Life in the Arctic labyrinth

Natural History, April, 1998 by Kevin Krajick

Rick Crawford, a fish biologist from Massachusetts, brought the gear: a pole cobbled together from a thick orange mop handle and a bolted-on deep-sea reel, with gobs of duct tape wrapped around the handle. He plopped a line over the ship's fantail into a watery crack fifteen feet below and jiggled the lure. Light from an open hatch showed pressure ridges and ice hummocks a dozen feet away and almost level with the deck; beyond was total darkness. Snow began to fall. After a while, Crawford handed me the mop handle and went to fetch another pole. "Catch something," he whispered.

We and others aboard were trying to catch anything that would tell us about life in the world's least explored marine region. Crushing year-round ice; narrow channels, uncharted shoals, and a crazy quilt of currents make travel here difficult to impossible, even for the 30,000-horsepower Louis. Biologists have long presumed the area almost lifeless, yet there is growing evidence of biological hot spots: packs of deep-diving whales, conventions of polar bears and seals, swirling masses of birds. Some of these local concentrations appear in the same places yearly; others pop up - seemingly at random - for a few hours or days, then disappear. Scientists on our 2,400-mile research voyage, conducted by the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO), to these normally inaccessible places were asking the essential Arctic biological question: why are things where they are?

The Arctic Archipelago is less studied than the remotest parts of Antarctica. The reason is ice. In austral winter, the southern ocean waters are a frozen mass surrounding a single piece of land; but in summer, most ice dissipates into adjoining warm seas, opening the way for beasts and scientists. The Arctic Ocean is the opposite: a sea shut in by the landmasses of Siberia, North America, and countless islands. During the brief summer, the ice breaks up a bit but has nowhere to go. Pacific and Atlantic waters stream in through straits along Alaska and Greenland and, once inside the trap, gyre in a complex parfait topped by ice up to twenty feet thick. About a third of the outgoing water is thought to drain through the archipelago to the Atlantic, but passages are so constricted and twisty that floes may take thirty years to reach open sea. Shore-to-shore pileups and freeze-thaw cycles create monstrous stretches of sea ice as deep as 150 feet - the world's thickest ice - and water streaming underneath rarely comes up to the surface.

With so little open water, living things that abound on the edges of the permanent ice pack - such as seabirds and phytoplankton, the ocean's floating plant life - seem to thin out or disappear in the inner islands. Scientists have thought that because of the ice, phytoplankton are unable to photosynthesize, seabirds cannot get at fish, and marine mammals are unable to find breathing holes. Gigantic bowhead whales and smaller beluga whales form distinct populations east and west of the archipelago. Narwhals, small whales whose single spiral tusks once fueled the unicorn myth, are found almost entirely in the east. Even signs of ancient Arctic peoples are exceedingly rare on the central ice pack; animals were probably too scarce, travel too dangerous. Not a single inhabited settlement exists in the inner archipelago.

Beneath the ice, though, is previously unsuspected life. Since 1993, radio-tagged belugas, once thought to live only in shallow coastal waters, have been tracked migrating each fall to a 1,650-foot-deep ice-covered trough in Viscount Melville Sound, at the very center of the archipelago. Signals show that the whales dive to the bottom, presumably to some rich, secret food source. Radio tags on polar bears have revealed that some frequent a nearby bay. While polar bears nearly everywhere else range thousands of miles in search of food, these apparently have a steady source. No one knows what is driving these seemingly rich ecosystems because no one has been able to observe them firsthand.

Starting in about 1500, Europeans tried to find a way through the Arctic Archipelago to the Orient, but most voyages resulted in dead ends. Crews suffered frostbite and scurvy; months or years of deprivation and despair often ended in madness, mutiny, and death. In 1845, Sir John Franklin and his 129-member crew set out to find a "northwest passage" through the labyrinth - and disappeared. The fate of Franklin's expedition became the subject of endless, vain searches and worldwide speculation. Archeologists to this day find bones of his men, hacked with knife marks, on lonely islands; we now know the dead were eaten by their comrades. Neither Franklin nor his two ships, probably crushed by moving ice, have ever been found.

Explorers finally pieced together a map of the region, but it was not until 1944 that a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer in a schooner sailed through in one season. Plans to ship oil across the archipelago came to nothing. The handful of vessels that now enter the islands during the six-to-eight-week shipping season mostly haul supplies to a few tiny native communities along the southern fringe, near the mainland coast. Our expedition intended to avoid these areas, instead threading between the far north islands, pushing against the main ice stream in Viscount Melville Sound, then through M'Clure Strait, where much of the ice flows in from the Arctic Ocean - an east-west voyage made only once, in 1993, by the Louis itself. On August 28, 1997, I and many of the scientists flew in to meet the ship at Resolute, a mostly Inuit settlement of some 180 persons at the eastern edge of the permanent ice - the end of the line for most vessels coming from the east. Here, from late July to mid-September, floes peel off into open water and drift toward the Atlantic, and huge numbers of migratory whales, seals, and seabirds come to the ice edge to feed or breed. A few weeks later, most creatures flee as the water refreezes for thousands of miles around.