The 353-foot ship tears through the endless frozen plain, tossing glassy wedges of turquoise and white ice alongside the reinforced steel hull. Huge floes sparkle in a sun that doesn't set. "I call it my cold campfire," says an onboard oceanographer, gazing across the polar landscape. "I could watch it all day."
But the international team of researchers aboard the Swedish icebreaker Oden haven't come to the Arctic to gawk at the frigid expanse. They're headed to the middle of the ice cap to find out what's below it. Way below.
The expedition's chief scientist is Robert Reves-Sohn, a 42-year-old geophysicist from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. He's been wanting to explore the forbidding floor of the Arctic Basin since his days as a postdoc. Now he's finally getting his chance.
Reves-Sohn's mission is partially funded by NASA—the agency invested $3 million because it sees the Arctic Ocean as a proving ground for robotic technologies that might one day help in the search for life on Europa, Jupiter's ice-covered moon. (The National Science Foundation kicked in $4.6 million and Woods Hole added $500,000.) The expedition's deep-sea robots—two autonomous underwater vehicles dubbed Puma and Jaguar—have a tough, dangerous job. They'll be working in conditions that can cripple electronics and machinery, and they must maneuver in the compass-warping environs of magnetic north. To negotiate these disorienting depths, they rely on acoustic navigation tools that communicate with transponders placed on the seafloor. Unlike other AUVs, they also receive commands from engineers aboard the ship regarding, say, where to surface between constantly shifting ice floes.
With Europa missions still decades away, Reves-Sohn's immediate goal is to better understand this alien terrestrial territory and, perhaps, find freaky species no one has ever seen. He's focusing on the Gakkel Ridge, some 2 miles under the sea. This submarine mountain range stretches between Greenland and Siberia, passing just a few hundred miles from the North Pole. An earlier expedition picked up tantalizing hints that hot springs—hydrothermal vents—might be perking along the ridge. (Vents give off a telltale chemical signature that can be picked up by water-sampling equipment.) In other oceans, such deep-sea oases often support bizarre life-forms called extremophiles, which can thrive on alternative metabolic energy sources like sulfur.
This summer, Reves-Sohn's expedition, dubbed Agave for Arctic Gakkel Vents Expedition, spent six weeks at sea. In that time, the robots made eight dives and had a few close calls—like the time Jaguar got lodged under the ice, until the captain cracked open the floe by bumping the 14,330-ton Oden against it.
The Agave crew never found a hot spring, but they did discover that the Gakkel Ridge may be even stranger than anyone thought. The researchers came across vast, eerie patches of "fluffy stuff" that turned out to contain at least 150 different species of microbes. The yellowish fluff looked like cotton candy stuck into cracks in the seabed. The team also retrieved the exoskeleton of what appears to be an unknown species of sponge. Analysis of the creatures will continue through the winter. Science this deep takes time.
Erica Lloyd (email@example.com) wrote about antique-engine enthusiasts in issue 13.09.