Jennifer Kingsley’s last story for National Geo-
graphic was about women in the Chukotka region
of Russia. Esther Horvath is a Germany-based
photographer who documents polar regions.The hours are long, the logistics complex.
With rapidly changing conditions—sun to snow
in an hour sometimes—there’s always some risk.
Thomas Krumpen, a senior scientist from Ger-
many’s Alfred Wegener Institute, leads aircraft-
based surveys that measure, among other things,
the summer thickness of sea ice, which is very
difficult to calculate from satellite imagery. To
do this, a modified DC-3 aircraft flies over the ice
at an altitude of 200 feet while trailing a sensor
on a cable just 50 feet above the ice surface. The
job takes so much concentration, Krumpen says,
“I find it hard sometimes to really just look out-
side the window and enjoy or observe what I am
actually surveying.”
These flights demonstrate the effort it can take
to answer simple questions: How thick is the sea
ice? How reflective is the snow?
Observations from the flights feed into climate
models, complex computer programs that use
equations and thousands of pieces of data to
project what will happen as the climate contin-
ues to change. Information about the Arctic is
essential to predicting global consequences such
as temperature increase and sea-level rise.
“We need to look into the future in order to
tell people what are the consequences we are
facing,” Krumpen says. Other researchers fly
weather balloons, dig pits to sample the snow,
or peer at their instruments all night with a
sled dog nearby to warn them of polar bears.
Little by little, they glean information that will
help answer the biggest question of the climate
change era: What is going to happen to our
planet? The answer is both politically and sci-
entifically contentious, and it takes many years
of data from many locations to draft an answer.
For this region of the world, none of it could
happen without station specialists such as Jes-
per Juul Hansen, who makes it sound simple.
“We just did our part so that they could do their
part,” he says.
The work takes its toll. Nora Fried celebrated
her 25th birthday at the station as a research
assistant in 2018. Someday, “I have to explain
to my children that we didn’t do anything,
although we knew that the Arctic would be ice
free,” she says. “I feel sorry for the Arctic.”
One Saturday each summer, the soldiers
organize an annual pig roast—the pig arrives
by cargo plane—and a game night, including
a jousting competition. Each team of two is
given a three-wheeled cargo bike and a wooden
jousting lance they must push through a ring
hanging from a rope. The ring gets smaller with
each round, and competitors try hard to distract
each other. The silliness brings people together,
and pushes those at the station toward feeling
like a community.
“You realize that you are relying on people all
the time for your life to work out, right, but you
don’t see it back home,” Hansen says. “You don’t
really have that feedback where you see the fruits
of your labor reflected in other people.” But up in
the Arctic, he says, “it’s very obvious.” jEYES ON THE ICE 111