‘How cold is cold?’ I asked. I felt a bit stupid. Simon, the Ice Base Manager was giving me a briefing in the sitting room of his house in late February. I had never been to the Arctic before and had no idea what to expect.

We went for a walk after lunch. The air was damp and heavy. It crawled in between my jacket and fleece, the heavy, clinging, damp cold of England. It must have been 5°C.

Simon was a polar veteran. I tried not to shiver in the relative mild.

The temperature at the Ice Base was likely to be between about -35°C, rising to about -20°C towards the end of April. I had no idea what these figures meant. Is -35°C twice as cold, three times as cold, ten times as cold? These numbers were abstract and extreme in equal measure. They accompanied me on shopping trips to buy thermal leggings and fleece jackets and entertained friends in pubs at weekends.

I am now in Resolute, one of the coldest inhabited places in the world, waiting for a flight to the Ice Base. The cold here is a sharp and dry cold that is, at first, a comfortable contrast to the stuffy and claustrophobic warmth of the hotel.

As I stretch outside, the first sensation is a stiffening brittleness in my nose as the damp exhalation freezes. Then my beard starts to feel waxy. Nose and cheeks are pinched and sting. It is -40°C, yet I do not feel cold. Ears if uncovered give off a sharp ache. The fabric on my gloves hardens. Each layer of clothing is like a piece of armour, a defence.

It is a battle to see how far the cold can penetrate from the outside and how well my body can warm from the inside. I feel cocksure wandering around town, confident that the extra chips and chocolate cake will fuel me in this fight. To battle the cold, you need energy.

If I were in London, I would be eating 2,000 calories a day to lead a normal working life. Here, I need to eat 5,000 calories a day. 3,000 calories just to fuel my body to stay warm, like feeding an extra me. On an expedition, pulling a sled, polar explorers will be consuming three times as many calories as recommended by your doctor and losing weight.

Even with the food and thermals, I feel like an invisible sprite has a frozen set of tongs and presses them to any patch of exposed flesh.
It is not colder in the Arctic. It is a different cold. Not malicious but lethal for the unwary. Do not think in terms of degrees. Imagine that the cold here is not a temperature but an animal or ice spirit, a polar djinn if you will, trying to find a way in, trying to find a weakness, biting, clawing, burning.

The team at the Ice Base put their idea of cold into words. This is what they came up with.

We met at Heathrow airport on the way to join the Catlin Arctic Survey and compared choices of bad films on the flight to Ottawa.

Dr Ceri Lewis of the University of Exeter drew a picture of a copepod for me on the paper table cloth of Montana’s in pink crayon. It looked like an elongated marine wood louse.

A copepod is a small marine animal. It is a crustacean, which means it is related to lobsters, shrimps and crabs. Copepods are plankton, animals (zooplankton) and plants (phytoplankton) that are carried by ocean currents rather than making their own way in the world.

The word copepod comes from two Greek words kope- oar and pod- foot. These are the oar-footed creatures and they are the most abundant animal on this planet.

There are an estimated 1,347,000,000,000,000,000,000[1] copepods in the world’s oceans.

They would fill over 80 million Olympic swimming pools[2] and weigh more than 16 billion double-decker buses[3].

If you placed them end to end, they would stretch to the moon and back 87 million times[4].

There are nearly 200 billion times as many copepods than people on the planet, and even though they are small, their combined mass is over 400 times that of the human population[5].

At their fastest, they travel a hundred times faster than Usain Bolt[6]. “My little babies rock,” Ceri reminds me.

Not only are there a lot of them, they are also essential for the marine food chain. In any food chain there are the ‘primary producers’, life forms that take energy from the sun and turn it into carbohydrates, simple food. In the seas, this is algae, which are anything from single-celled phytoplankton to hundred foot long kelps and meadows of sea grass. This marine plant life does not generally contain the more complex carbohydrates, fats and proteins needed to sustain larger animals.

Copepods are secondary producers, gobbling algae gathered by their front three pairs of legs, and turning this into the more complex building blocks needed for larger marine life. They feed at night, avoiding their natural predators of krill, fish and baleen whales. During the day they can tail-flick as much as 500 metres down out of sight: a journey equivalent to you or I travelling from John O’Groats to Lands End on a daily basis, a 1,400 mile round trip.

But copepods are sensitive creatures. They are susceptible to changes in the marine ecosystem. Increased levels of carbon dioxide are being absorbed by the oceans, making them more acid. Do you remember this experiment when you were at school? You had to blow through a straw, bubbling a beaker of water containing a pH (acid level) indicator. As your exhaled carbon dioxide dissolved, the water acidified and reddened. This is happening in our seas and nowhere faster than in the Arctic Ocean.

Ceri’s work over the next three and a bit weeks is to see how copepods respond to increased acid levels in the ocean. The results can help us to understand whether fish and chips may be the caviar of the 21st Century.

When you think of Arctic wildlife, threatened ecosystems and climate change, you think of polar bears. At least I did. They look better on a poster or in a documentary, but copepods are the stars of this show and changes in their numbers could have drastic knock-on effects on the health of the marine ecosystem.

To learn more about the Catlin Arctic Survey visit: www.catlinarcticsurvey.com.

[1] Estimate taken from GA Boxshall – http://www.planktonsafari.net/?page_id=15
[2] Estimate of ocean volume from GA Boxshall multiplied by 0.1455ml/m³ global average displacement volume – from COPEPOD: A Global Plankton Database 2005 http://www.st.nmfs.noaa.gov/plankton/2005/biomass-fields.html. The minimum volume for an Olympic swimming pool is 2,500 m³, but can be more.
[3] Estimate of ocean volume from GA Boxshall multiplied by 177.3mg/m³ global average wet mass – from COPEPOD: A Global Plankton Database 2005 http://www.st.nmfs.noaa.gov/plankton/2005/biomass-fields.html. The weight of an unladen double-decker bus is 14,560kg.
[4] Dr Ceri Lewis over a coffee in South Camp Inn, Resolute Bay reckons that 0.5mm is a good working length for a copepod. Someone else measured the distance from the earth to the moon.
[5] Estimates used are a human population of 6.91 billion and an average weight of 60kg.
[6] Strickler 1977 estimates a copepod’s escape speed at 500 body lengths a second. This comparison assumes that Usain Bolt is exactly 2 metres tall and runs the 100 metres in 10 seconds.

I spread out in a spacious room on the fifth floor of the Southway Inn in Ottawa. Strip malls and apartment blocks spread through scrubby woods, five minutes drive from the airport. Tanning salons, hardware stores, petrol pumps and fast food. Tucsons, the local bar across the street offers drinks and dancing with live music on Saturdays and Wednesdays. It was Thursday.

Somewhere between the anonymity and dullness of the ringroad hotel, there is a freedom. I look down at the three kit bags lying on the patterned carpet. Down jackets, rugged weather proof computers, adaptors, tape, kit, thermals, bandages, medicine, back-ups, independence. This is the thrill: knowing that I have everything I need and nothing more.

The hotel promises nothing in its transience. I shall never stay at the Southway Inn, unless I am on the way to somewhere else.

The flight to Resolute Bay from Ottawa is full. We start in a small Boeing 737 and set out for Iqaluit. The ‘we’ is myself and two scientists, Ceri and Oliver, joining the Ice Base team as part of the Catlin Arctic Survey. Iqaluit is the capital of Nunavut, an area of Canada owned by the Inuit and covering over 2 million square kilometers, one fifth the total land of Canada.

The landscape slipped by, detail lost in the late spring snow. The flight is warm and the cabin air desiccating. I feel cosseted against the cold, enjoying my warm First Air cookie. We are further north now and the view has taken on an alien quality. The terrain is now longer ‘normal but whiter’, but different in texture altogether. Marshmallow mounds, heaped cumulus, a weightless land, pillowed and mesmerizing and endless, but it doesn’t seem endless. It seems like another world.

The flight path leaves land and crosses the straits between the islands of the Canadian Arctic. The fabled North West Passage would pass beneath us. The ice is melting already and headlines may promise commerce through these waters soon. My first glimpse of the sea ice reminds me of the crinkled patterns of cellophane or the heavily lined palms of a sage. I wonder if you can tell the future from these lines. Pancake patterns appear. Great lily pads of ice, bumping through blue, grey, oil black water. I dream a giant playground with a mythic hunter skipping and jumping from one disc to the next after his mythic prey.

Human outposts. Airports reduced to small buildings, fuel bowsers and compacted snow. Igloolik, Arctic Bay and then Resolute Bay and the camaraderie of fellow misfits and a base for the next days.

The Arctic is not empty and bleak but full of wonder.

To learn more about the Catlin Arctic Survey visit: www.catlinarcticsurvey.com.

Research on thermohaline circulation concerns the health of the world’s ocean currents. If these currents break down, it could have quite different impacts on the climate to those that we might be expecting.

I found it easier to understand in terms of property development. Where should I buy a house which would be future proof from the point of view of the changing climate? The answer isn’t as simple as I had hoped. Depending on which climate model or theory you listen to, it could be anywhere between the Canary Islands and Ullapool.

The planet is getting warmer. The average climate is 0.7°C hotter than it was 100 years ago. Maybe colder in some places, warmer in others, but on average getting warmer and getting warmer at a faster rate.

So, here are a couple of housing options for you to consider.

Small holding on the West Coast of Ireland
The climate continues to get warmer, perhaps even 4°C warmer by 2050. The South of England goes through a stage of being a more important wine producing region than France (been there already during the medieval warm period, when France imported wine from England). Then it becomes a little too warm and dry. Sea levels rise and waterfront apartments in London are a little more waterfront than they should be. A delightful small holding on the west coast of Ireland would cater perfectly for this scenario. Good winds off the Atlantic would power your house through two 1kW personal wind turbines, protecting you from spiking and ridiculous oil prices. Plentiful rain from the sea and good warmth and increased sunshine would give you wonderful fruit and veg as grain and food costs spiral. All this in the bosom of a wonderful community and miles from the climate refugees clamouring from northern Africa and seeking solace from Gibraltar northwards.

Farmhouse on the Canary Islands
The warming climate melts the Arctic ice and the Greenland ice sheet, flooding the north Atlantic with fresh water. This switches off the ocean currents that keep Britain and the rest of north western Europe unseasonably warm. Temperatures drop as much as 8°C in some areas. Britain experiences Siberian winters. The Costa del Sol becomes a refuge of a different kind. The Canary Islands become a haven. The volcanic soil contains good nutrients and the long days of sun and moisture from the ocean allow for a small eco-community to flourish, but only for the privileged. Taxes do rise as the need for better a better coast guard to turn away refugees becomes more pressing.

These wildly differing scenarios make planning difficult if you are in the real estate business. It also can cast doubt on how truthful scientists are. But we need to realize that the planet is incredibly complex and there are feedback loops and nuances that have not yet been researched. Someone once told me that the human brain will never be powerful enough to understand itself. I rather like that. It reminds me how little we know.

As a civilization, trained in enlightenment and scientific reasoning, we collect data, we analyse data, we create theories, we test theories, we revise our ideas, we collect more data, we synthesise. But we want certainty. We want to know where to buy the house.

The one certainty seems to be that neither of the above scenarios looks great for us. We can plan. Maybe not where to buy a house, but how we can be more adaptable. The only certainty is change.

To learn more about the Catlin Arctic Survey visit: www.catlinarcticsurvey.com.

In childhood we ask: ‘Why is there good and evil?’ ‘How does nature work?’ ‘Why am I me?’ If circumstances and temperament allow, we then build on these questions during adulthood, our curiosity encompasses more and more of the world until, at one point, we may reach that elusive stage where we are bored by nothing. The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones. We end up wondering about flies on the sides of mountains or about a particular fresco on the wall of a sixteenth-century palace. We start to care about the foreign policy of a long-dead Iberian monarch or about the role of pear in the Thirty Years War.

from ‘The Art of Travel’ by Alain De Botton

‘I’m going here.’ I pointed to an island in the Arctic.

‘Are you excited?’

To be honest, excitement was the wrong word. Impending trips mean frenetic organisation and prioritisation. Maybe I should go away more often. It certainly helps to clear away the clutter of a quotidian life.

But I was curious. I had been asked to join an Arctic science expedition, the Catlin Arctic Survey, as communications officer. I don’t need to be cold any more to prove myself and if it hadn’t been for the science, I think I would have declined.

Three weeks before I was due to leave, I started to read: books about travel, books about science, articles on ocean circulation, books about the Polar Regions. Questions started to form.

‘If Hudson Bay is the same latitude as London, why is it twenty five degrees warmer in London?’

‘Is the scenario in The Day After Tomorrow a possibility?’

‘Why are we going all the way to Ellef Ringnes Island to do the science?’

‘How many sets of underwear does a grown man need for a month in a tent without washing?’

‘How do I make what’s happening in the Arctic relevant to a teenager in Barking?’ This is my litmus test for whether I am communicating at the right level, and comes from starting my teaching career in this borough on the Essex- East London border.

The process also made me think about curiosity itself. Am I strange to ask all these questions? Are we trained out of a childlike curiosity, when ‘why’ is a constant refrain? I am often accused of being childlike and I take it as a compliment.

Apsley Cherry-Garrar, the Edwardian polar explorer wrote ‘Exploration is the physical expression of the intellectual passion.’ If he were born a century later he might have been a little less clipped in thought and style. I think he would have gone for ‘Exploration is the physical expression of curious bloody-mindedness.’ The Worst Journey in the World, the book for which he is famed, was the quest not for the South Pole, but for a penguin egg to help better understand evolution.

Over the next month, I will have the privilege of working with some of the world’s leading scientists investigating the Arctic Ocean and finding out more about how our complex world is changing.

I aim to remain childlike and curious in a very grown-up world.

To learn more about the Catlin Arctic Survey visit: www.catlinarcticsurvey.com.