Helen FieldsScience Writer

On March 31st, I’m leaving for the adventure of a lifetime.

One Wednesday night in November, I got an e-mail about a freelance gig – someone was looking for a science writer to go along on a six-week research cruise aboard an icebreaker in the Bering Sea. Awww, shoot, I thought to myself. Why do I have to have a job so I can’t drop everything and go to the frozen North for six weeks? Twelve hours later, I found out I was getting laid off. I applied, photographer/scientist Chris Linder picked me, and on April 3rd, the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Healy is pulling out of Dutch Harbor, Alaska, with us on board.

The organizations involved are – well, there are a bunch. The Coast Guard operates the Healy. Chris has a grant from the NSF to document a series of expeditions like this one. He works at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, so I’m going through WHOI (“WHO-ee”), too. There will be 41 scientists on the ship from 14 research institutions working on a dozen or so projects, plus 70 or 80 Coast Guard folks.

The overall question for the scientists on this cruise is how climate change is affecting the Bering Sea ecosystem. The Bering Sea is crazy productive – that’s where Deadliest Catch is, the Discovery Channel show about catching crab in bad weather. U.S. and Russian fishing vessels pull bazillions of tons of fish and crab out of this sea every year. But all that productivity depends on the ice and the currents behaving in a particular way at a particular time. If the climate changes, crabs and fish could move or disappear.

I’ll be spending the cruise poking around, watching people work, asking them what they’re doing, and sometimes helping out. Chris will be doing the same, but with a camera in his hands. Every night after dinner, we’ll sit down and pick eight pictures to go on the Polar Discovery site the next day, then I’ll write about them.

So, basically, I can’t wait. If getting laid off means I get to do stuff like this, well, I’m all in favor of getting laid off.