On the Ice, Watching it Melt--As Soon as the Bears Leave

Barrow, Alaska--Hut 171 reeks. There has been another “septic tank” incident, common in Barrow because septic tanks have to be drained regularly and that requires both competence and luck and sometimes one or the other runs out. The tank and the toilet in hut 171 backed up for whatever reason. The mess has been cleaned up, but the aroma lingers. Where else would you put four graduate students and a non-productive journalist?

We are at the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium (BASC), the Iñupiat corporation-run science center that does research in the Artic Ocean coast in the U.S., and along with the Inupiat in Siberia, in Russia. We are several hundred miles above the Arctic Circle, 1,200 miles from the North Pole, most of it ice-covered Arctic Ocean. We have come to measure that ice. When you do science in Alaska, you often wind up in places like this--if you are lucky.

Barrow’s airport is likely the only one in the world named after victims of an air crash who were trying to land there: Wiley Post and Will Rogers, who were killed in 1935. When you fly in you are likely to come in an Alaska Airlines 737-400 Combi, unique to Alaska. The front half is cargo (no windows) and the back half, passengers, usually Eskimos or oil field workers coming or going to Prudoe Bay east of the town. A bulkhead separates the two sections. The oil workers get off at Deadhorse, the airport nearest the oil fields. The Eskimos continue on the 20 minute flight to Post-Rogers. From there many travel to their villages and settlements on snow machines or all terrain vehicles. (ATVs).

Barrow sits on the Arctic coast where the part of the Arctic Ocean called the Chukchi Sea meets the Beaufort. It has several distinctions besides really terrible weather. It is one of the two or three northernmost communities in the world, or at least northernmost communities with more than 2,000 people. It is the largest Eskimo settlement in the world, Eskimos not inclined toward settlements, and is called Ukpeagvik in Inupiak. Barrow is part of the North Slope Borough (county), the largest municipality in the world (86,000 acres with only 8,000 people, most of whom live in or around Barrow). Sixty-five percent of the population is Iñupiat Eskimo. While winter temperatures don’t actually get as cold as they get in Fairbanks, 500 miles south, the position, between the two parts of the Arctic Ocean produces fierce winds which can drive the wind-chill numbers down to 90 degrees below zero (“negative 90” to Alaskans), where any exposed skin freezes almost instantly.

Barrow is surrounded on three sides by ocean and, to the south, flat tundra. There probably isn’t a tree within 300 miles. Most of the year, the ground is covered with snow and, combined with the frozen water at the shore, the predominant colors are white and grey. You cannot tell where ground ends and water begins. In the brief summer, everything turns to and is covered by mud and the predominant color changes to brown. In mid-November, the sun goes down for three months. In mid-June it goes up for three months. That doesn’t mean it is always either dark or light; in both seasons much of the time is in a weird twilight, but winter darkness can help account for a high suicide and alcoholism rate. Barrow can be very depressing.

Permafrost underlies all of Barrow, the reason all buildings are on stilts. If you built a house directly on the ground, heat from the house would melt the permafrost and the house would sink, sag, or tilt. That’s happening in Fairbanks. Utilities in the older section of town are in heated tunnels, with all the liquids constantly in motion to keep them from freezing. The tubes are called “utilidors,” as in utility corridors. Some are elevated, and square wooden tubes on stilts cross over the ground and streets. In the newer parts of town, sewage and water are stored in outdoor tanks. The sewage, hopefully, is removed daily before it freezes. Sometimes the honey-pot men are new to the job and instead of sucking the sewage out, they blast it back into the houses, which is likely what happened in Hut 171. Water is also replenished, hopefully, on a daily basis. Most of the homes are heated with natural gas from the nearby North Slope gas fields, an advantage over most Alaskan rural communities that have to rely on stored diesel fuel in the winter.

The schools in Alaska tend to be better funded than schools elsewhere, the result of oil revenues, and the ones in Barrow are no exception. They serve as community centers as well as schools. The local high school has a swimming pool open to the community, and thanks the gift of a woman in Florida, the Barrow Whalers, the high school football team, plays football on an artificial turf field, which has to be plowed before every practice or game. Alcoholic beverages are banned, as is the case in many Eskimo communities, but it is smuggled in regularly. A Barrow policeman told me that there were several dozen police in Barrow but if they managed to stop the smuggling of alcoholic beverages, they would only need three or four. Sober Inupiats are a peaceful lot. Marijuana is abundant as it is in all of Alaska, most of it home-grown indoors where federal authorities are unlikely to find it. Local police, as elsewhere, have better things to do with their time.

Most of the population still depends on subsistence hunting to get through the year, even those men with steady jobs. It is part of the culture.

Nothing comes easy in Barrow. Like most of the towns and villages in rural Alaska (which is almost all of Alaska), there are no roads in or out of town. Indeed, Juneau, the state capital, is the only capital in America inaccessible by road. Hence, everything in Barrow that does not come from fish or marine mammals in the sea is shipped in, either by barge in the summer, or by air the rest of the time; everything from cars ($3,000 for shipping in C-130s) to cans of soup ($2.65 for Campbell’s condensed in the native-owned small supermarket). Eating out is expensive, and there are not many choices.

There are occasional land excursions into Barrow, however, one of the most dangerous journeys on the planet. A single road links Fairbanks to the oil fields, the Haul Road, technically known as the Dalton Highway. It is a two-lane, mostly gravel road used to haul equipment and supplies to Prudhoe Bay--when it is open, which is not often outside of the brief summer. When winter sets in, trucks and cars already at Prudhoe Bay, operating in convoy, will drive to Barrow. Part of the ride is on the snow-covered beach, but much of it is an ice highway over the frozen Beaufort Sea. This is not done very often, and as the climate warms, it becomes even more dangerous.

Then there are the bears. Barrow lives with polar bears. Almost no one leaves town unarmed; the bears come up to the beach in town and have even wandered into the faux-suburbs and have to be chased, usually with rifle fire. Sometimes the locals have to kill one that gets too close to people, which is perfectly legal. The bears are as dangerous as they are beautiful. On a previous visit, a guide described how a bear recently pursued his justifiably hysterical wife into the house. He chased the bear, firing shots over its head. The bears usually congregate on the snow north of town just beyond end of the road, where the Eskimos butcher the bowhead whales they harvest. The bears will spend months picking the bones clean. They will also wander down the beach into town, which is lined with houses. Visitors are warned--seriously--to watch out for the bears whenever they go near the beach. If you see one, you are instructed to walk slowly away--never, ever run.

Climate change in Barrow has so far affected the dead more than the living. The Eskimo cemetery at Barrow Point (the northern-most place on the North American mainland) now has been moved twice as the burial site is regularly flooded. The families of the deceased and buried have had to dig up their ancestors and rebury them anew, only to have to do it again when the new burial site flooded again. They will likely have to repeat the process a few more times. But the threat to the living and their children, is real. The culture and survival of the Iñupiat--and the bears--depends on the ice.

“We are the hyperboreans,” says one Inupiat elder. “We live on the ice and snow. If we don’t have the ice and snow, who are we?”

Measuring the ice is what Hajo Eicken does.

Eicken, a sea-ice geophysicist at UAF’s Geophysical Institute is part of an international project to measure the recession of sea ice in the Arctic. The term “recession” implies--correctly--that no one doubts the sea ice is receding. Aerial photos, pictures from space and measurements on the ground proved this was the case 30 years ago. There now is less sea ice than at any time in the records. How much it is receding and how, is what the international project is measuring. Eicken, a tall, thin, bearded associate professor, born and educated in northernmost Germany, is a frequent visitor to Barrow and BASC usually with his graduate students. He has three in tow this time and the goal, as usual, is to go out onto the frozen sea and plant instruments that measure both the ice and the snow on top of the ice through the season. The data is then compared to data from previous years to watch the trend. He uses what he measures to see the effects the recession has on the local, coastal environment and, in macro, the earth’s climate.

Ice plays a disproportionate role in running the Earth’s climate. It restricts the amount of energy exchanged between the ocean and the atmosphere and reduces the amount of heat suppled to the water. Ice and snow reflect the sun’s radiation, a characteristic scientists call albedo. Open water is dark and absorbs the heat. The ice and snow actually keeps the polar regions cool by reflecting sunlight, moderating global climate. When this function is damaged, the balance is tipped. Sea ice also helps keep the conveyer belt of ocean currents moving world-wide. Sea ice is essentially salt free. The salt is pushed beneath the ice as it forms. The water directly under sea ice is hence saltier than the rest of the ocean. Salt water also becomes denser as it gets colder (unlike fresh water--see floating ice bergs). Because it is heavier, the water in the Arctic sinks and the cold, heavier water flows south, toward the equator, and is replaced by warmer, lighter water coming up from the south. If that pattern is disrupted--say by a reduction in sea ice--the current system in the world’s oceans also are disrupted, completely unhinging the climate balance on the planet. If you saw the movie The Day After Tomorrow, that is the premise for a fictional end of civilization. The movie was totally ridiculous in its conclusions, but the premise was real. Melting sea ice in the Arctic can dramatically alter the climate in the rest of the world.

The ice has been shrinking for the last 20-40 years and there is nothing in the modern records to match it.  Temperatures in the Arctic are the warmest they have been in 2,000 years. The thickets and oldest ice is melting a particularly bad sign. The retreat in 2007 set all records. In the ten days from August 1, 2008 until August 10, 390,000 square miles of ice disappeared. Not only is there less ice in the summer, but less ice is growing back in the winter. In the late 1980s and 1990s, changing wind patters from the north pushed thick sea ice from the Arctic Ocean into the North Atlantic, where it melted. The thinner ice that formed to replace it melts more readily in the summer, opening up the sea to increasing amounts of radiated heat. That melts more ice and energizes the cycle. Models, taken very seriously by scientists, predict an Arctic Ocean free of ice in the summer by 2040 or 2050. Now think of what that might do to ocean currents and to the weather.

It is not just in Alaska, of course. In Greenland 553 billion tons of ice melted from the Greenland ice sheet, all of it entering the Atlantic. Some 965,300 square miles of annual ice--the stuff that builds during the winter and melts in the summer--has disappeared, an area one and a half times the area of Alaska, a 50 decrease between 2007 and 2008. That now is an area of open, dark water that until recently reflected heat and is now absorbing it.  The ice has half the volume of only four years ago. The legendary Northwest Passage over Canada and the Northern Sea route over Russian, once the dreams of explorers for centuries, is now open part of the year. Roald Amundson barely was able to navigate through the ice and islands of the passage to get to the Pacific in the summer of 1903. Now the passage looks like it may become a common shipping lane. This has huge geopolitical ramifications.

Once, the effects were limited to local phenomenon, such as bears and the Eskimos. Now scientists believe that the drought in the American west and the increased precipitation in parts of Europe are linked to what is happening to the ice off Barrow and the rest of the Arctic. For example, according to the University of Colorado Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, the reduction in sea ice in the Arctic Ocean reduces the severity of cold fronts that drop into the American and Canadian west. That reduces snowfall, which contributes to the drought. Agriculture and the ski industries were the first businesses to feel the effects.

BASC is the center for research in the area and has all the facilities of a modern research center, most of it coming from the wealthy Inupiat corporation. Getting funding from the National Science Foundation was sometimes problematic so BASC is cheefully independent, although it does get some NSF funds. Most of the visiting researchers are housed in quonsut huts, mostly left over from when the facilities were run by the U.S. Navy, or in cottages, like 171. Our hut had four bedrooms, a full kitchen and bathroom--and on this visit--a bad smell. Fortunately, BASC shares a large H-shaped building with Ilisagvik Community College, also Inupiat-run, which has a decent cafeteria. Alaska is the most-wired state in the U.S., and the facilities in Barrow are hooked by satellite to the Internet. The satellite dishes are pointed horizontally because of the high latitude but the facilities and all the homes in Barrow have Internet and television. Researchers at BASC are plugged in.

Eicken has six hours of daylight in which to work when he arrives in Barrow in March. Three weeks earlier, he would have had none. The sun didn’t rise until January 23, after two months hiding. Along with an armed Inupiat guard (you don’t leave Barrow without one), we leave shortly after 10:30 a.m. on three snow machines. Two of them are pulling long wooden sleds filled with gear. I stand on the back of one of the sleds, instructed to lean against any tilt to help keep the sled upright, which turns out to be the least of my worries. This position, the most exposed,  is traditional for newcomers, particularly the non-productive kind. The wind-chill is negative 40. We are going to plant instruments on the ice.

What does a modern Arctic explorer wear to work? The secrets to keeping warm in temperatures cold enough to alter the molecular structure of steel (minus 20, by the way) is layers and wool.After serious consultation, I am wearing two-layered woolen thermal underwear, flannel padded jeans and Carhartt canvas and fleece snow pants, a quilted woolen shirt, a polyester liner and a Siberian-made parka, certified to negative 40. The boots are Canadian-made Sorels, also certified to 40 below, with woolen socks. Note all the wool. Cotton can kill you here because loses the ability to keep you warm once it gets wet and perspiration makes it wet. Wool does not. No artificial fabric is as good.  I have a woolen balaclava and a wool and polyester neck warmer. I have three layers of gloves and an extra set hung on a cord around my neck I can plunge my hands into if they get cold. Everyone else is dressed more or less the same. Most of us have ski goggles. One serious problem: once you put the mask on--and you will put the mask on because the skin freezes at those temperatures--eye glasses fog up and the moisture instantly freezes, rendering you effectively blind. No one has yet invented a solution to that problem so you are faced with a choices of skipping the glasses, or wearing them and looking at the world through a sheet of ice. Contact lenses are the only way to go. I have none.

And speaking of problems: what does the modern explorer (male) do if he has to make a pee? If you are a male explorer over the age of 50, this is not an inconsequential consideration. The answer usually given is to turn your back to the wind and work as fast as you can. This is not easy with four layers, two zippers, and gloves. The real answer is not to worry: The air is so dry it sucks moisture out of your body and you will go all day without peeing. I found that to be true.

Defecation is out of the question.

The other thing I learned is that to do anything with your hands you almost always have to take your gloves off (mittens actually because they are more efficient in keeping your hands warm) and in that cold, it hurts quickly. Your hands are not just cold, they produce pain, an intense burning sensation followed by numbness. A few minutes in the mittens--if they are good enough mittens--will fix that, but a few minutes later, off they come again because you have to fiddle with something else, usually involving clothing. And finally, despite zippers, clasps and Velcro, the cold will find any opening between garments, including some you never suspected you had. As soon as we started bouncing over the ice I had the feeling someone had stuck a cold knife up my sleeve. I chased down the opening and snapped it shut with Velcro.

The expedition followed the road east, toward Barrow Point, running on the snow that covered the Chukchi beach. Just parallel to the end of the road, we came to a halt. Four polar bears were at the dump about 200 yards before us, a female, two cubs and what the guard thought was a young male. Perhaps the stupidest thing any sentient creature can do is get near a mother polar bear with her cubs. Bears also don’t like large groups of humans on noisy machines and were taking their time searching for snacks. (“I’m a polar bear and I’ll move when I damned well please.”) They were between us and the sea ice so we waited until they moved on, about 10 minutes. When they finally sauntered off, we resumed the trip, finally curving off the beach onto the sea. My instructions were to not only try to keep the sled upright but to turn my face away from the direction we were traveling if the wind got too bad. With the balaclava, the goggles and the parka collar, not a lot of wind got to my face and it was not unbearable. I needed to see where we were going to anticipate the bumps. I was told to keep my knees flexed to absorb the shocks and I did it successfully all but once. I wasn’t paying attention for one bump and felt the shock particularly in the place where my spine meets my neck. Eicken, who was driving the snow machine pulling my sled, could see obstacles and bumps and slowed when the ice got particularly ragged. The ice is rarely flat or smooth. There are occasional cracks, but mostly there are pressure ridges caused by the motion of the ice, in part reacting to tidal pressure and waves. Hunks, blocks and ridges glistening in the sunlight, their shadows a grey blue, were tumbled across the ice. This was “fast ice,” meaning it was fast to the coastline. The life of this ice is crucial to understanding climate changes. On top of the ice was several months’ accumulation of bone-dry snow.  Snowball fights are impossible here; the snow will not form balls. It was not clear when we passed from the snow covering the beach and the snow covering the ice and water.

Eicken located the site he wanted using GPS positioning. It was a relatively flat section of ice with a pressure ridge about four feet high a couple of hundred yards to the north. The bear guard put up a tent with a gas heater, and Eicken’s team began unloading the equipment and setting up their stations.

Essentially, the UAF team was studying three things: the thickness and temperature of the snow, the thickness of the ice below the snow, and the depth of the water beneath the ice. They were setting  up automatic stations that would transmit readings back to Barrow and would be able to track the data from the Internet back in Fairbanks until “melt” in the end of May. The equipment was powered by two car batteries, which like all batteries, suffer in the cold. They transmitted their condition back to shore and someone from BASC would go out and recharge or replaced them when they waned.

The main instrument was erected on a scaffold-like structure with cables leading to holes in the ice, the instruments inserted in holes bored into the ice. The cables were protected by metal coverings because Arctic foxes love to play with scientific equipment, particularly if electricity is involved. Electricity turns them on. “If we come back tomorrow, we will probably find a fox turd on the box,” one of the grad students said. Another student walked along the pressure ridge with an instrument measuring snow depth. Occasionally, a breeze would pick up and you would understand just how truly awful it could be. Soon our faces were entirely covered with frost, our eye lashes froze, and ice hung from our eyebrows. We were lucky it wasn’t much worse.

The ice was about three feet thick over twenty-two feet of Chukchi Sea water. About six inches of snow covered the ice. The snow was weird. The sound you made walking on it was a metallic hollow sound, not what you want to hear when you are standing over twenty-two feet of really cold water. We eventually got all the instruments in (I was of no use). Eicken decided to go back before the students finished the last of the instruments and I rode back on the backseat of his snow machine. I quickly decided that if I was going to die on the ice, it would be on this ride. We flew. We bounced. We tilted. We roared. I held on to two handholds behind me until I lost all feelings in the hands.  I could see through my goggles (I gave up on the glasses early on) and tried to anticipate when I needed to hold on for dear life or when I just needed to keep attached to the machine. Moreover, earlier I had been in the warm-up tent adjusting my clothing and brushed my right arm against the gas heater. This melted the outer layer of my Russian parka. I didn’t notice. When I got on the snowmobile I began to stream Siberian goose feathers behind. We eventually got back to BASC and I ran into the warm equipment room, still leaving a trail of feathers. The arm was patched with duct tape, which true Alaskans will tell you, is what really holds Alaska civilization together.

The next morning we found out that a bear had knocked over the equipment and the UAF team had to go out again.

All this was when the weather was relatively good. In April, one of the graduate students was caught in a white-out which was potentially life-threatening. He had to wait until the wind died down and the powdery snow was blown away to go out again.

Eicken’s measurements are crucial to understanding what is happening in Alaska and why it affects what will happen to the rest of the world because of it.