Diver on a rope in the hole at top of the sea

Any day now, not too far from the North Pole, Seattle scientist Jim Osse will don scuba gear and disappear into a hole in the ice atop the Arctic Ocean.

NORTH POLE WEBCAMS

Check out NOAA's North Pole Webcams page at http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/gallery_np.html

It's 10 or 12 feet down into a dark world. There, the sea bottom lies more than two miles below -- enough room to stack up 23 Space Needles. Except for that hole in the ice, maybe 3 or 4 feet wide, Osse is cut off from the world. As soon as he splashes in and submerges, the water at the surface will start to look milky as it refreezes.

Osse and his co-workers literally have gone to the end of the Earth to gather information on how global warming is affecting the planet.

What's the dive like?

"It's like going down a manhole shaft," Osse says -- except that at the bottom is not the firm ground of a sewer pipe but rather the unending ocean.

Osse and a second diver will be tethered to two other scientists on the surface, with equipment that allows the four to communicate. But if anything goes wrong, it's them against the world. A very cold world.

When a glitch comes up underwater, "You just have to be calm," Osse said. "You just don't want to get excited."

The exploits of Osse and other scientists who travel to the Far North each year on expeditions funded by the National Science Foundation are the subject of a book coming out this month, "The North Pole Was Here."

Written for young readers by New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin, the book recounts how a team based at the University of Washington made their 2003 trek to the North Pole.

The book's title comes from a sign that UW oceanographer Jim Johnson placed at the North Pole on a candy-cane striped barber pole like the kind you might imagine outside Santa's workshop. He put it at the North Pole, but it was only at the pole for moments because the whole landscape is ice -- ice that constantly drifts.

So, a sign that once said "The North Pole Is Here" had to quickly be amended: "The North Pole Was Here."

"You can land a helicopter at the North Pole, and within 10 seconds you're off position," Johnson said.

The research is important. Some of the most profound warming experienced to date has been in the Arctic. In fact, it seems likely that this century will see an ice-free Arctic, at least during the summer.

As Revkin wrote, "The sign also reflects the broader and much more profound idea that confronts everyone up here: that the unreachable, unchanging North Pole of our imagination, history, maps, and lore no longer exists."

Just getting to the Arctic is an odyssey of plane rides through places with names like Resolute and Alert. Researchers have to haul along everything they'll need, small mountains of equipment to melt a hole in the ice, haul up the 3-ton ice core, hack it off in 3-foot lengths and much more.

Even simple things can seem complicated. When a scientist wants to make a note, he reaches for a pencil -- because it's so cold that the ink in pens freezes.

There's also one small security concern -- polar bears. Rifles and shotguns are left outside in the subzero cold all the time because if they were brought into the warm air of a tent, the resulting condensation could make them inoperable, Osse said.

If something goes wrong, it's up to the researchers to fix it. One time when a winch used to haul up scientific instruments broke, the researchers found that bolts inside had sheared off.

They didn't have any spares.

Osse, luckily, figured out how to borrow the needed bolts from a part of the winch motor where they weren't missed.

"Luckily, we had some engineers along. They just love that kind of scenario -- troubleshooting on the fly," Johnson said. "That's what brings us joy in our work is fixing something and carrying on, instead of just being shut down."

Osse scuba dives below the ice to retrieve a series of scientific monitors that record data on temperature, salinity and other ocean conditions. They are tethered to the ocean bottom, with the top of the array held up by a float 30 or 40 feet below the ice.

Each year when they return, researchers use a remote-control device to signal the tether at the bottom to release the string of instruments. It's so long that it takes an hour or more for them all to reach the bottom of the ice. During that time, the ice keeps drifting -- and the $200,000 worth of equipment ends up strung out a long way. Osse and the other diver go retrieve it.

One time, Osse said, the 15-ton airplane that was supposed to get him home careened to a stop after a tire blowout. Oh great, he thought -- why did I give up my seat on that plane that went out awhile ago?

Fortunately for him, the pilots had the forethought to bring along a spare tire.

It's one of many experiences that have given Osse these words to live by: "In the Arctic, never pass up a meal, a shower or a flight south."

The leader of the expedition is Jamie Morison, a UW oceanographer.

Morison is driven, he said, by curiosity.

"You're trying to understand how something works, and so that's intellectually exciting," Morison said. "And there is this element of just you kind of fall in love with the lifestyle and the work and the adventure of it. ...

"Sometimes I think, 'Why am I doing this?' And other times I catch myself saying, 'How did I get so lucky as to do this?' "