We crossed the Arctic Circle, 66° 33’ North, southbound on Friday afternoon, June 20, an exquisite, cloudless day.  The snowy, black-rock mountains of Cape Dezhneva lay away to starboard, to port Cape...

THE LAST ICE STATION As of yesterday morning, Healy had passed the 5,000-mile mark.  On 19 June, she’ll point her bow toward Dutch Harbor 1,000 miles to the south, and three days after that, this 42-day...

Dean Stockwell was helping Joannie Ferland identify individual species from photographs of phytoplankton she’d shot with her submergible version of the microscopic imaging machine I mentioned the other day,...

Back when much of the world remained unexplored, Europeans filled the blanks on their maps with whatever they wanted most, the cartography of wishful thinking.  During the Renaissance, when a bag of nutmeg...

Cruise—this is a cruise; that’s the commonly used word.  I found it jarring on first encounter some years ago.  It seemed to suggest a lubberly, all-you-can-eat jaunt to the Bahamas from Ft. Lauderdale...

Well, it looked highly promising for a while, the snow cover melting back, turning granular, bare ice in spots, and air temperature almost above freezing.  The ice algae, a generic category of phytoplankton,...

A typical day's work on the frozen sea. Even before we’d cleared the Bering Strait northbound, people started asking Chris when the melt ponds would appear. “June third,” he said without missing a...

We’ve been talking about ice and light, nutrients and plankton, and occasionally polar bears, but little about the setting in which all of the things are contained—the ocean.  To begin rectifying that...

It’s shortly after midnight and I’m standing at the portside rail with a couple of other gawkers squinting into bright sunlight as Healy heaves up chunks of ice over two meters thick, some larger in area...

Scientists and coasts begin another ice deployment. You’d better hang on and tread carefully down the steep brow onto the ice.  It’s cold, 12° F, on this Memorial Day.  Back home sweaty citizens are...