Giant Waves Change Arctic Ecology and Weather

Towering seas can smash sea ice, with far-flung effects on climate and nature

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The summer of 2014 was a strange one in the Chukchi Sea. The Arctic waters, historically icebound much of the year, were oddly free of ice. There was so little ice that 35,000 walruses had beached themselves on a northwest Alaska shoreline after failing to find floes to feed from. One morning in September, oceanographer Jim Thomson was on a research trip onboard the vessel , hundreds of miles from land, when he noticed something else that was strange: some of his shipmates were seasick.

Nausea might sound pretty ordinary for a trip to the high seas but not out here, where the Chukchi meets the Beaufort Sea. This remote area usually has no room for waves to build. Now there was open water, and the waves were huge—15-foot rollers that tossed the ship around and exploded over its decks. The sea was so rough that the captain could not safely sail against the waves and had to run in front of them. While Thomson, a seasoned sailor, watched his fellow researchers stumbling around the ship, looking as if they were about to lose their lunch, he was reveling in the stormy weather. He had come to hunt waves, and here they were.

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