Here, a couple of dozen miles from the Alaskan coast in but 35 meters of water, the ice field is rumpled, ridged, and caked with dirt due to near-shore wind and tide action, quite different from the ethereal...

Monday, 19 May, a breathtakingly beautiful morning, a cloudless, cobalt blue sky, endless visibility across leadless ice, riven here and there with pressure ridges, sprawling from horizon to horizon.  Tiny...

As I wrote in the Introduction, the objective of our expedition is to witness the entire life cycle of the phytoplankton and to understand why and how they have bloomed beneath the ice.  This requires that we...

At 0900 on this our second morning at sea, we’re abeam of St Lawrence Island, making 14.5 knots (one knot equals 1.15 statute miles), and visibility’s reduced to less than a ship length in woolen fog. St....

“Passing left at two-four-zero degrees,” called the helmsman as twin tugs, one pushing, the other pulling, spun Healy in her own length away from the wharf.  “Passing left two-three-zero...

Something startling is happening up north of Alaska in the Chukchi Sea.  In 2011 a team of scientists aboard the Coast Guard icebreaker Healy discovered a massive springtime plankton bloom, in fact, one of...