The 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.
This story is from the September/October 2021 edition of Canadian Geographic.
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This story is from the September/October 2021 edition of Canadian Geographic.
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