Delaney Owens
Cincinnati, OH
2020, Senior, Creative Writing

I began my work at LICI 35 years ago, shortly after it was founded by my mentor, Dr. Sesi Williams. She took me on my first research expedition to the Arctic, to a place between Canada and the tip of Greenland called the Last Ice Area.

Between 1979 and 2020, the surface area of Arctic sea ice had decreased 40 percent, and the thickness of the ice was nearly cut in half.¹ Even if we had stopped the climate crisis in 2020, the Arctic would have continued to melt. We predicted that the Last Ice Area would be the last ice to disappear, a refuge for the Arctic wildlife left behind. In 2020, Dr. Williams and her team received funding for the Last Ice Conservation Institute, as the world began to take notice of nature’s second chance. In 2019, Canada and the Inuit partnered to designate two sections of the Last Ice Area as marine protected areas: Tallurutiup Imanga, along Lancaster Sound, and Tuvaijuittuq, north of Ellesmere Island. In Inuktitut, Tuvaijuittuq means “the place where the ice never melts.”²

But even then, even there, the ice was melting. Faster than anywhere else in the Arctic.³ The predictive melting models likely wouldn’t be able to give us a date before that date arrived. At the time, the general public didn’t have a clue about the ticking clock, the trickling ice shelves. The icy burden of inevitable loss seemed to rest entirely on just a few people. As we boarded our plane, Dr. Williams smiled at my unburdened shoulders, shaking from excitement as much as the cold.

“Ice is an incredible thing,” she said to me as we took off, “You’ll know what I mean once it’s gone.”

***

The first kind of ice you’ll see up there are old, deep slabs tethered to the land. We call them ice shelves⁴ because they hang out off of Greenland and over the water, like they want to protect it. And they do. This is one of the incredible things about ice. It has a much higher albedo than water, which means it reflects more solar radiation.⁵

Then you’ll look out to notice the sea ice, the floating pieces that grow each winter and retreat in summer.⁶ An ever-shifting guardian of the earth. Sea ice regulates global temperatures by reflecting 50 to 70 percent of solar radiation. The dark water surrounding it absorbs 94 percent, growing warmer and melting more ice, further exposing itself in a vicious feedback loop.⁵ The warming ocean cries out for more ice, but she can only watch as her waves crash onto thinner and thinner sheets. We measure the life of ice by its thickness, after all. We knew the Last Ice Area would outlive the rest of the Arctic because its ice was the oldest and deepest. It was at least five years old and about 13 feet thick. We knew the first-year ice in the West and two- or three-year-old ice in the Central Arctic wouldn’t withstand the winds, waves, and sun.⁶

When I stood on the ice for the first time, I felt the stability, the unbelievable strength that seemed to support only my feet and the frigid nothingness in all directions. I’ll tell you a secret. Ice looks lonely, but it isn’t. It lets just a little light shine through so zooplankton and algae can bloom underneath to sustain birds and fish. Seals carry those fish back to ice caves where they raise their young and hide from hunting polar bears.⁷ Ice is the heartbeat of the Arctic and the wildlife and people living in one of the world’s most extreme habitats.

Even as my body adjusted to the cold, and my eyes to the blinding magic before me, Dr. Williams’ words never really left my mind. Ice is an incredible thing. You’ll know what I mean once it’s gone.

***

We couldn’t know exactly when that day would come. There was a lot of talk back then about when we would see the first ice-free summer. Many models settled around 2050.¹ However, thin ice is easily torn apart by wind, and there was less sea ice to protect the remaining ice shelves from waves. A storm could have changed everything.

The 2015 Paris Agreement set an international goal to limit temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius. If we met this goal, it was very unlikely that we would see an ice-free summer before 2065.¹ I held onto this thought. I did what I could to help. I started to see others doing the same. The 2020s, of course, was a decade of change. A pandemic held the attention of the whole world, and then that attention shifted toward transformation. Year after year, millions raised their voices and made change, for their fellow humans and for the earth. We were turning a corner, too late and too slowly, but it was more than I had ever imagined.

Ice kept melting. In 2025, Canada, the Qikiqtani Inuit Association, and Greenland created a marine protected area to encompass all of the Last Ice Area, limiting the threats of shipping and risky oil exploration. The U.N. passed strict regulation on marine industrial contaminants.

At LICI, we poured our time into new experimental solutions. In the winter of 2028, my team and I began the process of restorative ice thickening in Tuvaijuittuq, the place where the ice never melts. Wind-powered pumps brought cold water up on top of the ice, where it froze to form a new layer.⁸ This became a yearly occurrence, and more groups began to use it to restore ice in other parts of the Arctic and later in Antarctica. We put other geoengineered solutions to the test. We scattered artificial snow that reflected sunlight. We built supports under the ice shelves to block warm water from getting underneath.⁸ Ice kept melting.

Ice kept melting, but each year since 2030 we’ve lost less ice coverage than the year before. Great parts of the sea ice have disappeared, but today the Last Ice Area is still not the only ice area, not yet.

When Dr. Williams retired, I asked her for advice. “Look at the numbers and models and predictions,” she said, “but don’t stop looking there. Keep looking until you see something you can change, or do, or try. You have to let a little light shine through. Even the ice does.”

***

I hope that this program has prepared you with the knowledge you’ll need to begin your research. But even more than that, I hope it has given you the confidence to try the impossible. To revive a world that was once declared dead. To fail and keep going. Because each year, the winter ice grows back and polar bears follow it as far as they must to find food. Nature won’t give up, and we won’t give up on it.

I know you’re eager to get on the plane, so I’ll leave you with one last thought. We’re standing here today because of hope. Not the kind of hope you close your eyes and wish for, but the kind that keeps your eyes wide open. Hope makes us curious and ambitious. It shows us the little things, the incredible things, that not everyone can see.

Ice is an incredible thing. You’ll know what I mean when you see it.

—Dr. Katie Ness. Last Ice Conservation Institute, Commencement Speech, 2055

 

Works Cited

1. Dunne, Daisy. “Interactive: When Will the Arctic See Its First Ice-Free Summer?” Carbon Brief, 12 Dec. 2019, interactive.carbonbrief.org/when-will-the-arctic-see-its-first-ice-free-summer/.
2. “Tuvaijuittuq Marine Protected Area (MPA).” Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Government of Canada, 7 Jan. 2020, www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/oceans/mpa-zpm/tuvaijuittuq/index-eng.html.
3. “Ice cover in a Far North MPA is disappearing twice as fast as ice in the rest of the Arctic Ocean.” Oceanographic, 14 Nov. 2019, www.oceanographicmagazine.com/news/last-ice-area/
4. Anselmi, Elaine. “The Last Ice.” Up Here, 4 Dec. 2019, uphere.ca/articles/last-ice. “Thermodynamics: Albedo.” National Snow & Ice Data Center, 3 April 2020, nsidc.org/cryosphere/seaice/processes/albedo.html.
5. Weisberger, Mindy. “The Arctic’s Most Stable Sea Ice is Vanishing Alarmingly Fast.” Live Science, 13 Nov. 2019, www.livescience.com/arctic-ice-refuge-vanishing.html.
6. “Last Ice Area.” World Wildlife Fund Canada, wwf.ca/habitat/arctic/last-ice-area/#:~:text=Indigenous%20peoples%20rely%20on%20sea,algae%20to%20massive%20bowhead%20whales.
7. Harvey, Chelsea. “Can we refreeze the Arctic? Scientists are beginning to ask.” E&E News, 6 March 2018, www.eenews.net/stories/1060075503.

Share Gallery

Where the Ice Never Melts