Dispatches from the Last Ice Area

National Observer

17-06-2025

This story was originally published by bioGraphic and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration
There is nothing easy about visiting the Last Ice Area, the last stronghold of permanent, multiyear sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. The million-square-kilometer expanse of jagged, fractured, floating ice is located in the Canadian and Greenlandic High Arctic. Despite its character and location, Mathieu Ardyna, a biological oceanographer at Laval University in Quebec City, Canada, felt compelled to visit. But while leading the first of a pair of 28-day expeditions beginning in August 2024, he had to pivot several times. At one point, impenetrable sea ice blocked the team's icebreaker, the CCGS Amundsen, from cutting through to the Greenland coast.
The pair of expeditions, together called Refuge-Arctic, was an effort by Ardyna and his collaborators to collect glacial samples and ice cores from the Last Ice Area. He aspired to gather enough samples to thoroughly study the withering environment. 'We knew that it would be impossible,' he says. 'But it was still part of the plan.'
As the world warms, the Last Ice Area will likely be—as its name suggests—the last remaining chunk of permanent sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. Recent research suggests the Last Ice Area will hold out until around 2045. After that, scientists expect the swiftly thinning ice to break up and flow into the Atlantic Ocean. That's put pressure on scientists to understand how the region is changing, says Stephanie Pfirman, who studies sea-ice dynamics at Arizona State University and was not involved in the recent expedition.
For decades, scientists have been monitoring the Last Ice Area with satellites and ground-based weather stations. In general, researchers understand the big picture of the region's sea-ice dynamics, such as how strong Siberian winds push floating ice across the Arctic basin like a snowplow, jamming it into the Canadian and Greenlandic coasts, says Pfirman.
But details from the field are sparse. Not much is known, says Warwick Vincent, an expert on Arctic ecosystems and a Refuge-Arctic collaborator, about what kinds of animals and microbes find refuge on, in, and under the ice, nor how they're affected by climate change or other threats, such as oil spills, pollution, and shipping activity.
'If you want to understand how [the Last Ice Area] may change or predict its fate, you need to have an idea of what is present,' Ardyna says.
Despite the challenges, Ardyna and his team caught a break. In August 2024, their icebreaker managed to navigate the ice floes, carving a path into five of the original eight glacial fjords they were hoping to investigate across the Far North. From there, some of the scientists split into two small teams. One launched in a helicopter, the other in an inflatable boat, but both had the same goal of gathering water samples from coastal glaciers.
With glacier water samples in hand, researchers on the second 28-day leg of the Refuge-Arctic expedition turned their focus to the sea ice itself. This time, the scientists sought out ice floes that were stable enough that a small squad of scientists could disembark and collect cores up to five meters (16 feet) long. These ice cores, capturing a detailed view of some of the oldest sea ice in the Arctic, will be closely analyzed to give the scientists a sense of the ice's internal structure and the chemistry at play. The researchers will also analyze the diversity of microbial life hidden within the ice, and the extent to which this rugged, remote ecosystem is already affected by threats like pollution and microplastics.
Melanie Lancaster, a conservation biologist with the World Wide Fund for Nature who wasn't involved in the Refuge-Arctic project, says the research could play a big role in securing additional help for key Arctic species that depend on sea ice, like polar bears and bowhead whales. Parts of the Last Ice Area are already protected by the Canadian government. But to extend those protections, and to better manage shipping activity and resource extraction in the central Arctic Ocean, 'science is really needed to make the case for that policy action,' Lancaster says.
In early 2025, the water and ice samples collected by the Refuge-Arctic team were securely packaged and sent to laboratories in France, Norway, Japan, and Canada. The team expects that the results of this lab work will start to roll out later this year, giving scientists the most detailed look yet at life in the Last Ice Area—and its potential future.
For now, the scientists' daring adventure to the North is over. But, says Ardyna, 'We are just at the beginning of what we'll discover.'