I don't know I cant get there.

Im heading back to one of the most remote places in the world.

The polar Inuit left these lands nearly a thousand years ago, and these shores have been wild and uninhabited ever since.

Today, scientists are trying to make sense of this region mainly by using data theyve collected from satellites.

But how do you comprehend a frozen ocean from the sky?

Well be landing 500 nautical miles from the North Pole, right on the doorstep of the “Last Ice Area.

” A unique place where oceanographers predict the oldest and thickest sea ice can be found.

Our plan is to survey the sea ice, to see for ourselves how accurate their predictions are.

PILOT: So, were making a pass and well look at those those big cracks going across the strip.

And then, uh, well come in to land.

So, uh, just brace yourself.

Wahoo!

Okay, Diana, Im just going to hand it down to you.

A decade ago, I worked with friends in Greenland to make a documentary film.

What people there wanted the world to know is how their culture was losing sea ice.

Since then -- Ive been trying to reconcile how changes happening in the Arctic are impacting my life down South.

The ancestors of todays Inuit invented kayaks to navigate the polar seas.

Kayaking is still a really good way to get around up here.

With these boats.

Well have unequaled access to the sea ice in the Last Ice Area.

Access that scientists havent had before.

There are five of us.

Im Steve.

I've been coming to the far North for 40 years.

My wife Diana runs an organic farm.

Ten years ago she backpacked across the mountain range behind us.

Chris is a polar oceanographer.

He just got his PhD from Harvard.

This will be his first Arctic field expedition and his first time setting foot on Arctic sea ice.

Were going to put this inside the tent bag Yeah When it comes to sharing adventures, Mike and his son Bryce have done a lot together.

Mike has joined me on two other High Arctic projects.

Itd be a nice, reasonable thing for us to do And either either in here somewhere or around the corner into here somewhere, and thatll set us up.

Well be really, really close to that open water, which runs by through here.

There are only a few passages where sea ice can escape the Arctic Ocean.

Nares Strait is one of them.

Here we can observe the floes without having to go far from shore.

For the next five weeks well be surveying the ice, making our way down Nares Strait until we reach a small research station where a plane will pick us up.

Once we enter the current, therell be no going back.

If an accident happens, -- if someone gets injured -- worst case scenario, rescue could take weeks.

Well be totally on our own.

My goal in coming here is scientific.

I think part of me wants to understand how the sea ice has changed so dramatically, and in Nares Strait theres been a very precipitous drop in the amount of sea ice that gets stuck here.

If there is one place where we might encounter a bear, its going to be right down where the sea meets the land, because thats where the bears end up being in the summertime.

There are little nooks and crannies here and there that you might not be able to see a bear in.

If youve just come up a little rise and you see a bear, chances are that bear hasnt seen you.

So the thing to do would be slowly back down, away from that and then turn and get back to camp.

But if you chance upon a bear, and youre in that kind of a stand-off situation, absolutely 9 times out of 10, that bear is going to turn around and run, because thats what they do.

What about the tenth time?

Yeahthats right, the tenth tim Thats the part I worry about.

What are you going to do, Steve, Ive just eaten you?

No, seriously Tell me what I ... you know.

In that case, yes, youre going to shout, “Hey!

Go away!

” Youre going to start bellowing and make yourself look big.

Put your arms in the air.

If anything, take a step forward.

So, I have a final question.

Yeah.

Um, Steve, how would you feel if one of us was eaten by a bear?

Oh, geez.

Diana!

What!?

I mean, you brought us up here, Im just wondering, you know.

Yeah, I would not feel very good about that, Diana.

Not good at all.

No, I would not feel good about that.

After a year of planning, the journey has begun.

Im about to get squished Think skinny.

Now pull.

Its jammed.

Huh?

Weve decided to call it a day.

So weve set up camp on the sea ice.

There's only a few feet of ice between our tent floor and the ocean below.

There could be whales swimming beneath us.

So I think this should be a good place to put these buoys out.

Like many polar oceanographers, I do my research remotely.

I work with equations, I run computer models, and I interpret satellite imagery.

Most of the time I sit at a desk.

Ive been in the Arctic just once before.

It was on an icebreaker, confined to the ship.

First application of using these Its a different experience, having my feet on the ice, seeing everything up close.

Im pretty excited to see if they actually work.

Today Diana and I are testing these prototype wave buoys.

I want to find out how sea ice breaks up and use that information to improve climate models.

It looks pretty good over there.

As we make our way down Nares Strait, well be placing them on a bunch of different floes.

The color of sea ice is what is perhaps most important about it.

Sea ice is brilliantly white sometimes, particularly snow-covered sea ice, and that means its very reflective to sunlight.

That sunlight is what heats the oceans and the atmosphere.

Were going to put them out on opposite sides of a place we think thats going to fail and break up.

So, well put this one buoy over here, and the other one is going to go on the opposite side of this ridge.

Alright, mission accomplished!

The Arctic Ocean is warming incredibly rapidly.

And as the Arctic warms up, this warms the rest of the world.

The more the ice melts theres less white ice, theres more dark ocean.

So, it gets warmer so there is less white ice and more dark ocean, until its just so much dark ocean that the white ice is melting super fast.

Exactly.

So, thats the sea ice albedo feedback, and thats all it is.

In the Arctic, the surface is either white, reflecting the suns energy back out to space, or it is dark, absorbing the suns energy.

Earths albedo is a big part of what keeps us from cooking under the sun.

It keeps the earth cool.

Were camped right where the historic Lady Franklin Bay Expedition began.

In August, 1881, 25 men were dropped off here.

They were under US Army orders to conduct research and fill-in blank spots on the map.

They built a station.

Fort Conger.

Their work went well, but resupply ships never showed up.

And in those days there wasnt any way to contact the outside world.

By the end of a third summer, they loaded up their wooden rowboats and headed down Nares Strait.

They made it 300 nautical miles to a place where they expected to find a food cache.

But nothing had been left for them.

When rescue finally arrived, out of 25 men, only seven were still alive.

As we survey the sea ice, well be retracing their escape from Fort Conger.

In 2004, I led the first small boat journey to retrace the escape of the Lady Franklin Bay expedition.

We went from this site to the place where they spent their last winter.

‘and the conditions we encountered matched their records.

According to their accounts, Nares Strait was often blocked with enormous ice floes: single slabs of sea ice stretching clear across to Greenland, wide patches of completely open water in between.

This is not what I expected.

Ive never seen it so rumbled up.

Whats brash ice?

Ah, so this stuff thats all broken up, it doesnt look much like floes.

Kind of peaks out and stuff, things that we cant really haul over.

Thats brash ice.

The stuff on the west is land-fast ice.

Before I became a polar oceanographer, whenever I thought about the Arctic, I imagined icebergs, these big chunks of glacial ice.

But really, its sea ice that dominates the Arctic landscape.

This ice freezes out of the ocean.

Its made up of many individual pieces, which are called ice floes.

Sea ice in the Arctic is constantly drifting, and over time winds and currents drive much of it into the Last Ice Area.

Floes that enter Nares Strait end up being carried south with the prevailing current.

This ice is on a journey of no return.

We came from Fort Conger, and that took us all day, and now we have to go all the way across there.

Its interesting to have a journey up here in this really remote place, where you think of these hardened explorers coming, and just have kind of regular people, like except for Steve, you know, the rest of us are pretty much ordinary people just plucked out of life.

Like Mikes plucked out of Silicon Valley, and Bryce is plucked out of college.

and you know, Chris is plucked out of academia, and Im just lifted up from my farm.

Its 13 nautical miles to the other side of Lady Franklin Bay.

With the ice about to break up at any time, I dont feel safe.

Those men of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition mightve been the last people to walk across this bay.

Im imagining sodden wool jackets ‘and leather army boots.

Aaaargh!

Whoahhh!

Come onnn!

Look what happened!

I wanna take a picture of this!

I work on these floes, and try to understand how the sea ice itself evolves, and then therefore how the climate system evolves.

When the sea ice goes away, its replaced by the ocean, which is dark.

And this dark surface absorbs a lot of that sunlight.

So in areas like this where theres tons and tons of sunlight, 24 hours a day, a transition between an ice-covered region and an open water covered region represents a big shift in how much heat is entering the ocean.

Were trying to see if we can figure out what percentage of the ice is made of floes of what size, just in Nares Strait.

And so were sending up this drone, and its going about a kilometer out and taking images all the way and coming back, and were going to stitch them together.

And were going to get a picture of what the ice looks like.

Ive never seen imagery this good.

Its incredible.

Like, careers have been built on less than this.

Honestly.

We get this unbelievable, I dont know, resolution of everything thats going on.

You can see this huge floe and its probably not even that big -- were not that high up.

Its covered in these chunks of ice that have been thrown up on top and you can see all of them.

I mean... the resolution on this is incredible.

So, we expect that these floes are changed in time by melting, by interactions between themselves, by waves that break them.

And the truth is we have no clue how strong any of those are.

And the only way you can really tell is to know what the environments doing and to watch the floes themselves.

Weve never been able to do this.

So, its astounding.

-- I mean, It really is something amazing that I didnt think Id get to ever do.

Its going to tell us something about why the floes are changing here.

After sleeping another night under the Arctic sun, We woke to a surprise.

Our first patch of open water.

And a call Ive never heard this far North.

The last people to see narwhal up here might have been the Polar Inuit 1000 years ago.

I dont get narwhal.

Like, theyre not seals, but theyre not really whales either.

Well theyre little toothed whales.

They're like...

They're a dolphin.

Yeah, theyre like a dolphin.

A manatee with a horn.

Its not a horn though.

Its got a tooth.

Oh, come on.

Ah, Steve.

Its like a unicorn.

Yeah.

Its so like a unicorn, but its a tooth.

Theyre the unicorns of the North.

If you saw a unicorn floating around, youd say, “Look at its tooth.

” “Look at that big tooth.

” These days, with changing ice conditions, wildlife species are being found in unexpected places.

By the time we broke camp, the ice had drifted in and chased the narwhal away.

Were caught in a paradox.

We want to study the breakdown of the big ice floes, yet all of this broken up ice is getting in our way.

What Im learning is Chris needs certain conditions in order to conduct his research.

There have to be big drifting floes nearby, and there has to be enough open water for us to get out to them.

The last time I went down through the Strait because it was frozen from shore to shore, you didnt have any of this kind of ice.

Its precarious, like all of these boulders of ice that are just kind of piled on top of each other.

Quite precarious.

All of this ice is really thin, its a meter thick, two meters thick at most.

and because its so thin, its really easy to break.

So, when the floes come into contact with each other they fracture, they rubble up against each other.

When they encounter wind and waves, they break apart Here all this ocean thats exposed is above the freezing temperature.

Every time these small pieces of ice are in contact with the ocean its working to melt them.

Alright guys, what time is it?

It's one, two, three, four?

Two something.

I think its three.

You think so?

So, that means that its potentially night.

The suns going to come around Well, its already out, right?

But -- Well, the suns behind a cloud somewhere.

Is it behind a...

The sun is always out somewhere.

So just wait up.

Yeah.

There you go.

This is a typical day in the Arctic.

Its like we get in our boats, and we try to go somewhere, and we make it about a 100 feet in 20 minutes.

Here we are on this tide flat, and the tides going down, and we have to get out of here before we get stuck in this ice with nothing but mud and nowhere to take our boats.

So, we have to go back the way we just came, hey Yeah.

Not, not all the way, just in this last little section.

And we have to do it soon.

Theres a hierarchy of experiences.

Theres the experience of thinki about something abstractly ‘theres the experience of looking at it from space ‘theres the experience of watching it pass by you on an icebreaker ‘and theres the experience of pulling a half-ton kayak across the surface of sea ice.

Alright Team -- down!

-- set!

-- up!

Alright, Im going to walk forward a little bit, and now you guys can just crabwalk sideways Cant say Im having fun.

Yeah this thing is going to be a challenge.

Wheres it going?

Wherere you going, buddy?

Thats wrong So were close to the North Pole -- at least the magnetic North Pole -- which makes flying this drone pretty troublesome.

This little guy has a pretty cheap compass, which means it has a hard time figuring out where it is.

So that means it cant stabilize itself and I gotta fly this thing against the wind.

I really didnt think Id have to contend with this much difficulty in actually just taking pictures of the ice.

Lets see.

Weve each been allocated three rolls of toilet paper.

Except for Chris, hes got five.

But hes going to share with us.

So, um, weve been really good.

Its past 11 days now so um, we can get new rolls of toilet paper.

This is really exciting.

Everything on this journey is kinda limited.

So, there we go.

Eleven more days in the wilderness.

On this journey, the very way on which I thought we would travel has changed.

I thought that we would be able to come here and take advantage of the same kinds of ice conditions that Id had in the High Arctic previously, be able to work our way from ice floe to ice floe for example.

You could paddle a few kilometers offshore, and then you could hug along the coast of one of those floes and work your way along the coast of one of those floes just like you would work your way along the coast of the land.

And if a big wind were to come up, you could easily pull out onto that ice floe and dig in.

Set up your camp, and wait.

In the early 2000s, you would see floes that were 20 -- 30 -- 40 -- 50 -- square kilometer floes.

There are no large floes in this strait anymore.

Even though there is a lot of ice here, this is ice thats being emptied from the Arctic Ocean, and this tells us the Arctic Ocean is no longer an area of very thick, large pieces of ice.

Steve has seen the transition from lots of multi-year, large pieces of ice to what we see now.

And thats been incredibly invaluable for me because I dont know what it used to look like.

Let him get down there and hell Wait!

Im getting it!

Aargh Wahoo!

That was so easy.

When Steve was last here, a typical sea ice floe might have drifted around the Arctic Ocean for years.

Back then, floes grew to be so large that passages like Nares Strait were often blocked for months or even years at a time.

These floes are too thin to withstand collisions with other floes.

Theres isnt anything big enough here to plug Nares Strait.

To me, its alarming.

In this area theres nothing that stops sea ice from escaping the Arctic Ocean.

Yeah, you see this big mumbo-jumbo of ice, you think -- “Hmm, might be sledging today?

” Not just sledging, but lifting kayaks, fully loaded kayaks, thats the part.

You see how were going to go across there, thats going to just -- Aghhh Alright, so the one thing we want to be careful of here is actually that we dont damage the boats, right?

Steves got a ton of experience with this place and I think even he is just baffled right now.

And as its going down, youre just going to ease it down as much as you can.

Ahh, watch yourself... We thought this was going to be kayaking every day, but its turned into pretty much sledging, pulling the kayaks every day.

Wait, Mike.

Wait -- wait.

Ahhhh!

Dont pull, dont pull, Im getting pulled underneath it.

Give me a second.

Looking out there Im not too optimistic about having open water or actually really sea kayaking.

There just doesnt seem to be any -- let up.

Personally, its a bit of misery.

Weve made it about 35 miles as the crow flies in 14 days.

And the ice is rubbled up and compacted and so here we are stuck behind a huge wall of ice and not very clear on where were going, or how to get there.

Yeah Do you imagine like that this is going to clear out like when we get a blow or could there be a break or ice jam up higher, like or is it just going to be more of this, what we have?

Like, what do you think is going to happen?

Well, the only thing I can see us doing because of all of this pack ice, because there is absolutely no way of stepping off the ice-foot.

Like we cannot leave the ice-foot.

We have to stick with the ice-foot.

And the only time we can travel is when the tide is high.

The power of each chunk of ice the power of that chunk of ice, you know, is just We cant deal with it.

Were 260 nautical miles from our final destination.

We may need to come up with an alternative plan.

Our closest option for evacuation is Carl Ritter Bay.

There's no actual runway, but planes have landed there before.

Its heartbreaking.

Watching the Arctic Ocean losing its ice.

Lets go up here Climate models might say theres still a lot of old, large and thick sea ice here, but thats not what Im seeing.

That were not seeing any large floes here means theres no large floes in the Arctic Ocean either.

The sea ice thats left -- its young, ephemeral, and its easily broken into small pieces.

Ill get on the ice.

This transition from old ice to young ice has occurred decades before we expected.

Its telling us it wont take much for summer sea ice to disappear altogether.

Oh, all right.

All right.

To me, its fascinating.

The way I think about it is, the Arctic Ocean is white.

Its white ice.

If the ice wasnt there, if it all melted, the ocean would be dark, like super dark.

An analogy I think about is, its a hot day, and youre going to send your kid out to play.

What t-shirt do you want your kid to wear?

Do you want your kid to wear a white t-shirt, or a black t-shirt?

And we all know, wear a white t-shirt.

And so what Ive learned, is that the Arctic Ocean is kind of like the white t-shirt for the planet.

There we go.

Hey.

Hi.

Hows it going Steve?

The kayak just slid backwards against that chunk of ice.

Yeah, you know why it slid back is because you told us to go harder.

In fact, you pulled it and then I was in the back, and I couldnt hold it and it slung in and hit the rock.

And I was tired, and if you hadnt pushed it and made us go faster, that would not have happened.

Well, we have to get to a place where we can get a plane in.

I get that.

Thats all there is to it.

Its like we never get a break.

Well, were gonna take a break, and your point is well made, and then were gonna have to go back at it, and were going to have to be more careful.

Are we feeling collectively good enough to go back at the ice-foot?

Well, this brings up a question in terms of end goals.

Mike and I were talking about this yesterday a bit, I dont know if you guys have chatted End goals?

Like, right now the end goal might be Carl Ritter.

Yeah...

So, do you think maybe right now our primary objective is get to Carl Ritter?

And then assess as soon as we get there what well do next?

Yup.

Carl Ritter Bay is 33 nautical miles away.

Im actually questioning whether well be able to make it there.

We need to put the science on hold.

With these ice conditions, we have to focus on getting safely out of here.

Our way forward is completely blocked.

We have no choice but to go out into the fray, and to join the parade of ice floes headed south.

Okay, stop.

Yup.

Okay, beautiful, keep it going, keep it going.

Keep it going, keep it going, ‘nice and steady.

Fast.

Okay -- drop the line -- let go -- let go -- let go -- okay Alright!

We are witnessing the breakdown of this ice.

Weve seen the wind and waves bashing it to bits.

This ice is so thin that sometimes just jumping from floe to floe is enough to break it apart.

Before I came on this journey, I had no idea how the Arctic Ocean ice melted.

What happens?

You know, does it stay up in the Arctic and melt?

And what Im learning on this journey is that, at least some of that ice is going south in currents.

So thats the ice that we see going by us every day, just flowing down Nares Strait, just like its flowing out of a bathtub, down the drain, down South where its going to melt.

So many hours of intense slogging, and weve barely covered 2 nautical miles.

Its ironic.

Theres less sea ice than ever in the Arctic Ocean, and yet here we are, forced ashore by the ice, hauling.

Thats it for today, guys.

We can pull, we should pull them up into here and walk up and find a place to camp up there.

We have to go on to the rubble, and this is not the time to go onto the rubble.

I wonder how we are going to get out of here?

Its unclear.

Weve got behind us no ice-foot, or in front of us no ice-foot.

And immobile, messed-up, ridged and screwed-up ice.

Are you stressed out at all?

Well They are only hurricane force winds, nothing serious.

It doesnt matter, you can get all the technology in the world, the satellite phones, the SOS buttons, the -- whatever you need -- but when the weather is doing what its doing -- thats it, were at the whim of the weather.

So, if something really goes wrong, we have to be able to deal with it out here.

Thats all there is to it, we cant -- we cant depend on the outside world if something goes wrong and the weather is bad.

I didnt go camping until I was in grad school.

I have never really been outdoors.

Im not a wilderness person.

There is very little wilderness exposure for scientists.

A lot of the work thats being done in science is computer driven, its desk driven, its mathematics.

I dont know any climate scientist thats done this.

“So Chris, ” “Come to the Arctic.

Itll be great.

” I dont know for what.

I thought you called yourself a polar oceanographer.

I am.

I could do that at a desk, my friend.

This isnt oceanography.

Im sitting on the land in the wind.

This is atmospheric science.

But if youre a true polar oceanographer, then you need to be able to savour the delights of If I was a true polar oceanographer, I should have flippers, I should be swimming in that ocean.

This is a sham.

The wind has dropped.

Were up against a low tide, otherwise, conditions are good to go.

Hang on -- hang on!

Alright -- moment of truth.

So what youre going to do is get it down so its tail-end is in the water.

Yeah.

You guys are going to walk it towards me, youre going to hand me the line, and Im going to walk it down.

Beautiful, keep ‘er going Keep her going.

Yup...

Okay.

Beautiful Keep it going.

Keep it going.

Its going right into the water.

Exactly.

Keep it going, keep it going.

Nice and steady -- fast!

Okay, I got the line, let go, let go, let go.

OK. Alright, whos in this boat?

You can even stand up and pull those paddles out -- whatever you need to do, Mike.

First person is in.

Okay.

Im gonna pass Yeah, not yet, but youre almost there, but you cant sit down on your paddles.

I know, I know.

We have to make progress before the ice drifts back in on us again.

What is it?

Could this be from the Greely thing, Steve?

Well yeah, its old.

These square nails, these are very similar to the nails that we find up at Fort Conger, that Greely left up there.

Same kind of nails, you know, so probably same era.

You know, there were quite a few ships that went down around here.

They got crushed in the ice.

Wow, yeah look at this, it goes down The men of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition wouldnt recognize this place today -- all of these battered-up bits of sea ice.

Theyd be astonished to see how this ocean has changed.

To me, its really disturbing.

Polar oceanographers like Chris are reporting that the Arctic Ocean has lost three quarters of its sea ice volume in the past 40 years.

And were barely acknowledging the impact of these losses on the cooling system of our planet.

In all my previous expeditions, Id be surrounded by seabirds almost every day.

These are the first guillemots weve seen on this journey.

Its required being here for this five weeks to show me what the outflow of the Arctic Ocean where -- where the sea ice is supposed to endure the longest -- is really like.

Coming here really shows me that this is a dramatically changing environment over periods of time that are smaller than my life.

Weve lost an area of sea ice larger than the United States in the last 40 years.

Could be even bigger.

Thats incredible -- I mean thats just such a big chunk of the globe.

Like imagine if we lost that much landmass all of a sudden -- Like imagine if if every single area that was populated by rainforest turned to desert over a 30 year period.

Thats what its like.

Its changing the surface of the Earth over the period of a human life.

Ahhhh, Carl Ritter!

I love you!

Carl Ritter Bay is sheltered from the winds of the Strait.

And with protection from the wind -- theres life.

Theres even a lone muskox.

A few miles away, the ice streams past on its inevitable journey to warmer waters.

And knowing that is bittersweet.

The plane will be arriving in three days, which is good because we dont have much food left.

Weve got around 1,000 feet now of ceiling, and it breaks up in places like For instance, weve got mountaintops sticking out in a few places to the south of us.

Looking out towards Greenland, weve got more than five kilometers visibility.

Thats thats the status.

Its a challenging situation, but theyve got their challenges weve got our challenges.

Yeah, but its like you can go out, we have one day, and if we dont get you that one day, well get you in another month?

Like -- excuse me?

Well if they get going now, you know, theres a hope of them getting in here before things really change again.

But as the evening cools off, as we know, things change.

So thats the other factor in all this, its like theres definitely a now-or-never element to this.

I cant believe the plane got here.

Okay.

Its like going over an ice-foot.

If we hadnt come up here, I think itd be hard for any of us to grasp the extent of the shifts that are going on in this region.

And how those shifts affect us all.