Arctic Drift

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Arctic Drift

PBS Airdate: October 13, 2021

NARRATOR: The Arctic: its vast frozen ocean cools our planet and impacts weather around the globe. But the Arctic is changing, warming at least twice as fast as the rest of the planet. Exactly what’s happening and how it will affect life on earth has not been fully explored.

But now, a global team of scientists is setting out on the biggest polar expedition ever attempted.

MARKUS REX (Expedition Leader, Germany): We have hundreds of people, from 37 different nationalities, on board. It’s a massive operation, on a scale that we have never seen in the Arctic before.

ALLISON FONG (Ecosystem Team Leader, United States): We’re creating a benchmark of measurements that we may never be able to repeat in the future, because there won’t be sea ice for us to study.

NARRATOR: The plan is a world first: to take a high-tech research icebreaker and freeze it into the central Arctic ice for an entire year.

MATTHEW SHUPE (Expedition Co-coordinator, United States): We’re taking a whole new level of sophistication with us. On board the ship will be instruments that have never been installed in the central Arctic.

NARRATOR: Locked in place, they’ll explore every aspect of the Central Arctic as never before. Through the constant darkness of a polar winter and some of the harshest conditions on Earth. Their mission: to investigate why the ice is melting so fast and help us better predict how its rapid change will impact the rest of our planet.

ALLISON FONG: It’s about taking stock of what we’ve done to the earth and what we can still do.

NARRATOR: Arctic Drift, right now, on NOVA.

After more than 10 years of planning, an international team of scientists is heading north, on the journey of a lifetime.

ALLISON FONG: This mission is the modern climate science equivalent of going to the moon. If you asked me if I’d ever imagined myself working in the Arctic, going to polar bear safety training, handling a rifle, I would have laughed at you. I would have been like, “You’re crazy. There’s no way.”

VISHNU NANDAN (Radar Remote Sensing Scientist, India): Coming from a place where people have never seen snow or ice for the past thousands of years, Arctic for me is something out of this world. The expedition will definitely give us a new perspective about the changes happening in the Arctic environment.

MATT SHUPE: Making scientific observations in the Arctic is very difficult. Relative to the rest of the globe, we have very few observations of the Arctic system, especially in the wintertime. We’re going into a frontier, really. The Arctic is still a frontier.

NARRATOR: The mission, dubbed MOSAiC, and led by Germany’s Polar Institute, is heading deep into the Arctic sea ice, a place like nowhere else on Earth. A vast frozen world, floating on a deep ocean, it’s thin and treacherous in summer and almost impenetrable in winter. It means the central Arctic remains one of the least understood places on the planet.

But now, the team plans to establish a cutting-edge research camp by allowing their icebreaker, the Polarstern, to become frozen into the ice itself.

MATT SHUPE: This looks great, I think, as far as size.

We’re going into the sea ice to try to find an ice floe. An ice floe is a discrete chunk of ice. It’s maybe a couple of kilometers across. Ideally, our floe will be thick enough so that it can support all of our equipment that we want to put out on the ice. And this will be our home for the next year.

So, this is really a crucial moment in our whole expedition.

NARRATOR: The success of the mission depends on taking advantage of a natural phenomenon. The plan is to hitch a ride on the Transpolar Drift, a constantly moving belt of sea ice that’s driven by prevailing winds and ocean currents. If they freeze-in near Russia, it should carry them for hundreds of miles, close to the North Pole, then towards the Atlantic.

MATT SHUPE: If we pick the right ice floe, then we’ll stay in the ice pack for a full year. If we pick the wrong ice floe, it might drift out to the ice edge faster than we anticipated. It might break up. And so, we’re walking a thin line here.

RADIO CONTROL: So, we are standing by.

Okay, door is closed.

NARRATOR: The team has spotted several potential ice floes. To find out if they’re suitable they need to explore them on foot.

MARKUS REX: (Translated from German) Thirty three centimeters.

Our dream would be an ice floe that is thicker than, maybe, one-meter-twenty, just a stable island of ice.

(Translated from German) Thirty eight centimeters.

Well, here. This one isn’t it.

NARRATOR: The team searches for days.

MARKUS REX: Okay, okay, this is not our floe.

NARRATOR: But the ice floes are all too thin. They’re running out of options.

MATT SHUPE: This is interesting. This whole area here looks somewhat homogeneous. We’ll look over here and see what we can find.

NARRATOR: Eventually, they spot a floe that looks like it could be thicker.

MARCEL NICOLAUS: So, we’ll first go some 50 meters that way, and then we’ll try to walk parallel to Polarstern, over there.

MATT SHUPE: There are quite a few potential hazards out there: how thick is the ice? Is it stable? Is it safe?

MARKUS REX: Matt this is Markus. Matt this is Markus.

MATT SHUPE: Markus, Matt.

I think our thinnest ice is 70 centimeters, and we’ve seen some up to multiple meters. And there’s quite an extensive area of that thicker ice.

MARKUS REX: All right, Matt. That sounds great.

NARRATOR: After days of uncertainty, it’s an enormous relief. They’ve found their ice floe.

Now, as the ice starts to freeze around the ship, the real work can begin.

MATT SHUPE: I think we should build this up and get it moving.

NARRATOR: The team needs to unload around a hundred tons of equipment and set up bases out on the ice. With just days remaining before the perpetual darkness of Arctic winter arrives, the pressure’s on.

ALLISON FONG: Every day we’re looking out the window and light is diminishing. It’s a race against time.

NARRATOR: The plan is to build five research stations they call ice cities, up to a half-mile from the ship.

The cities and their cutting edge equipment will allow scientists to explore every aspect of the central Arctic at the same time, and, crucially, constantly monitor how each piece of this complex puzzle affects all the others, from high in the atmosphere to the ice and the deep oceans beneath.

A mile-and-a-half of data cables, and over three miles of power lines connect the cities to the Polarstern. Beyond, is a network of more distant science sites, as well as almost 250 remote monitoring stations. The entire operation stretches across an area of around two-and-a-half-thousand square miles.

While the scientists work, others keep watch. There’s one thing they’re all concerned about.

ESTHER HORVATH (Expedition Photographer, Hungary): I’m standing there, on this small hill at Met City, on my very first polar bear guard duty.

RADIO CONTROL: Bridge, bridge.

Pack your stuff together. You have to evacuate.

ESTHER HORVATH: Suddenly, I hear from the bridge that two polar bears are approaching us. They are a thousand meters away, nine hundred meters away, and we all have to go back immediately.

In that second, I start to shout, “Stop doing what you’re doing, and head to the Ski-Doos®.”

Polar bears, if they are hungry, they would hunt for a person.

MARKUS REX: These huge animals can reach speeds of 40 kilometers per hour, and everybody has to have that in mind. Once a polar bear is close, it can be at the person in seconds.

ESTHER HORVATH: I am the only person who has a rifle. And am I going to be able to use it protecting all the people around me? And there’s a lot of people there.

MATT SHUPE: Bridge, bridge, Matt.

We are actually really full here.

RADIO CONTROL: We’re going to try to load everybody on these. It’s going to be really full, but we’ll try to make it out with what we have here.

ESTHER HORVATH: Guys, hurry up!

In my mind that…I don’t care how small the sleds are. Everybody has to fit. We all have to go back now.

As we all got on board…

GAUTE: Bridge, bridge, this is Gaute, over.

RESEARCHER: Yes, bridge?

GAUTE: Polar bears are at a hundred meters.

ESTHER HORVATH: …that was when I saw them.

GAUTE: I will inform you when you have to shoot with the flare guns.

Where is Trude?

RESEARCHER: She is right next to me.

TRUDE HOHLE (Bear Guard, Norway): The main goal is to have everyone safe and then scare the polar bears away. We are invading their space. I don’t want to harm them. So, it is so nice when they understand that we are making too much noise for them.

NARRATOR: The darkness of Arctic winter arrives. The team will not see the sun again for almost five months.

ESTHER HORVATH: It’s an incredible experience to live, exist and work here in the wintertime. It looks unreal. It feels like we are somewhere else in the universe. This is not the earth, this is something completely different.

ALLISON FONG: The darkness, working in the dark for months on end and not really being able to see beyond where your head lamp shines, that’s scary. Yeah, that’s pretty scary.

NARRATOR: After three weeks on the ice, one of the most complex research camps, Met City, is up and running.

MATT SHUPE: All systems green. The tower is alive today.

Our tower here is about 11 meters tall. And this can tell us about the turbulent exchange of heat, of energy, of moisture at the surface.

NARRATOR: Such detailed data has never been captured year-round in the central Arctic before.

MATT SHUPE: We need to understand what the sea ice is experiencing and how that affects the melting of the sea ice or the freezing of the sea ice.

The Arctic ice is melting. It’s retreating. And we want to understand why that ice is changing.

NARRATOR: Today, sea ice in the summertime covers only half the area it did just 40 years ago, and the decline is accelerating. Only some of the reasons are known.

MATT SHUPE: Decades ago, when there was more extensive ice cover, a lot of the sunlight that comes in in the summertime would just reflect back off that really bright, white surface and go back to space. Now, we have progressively less and less sea ice, and that exposes more ocean. And that open ocean is dark. It absorbs the sunlight and therefore warms up the ocean and melts even more ice.

NARRATOR: This feedback loop is a major reason why the Arctic is now warming at least twice as fast as the rest of the planet. But it’s not the only factor.

Already, Met City is shedding new light on another potentially powerful warming influence.

MATT SHUPE: Clouds are a big player in the Arctic system, as they are in the whole global system. On the one hand, they shade the surface from the sun, so they cool the surface. On the other hand, they serve as a blanket and they trap the energy at the earth’s surface. And it gets really interesting in the Arctic, because, during parts of the year, there is no sun. It’s dark for four months straight, and so the clouds are only serving as a blanket.

What we’re seeing is that in polar winter there’s actually a lot more thick cloud than I expected, slowing the winter sea ice growth. That means less ice going into spring and summer, which in turn makes it more vulnerable to the melting season.

NARRATOR: The clouds are one piece of the complex puzzle the expedition is trying to put together. Another is the hidden world under the ice.

ALLISON FONG: It doesn’t look like much, right? At the surface. You’re like, “It’s just snow. It’s quiet.” But actually, below the ice, there’s a flurry of activity.

I’m used to making lab experiments with a pipetter, delicate work. And here I am with a 60-centimeter-long chain saw. Some of the big outstanding questions are what are the activities of organisms in polar night?

From the central Arctic, there are basically no measurements, whatsoever. So, this will be the first chance in history for us to do that work.

NARRATOR: This device can collect water samples at specific depths, down to just above the ocean floor...

RESEARCHER: Okay, I’ll close a bottle.

NARRATOR: …two-and-a-half miles below.

ALLISON FONG: At this place in the world, at this time of year, there’s never been data like this. And that’s incredible. And so, every time we put a piece of equipment out and we collect a sample successfully, we’re the only people that have been able to do it.

Okay, so, Jien, you’re done for D.I.C. on one. Haylun, that means you can do salinity.

NARRATOR: What they’re finding is a huge surprise.

ALLISON FONG: I think winter, in general, is thought of as a time of hibernation or low metabolic activity. But what we’re seeing is that organisms have adapted over millennia to this, what we consider an extreme environment.

In one milliliter of seawater, which is basically like a teaspoon of seawater, are 1,000,000 bacterial cells. And from there, the diversity is extraordinary.

NARRATOR: The team finds that phytoplankton, plant-like organisms that rely on the sun for their energy, are still present in winter, primed and ready for spring. They also discover tiny zooplankton in their thousands, far more abundant and active than they’d imagined. This thriving ecosystem is vital for our planet.

Globally, phytoplankton produce around half the oxygen we breathe and absorb vast amounts of carbon dioxide, while the zooplankton that feed on them help lock that carbon away in the depths. It’s partly why the oceans absorb around a quarter of the CO2 produced by the burning of fossil fuels.

For our climate, these tiny creatures play a crucial role.

ALLISON FONG: Given that the Arctic is experiencing so much change, we need to understand what impact reductions in sea ice and global warming are having on these organisms and how these components of the climate interact.

NARRATOR: Almost two months into their yearlong mission, the Transpolar Drift has carried the Polarstern over a hundred miles deeper into the Arctic.

TRUDE HOHLE: Bridge, bridge, Trude.

HANS HANOLD: Trude, go ahead.

TRUDE HOHLE: I’m in position stern.

HANS HANOLD: Yes, thank you. Enjoy your watch.

TRUDE HOHLE: Do we have a ladder here? Good.

Oh, my god. The ice is moving a lot.

Bridge, bridge. For your information, the ice has really started to move. We noticed by the sound and are monitoring it now. We managed to save the ladder, which is now on our side.

It’s so loud! It sounds like an engine as it starts. It is like an earthquake under your feet, and there is nowhere to run. You really feel how fragile you are. It’s a frightening experience.

Let’s hope we find a way over.

Oh, it’s stopped.

Bridge, bridge, Trude.

BRIDGE: Go ahead, Trude.

TRUDE HOHLE: The ice has stopped moving, and it’s completely silent, here, in the Arctic again.

MATT SHUPE: This is stress on the ice. This is the winds and the currents in the ocean causing pressure in the ice, and, eventually, the ice just lets go. There’s internal pressure, and it breaks.

NARRATOR: And those stresses are intensified by the arrival of a violent storm.

Cracks in the ice, known as leads, open up, some big enough to wreck the entire base.

HANS HANOLD: There is one crack behind Met City. We’ve lost the power.

MATT SHUPE: It’s knocked out our power supply. It’s taken down our measurements at Met City. We have to get back out there. We have to get the power hooked up again, so that we can continue making our measurements.

MARKUS REX: The goal of the operation, really, is to rescue the cables, so we don’t lose them.

RESEARCHER: Yeah. So we prepare the kayak?

MARKUS REX: Yep. All right.

RESEARCHER: All good? Team Kayak?

NARRATOR: The first thing they need to do is find out if the cable is still connected to the ice cities.

RESEARCHER: All right. The connectors have been ripped off, so the other half is probably in the water. We can’t reach it, we can’t see it.

NARRATOR: With the power cable hanging deep into the ocean, they’ll need to retrieve it by hauling it out with a snowmobile.

HANS HANOLD: Slowly, slowly!

Stop! Stop!

There is something else hanging here.

Yeah.

Okay. We are very close.

Ah, this is the end.

Well done, guys.

NARRATOR: With the cable saved, the team can restore power to the ice cities and get the science back up and running.

VISHNU NANDAN: I don’t know if I am the first Indian to walk on frozen ocean waters, but at least for this expedition, I am the only Indian.

My name is Vishnu Nandan. “Vishnu” means preserver of the planet, and that’s my goal. I’m here to protect the planet, to protect everyone.

Let’s pull it across, we don’t want to block the way with this.

JULIENNE STROEVE (Ice Team, Remote Sensing, United States): Okay, yeah. So, let’s just drag it there for now. We can at least bring the cables this direction.

I’ve been going up to the Arctic region for almost 30 years now, but it’s always been during daylight. Doing it over winter, yeah, that’s a really unique experience that many people, even if you’re a scientist working in the Arctic, you don’t get to experience that. And honestly, you feel like you’re walking on the moon.

That’s amazing.

Hi, fox!

That is very cool. My first polar fox, that’s exciting. Yay. Okay, I’ll check if my instrument is working now. 

NARRATOR: Julienne and Vishnu are running the “Remote Sensing City.” They’re here to answer one of the most fundamental questions of all: just how much ice is in the Arctic Ocean?

JULIENNE STROEVE: We have over 40 years of satellite measurements telling us how much of the Arctic Ocean is covered by sea ice, but what we’ve really lacked is knowing how thick the ice is.

NARRATOR: The problem is that satellites can’t differentiate between the ice and what’s just snow on top of it. By testing the same technology at the surface, where they can compare their results against physical measurements, they hope to revolutionize our ability to monitor sea ice from space.

JULIENNE STROEVE: It would allow us to actually map, not just the spatial extent of the ice, but the actual ice volume in the Arctic, every single day.

NARRATOR: As they begin to analyze their results, it confirms what they suspected: satellites have been vastly overestimating ice thickness. It will take time to turn their data into new, more accurate predictions, but it’s a major breakthrough.

JULIENNE STROEVE: Collecting the data is really key and will, hopefully, help the public and policymakers understand how quickly the Arctic is transforming and that we need to do something before it’s too late.

NARRATOR: As a new year begins, the team is less than 200 miles from the North Pole. They’re due to receive vital supplies, equipment, and a new team of scientists, before the ice becomes too thick to reach them. But the Russian icebreaker entrusted with the task is hundreds of miles away, struggling through thick ice.

AMY MACFARLANE (Ice Team, Snow Physicist, United Kingdom): As soon as the icebreaker started to move through the ice, I got the sense of how remote the area we’re going to is. I mean, we’re travelling for weeks to get to this, to get to this miraculous haven in the north.

NARRATOR: No icebreaker has ever tried to venture so far north in the middle of winter before.

ALEXANDR ERPULEV (Captain, Kapitan Dranitsyn, Russia): If there is not enough power to break through such heavy ice, we stop the icebreaker and reverse, then we speed up and use our weight to break through. We stop and reverse again. We’ll continue to make progress, of course.

Let’s hope so.

NARRATOR: If the supply ship has to turn back, the team here could be stranded for months, and they’ll be dangerously low on fuel for heat and power.

VISHNU NANDAN: It’s affected the morale of the scientists onboard. We are kind of stuck here.

RADIO CONTROL: There. There to the east, is that Dranitsyn?

NARRATOR: After a grueling month-long journey, and with the first signs of sun returning, the supply ship, Dranitsyn, finally makes it.

AMY MACFARLANE: At one point, I didn’t think we’d be here. But it’s happened. It’s incredible.

NARRATOR: With the new scientists and supplies on board, the mission is back on track.

As the sun returns, the Arctic begins to transform once again. For the scientists, it brings a whole new world to explore.

AMY MACFARLANE: Welcome to the office.

For me, snow tells a story. We’re trying to understand, in this scale, how it’s changing, and, eventually, link it to the whole of the Arctic snowpack. We start one snowflake at a time.

So, at the surface today, we have got minus-20 degrees. But then just 17 centimeters below, you have minus-nine degrees. So, it has a really big influence.

NARRATOR: The snow here is acting as a major insulator, trapping heat from the warm ocean in the ice and slowing its escape to the atmosphere.

With scientists predicting that a warming Arctic will see more precipitation, which means more snowfall, understanding why it’s having such a dramatic effect is crucial.

Using a C.T. scanner, the team can study the structure of Arctic snow in minute detail.

AMY MACFARLANE: So, at the top, these are all really compact and tightly together. And then, as you move further down, you come across these large crystals. I’ve never seen these crystals quite so big before.

You can start to see more and more air. The blue would be an air gap.

NARRATOR: The scans reveal how, during winter and early spring, large crystals in the snow trap more air, keeping the ice warm and inhibiting the growth of new ice. This may seem strange, but under certain conditions more snow can mean less sea ice.

The Arctic is now in full transition. With just over two weeks between first sunrise and 24-hour daylight, every day there’s more opportunity for one team to take to the skies.

JOHN CASSANO (Atmosphere Team, United States): Let’s do this.

GINA JOZEF (Atmosphere Team, United States): Let’s do it.

Three, two, one, go. Hell, yeah.

Wooo!

JOHN CASSANO: Way to go, team drone.

GINA JOZEF: We did it. Wooo! First flight: success.

JOHN CASSANO: The plane will spiral up, from near the surface, to a thousand meters, and we’re measuring the state of the atmosphere. So, that’s the temperature, pressure, humidity and wind.

It’s flying really well. I am so happy.

NARRATOR: And right away, there are exciting findings.

GINA JOZEF: So, here, we have a plot of the temperature and the wind speed. And you can see that we have a really strong inversion in the temperature, around 200 to 300 meters.

JOHN CASSANO: The first flight we did had this real sharp temperature inversion, where the temperature increases with height. It’s the opposite of what we normally see, where we live.

NARRATOR: This phenomenon, characteristic of the poles, is caused by the icy surface cooling the air just above it.

JOHN CASSANO: What’s interesting to me is that the temperature inversions are often associated with this core of really fast winds, right near the surface of the earth, where the sea ice or ocean or snow exchange energy and moisture and different gases. And so, the wind is really a critical part of understanding how the atmosphere is coupled to these other parts of the climate system.

NARRATOR: Along with these crucial surface winds, there are other polar winds, much higher, that have a powerful effect on the climate, far beyond the Arctic.

The jet stream is a band of high-altitude wind that whistles around our planet at over a hundred miles an hour, influencing much of the weather in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s driven by the temperature difference between the warm equator and cold Arctic.

Many scientists think the faster warming Arctic may be weakening the jet stream, causing it to become unstable. It’s a controversial theory, but if true, it could have catastrophic results.

JOHN CASSANO: Cold air is able to escape out of the Arctic and cover parts of Europe or North America and give us really cold winter weather. Or if the jet stream pushes very far north and then you get these intrusions of warm air up into the Arctic.

NARRATOR: The weaker jet stream might also be causing weather patterns to get stuck over the same area for longer, prolonging droughts and floods.

JOHN CASSANO: It impacts everything we do. It impacts farmers and where they can grow crops, where rain falls, how often droughts occur, how often heatwaves occur, how often blizzards occur, I mean, all of the weather that we experience.

NARRATOR: In addition to altering weather patterns in the Northern Hemisphere, the warming Arctic is also speeding up global warming, which will affect weather everywhere. And as ice on land also melts faster, it accelerates global sea level rise. What happens in the Arctic affects us all.

JOHN CASSANO: The Arctic is far away. You think, “Oh, it’s so far away, who cares?” But it has such a critical impact on the global environment that we all have to care.

NARRATOR: Six months in, the Transpolar Drift is carrying the Polarstern and its ice cities around eight miles each day, as the rest of the world faces a pandemic.

BORIS JOHNSON (Prime Minister of the United Kingdom/News Clip): The Coronavirus is the biggest threat this country has faced for decades. All over the world, we are seeing the devastating impact of this invisible killer.

NARRATOR: The scientists may be more isolated than anyone else on Earth, but as spring turns to summer, they face their own challenges.

The thinning ice is increasingly treacherous. Large cracks form, and huge ridges of colliding ice bury equipment. Both are made worse by violent storms. And as they drift ever closer towards the edge of the ice pack, the favored hunting ground for bears, their work is constantly interrupted.

By mid-June, much of the Arctic is in the grip of a record-breaking heatwave. In July, the ice is disappearing fast, leading to the smallest area of Arctic sea ice ever recorded for this time of year.

The question on everyone’s mind is how long will their ice floe last?

AMY MACFARLANE: So this one. Can you see it? There’s a few lines. This is undergoing melting.

RESEARCHER: Yes, I see.

AMY MACFARLANE: The water in the snow, it’s just trickling down and pooling on the ice. And the ice starts to become…we call it “rotten.”

The process and changes have been really quick, a lot quicker than I thought they were going to be. So, how long have we got? That’s a good question.

NARRATOR: While the floe is becoming increasingly fragile, the thinner ice is also moving faster than expected. The team had hoped to stay locked in until September, but by mid-July the Transpolar Drift has already brought them close to the ice edge, where the waves of the open ocean will finally destroy their floe.

MATT SHUPE: It could be a very dangerous situation, where the ice floe breaks into small pieces. It could be any day now.

ALLISON FONG: You know, sea ice has a lifetime of its own. And so, we watched it grow when we arrived, and now we’re watching it decay.

MARKUS REX: Good morning, everybody. We are at a distance of nine nautical miles from the ice edge, and that is the distance where we need to take things down. It’s time to say goodbye to our research camp.

We measured right up to the end, and, actually, that feels great. To me, this feels like a huge accomplishment.

ALLISON FONG: So, I wake up, and I go to the bridge, and there’s nothing.

MATT SHUPE: Our floe is gone. It’s totally gone. It’s disintegrated into a thousand pieces.

ALLISON FONG: Overnight, we went from having a floe that we could work on, that we’re moving heavy equipment on, to, literally, shambles of ice. It was incredible.

NARRATOR: Soon after their ice floe melts away into the ocean, 2020 is confirmed as having the second-smallest extent of summer sea ice on record. Across the Arctic, vast areas are ice-free. There are even patches of open water at the North Pole, itself.

JULIENNE STROEVE: We don’t have that much time left. If the Arctic Ocean is going to lose its summer sea ice, that’s a big climate shift.

JOHN CASSANO: The problem is that climate change is this gradual, creeping change. I think, eventually, we’re going to cross a threshold where the weather and the climate becomes so different from what we’re able to deal with, that it will become a crisis. It will become urgent, like COVID has been for us.

ALLISON FONG: Here’s the question I would like to pose now, “Why not act now?”

JOHN CASSANO: Humans are very resilient, we’re very innovative. We can come up with ways to solve this, but we need to start working together more than we are.

MOSAiC is a symbol of what we need to deal with the challenges we face. It’s a global problem. And you solve global problems by acting as a global community.

MATT SHUPE: We’re leaving the Arctic now with a tremendous amount of new knowledge, and it’s going to be available for everyone around the world to use.

AMY MACFARLANE: What each team has found has been really extraordinary. The implications are huge.

NARRATOR: From thousands of feet above the Arctic ice, to the ocean deep below it, the team has gathered more than 150 terabytes of vital new data and countless samples still to be examined.

As scientists around the world work together to analyze and combine the findings, they’ll piece together a new picture of our changing Arctic, transforming how we see our future and what can be done about it.

ALLISON FONG: The world is changing, and there is something that we can do about it, but it takes us making better choices about our everyday lives. I hope that what you’ve seen encourages you to believe that as we continue to be curious about our world, will help us protect it.

JULIENNE STROEVE: What is at stake? Everything, I would say.

Credits

PRODUCED AND DIRECTED
Ashley Morris

SENIOR PRODUCER
Philipp Griess

PRODUCERS
Annabel Gillings
Debbie Lowe
Rachel Vaknin
Uli Zahn

SENIOR PRODUCER FOR NOVA
Caitlin Saks

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EDITED BY
Nick Price

CAMERA
Jakob Stark
Lars Barthel
Dieter Stürmer
Susanna Salonen
Bettina Borgfeld

ADDITIONAL CAMERA
Alex Witkowicz
Christopher Durkop 
Will Edwards

NARRATED BY
Jeannette Robinson

ANIMATION
BDH Creative

ORIGINAL MUSIC
Biggi Hilmars

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HEAD OF PRODUCTION
Jane Taylor

LINE PRODUCER
Jackie Chivers

PRODUCTION MANAGER
Nuria Harrison
Christoph Korczak

PRODUCTION COORDINATOR
Warren Correia

ADDITIONAL EDITOR
Antony Oliphant

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RESEARCHER
Erika Gajda

ONLINE EDITORS
Adam Grant
Yiorgos Loizou

AUDIO MIX
Matt Skilton

COLORIST
Paul Fallon
Andrew Cloke

MUSIC SUPERVISOR
Rachel Menzies

MUSIC EDITOR
Sam Dobson

ARCHIVE PRODUCER
Jamie Smith

ARCHIVE MATERIALS
Esther Horvath
Getty Images
Pond5

SPECIAL THANKS
Alfred Wegener Institute
Scientists & Crew of the MOSAiC Expedition

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EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS FOR WILD BLUE MEDIA
Cameron Balbirnie
Gary Hunter

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER FOR FREMANTLE
Angela Neillis

EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS FOR UFA SHOW & FACTUAL
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A NOVA Production by Wild Blue Media, UFA Show & Factual and Fremantle International for GBH

© 2021 UFA SHOW & FACTUAL and Wild Blue Media

Additional Material © 2021 WGBH Educational Foundation

All rights reserved

This program was produced by WGBH, which is solely responsible for its content. Some funders of NOVA also fund basic science research. Experts featured in this film may have received support from funders of this program.

Original funding for this program was provided by the Richard Saltonstall Charitable Foundation, the David H. Koch Fund for Science, the NOVA Science Trust and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Image: (Lights from the Polarstern shine through the Arctic night)

© Alfred-Wegener-Institut, Esther Horvath and Lukas Piotrowski

Participants

John Cassano, Alexandr Erpulev, Allison Fong, Trude Hohle, Esther Horvath, Gina Jozef, Amy Macfarlane, Vishnu Nandan, Markus Rex, Matthew Shupe, Julienne Stroeve