Last July, glaciologist Derek Mueller made his fourteenth annual quest to gather samples from Milne Fjord, a research station on the coastal margin of the “Last Ice Area”— a 400,000-square-mile region north of Greenland and the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. The facility sits about 500 miles from the North Pole, nestled between tremendous ice flows. The landscape is rich with harsh beauty: Melt ponds, underlined by glistening ice, rest between white hillocks. Contrasted against the vivid white ice and dark, churning sea, each pool glows with its own crystal-blue light.
Mueller’s work had focused on Milne Fjord’s only known epishelf lake — a microbially rich ecosystem that arises when an ice shelf creates a dam, allowing a thin layer of freshwater to float above seawater connected to the open ocean. As with the rest of the Arctic, they are threatened by climate change. But there was reason to hope for Milne Fjord: For years, scientists believed this area, home to the oldest and thickest ice in the northern hemisphere, would survive the worst effects of global warming.
