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Language: en
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you're watching a Nova Video
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podcast sea ice is one of the brightest
surfaces on the
planet open water surfaces on the other
hand are very
dark as we're melting away ice we're
replacing essentially the brightest
thing on the planet with the darkest
thing on the planet and that speeds
warming temperatures in high latitude
areas in the
Arctic when seawater reaches 29° F ice
begins to form young sea ice an elastic
crystallin carpet that floats and bends
with the waves until it reaches a
thickness of 4 in as it continues to
thicken it's shaped by winds and by
ocean currents pushed shoved fractured
and stacked into flows Bergs and
sheets at first glance the ice appears
deceptively inert
lifeless everybody thinks of the freezer
at home and and everything's sterile
nothing's growing but here it's opposite
if you take a chunk of ice and you melt
it and you take a look in the microscope
scope you will find millions of tiny
animals and plants in there they are
moving they are swimming they are
crawling around it's hundreds of species
we are talking
about if hundreds of species live in the
ice there are many more living around
it in the bearing every creature is
linked to the sea
ice wers like to stay in the ice when
the ice is close by we get our game
close
every day I uh I come down here and look
at the ice conditions to see if there's
over any open water if hunting hunting
conditions are uh favorable most of the
hunters spend a lot of time observing
the weather the ice conditions the uh uh
water
currents information is going to save
your own life or somebody else's life
most likely a family member
subsistance Hunters on the Bearing Sea
pay close attention to the
weather and so does the Coast Guard with
good reason it's dangerous out
there approximately
345 uh we will be 80 Mi Southwest of St
Lawrence irland we have North winds at
12 knots temperature is a b me 5 degre
out okay as far as protective equipment
we'll all be wearing MSD 900s
we're going to put those on in the
hanger an unprotected person might last
3 minutes in the icy waters of the
baring sea in an MSD suit survival time
goes up to a few hours which makes the
struggle to put one on well worth the
effort oh yeah sequence of events is
planned as
follows we will stop on station and
deploy the brow we'll send the Coast
Guard personnel out first to survey the
work
area of course the first person on is
the bear watch and
swimmer well we evaluate the thickness
of the ice and the what the boat has
done to the
ice a lot of times the ship will
actually hit up against the ice and
cause more cracks to form and if you're
in the wrong place at the wrong time if
it cracks the two pieces come together
and put you in the
water just a reminder if someone falls
in the water uh basically we're going to
stop all work we're going to deal with
the
situation the first responder should be
the coties please alert them and uh
they'll get that person out of water and
on bring them back to the
ship so 375 Magnum uh we're carrying an
event that we have to put down a polar
bear but we want to avoid that at all
costs it's going to be a The Last Resort
if we absolutely have to we will or I
will but I I we will do everything our
power to avoid it if the event happens
to where our polar bear comes up our
policy is everybody off the
ice so this is our first chance to
sample sea ice during this
Expedition we are taking now several ice
cores to figure out where biology is
happening where coloration occurs within
the ice and that ice is pretty new when
when you look at it in detail then you
see it it looks like a lot sampage of
Pancakes and that is relatively new ice
that has been formed over the last weeks
and and one thing we try to achieve is
to sample eyes of different ages and see
how the biology is different between
these different kinds of
Ages so what we are doing here is we are
taking the ice cores and then we are
cutting them up in in different
pieces put them in the cooler and bring
them back to the vessel
so the next piece of gear that we are
using is our little water sampler fits
nicely through the AA holes we made and
we take this sample to compare it what
happens in the water with what happens
at the same time in the sea
ice you know snow on top of the Ice is
very very important both for the ice
physics and for the ice biology and and
just to give you an example such a layer
of snow takes away more light for alal
grp grow than a 2 2 m thick Ice Flow so
knowing how much snow we have on the ice
is very crucial for biologists and what
Karen is doing she's doing long
transects about about 200 met long
transects where she measures every meter
the snow
depth snow samples at the beginning and
at the end of each transact will be
analyzed for their chemical
composition the Bearing Sea is among the
world's most productive Marine ecosystem
and everything begins with the sea ice
the sea ice starts to melt and the bloom
of algae begins and the entire food we
stems back from that when you start
changing the variability in sea ice not
only do you change the variability in
algae but you you change the variability
in everything that feeds on that so you
change the sea ice you change the algae
you change the entire food web that
stems from that all the way up to the
polar bear back in the old days when
things were normal
we can predict uh weather conditions for
for the year and our subsistence
activities revolve around these uh
projections on
conditions uh but
now climate change has changed all
that Hunters uh about 20 years ago began
observing that there were subtle changes
in in the weather patterns and also in
the ice conditions I noticed that the
ice was Getting Thinner and the um sea
level was rising and um they also
noticed that the there were more extreme
weather that were occurring in the
weather patterns
here there are a lot of subsistence
Hunters up there and for these people
living with sea ice is part of their
daily
experience for subsist hunt they use SE
ice as a platform for traveling between
locations they use SE ice and they do it
basically every day for months they have
a well established understanding of the
ice system and and similar to scientists
they are very concerned about the
changes in the sea ice because that is
impacting their
lifestyle ice comes out here once a
year we're out in the ice trying to get
food when I was a kid it'd be ice in
October right now we don't get it till
end of December January so it's pretty
late in November my dad used to pull
allus from the ice he'd be pulling it in
for Thanksgiving
dinner right now we don't go out hey
Jackson's got a fish or
something yes he did look at that he's
got one trophy most of my children live
in Anchorage and Wasilla where life is
easier conditions are so harsh here and
with
this climate change and the adverse
weather conditions that we're starting
to get uh all the time is making it very
very hard to harvest our game uh it's
not uh easy like it used to
be we get the uh high winds in the fall
time and then in the springtime the ice
recedes so fast
the ice you see out
here uh can be gone
tomorrow e