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

around the arctic ocean for years. back then, floes grew to be so large that passages like nares strait were often blocked for months or even years at a time. these floes are too thin to withstand collisions with other floes. there's isn't anything big enough here to plug nares strait. to me, it's alarming. in this area there's nothing that stops sea ice from escaping the arctic ocean. yeah, you see this big mumbo-jumbo of ice, you think -- “hmm, might be sledging today”"

not just sledging, but lifting kayaks, fully loaded kayaks, that's the part. you see how we're going to go across there, that's going to just -- aghhh! alright, so the one thing we want to be careful of here is actually that we don't damage the boats, right? steve's got a ton of experience with this place and i think even he is just baffled right now. and as it's going down, you're just going to ease it down as much as you can. ahh, watch yourself... we thought this was going to be kayaking every day, but it's turned into pretty much sledging, pulling the kayaks every day. wait, mike.

wait -- wait. ahhhh! don't pull, don't pull, i'm getting pulled underneath it. give me a second. looking out there i'm not too optimistic about having open water or actually really sea kayaking. there just doesn't seem to be any -- let up. personally, it's a bit of misery. we've made it about 35 miles as the crow flies in 14 days. and the ice

is rubbled up and compacted and so here we are stuck behind a huge wall of ice and not very clear on where we're going, or how to get there. yeah! do you imagine like that this is going to clear out like when we get a blow or could there be a break or ice jam up higher, like or is it just going to be more of this, what we have? like, what do you think is going to happen? well, the only thing i can see us doing because of all of this pack ice, because there is absolutely no way of stepping off the ice-foot. like we cannot leave the ice-foot. we have to stick with the ice-foot. and the only time we can travel is when the tide is high. the power of each chunk of ice the power of that chunk of ice, you know, is just

we can't deal with it. we're 260 nautical miles from our final destination. we may need to come up with an alternative plan. our closest option for evacuation is carl ritter bay. there's no actual runway, but planes have landed there before. it's heartbreaking. watching the arctic ocean losing its ice. let's go up here. climate models might say there's still a lot of old, large and thick sea ice here,

but that's not what i'm seeing. that we're not seeing any large floes here means there's no large floes in the arctic ocean either. the sea ice that's left -- it's young, ephemeral, and it's easily broken into small pieces. i'll get on the ice. this transition from old ice to young ice has occurred decades before we expected. it's telling us it won't take much for summer sea ice to disappear altogether. oh, all right.

all right. to me, it's fascinating. the way i think about it is, the arctic ocean is white. it's white ice. if the ice wasn't there, if it all melted, the ocean would be dark, like super dark. an analogy i think about is, it's a hot day, and you're going to send your kid out to play. what t-shirt do you want your kid to wear? do you want your kid to wear a white t-shirt, or a black t-shirt? and we all know, wear a white t-shirt. and so what i've learned, is that the arctic ocean is kind of like the white t-shirt for the planet. there we go.

hey. hi. how's it going steve? the kayak just slid backwards against that chunk of ice. yeah, you know why it slid back is because you told us to go harder. in fact, you pulled it and then i was in the back, and i couldn't hold it and it slung in and hit the rock. and i was tired, and if you hadn't pushed it and made us go faster, that would not have happened. well, we have to get to a place where we can get a plane in. i get that. that's all there is to it. it's like we never get a break. well, we're gonna take a break, and your point is well made, and then we're gonna have to go back at it, and we're going to have to be more careful. are we feeling collectively good enough to go back at the ice-foot? well, this brings up a question in terms of end goals. mike and i were talking about this yesterday a bit, i don't know if you guys have chatted. end goals? like, right now the end goal might be carl ritter. yeah... so, do you think maybe right now our primary objective is get to carl ritter?

and then assess as soon as we get there what we'll do next? yup. carl ritter bay is 33 nautical miles away. i'm actually questioning whether we'll be able to make it there. we need to put the science on hold. with these ice conditions, we have to focus on getting safely out of here. our way forward is completely blocked.

we have no choice but to go out into the fray, and to join the parade of ice floes headed south. okay, stop. yup. okay, beautiful, keep it going, keep it going. keep it going, keep it going, nice and steady. fast. okay -- drop the line -- let go -- let go -- let go -- okay! alright! we are witnessing the breakdown of this ice. we've seen the wind and waves bashing it to bits. this ice is so thin that sometimes just jumping from floe to floe is enough to break it apart. before i came on this journey, i had no idea how the arctic ocean ice melted.

what happens? you know, does it stay up in the arctic and melt? and what i'm learning on this journey is that, at least some of that ice is going south in currents. so that's the ice that we see going by us every day, just flowing down nares strait, just like it's flowing out of a bathtub, down the drain, down south where it's going to melt. so many hours of intense slogging, and we've barely covered 2 nautical miles.

it's ironic. there's less sea ice than ever in the arctic ocean, and yet here we are, forced ashore by the ice, hauling. that's it for today, guys. we can pull, we should pull them up into here and walk up and find a place to camp up there. we have to go on to the rubble, and this is not the time to go onto the rubble.

i wonder how we are going to get out of here? it's unclear. we've got behind us no ice-foot, or in front of us no ice-foot. and immobile, messed-up, ridged and screwed-up ice. are you stressed out at all? well' they are only hurricane force winds, nothing serious.

it doesn't matter, you can get all the technology in the world, the satellite phones, the sos buttons, the -- whatever you need -- but when the weather is doing what it's doing -- that's it, we're at the whim of the weather. so, if something really goes wrong, we have to be able to deal with it out here. that's all there is to it, we can't -- we can't depend on the outside world if something goes wrong and the weather is bad. i didn't go camping until i was in grad school. i have never really been outdoors. i'm not a wilderness person. there is very little wilderness exposure for scientists. a lot of the work that's being done in science is computer driven, it's desk driven, it's mathematics. i don't know any climate scientist that's done this.

“so chris,” “come to the arctic. it'll be great.” i don't know for what. i thought you called yourself a polar oceanographer. i am. i could do that at a desk, my friend. this isn't oceanography. i'm sitting on the land in the wind. this is atmospheric science. but if you're a true polar oceanographer, then you need to be able to savour the delights of... if i was a true polar oceanographer, i should have flippers, i should be swimming in that ocean. this is a sham.

the wind has dropped. we're up against a low tide, otherwise, conditions are good to go. hang on -- hang on! alright -- moment of truth. so what you're going to do is get it down so its tail-end is in the water. yeah. you guys are going to walk it towards me, you're going to hand me the line, and i'm going to walk it down. beautiful, keep 'er going! keep her going. yup... okay. beautiful! keep it going. keep it going. it's going right into the water. exactly. keep it going, keep it going. nice and steady -- fast! okay, i got the line, let go, let go, let go. ok. alright, who's in this boat? you can even stand up and pull those paddles out -- whatever you need to do, mike. first person is in. okay. i'm gonna pass. yeah, not yet, but you're almost there, but you can't sit down on your paddles. i know, i know.

we have to make progress before the ice drifts back in on us again. what is it?

could this be from the greely thing, steve? well yeah, it's old. these square nails, these are very similar to the nails that we find up at fort conger, that greely left up there. same kind of nails, you know, so probably same era. you know, there were quite a few ships that went down around here. they got crushed in the ice. wow, yeah look at this, it goes down. the men of the lady franklin bay expedition wouldn't recognize this place today -- all of these battered-up bits of sea ice. they'd be astonished to see how this ocean has changed. to me, it's really disturbing. polar oceanographers like chris are reporting that the arctic ocean has

lost three quarters of its sea ice volume in the past 40 years. and we're barely acknowledging the impact of these losses on the cooling system of our planet. in all my previous expeditions, i'd be surrounded by seabirds almost every day. these are the first guillemots we've seen on this journey.

it's required being here for this five weeks to show me what the outflow of the arctic ocean where -- where the sea ice is supposed to endure the longest -- is really like. coming here really shows me that this is a dramatically changing environment over periods of time that are smaller than my life. we've lost an area of sea ice larger than the united states in the last 40 years. could be even bigger. that's incredible -- i mean that's just such a big chunk of the globe. like imagine if we lost that much landmass all of a sudden -- like imagine if if every single area that was populated by rainforest

turned to desert over a 30 year period. that's what it's like. it's changing the surface of the earth over the period of a human life. ahhhh, carl ritter! i love you! carl ritter bay is sheltered from the winds of the strait. and with protection from the wind -- there's life.

there's even a lone muskox. a few miles away, the ice streams past on its inevitable journey to warmer waters. and knowing that is bittersweet. the plane will be arriving in three days, which is good because we don't have much food left.

we've got around 1,000 feet now of ceiling, and it breaks up in places like... for instance, we've got mountaintops sticking out in a few places to the south of us. looking out towards greenland, we've got more than five kilometers visibility. that's that's the status. it's a challenging situation, but they've got their challenges we've got our challenges. yeah, but it's like you can go out, we have one day, and if we don't get you that one day, we'll get you in another month? like -- excuse me? well if they get going now, you know, there's a hope of them getting in here before things really change again. but as the evening cools off, as we know, things change. so that's the other factor in all this, it's like there's definitely a now-or-never element to this.

i can't believe the plane got here. okay. it's like going over an ice-foot.

if we hadn't come up here, i think it'd be hard for any of us to grasp the extent of the shifts that are going on in this region. and how those shifts affect us all.

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