For most of us, the Arctic is a vast, alien landscape; for research scientist Marco Tedesco, it is his laboratory, his life’s work—and the most beautiful, most endangered place on Earth.

In fact, scientists say that Arctic summer sea ice may disappear by 2035. And this touches virtually every aspect of life in the region—as sea levels rise, coastal erosion endangers the local flora and fauna, as well as the dozens of communities and villages built along the coasts.

The Hidden Life of Ice, publishing today, is an urgent tribute to an awe-inspiring place that may be gone all too soon. Marco Tedesco, a world-leading expert on Arctic ice decline and climate change, invites us to Greenland, where he and his fellow scientists are doggedly researching the dramatic changes afoot. Following the arc of his typical day in the field, he unearths the surprising secrets just beneath the icy surface—from evidence of long-extinct “polar camels” to the fantastically weird microorganisms that live in freezing cryoconite holes—as well as critical clues about the future of our planet. Read on for an excerpt from the book, and be sure to pick up your copy of The Hidden Life of Ice, available now!

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CHAPTER 1

The Origins of Ice

I’m first to wake up. I often am. The silence surrounding me is absolute. There’s something special about night in the Arctic. I’ll never forget the first time I slept here: the emotion of being camped on the immense ice sheet, the light of the sun that never sets, a constant companion for people in this job. I’ve always woken up early and find it almost impossible to go back to sleep once I’m awake—a habit that intensified when I became a father and has never left me since.

The first “trial” of the day when living on the ice is to get dressed. It’s not as easy as you might think. To prepare for the world outside the tent, you need to be wearing multiple layers. Some call it dressing like an onion: You don different layers of differing weights, each one serving a different purpose—for example, a base layer closest to the skin, intermediate layers, then an outer layer to provide protection from the wind.

It takes a serious degree of body contortions: The tent is only a meter and a half high, so every movement has to be carefully coordinated. I rock on my back to pull up my trousers, sit cross-legged for upper body layers, and then attempt to “slide” on two pairs of thick socks, which is difficult because my now-exposed feet are usually like blocks of ice by then. Then there’s the golden rule: No cotton. Clothes keep us warm because of the way they trap warm air next to the skin, but the problem with cotton is that once the clothes get wet, the pockets of trapped (warm) air in the fabric fill up with water and don’t protect you anymore. Like how, when you’re out walking and start to sweat, a cotton top will soak up the sweat like a sponge and make you feel cold, since your initial body temperature was warmer than the temperature of the air outside (which is very much the case in Greenland). Once cotton clothes are wet, they no longer provide the necessary insulation, which is why we always make sure we bring things made of insulating fabric—either wool or a synthetic material.

I scooch over to the zipper on the tent door. I have to be extra careful not to wake my travel and research companions: Anywhere else, the metallic whoosh of a zip opening would be almost inaudible. Not here. On the ice, even the tiniest of noises is amplified. Our tents are of the standard camping variety, known in the trade as “four-­season.” They’re light and go up in less than twenty minutes. The outer layer is waterproof to protect us from the rain, which does actually fall in Greenland. Many people think it’s cold inside the tents but, generally speaking, that’s not the case. When the sky’s clear, the hot Greenland sun warms them up so much we have to open them at night to let some cool air in before we go to sleep. It’s worse in the middle of summer when the sun never sets.

As I mentioned before, there’s an unearthly hush around our camp; the only source of noise pollution, if we can call it that, is the whistling of the wind, which sometimes blows in a steady stream, sometimes in bursts. I finally manage to pull the zipper down and, to my ears, it sounds nothing short of an explosion. That’s to be expected, though, when you think that sound is the transmission of pressure waves arriving in the ear and encoded by the brain. Since the air is so rarefied in Greenland and there are no other sources of noise, ordinary sounds are perceived in a completely different way and with an entirely different timbre. Or maybe it’s exhaustion and auditory hallucination, or just the cold playing tricks with our senses.

I crawl out on my knees, pull myself onto the waterproof mat outside the door, and sit up. Time for one last effort: to get my boots over the woolen socks that are too thick, but essential. I’m tired already. Tired, yet excited at the prospect of what lies ahead, aware that we only have the objects we brought with us to overcome every obstacle and to deal with every situation that might present itself. When you’re in the middle of the ice sheet in Greenland, there’s no stopping by the local supermarket or hardware store if you’re missing a screwdriver or need a ball of string.

I can’t tell if the others are awake: The only sound coming from the tent is the rhythmic susurration of people breathing. Last night was one of the kind I call ­“interesting”—when someone wakes up and then wakes you up to fire a question at you, talk about an idea, or—as happens more frequently—is alarmed because of something they think they heard. It was Patrick’s turn this time.

Patrick was one of my PhD students—he had never been out of New York and had gleaned his knowledge of Greenland purely from satellite data and models. I invited him to join our team to give him a well-deserved opportunity to grow further as a professional in the field, and also to give him firsthand experience of the ice. I truly believe that if you’re studying this immense and magnificent ice mass, you have to see it for yourself, at least once in your life. It must’ve been around three in the morning when Patrick woke me. He seemed on edge and wanted to know if I’d heard the loud noise, like a thunderclap, from the ice below us. “Whatever you need, just give me a shout, even if it’s the middle of the night,” I’d glibly reassured him when we’d landed. He’d taken me at my word.

I tried to put his mind to rest, explaining that the ice often creaks and that given the absence of any other noise around us, it’s easy to imagine things. What we normally hear, though, are muffled thuds, like something splitting beneath us, the noise an enormous stone would make when it lands with a thud on mountainous terrain. I suggested he go back to sleep, with the reassurance that there was nothing to worry about. Not that I was wholly convinced, either; clearly, when you’re deep in the Arctic you shouldn’t rule anything out, no matter how small and seemingly insignificant.

A few minutes after my chat with Patrick, I heard it, too, the noise he’d been talking about. It was the ice, flowing powerful and inexorable beneath us at speeds, in summer, of up to about half a mile a day on the top layer. In layman’s terms, that would be like pitching your tent outside the Empire State Building at night and waking up the next morning in Madison Square Park. Patrick had touched a nerve, though, and I couldn’t get back to sleep, partly because I was worried and partly out of excitement. My muscles were tensed, ears pricked, waiting for a sound, any sound, however small and inaudible—like I was listening to a dinosaur’s breathing with a stethoscope, only in my head.

Not many people know that the ice moves; there’s a common perception that the ice in Greenland is static, ­motionless—inanimate, in other words—when it’s anything but. Panta rhei, the ancient Greeks taught us: ­Everything flows. Even ice masses, like dense rivers, move under their own weight. The flow slows in winter, when it’s colder and the ice less fluid, but in summer it’s like driving downhill on a wet road: No amount of braking can stop the forward motion. In the “warm” season, meltwater seeps through cracks and fissures in the ice, accelerating flow rates when it reaches the rock below the sliding ice.

I think about this as I look down at my boots, feet tucked safely inside. These aren’t the boots I’ll wear for our excursion later—they’re knee-high and ideal for camp life but not for trekking. The padding inside protects your feet at temperatures of up to -104°F (-40°C). Not my feet, though. They’re having none of it. They’re cold from the minute I leave the tent in the morning until I get back at the end of the day. “You must be used to the cold by now,” people often say to me, “you probably don’t even notice it.” Actually, the opposite is true: I have a fairly slender build and don’t have the mass I need to retain body heat. On excursions, we wear either hiking or Arctic crossing boots, which are sturdier and provide more ankle support to protect us from sprains. But the flip side of this is that they offer slightly less protection from the cold.

Once outside, I sink into the folding chair near the tent door and think how perfect a hot cup of coffee would be right now . . . but also how I should probably wait until everyone else wakes up. My mind drifts again, as if I’m still half asleep. I think about how impossible it is to quantify, or put a price on, the good fortune I have—I can think of no better way to describe it—to be looking out at this stunning landscape: in such profound stillness, surrounded by snow and ice.

If you’ve never been to the Arctic then there are a few things that would no doubt surprise you on your first visit. Even just at first glance. What I’m looking at now is anything but mundane or flat: Snow dunes, a few meters long, desert-like, line up in parallel with the wind ­direction. You have to pay attention to things like this when putting up the tents. If you get them in the right position with respect to the wind, it can stop them from filling up with snowflakes, glistening and lining the tent floor with a fine sheet of delicate diamonds. The glimmer reminds me of the huge waves I saw surfers ride in Hawaii or crashing on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro. The sparkle comes from the snowflakes fracturing when they hit the ground, split by the wind and other factors into tiny shards that then scatter randomly. The snowflakes, or what’s left of them, behave like a multitude of minuscule mirrors strewn over the surface, reflecting the sunlight in all directions. That’s why they seem to glimmer.

In awe, I continue to gaze out. A veil of wind-borne snow is painting circular patterns across the surface, reproducing the gusts and whirls of the glacier breeze. It’s as if there’s an artist standing behind me, adding details to a painting as I watch—someone who has dotted color at various points on the horizon, then decided to fan it out using their brush like a spatula. The turquoise sky—uniquely turquoise on account of the thinner air and lower humidity than southern latitudes—provides a backdrop for my meandering mind. It’s a majestic color, and despite lacking the force of rain-packed clouds over the English countryside or the sudden violence of an equatorial storm, it has a quiet power—like a gigantic wave of color. It is majestic yet motionless, aware of its own vastness and strength, but with no need to flaunt it.

The enormity of the sky is determined by the vastness of the mass it embraces. The two elements—sky and ice—share the same space, totalitarian in their chromatic supremacy, leaving no room for anything but blue and white. I have a flashback. Images spring to mind of when I was flying back in a helicopter from my first trip to Greenland, after endless weeks of white, when I saw the green, the reds, and the full rugged tundra color palette again. That’s when I realized—when I felt—as if my time on the ice had been spent speaking and hearing only a few words. As if someone had cut away part of my chromatic vocabulary, and part of me with it.

The desolation of the ice before me is a pleasant one, infusing me with a sense of peace and tranquility. Still halfway between sleep and wakefulness, I let this feeling wash over me, like I’m bobbing in a lifeboat on a calm sea. Time here is different: It’s more like the “geological” time of my homeland. I don’t need a watch. I can’t and don’t need to catch up on the latest news or download new music. The passage of time, as we normally think of or experience it, has no meaning here.

The ice is an elephant; I am a mere cell. Here in Greenland, it has taken thousands of years to form: Snow falls, year after year, never melting in the summer, becoming buried under yet more layers of snow. Greenland was created and has developed through the action of millions of minuscule particles—snowflakes that pile up with the passing years, snow layers compressed under their own weight, forcing out the air until they turn into ice with that ­all-­important density, a dogma for scientists like me: 917 kg/m3. Nine hundred and seventeen. The magic number. Less than 10 percent of the structure of glacial ice is air; all the rest is water in a solid state. Ice formation is a constant process that has been taking place for decades, centuries, millennia. When ice reaches a “critical” mass, it begins to flow, literally, under its own weight. Gravity, that mysterious natural force, sculpting the world around us yet again.

It takes much less to melt the ice: Nature’s slow, painstaking labors can be reversed in a day, maybe even less. The vast, icy expanse moves at a natural pace, heedless of us, of contemporary society, of humans, dashing around like crazed cells trying to take everything in before the next digital distraction—the next screen—grabs our attention. We human beings are tiny, but with our greenhouse gas emissions and global warming, we’re like a virus attacking everything and everyone—and have managed not only to threaten the mighty Greenland but also to bring it to its knees.

At the center of this polar landmass, at its thickest point, the ice can be up to 2 miles (3 km) deep, thinning out to around a few hundred meters along the coast where it flows into the ocean, like a river of opalescent lava. The deepest sections of ice are also the oldest and the ones that have been compressed under the most weight, resting on the granite bedrock for thousands of years. Little by ­little, as the ice slides toward the ocean, preparing to return to its origins, it melts on the surface, releasing a part of its memory into the ocean. Layers of ice deposited at different times become distorted, undulated, fused together by the constant movement, and the surface ultimately merges with the deeper roots.

I go over the last few details of our experiments in my head, reminding myself of the things I must do and those I must not. We’re preparing to collect data that will help us understand the impact of climate change on the rate of the ice’s melting and, in turn, what role this plays in rising sea levels. We’ll be studying not only the impact of rising temperatures on the formation and evolution of the systems of meltwater rivers and lakes, but also how the sun—and the fact that ice is getting “darker”—are a key part of this. We know, though, that Greenland is more than all this—and another reason we’re here is simply to savor it, to absorb it, and to get to know it.

I gaze and dream, dream and think. I think back to the southern Italy of my youth: a rich, harsh land where roots run very deep for those who still live there or for those who maintain strong bonds despite living elsewhere for many years. My roots are the linchpin of my existence: They define me and influence me, even in the US, my adopted home, the place I’ve hung my hat for several years now. Roots provide an anchor—restraining, circumscribing, restricting. They give us stability, but they also sometimes make it more difficult to effect real change. They shape us slowly, bit by bit, as if mimicking the gentle rhythm of sap bringing forth a tree from the inert soil—nurturing its branches, growing its leaves.

The sluggishness of the morning, the accumulated fatigue, and the longing—now more a need—for coffee, make me feel hallucinatory for a moment. I imagine roots reaching deep into the icy ground, roots that move, following the flow of the ice and the flow of time. On this cold morning in the Arctic, I feel at ease with this train of thought: After all, I also moved a long way from my place of birth, a move that was necessary for new branches and new leaves to sprout—the lifeblood of their roots giving them the strength they needed to grow and mature, the spores and seeds around them helping them grow stronger and reach further.

In this way, ice, and its static vitality, reminds me a little of myself. It reminds me of all of us.

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