> field notes / arctic
Ice, ground, ocean, ships, towns. Five subjects. Short entries. How each part of the north behaves now, what is shifting, and what the shift touches next. Written to be read in order or dipped into.
Order is editorial: ocean first, ground second, then the ice sheet, then the human systems that respond. Not a ranking.
[01] ocean
Frozen seawater. Grows every winter, shrinks every summer. The old, thick ice is going first, leaving a younger pack that melts back further each year. Albedo, ocean heat, storms. What an ice-free summer means and what it does not.
Open note 01[02] ground
Ground frozen for years, sometimes since the last ice age. Thaws from the top down. Carbon leaves as gas, buildings lose their footing, coasts of frozen mud slump into the sea. Zones, mechanisms, and what stands on it.
Open note 02[03] ice sheet
The largest body of ice in the northern hemisphere. Loses mass two ways: melt on the surface, calving at the coast. Outlet glaciers, dark zones, warm fjord water. Why its future matters to every coastline on the planet.
Open note 03[04] routes
Three passages: along Russia, through Canada, across the pole. Seasonal windows, ice-class hulls, escort, the Polar Code. Whose waters they are, who disputes it, and why most Arctic shipping still goes to the Arctic rather than through it.
Open note 04[05] people
Who lives there. Coastal villages losing ground. Ice cellars, reindeer, whales, fire. The Arctic Council, the law of the sea, the Svalbard Treaty. Decisions made far from the coast that decide what the coast becomes.
Open note 05