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Two summers ago, a team of scientists set out on an epic journey to the northernmost place on Earth.
You could even call it the edge of the terrestrial world.
There's just something fascinating about the edge of things, like the last thing.
That's ecologist Brian Buma, who led the expedition.
And he was joined by our very own Alejandra Barunda from NPR's Climate Desk.
Hi.
Hi, Emily.
It is so great to be here.
I am so intrigued by this trip you went on to the edge of the Earth.
But where is that and why?
Yeah, it's a great question.
So the main goal of this trip was about going all the way up to the northernmost landmass on Earth, which is this tiny gravel island surrounded by sea ice way at the top of Greenland.
It's called Inuit Kerkatat.
It's also known as Kafe Klubin Island, which literally means Coffee Club Island.
Coffee Club Island?
Take me there.
Yeah, it was named by some Danes who really loved coffee.
Okay.
Why did you all want to go there?
Yeah, so I was up there with some ecologists who think a lot about how climate change is reshaping the Arctic.
So in other parts of the Arctic, like Alaska, plant life is changing really fast.
And that's changing how the permafrost works.
The amount of carbon that gets stored in the ground and a ton of other stuff.
But no one really knows if that's happening in northern Greenland as well, because it's so hard to get to.
And like that means that there's very few plant surveys at all.
Here's what ecologist Jeff Kirby, who was another person on the questing party, here's how he put it.
We still have really fundamental gaps in understanding how things work.
Satellite images and fancy tech doesn't solve all the problems that boots on the ground can.
So we were up there to be those boots on the ground.
That's very cool.
Okay, so what kind of research were you all doing and what were you looking for up there?
Yeah.
So the question for this expedition was what's the northernmost plant living up there right now?
Like the final plant, like the plant at the edge.
Yes, the final plant.
And we wanted to know that, so we can see what it is today, so we could keep track of how that changes in the future.
Wow.
And Brian, he's the ecologist who led us on the whole quest.
We'll be the first to truly document scientifically what's growing on the islands, what the island looks like in high detail, and create a record that can be followed up on in the future.
And so this was actually pretty fun.
There was a bedding pool going.
Some people thought that the northernmost plant would be this tiny electric yellow poppy.
Others were voting for this little purple flower called a saxifrage.
And others thought it might be a moss.
But the real point of all this was just what Brian says here.
It's great to have a few blank spots on the map still in many ways.
So that was what we did.
We went off into the blank spot.
Today on the show, we find out exactly what is growing in the northernmost blank spot and what the landscape there tells us about how the world is changing.
You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
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All right, Alejandra, the adventure begins to find the plant at the edge of the world.
And you said something about this being a blank spot on the map.
You all were going to a place that we don't really know what's there.
How does one even get to a blank spot?
Oh, my gosh.
So, so slowly.
So it started like this.
Four of us met in this little tiny town in northern Iceland.
So it was Brian, who is this really hardy marathoner from Boulder, Colorado.
Then there was Nat Geo photographer and ecologist Jeff Kirby, who you heard from already.
And then there was Aka Simonson, who's an indigenous Greenlandic archaeologist.
And there's me.
Journalists.
We should be a part of the adventure always.
I mean, this is my main goal in journalism.
Yeah.
But also, I was a climate scientist before.
Oh, really?
So I was extremely down to help do some cool science while also recording a radio story.
This is like a D&D team up.
Okay.
So the traveling party is assembled.
Arctic Dungeons and Dragons can begin.
Okay.
What happens?
So, yeah, then things start to go off the rails a little bit.
We run around frantically trying to find a ton of gear that had somehow gotten lost in transit.
Like, you know, our food.
Oops.
And this little boat that we would need to cross some water.
And that was a little bit stressful, but eventually found it all.
And then we started going north.
And so we bunny hopped up the whole eastern coast of Greenland in this teeny tiny plane.
And honestly, this was a beautiful part of the trip.
It was gorgeous.
All the sea ice was sparkling below us.
These giant mountains were covered in glaciers to our left.
It was just a super dramatic landscape.
And there's pretty much no one up there.
So it took us like two days, but we finally made it up to the northernmost airstrip on the planet.
Welcome to Blister.
That is our pilot, Kitty.
Nice work.
Thank you.
How was the landing?
Go kitty.
195 meters.
You used 194 of it.
That pilot needed all that runway, but he sounds like he landed fine.
Oh yeah.
But after we landed, our final destination was actually still eight miles away and another mile out across the sea ice.
I run a lot, so I thought eight miles, that's like not that big a deal.
But I will say that it was basically the hardest eight miles I've ever hiked.
And that was mostly...
Thanks to climate change.
Oh, wait.
How did how did climate change make your job of covering this ground harder?
Yeah.
So you know, we thought that this ground was going to be totally firm and like frozen permafrost, because past explorers that's what they saw.
But the week before we arrived, it had been nearly 60 degrees Fahrenheit up there.
And we were carrying these 70 or 80 pound packs and dragging a bunch of our other gear.
And we were just sinking into this boggy, squishy permafrost which was thawing because of global warming.
And then there were all these rivers.
We expected little streams.
That was what was on the maps.
But a lot of nearby ice and snow was melting because it was so warm.
And instead, we had these really wide rivers to cross.
Yeah.
How long did it take? in the end to get there.
So we thought that we would be able to do this in like a day.
And instead, it took basically three.
But finally, we got close.
And when we woke up one morning, we got our first good view of the island.
And that's when everyone started laughing.
Basically, what we saw was this island, which is two big mounds of gravel.
And there were these little cairns on top of the mounds built by other travelers like us in the past.
And Aka Simonson, the Greenlandic archaeologist, she started laughing and pointed out.
Yeah, the island looks similar as Preston.
And she said Inuit people would have had a good name for it.
Well, you know, you call it like you see it.
And then what happens?
So then we inflated this little raft that we'd carried all the way from Iceland.
Remember that one that we lost?
And we paddled across some water.
And then we snowshoed across this absolute maze of sea ice.
We even had to help each other jump across some of the bigger puddles of meltwater.
Okay, one, two, three, go.
Yeah!
And then, after a really long walk, we got there.
You go on the island first, your island.
We're just visiting.
Oh, you make me cry.
She's on!
I'm on!
Oh, I'm crying!
And then literally the moment we step onto the island, Brian spots something.
I see a puppy.
There's at least one.
A flower.
So that was really exciting.
Also, they're really cute.
Arctic poppies are these cute little electric yellow flowers.
They're just a few inches tall and they can be so pretty.
So was that it?
That was the northernmost plant?
Not quite.
We kept walking north on the island and we were doing these longitudinal sweeps along the way to make sure we were capturing everything.
You know, we were actually doing geometry in Brian's notebook for a while.
You scientists.
And eventually... And we have a real contender.
What was it?
An arctic poppy. looking arctic poppy.
It was just like popping out of the gravel and it looked like it was gonna be our winner.
It is a gorgeous little poppy.
Again gorgeous being in the eye of the beholder.
There's actually.
It's actually next to a moss, which is um just a little bit.
Actually, the moss is the winner.
It was not a flower.
It was an unnamed moss.
That's the northernmost plant.
Yeah.
Who was not hoping for an unnamed moss?
What can you say?
It's not as epic, but it's the facts.
So Brian pulls out the GPS to double check where we are.
Dun dun dun.
For anyone who ever wondered how far north life goes, we're at...
88.665030 north.
To celebrate, we were like.
Obviously we have to jump in the water that's right next to us at this northernmost piece of land on Earth.
So we take off our clothes and run screaming into the Arctic Ocean.
All the way in.
All the way in.
You got to pull in.
We called it the Capucluban Swim Club.
Oh, God.
And then when I stepped out, I actually uncovered with my bare feet another tiny patch of moss.
And so that actually ended up being the winner, the northernmost plant on earth.
Oh, that's funny.
Oh, it's a different moss.
Nice find.
Swimming for science.
If you hadn't done that, you wouldn't have known.
Yeah.
Years of planning, weeks of travel, and swimming gave us a cute poppy and another unidentified moss.
It seems like actually there was quite a lot of plants up there at the edge of the world.
Yeah, there really was.
Honestly, more than we expected.
And that's probably partly because climate change is making it easier for plants to survive, especially in the summer season, like what we were in.
But plants weren't all we saw.
We actually also ran into this little stoat, which is like a tiny weasel living in a pile of rocks on the island.
And he was the size of a tube sock and he was completely unafraid.
We called him Randall.
This is Randall attacking the audio recorder.
I'm trying to eat the microphone.
I can hear his little mouth.
Oh, yeah.
He had no fear at all.
He was cool.
So taken together, what does this tell us about the present state of the Arctic and its future?
You mentioned, obviously, it's clearly warmer.
There's more life.
Climate change has a lot to do with it.
What else?
So this is one of the fastest warming areas on the planet.
And that warming is driving huge ecological change across the Arctic.
But like Brian said, this was a blank spot on the map.
And no one knew whether that warming and change was happening here today.
Oh, I see.
And so the main goal of this trip was really just to put a line in the sand, you know, to witness and to catalog what's up there now the poppies and the mosses and the sex dredges so that when scientists go back in 20 or 50 or 100 years, they'll know what else has changed.
You were out there for the sake of science, but is there value in just going back?
For the sake of exploration, just to know.
Yeah, I think that's a really good question.
And honestly, for me it was just this moment to live in, this wonder about the world that we live in, to see this very, very special place, the edge of the terrestrial world.
And I actually think that's a very human instinct.
And Brian agrees.
Just basic curiosity, I think.
What's over the next hill up until there's no more hills?
And so there's a question of what's that last hill?
That right there is the last hill.
And we went to it, that last hill.
Alejandra, thank you so much for taking us there, us Shore Wave listeners.
It's been a blast.
Yeah, thank you so much for listening.
This episode was produced by Hannah Chin.
It was edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez and Burleigh McCoy.
And it was fact-checked by Alejandra and Tyler Jones.
Beth Donovan is our senior director of podcasting strategy.
I'm Emily Kwong.
Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR.
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