INFOGRAPHIC
Until the last decade, we knew little about what lay beneath the Arctic ice. Now scientists and explorers are shedding light on this vanishing world.
Insights about life under the Arctic ice
TThe watery world beneath the Arctic ice cap is one that few have seen or studied. It’s expensive and difficult to get to, it requires specialized equipment — and, perhaps obviously, it’s extremely cold. More than a decade ago in 2010, a multidisciplinary team of explorers led by Ghislain Bardout sought to learn more about this unique ecosystem and share it with the world through the Deepsea Under the Pole by Rolex expedition. The explorer remembers searching for photographs showing the seascape underneath the Pole, but no one had yet dived under the ice with a camera to record the icy structures that meet the crystal blue water. His team surfaced not just with stunning images of, and data about, a little known world — they also brought a warning.
“The ice cap is melting right before our eyes and it isn’t recovering,” Bardout said at the time. “What we saw and filmed on the expedition was that a lot of that melting occurs on the bottom of the ice sheet, not on top where most people are looking.”
In the decade since, scientists have started to understand more about this submarine interface between ice and water — from microscopic life in the ice to underwater topography to the ocean processes occurring beneath the ice cap, as highlighted in this infographic.
Something that makes the Arctic Ocean unique among oceans is that the water is colder, and less salty, toward the surface and gets warmer and saltier farther down — this cool protective layer of water helps keep the Arctic ice frozen from below. But with ocean warming this is changing. Already, in the Eurasian region in the Barents Sea north of Scandinavia, the Arctic Ocean’s water layers are flipping upside down and starting to more closely resemble those of the Atlantic. This socalled “Atlantification” in the Arctic has resulted in warmer waters rising to the top and reducing the boundary between the colder water and warmer water. Without this cool protective layer, the ice melts from the bottom. The depletion of sea ice creates a positive feedback loop causing more ocean mixing, higher temperatures and more melting.
While this influx of Atlantic water isn’t happening in the Canadian Arctic, chances are it will in the future as sea ice decreases.
“We’re used to thinking about air temperatures causing the sea ice to melt,” says John Iacozza, a sea ice scientist at the University of Manitoba, “but bottom warming could be really accelerating our sea ice loss in the Arctic.”
As the ice melts, researchers continue to study and document this underwater world before it disappears.