Sea Ice Knowledge And The Lost Men

The deaths of Crawford, Maurer, and Galle — who walked off across the Chukchi Sea ice toward Siberia on January 28, 1923, and were never seen again — illuminate another dimension of what Traditional Ecological Knowledge meant in the Arctic context.

Sea ice is not a stable platform.

It moves.

It cracks.

It pressure-ridges into chaotic jumbles of blocks several meters high.

It contains leads — open water channels that can appear without warning and cannot be crossed on foot or by dogsled.