The Secret Life of the North Pole
When Karley Campbell arrived at the North Pole for the first time, last year, it was raining. Even though she’d become a scientist, her implicit notions about the top of the globe had coalesced in childhood. It would be a solid place, with terra firma enough for at least one workshop of elves. Instead, she and her colleagues found lots of open water. “It was a somber, somber moment,” she recalls.
Campbell is a marine botanist at the Arctic University of Norway and the lead scientist on a project investigating “the metabolism of sea ice.” This may sound a strange pursuit in what would appear a barren, almost-otherworldly abiotic landscape. But the polar ice holds consequential secrets of, and for, life.
Scientific projects to understand the dramatic effects of the derailing climate are underway across the globe. Researchers are tracking warmer temperatures and rising seas, increasing droughts and wildfires, animals and humans on the move. Outside the spotlight, though, are projects like Campbell’s and people like her, taking account of incredibly subtle changes that will have lasting and uncertain effects on ecosystems—in this case, the ocean’s food web, which stretches from unseen microbes to us.1
A single milliliter of sea ice can contain upward of 1 million living bacteria.
It takes a certain type of person to dedicate their career to studying life our eyes can’t see, in a place our bodies aren’t suited for. Perhaps an eternal optimist. Or, like Campbell, a self-described pessimist. Whose outlook brings a certain essential pragmatism
