86 Scientific American, May 2022
RECOMMENDED
Edited by Amy Brady
wonky, that’s because The Greatest Polar
Expedition of All Time is written by an atmo-
spheric scientist rather than a nature essay-
ist like Barry Lopez or a climate novelist like
Ashley Shelby, whose 2017 book South Pole
Station explores the way community is
forged (and tested) by isolation and ice.
There are no characters (beyond the author)
and no conversations between those people
he resides alongside. The book reads more
like a ship log than it does a piece of literary
reportage. If you’ve ever wondered what it is
like to gather the information on which the
IPCC reports are built, this is your front-row
seat. The series of dated entries is densewith the particular drama of conducting
state-of-the-art science in a place where sat-
ellites don’t reach and there’s nowhere to
refuel (be it with candy or combustibles)
when the supplies run low.
As someone who has lived on a research
icebreaker (and is currently at work on a book
about the experience), I took great pleasure
in reading the details of day-to-day activities.
On the Polarstern, even the most mundane
tasks require planning, patience and ingenu-
ity to execute. How does one way-find on
a giant slab of ice that is drifting steadily
through complete darkness? Invent a coordi-
nate system where the ship’s bow—the sin-Illustration by London LaddNONFICTION
On
Thin Ice
Why do stories
about polar science
seem stuck in the past?
By Elizabeth Rush
On October 4, 2019, the Polarstern,
a German icebreaker the length of a football
field, sidled up to a thick ice floe above the
Arctic Circle and turned off its engines. Soon
the sun would set for months. The remaining
open ocean around the boat would ice over,
and three million square miles of liquid
would turn solid in the span of a few short
weeks. Were you to have peered down on
the ship then, it would have looked like an
almond lodged in a bar of white chocolate
the size of Australia.
Dig into the fine print of our most com-
plex global climate models, and you’ll dis-
cover that we have next to no observational
data from the high Arctic in winter. We know
the region is warming faster than any other
place on the planet, but what that means for
future weather patterns, sea level, storm
intensity, biodiversity (the list goes on and
on) remains achingly unclear. There is grow-
ing concern, however, that estimates of just
how bad it could get, and when, are too con-
servative. Enter MOSAiC or, as Markus Rex,
the mission’s leader, calls it (and, no, his
tongue is not planted firmly in his cheek),
“The Greatest Polar Expedition of All Time.”
On the surface, the plan behind MOSAiC
is simple enough: allow the Transpolar Drift,
a kind of conveyor belt that moves ice across
the ice cap, to carry the Polarstern straight
through the center of the Arctic during the
long polar night. By getting “trapped” in the
floe, those onboard will be able to assemble
a unique data set. They will record during
a single calendar year what goes on in the
ocean, in the air, and on the ice (where those
two systems meet), creating a holistic profile
of the processes that drive the birth and
death of sea ice. From this information,
scientists will “create a more robust model
of the Arctic climate system,” Rex writes.
If all of this is starting to sound a bit