i don't know i can't get there.

i'm heading back to one of the most remote places in the world. the polar inuit left these lands nearly a thousand years ago, and these shores have been wild and uninhabited ever since. today, scientists are trying to make sense of this region mainly by using data they've collected from satellites. but how do you comprehend a frozen ocean from the sky?

we'll be landing 500 nautical miles from the north pole, right on the doorstep of the “last ice area.” a unique place where oceanographers predict the oldest and thickest sea ice can be found. our plan is to survey the sea ice, to see for ourselves how accurate their predictions are. pilot: so, we're making a pass and we'll look at those those big cracks going across the strip. and then, uh, we'll come in to land. so, uh, just brace yourself. wahoo!

okay, diana, i'm just going to hand it down to you. a decade ago, i worked with friends in greenland to make a documentary film. what people there wanted the world to know is how their culture was losing sea ice. since then -- i've been trying to reconcile how changes happening in the arctic are impacting my life down south.

the ancestors of today's inuit invented kayaks to navigate the polar seas. kayaking is still a really good way to get around up here. with these boats. we'll have unequaled access to the sea ice in the last ice area. access that scientists haven't had before. there are five of us. i'm steve. i've been coming to the far north for 40 years. my wife diana runs an organic farm.

ten years ago she backpacked across the mountain range behind us. chris is a polar oceanographer. he just got his phd from harvard. this will be his first arctic field expedition and his first time setting foot on arctic sea ice. we're going to put this inside the tent bag' yeah. when it comes to sharing adventures, mike and his son bryce have done a lot together. mike has joined me on two other high arctic projects. it'd be a nice, reasonable thing for us to do. and either either in here somewhere or around the corner into here somewhere, and that'll set us up. we'll be really, really close to that open water, which runs by through here. there are only a few passages where sea ice can escape the arctic ocean. nares strait is one of them. here we can observe the floes without having to go far from shore.

for the next five weeks we'll be surveying the ice, making our way down nares strait until we reach a small research station where a plane will pick us up. once we enter the current, there'll be no going back. if an accident happens, -- if someone gets injured -- worst case scenario, rescue could take weeks. we'll be totally on our own. my goal in coming here is scientific. i think part of me wants to understand how the sea ice has changed so dramatically, and in nares strait there's been a very precipitous drop in the amount of sea ice that gets stuck here. if there is one place where we might encounter a bear, it's going to be right down where the sea meets the land, because that's where the bears end up being in the summertime.

there are little nooks and crannies here and there that you might not be able to see a bear in. if you've just come up a little rise and you see a bear, chances are that bear hasn't seen you. so the thing to do would be slowly back down, away from that and then turn and get back to camp. but if you chance upon a bear, and you're in that kind of a stand-off situation, absolutely 9 times out of 10, that bear is going to turn around and run, because that's what they do. what about the tenth time? yeah'that's right, the tenth tim that's the part i worry about. what are you going to do, steve, i've just eaten you? no, seriously tell me what i ... you know. in that case, yes, you're going to shout, “hey! go away!” you're going to start bellowing and make yourself look big. put your arms in the air. if anything, take a step forward. so, i have a final question. yeah. um, steve, how would you feel if one of us was eaten by a bear?

oh, geez. diana! what!? i mean, you brought us up here, i'm just wondering, you know. yeah, i would not feel very good about that, diana. not good at all. no, i would not feel good about that. after a year of planning, the journey has begun. i'm about to get squished

think skinny. now pull. it's jammed. huh? we've decided to call it a day. so we've set up camp on the sea ice. there's only a few feet of ice between our tent floor and the ocean below. there could be whales swimming beneath us. so i think this should be a good place to put these buoys out. like many polar oceanographers, i do my research remotely. i work with equations, i run computer models, and i interpret satellite imagery. most of the time i sit at a desk. i've been in the arctic just once before. it was on an icebreaker, confined to the ship. first application of using these, uh it's a different experience, having my feet

on the ice, seeing everything up close. i'm pretty excited to see if they actually work. today diana and i are testing these prototype wave buoys. i want to find out how sea ice breaks up and use that information to improve climate models. it looks pretty good over there. as we make our way down nares strait, we'll be placing them on a bunch of different floes. the color of sea ice is what is perhaps most important about it. sea ice is brilliantly white sometimes, particularly snow-covered sea ice, and that means it's very reflective to sunlight. that sunlight is what heats the oceans and the atmosphere. we're going to put them out on opposite sides of a place we think that's going to fail and break up. so, we'll put this one buoy over here, and the other one is going to go on the opposite side of this ridge. alright, mission accomplished!

the arctic ocean is warming incredibly rapidly. and as the arctic warms up, this warms the rest of the world. the more the ice melts there's less white ice, there's more dark ocean. so, it gets warmer so there is less white ice and more dark ocean, until it's just so much dark ocean that the white ice is melting super fast. exactly. so, that's the sea ice albedo feedback, and that's all it is. in the arctic, the surface is either white, reflecting the suns energy back out to space, or it is dark, absorbing the suns energy. earth's albedo is a big part of what keeps us from cooking under the sun. it keeps the earth cool. we're camped right where the historic

lady franklin bay expedition began. in august, 1881, 25 men were dropped off here. they were under us army orders to conduct research and fill-in blank spots on the map. they built a station. fort conger. their work went well, but resupply ships never showed up. and in those days there wasn't any way to contact the outside world. by the end of a third summer, they loaded up their wooden rowboats and headed down nares strait.

they made it 300 nautical miles to a place where they expected to find a food cache. but nothing had been left for them. when rescue finally arrived, out of 25 men, only seven were still alive. as we survey the sea ice, we'll be retracing their escape from fort conger. in 2004, i led the first small boat journey

to retrace the escape of the lady franklin bay expedition. we went from this site to the place where they spent their last winter. and the conditions we encountered matched their records. according to their accounts, nares strait was often blocked with enormous ice floes: single slabs of sea ice stretching clear across to greenland, wide patches of completely open water in between. this is not what i expected. i've never seen it so rumbled up. what's brash ice? ah, so this stuff that's all broken up, it doesn't look much like floes.

kind of peaks out and stuff, things that we can't really haul over. that's brash ice. the stuff on the west is land-fast ice. before i became a polar oceanographer, whenever i thought about the arctic, i imagined icebergs, these big chunks of glacial ice. but really, it's sea ice that dominates the arctic landscape. this ice freezes out of the ocean. it's made up of many individual pieces, which are called ice floes. sea ice in the arctic is constantly drifting, and over time winds and currents drive much of it into the last ice area. floes that enter nares strait end up being carried south with the prevailing current. this ice is on a journey of no return. we came from fort conger, and that took us all day, and now we

have to go all the way across there. it's interesting to have a journey up here in this really remote place, where you think of these hardened explorers coming, and just have kind of regular people, like except for steve, you know, the rest of us are pretty much ordinary people just plucked out of life. like mike's plucked out of silicon valley, and bryce is plucked out of college. and you know, chris is plucked out of academia, and i'm just lifted up from my farm. it's 13 nautical miles to the other side of lady franklin bay. with the ice about to break up at any time, i don't feel safe. those men of the lady franklin bay expedition might've been the last people to walk across this bay.

i'm imagining sodden wool jackets and leather army boots. aaaargh! whoahhh! come onnn! look what happened! i wanna take a picture of this! i work on these floes, and try to understand how the sea ice itself evolves, and then therefore how the climate system evolves. when the sea ice goes away, it's replaced by the ocean, which is dark. and this dark surface absorbs a lot of that sunlight. so in areas like this where there's tons and tons of sunlight, 24 hours a day, a transition between an ice-covered region and an open water covered region

represents a big shift in how much heat is entering the ocean. we're trying to see if we can figure out what percentage of the ice is made of floes of what size, just in nares strait. and so we're sending up this drone, and it's going about a kilometer out and taking images all the way and coming back, and we're going to stitch them together. and we're going to get a picture of what the ice looks like.

i've never seen imagery this good. it's incredible. like, careers have been built on less than this. honestly. we get this unbelievable, i don't know, resolution of everything that's going on. you can see this huge floe and it's probably not even that big -- we're not that high up. it's covered in these chunks of ice that have been thrown up on top and you can see all of them. i mean... the resolution on this is incredible. so, we expect that these floes are changed in time by melting, by interactions between themselves, by waves that break them. and the truth is we have no clue how strong any of those are. and the only way you can really tell is

to know what the environment's doing and to watch the floes themselves. we've never been able to do this. so, it's astounding. -- i mean, it really is something amazing that i didn't think i'd get to ever do. it's going to tell us something about why the floes are changing here. after sleeping another night under the arctic sun, we woke to a surprise. our first patch of open water. and a call i've never heard this far north.

the last people to see narwhal up here might have been the polar inuit 1000 years ago. i don't get narwhal. like, they're not seals, but they're not really whales either. well they're little toothed whales. they're like... they're a dolphin. yeah, they're like a dolphin. a manatee with a horn. it's not a horn though. it's got a tooth. oh, come on. ah, steve. it's like a unicorn. yeah. it's so like a unicorn, but it's a tooth. they're the unicorns of the north. if you saw a unicorn floating around, you'd say, “look at its tooth.” “look at that big tooth.” these days, with changing ice conditions, wildlife species are being found in unexpected places.

by the time we broke camp, the ice had drifted in and chased the narwhal away. we're caught in a paradox. we want to study the breakdown of the big ice floes, yet all of this broken up ice is getting in our way. what i'm learning is chris needs certain conditions in order to conduct his research. there have to be big drifting floes nearby, and there has to be enough open water for us to get out to them.

the last time i went down through the strait because it was frozen from shore to shore, you didn't have any of this kind of ice. it's precarious, like all of these boulders of ice that are just kind of piled on top of each other. quite precarious. all of this ice is really thin, it's a meter thick, two meters thick at most. and because it's so thin, it's really easy to break. so, when the floes come into contact with each other they fracture, they rubble up against each other.

when they encounter wind and waves, they break apart here all this ocean that's exposed is above the freezing temperature. every time these small pieces of ice are in contact with the ocean it's working to melt them. alright guys, what time is it? it's one, two, three, four? two something. i think it's three. you think so? so, that means that it's potentially night. the sun's going to come around well, it's already out, right? but -- well, the sun's behind a cloud somewhere. is it behind a... the sun is always out somewhere. so just wait up. yeah.

there you go. this is a typical day in the arctic. it's like we get in our boats, and we try to go somewhere, and we make it about a 100 feet in 20 minutes. here we are on this tide flat, and the tide's going down, and we have to get out of here before we get stuck in this ice with nothing but mud and nowhere to take our boats. so, we have to go back the way we just came, hey! yeah. not, not all the way, just in this last little section. and we have to do it soon. there's a hierarchy of experiences. there's the experience of thinki about something abstractly there's the experience of looking at it from space

there's the experience of watching it pass by you on an icebreaker and there's the experience of pulling a half-ton kayak across the surface of sea ice. alright! team -- down! -- set! -- up! alright, i'm going to walk forward a little bit, and now you guys can just crabwalk sideways. can't say i'm having fun. yeah this thing is going to be a challenge. where's it going? where're you going, buddy? that's wrong!

so we're close to the north pole -- at least the magnetic north pole -- which makes flying this drone pretty troublesome. this little guy has a pretty cheap compass, which means it has a hard time figuring out where it is. so that means it can't stabilize itself and i gotta fly this thing against the wind. i really didn't think i'd have to contend with this much difficulty in actually just taking pictures of the ice. let's see. we've each been allocated three rolls of toilet paper. except for chris, he's got five. but he's going to share with us. so, um, we've been really good. it's past 11 days now' so um, we can get new rolls of toilet paper.

this is really exciting. everything on this journey is kinda limited. so, there we go. eleven more days in the wilderness. on this journey, the very way on which i thought we would travel has changed. i thought that we would be able to come here and take advantage of the same kinds of ice conditions that i'd had in the high arctic previously, be able to work our way from ice floe to ice floe for example. you could paddle a few kilometers offshore, and then you could hug along the coast of one of those floes and work your way along the coast of one of those floes. just like you would work your way along the coast of the land. and if a big wind were to come up, you could easily pull out onto that ice floe and dig in. set up your camp, and wait.

in the early 2000s, you would see floes that were 20 -- 30 -- 40 -- 50 -- square kilometer floes. there are no large floes in this strait anymore. even though there is a lot of ice here, this is ice that's being emptied from the arctic ocean, and this tells us the arctic ocean is no longer an area of very thick, large pieces of ice. steve has seen the transition from lots of multi-year, large pieces of ice to what we see now. and that's been incredibly invaluable for me because i don't know what it used to look like. let him get down there and he'll wait! i'm getting it! aargh! wahoo! that was so easy. when steve was last here, a typical sea ice floe might have drifted