(Jan 4-6, 2026)
I was sleep-adjacent in my bed at 05:15, aware that the boat was shaking in a new and not-so-subtle pattern. Every so often there was a dull thud against the hull. We’d encountered sea ice for the first time.
Sea ice is frozen seawater, often snow-covered, that can blanket large swaths of the ocean in polar regions. Most of it melts out over the course of the austral summer, unlike icebergs—large chunks of glacier ice that calve from Antarctica and slowly melt as they drift north. The Araon is built for this sort of thing. Sea ice can be several meters thick (yards, for you Americans), and the ship is rated to push through roughly three meters of it.
The alpine start was unnecessary, but something new is always welcome when morale starts to sag. I sat on the bow deck and watched the hull initiate fractures that propagated hundreds of meters ahead of the ship. My mind wandered, obviously, to fracture mechanics in glacier ice. It’s the same process, really: concentrate stress at a weak point and you get a crevasse; push that crack tip past a threshold and it runs away from you—that’s how ice shelves collapse. Same physics governs avalanches in the mountains. Man, I miss the mountains. And being on land. And skiing—especially skiing. Although reports from back home in Montana suggest the snow isn’t great right now. I’m hoping that improves before February.
After my aggressively nerdy daydream and a gym session, we were treated to a tour of the Araon’s engine room. The crew’s English is limited (though infinitely better than my Korean), but they did a great job explaining things. The ship runs on four massive diesel generators—it’s fully electric—and has twin propellers that can rotate 360 degrees. I believe they told us we’re burning something like 23 tons of fuel per day (more at the moment, while breaking ice). It feels mildly counterproductive for a bunch of climate scientists, but I suppose every renovation requires putting a few holes in the wall.
I encouraged Jason to give a science talk, and he eagerly signed up. For the past several days he’s effectively locked himself in a closet to prepare it. He’s writing his undergraduate honors thesis on Mount Takahe, a volcano on the western margin of Thwaites Glacier, and I’m genuinely impressed by his ability to grapple with technical complexity at his age. That said, he has a tendency to overthink things. I keep preaching from the Mediocre Scientist’s Greatest Hits—science is incremental, the obvious answer is often the right one, and great is the enemy of good.
I hoped the talk would help him refine his message, but when he told me he had something like 60 slides, I feared I created a monster. No one—not even a captive audience of professional nerds—wants to sit through 60 PowerPoint slides. But I’ll admit it freely: the kid absolutely nailed it. Best science talk of the cruise so far, by a wide margin. And he pulled it off in under 30 minutes.
By the next morning, the sea ice had thickened and our progress slowed considerably. Instead of a clean trajectory, our GPS track looked like the Araon was ambling through the region after a little too much soju. In one eight-hour stretch we meandered something like 15 miles. Slow and steady wins the race, I suppose.
These days are especially taxing. You don’t sleep well when the hull is constantly ramming into things. For those of us who were here in 2022, the situation also felt uncomfortably familiar—thick sea ice had prevented us from reaching our objective that year, and we diverted to something like Plan F. No one is eager for a repeat.
When my final pair of underwear ended up being worn inside out (a maneuver I swear I haven’t attempted since college), I finally broke down and did laundry. This otherwise mundane task becomes highly experimental aboard a Korean icebreaker. There are two types of washing machines onboard—front loaders and top loaders, much like any laundry room back home. There is a cardinal rule: never use the top loaders. Ever. I learned this in 2022 but apparently needed a refresher, because I chose poorly.
All the buttons and dials are labeled in Korean. In a fit of optimism, I’d downloaded the Korean language pack in Google Translate before leaving. One button apparently corresponds to “Chinese Medicine,” another to “Prototype.” So much for preparation. I made a few selections, crossed my fingers, and walked away. The results were not good.
Round one: soap not dispensed.
Round two: ambiguous error message, cycle aborted.
Round three: what I assumed was the spin cycle filled the tub with water again and stopped.
I manually wrung out my clothes and hung them around my room to dry. Much like the ice outside, my mood—and patience—were beginning to fracture.
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