Global Warming and the Arctic Ocean | Outside Online

A seven-day trip aboard a U.S. icebreaker proves at least one thing about global warming: Things are getting very strange in the great white North.
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Borgerson predicts that Alaska's Arctic coast may come to look like offshore Louisiana, illuminated by thousands of oil-platform lights, and an Alaska port like Dutch Harbor may become a global hub for shipping, as busy as Singapore.
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BARROW, GEORGE'S HOME, probably has more scientists per square foot these days than any other town in America. "It's ground zero for climate change," one researcher told me. From the air, the town of 4,500 seems a muddy collection of ramshackle homes, most built on wooden blocks to keep them from melting the permafrost below. No roads lead to Barrow, and the vista south is of endless brown tundra.

But the town boasts the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium, where, year-round, researchers study carbon-dioxide emissions, Arctic animals, and sea conditions. They bunk, up to 150 at a time, on BASC grounds in an old Navy research laboratory. Spillover scientists sleep—as many as ten to a room—in "the Polar Bear Theater," a saggy, cold house in town. One night, when I was in Barrow, so many scientists were in town that they slept in cots laid out in a community gym between the basketball scoreboard and the climbing wall.