“Five hundred nautical miles from the North Pole, a scientific expedition is caught in the grip of the ice it has come to study.”
When ice on the Arctic Ocean disappears, the sea surface no longer reflects solar energy. It has lost its albedo. And now the sun’s heat is absorbed by an ocean.
Inside Canada’s “Last Ice Area” a research team has set out to measure the world’s largest and oldest sea ice floes. Steve is an expedition leader who has led projects in the High Arctic for 40 years. Chris is a polar oceanographer who studies ice floes from a Harvard lab. They know the data, the models, the science. None of that has prepared them for the truth on the ground. The floes are crumbling, collapsing. There is no way forward, there’s no way back. Caught in a frozen maelstrom, something has to give.
