Hajo Eicken kneels on the frozen Arctic Ocean near Point Barrow, Alaska, poking a temperature gauge into a long tube of ice. He dictates to a chilled Karoline Frey, who stops stomping up and down long enough to record the numbers with a pencil. Nearby, Aaron Stierle drills a hole with a huge auger, Karen Junge curses a frozen generator switch, and Andy Mahoney drives a snowmobile in circles, patrolling for polar bears.
"Karoline, why don't you cut this core, it will warm you up," Eicken says, giving Frey a small saw. She slices the ice into pieces the shape of hockey pucks and puts them into plastic containers. Eicken, his red goggles visible within the fur-lined tunnel of his parka hood, walks over to help Stierle lower a $12,000 device into the new hole to measure water currents nearly five feet below. The wind muffles their words and whips ribbons of snow across the ice, a white desert stretching in all directions.
On the frozen Chukchi Sea in the Arctic Ocean, sensors gauge snow depth and rate of accumulation as well as the temperature and thickness of "fast ice" that forms near shore.
During the past three years, Eicken and his research team have braved biting winds and occasional carnivores here, at the northernmost spot in the United States, to probe the finest details of the ice. What they've found sheds a wholly unfamiliar light on the Arctic. For starters, it's crawling with life. Even in the hardest parts of the ice, at temperatures as low as -4 degrees Fahrenheit (as cold as any environment known to host active organisms), bacteria and diatoms live contentedly in minuscule pockets of brine. Their cells seem to survive by clinging to bits of sediment or by emitting a sort of gunk that keeps ice crystals from piercing their delicate membranes. Some brine pockets are isolated bubbles, but many are connected by a spidery network of liquid-filled channels that persist no matter how cold the ice gets. Those channels supply the microbes with water and nutrients during the long winter.
