has two college-age daughters from his first marriage. His wife had permitted him to name the older Wren but felt another bird name would scar the second child, who instead grew up lamenting that she'd been given a boring name (Anna). For years Droege told her the lie that she'd been named after Calypte anna—Anna's Hummingbird.

"Most of what my wives have done is tempered my extravagances," Droege told me over grilled cheese sandwiches that night. "Which is a good thing, because then I'd have even fewer boundaries." He gave me a partial tour of his extravagances, such as they were. Over his front porch dangled a surplus government CO2 cylinder with the base cut off—a wind chime! After dark he took me out to the back of the house, where moths had gathered around a black light and fluorescent bulbs he'd set up to attract them. He snapped photos, which he would later send to a colleague conducting a moth survey.

Nearby, I noticed dozens of bullet-hole-sized chinks bored into the plaster wall. Droege explained that two species of Anthophora bees had taken up residence. We walked around to the side of the house, where a sliced-up tire lay on the ground. Droege was experimenting with ways to use recycled tires as a construction material. Eventually he hoped to build a rubber bridge that could span the Patuxent River. It was another work in progress, he said. "That'll be on my tombstone."

Facing Polar Bears, Isolation, Researchers Explore Arctic Sea Ice

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The R/V Lance. Credit: Andy Isaacson

FIRST PUBLISHED IN NATIONALGEOGRAPHIC.COM, MARCH 19, 2015

82.44 DEGREES NORTH—We've drifted across the frozen Arctic for 30 days. Four miles here, ten miles there—a squiggly red line on the ship's digital chart is the only measure of progress.

Trapped in ice, the Lance meanders at the mercy of wind and current. Some days, low, moist clouds engulf the ship from the south; on others, cold northerly winds chill it by 50 degrees. Switched off at this latitude for four months of the year, the sun now rises higher each morning, casting long shadows off surface ice ridges and snowdrifts as it traces a low arc across the horizon.

From January to June, in six-week stints, scientists are on board the Lance, a research vessel operated by the Norwegian Polar Institute (NPI), to study how the ocean, atmosphere, snow, ice, and biology all interact in the Arctic amid a backdrop of significant warming. "Right now we're just trying to take as much as we can, because this is a one-off opportunity to get this data," said Amelie Meyer, an NPI oceanographer. "And nobody's got it."

Isolation has settled in. The Lance is currently some 250 nautical miles from another human dwelling or vessel—farther than the distance between New York and Washington, D.C.

At one point, a polar bear crossed our path, paused for several days to sniff at the weather masts and strange-looking electronic instruments it encountered, and then eventually moved on.

A bioluminescent jellyfish happened by a hole bored in the sea ice one day, drawing excitement: signs of life! The other night, a marine biologist sat elated at her microscope as it magnified a rare glimpse of an amphipod, caught in a net that day from 200 meters (656 feet) below, giving birth to ten offspring.

People refer to life on board as "The Bubble." Snippets of world news leak in through email, via satellite, like communiqués from another planet. What date is it today? Certain things just fade from mind. "It's kind of comforting to not be bothered by all of ordinary life's problems," admitted Algot Peterson, a Norwegian oceanographer. Without smartphones or the Internet, he said, "you actually sit and talk to each other."

Absence of distractions also brings into sharper focus the task at hand. 

Each day, worker bees in yellow-and-black jumpsuits drag children's sleds laden with tools and equipment to their study sites across the ice floe. They analyze it from every angle. With a thermometer and a scale, a snow physicist stands thigh-deep in a snow pit, measuring the temperature and density of the different layers of snowpack to discern how much it insulates the sea ice from the cool atmosphere above. A Japanese biogeochemist deploys a robot that traps and measures carbon dioxide emissions off newly formed sea ice, its surface ornamented with delicate bouquets of salty ice crystals known as frost flowers. Nearby, sea ice physicists drill ice cores that they'll analyze for their internal crystalline structure, which holds clues to the environmental conditions under which the ice grew.

Farther below, warm Atlantic seawater, which passes between Iceland and Norway as it enters the Arctic, lies beneath a 100-meter-thick (328 feet) layer of cold surface water. Several times a week, oceanographers send down instruments that probe these layers of seawater to determine how much—and when—they mix, as heat from the Atlantic water influences ice thickness and its extent across the Arctic.

Woosok Moon, a researcher from the University of Cambridge, tries to make sense of all the data. In his cramped cabin on board the Lance, he spends evenings scribbling arcane equations into a notebook, which no one else seems to understand.

Much more than mid-latitude environments, Moon explained, the Arctic sea ice system, especially in the summer, is highly sensitive to any disturbances. As more bright ice melts and is replaced by dark ocean, for example, more solar energy is absorbed in the water, raising temperatures of the ocean and air that in turn melt more ice—a process known as the ice-albedo feedback.But other feedback loops counteract that process. "It's like an unstable person, bothered by neighborhood noise one day, and a gentleman the next. It's very hard to make future predictions about erratic behavior."

Moon is trying to forecast the status of the Arctic sea ice by building a stochastic model, which is similar to the models used to make stock market predictions. It concedes that there are certain behaviors of sea ice that are simply too complicated and too unknown to try to force into a model—how two ice floes located side by side can vary in thickness, for example—but it maintains that with a deep understanding of the basic physics driving sea ice growth and melting, one can narrow the uncertainties enough to make a reasonable prediction.

As Moon sat inside the Lance, 34-mile-an-hour winds swept in from the south. They pushed the ship in the opposite direction of its planned drift back to Spitzbergen, undoing two days of southward progress in a matter of hours. The temperature shot from minus 22 degrees F (-30°C) to 32 degrees F (0°C) overnight, eventually settling back to minus 7 (-22°). The ice floes hemming in the Lance, meanwhile, slowly became unstitched.

First one crack here, then another, the fractures slowly widened until the ship was separated from the various study sites across the floe by gaping channels of exposed seawater, which began radiating smoky vapor. One split took down a 33-foot-high (10 meters) weather mast in the atmospheric science quarter. A GPS station began to drift its own way. There went the neighborhood.

Also, the boat was stuck. The industrious crew spent the next two days trying to dislodge the Lance from nearly 18 feet (5.5 meters) of ice blocks that had nestled under its bow during a storm two weeks earlier. A tranquil week of data collection suddenly turned into an instrument rescue mission. It was time to pack up and abandon the floe—if only the boat could set loose.

Many, naturally, had anticipated such a disturbance. "That's uncertainty," Moon joked.