‘Spoon worms lick the seabed with a metre-long tongue’: a voyage into a vanishing Arctic world

Sea ice around the north pole is disappearing at an alarming rate. A group of scientists are on a mission to investigate the effects of the climate crisis on the region

It is summer and the air temperature is just below freezing. Fog has crept in, blurring the outline of Polarstern, the German icebreaker moored to a kilometre-long ice floe at 85 deg N latitude. Next to a hole we have just drilled through 1.4 metres of ice, Morten Iversen, who studies the flow of carbon around the ocean, has attached several plastic containers to a rope secured by ice screws. They will be left hanging in the water under the ice for a day to catch marine snow - clumps of dead algae and zooplankton faeces that sink from the upper ocean to the deep sea.

A few metres away, a team of biologists perforate the ice floe with a core drill. They are looking for algae that grow at the bottom of sea ice, which play an important role in the Arctic Ocean food web. Metre-long ice cores are pulled up, packed in plastic sleeves and stacked on a sledge to be processed in the ship's laboratories.

Daniel Scholz, an engineer for the Alfred Wegener Institute, lowers an instrument that measures temperature, salinity and nitrate - an important nutrient for algae and phytoplankton - through an ice hole