megapixel or two, the resolution of my own mental model of the world. Of course, as most oceanographers will tell you, a rubber duck isn’t a very sensitive instrument. You can’t follow it by satellite. It can collect PCBs and other POPs, which is of some scientific use, but it can’t measure salinity, or levels of dissolved pollutants like CO2 and mercury, or take the water’s temperature. “In fact, this data is not very good,” a Woods Hole oceanographer named John Toole told me, a bit apologetically, when I described for him Ebbesmeyer’s accidental flotsam studies. Bower’s dozen yellow floats would tell us far more about the ocean than a million castaway toys ever could, and her floats, as I learned from John Toole, are just a small part of a global fleet. Since the year 2000 oceanographers have seeded the oceans of the world with more than three thousand of these underwater robots. You can follow their peregrinations online. If the Evergreen Ever Laurel had spilled a shipment of profiling floats, we’d know their fates.
Profiling floats can’t descend below two thousand meters, however. And unlike polyethylene ducks, they can’t ascend into Arctic latitudes, where sea ice makes it impossible for them to communicate via satellite. North of Canada and Siberia are what oceanographers call the Canadian Hole and the Russian Hole. These holes aren’t holes in the ice, or holes in the seafloor. They are giant holes in the climatological record. The abyss and the poles remain the last redoubts of oceanic darkness. The data that profiling floats beam home won’t banish darkness from the deep once and for all, or resolve the ultimate mysteries of the sea. But slowly, over the next several decades, they may, one hopes, shed a little more light on the ocean’s fourth and darkest dimension.
With a big heave-ho, Ostrom and Valdes hurled Bower’s last float into the Knorr’s wake, where it swirled about in the roiling foam, then righted itself and went bobbing away. In a week or two it would, as Bower liked to say, “phone home.” Months later, I would visit Bower at her office on Cape Cod, and she would pull onto her big computer screen maps on which her floats—all but one successfully launched from her experimental mooring—had traced their wayward routes.
Our last night at sea, shivering on the Knorr’s bow, Sutherland, Ostrom, Maloof, and I watched the northern lights flicker green and psychedelic across the sky. “Aliens in September,” Maloof said, and Ostrom said, “It’s Elvis. I’m telling you that’s where he went. He’s with us.”
The Knorr docked in Nuuk a little after dawn. Waking in my cabin belowdecks, I sensed a strange stillness. We weren’t rolling, or pitching, or yawing or indulging in any of the six degrees of freedom. The Knorr’s engines had fallen silent. And when I ascended to the main lab and looked out the portholes, I’d seen an astonishment—dark brown mountains, frosted with snow: Greenland! Greenland, that white, icy island, huge as a continent, misnamed by that real estate developer Erik the Red. Greenland, which on world maps resembles a wordless thought bubble floating up from the coast of Labrador, as if Canada’s mind had gone blank. Bower and I and most of the scientific team spent the day wandering around Nuuk, sampling the reindeer soup, admiring a pair of bergy bits stranded in a fjord. With a startling crack, loud as a rifle report, one of them split in two. The two halves rolled over. Slush sizzled into the water. The next day, on the first of three connecting flights, we flew over the Greenland ice cap, that white Sahara. The flight lasted an hour, and for all but a few minutes of it there was nothing to see from my window seat but ice—no sign of life, no trace of color except the occasional pool of blue melt.
THE LAST CHASE, PART TWO
It’s a Hyperborean winter scene.—It’s the breaking-up of the ice-bound stream of Time.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
NORTHWEST PASSAGE
Three years after setting out on the trail of the toys, a few weeks before reaching its end, I find myself shoeless and prone on the red helipad of a Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker, trying to wriggle my feet into the rubber booties of a yellow survival suit. It’s a sunny afternoon in early July, and the icebreaker is tied up at the docks in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, across the harbor from Halifax. Spread out beneath me, the survival suit looks like the neoprene hide