ICY DEPTHS: Jens Ehn (left) of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and Christie Wood (right) of Clark University, scoop water from melt ponds on sea ice in the Chukchi Sea in 2011. The water was later analyzed in an icebreaker’s onboard science lab.© NASA/KATHRYN HANSEN Spirits were high on the overcast morning of June 25, 2011, when an interdisciplinary team of 47 scientists, funded by NASA and led by Stanford University biological oceanographer Kevin Arrigo, embarked on an arduous 5-week voyage to the icy Chukchi and Beaufort seas to study the effects of climate change in the Arctic. For the second consecutive summer, the Impacts of Climate on Ecosystems and Chemistry of the Arctic Pacific Environment mission—ICESCAPE for short—would spend the early summer navigating the polar waters to collect ice and water samples, hoping to shed light on the changing physical, chemical, and biological properties of the Arctic Ocean.
For Arrigo and his team, it was also a rare opportunity to study the Arctic marine ecosystem firsthand. “It’s so hard to get up there, and so few people do,” says Sam Laney, a marine biologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who participated in the study. “It’s a hard place to work in, and it’s very unforgiving.”
Sampling during the previous year’s expedition had turned up some intriguing finds. Just a few days after departing from Dutch Harbor on southwestern Alaska’s Amaknak Island in the Aleutians, the team’s vessel, a huge US Coast Guard icebreaker called the Healy, had hit an unexpectedly large phytoplankton hotspot in the Chukchi Sea, just off the Bering Strait. Fluorometers, which measure the amount of chlorophyll in the water, recorded ...
