Electric-blue meltwater sprays up under Terry Noah’s snowmobile as he races across sea ice extending out from Canada’s northernmost public community: Grise Fiord in Nunavut, a hamlet of 144 people closer to Murmansk in Russia than the Canadian city of Toronto. The bay’s cliffs loom higher and higher like stone icebergs as he approaches his destination across the bay.
Noah pulls his sled carefully over a seal’s breathing hole, about the circumference of a basketball. Using a custom-made winch, he lowers a submersible instrument into the sea below the ice.
