For a few years now, individuals from the MIT Lincoln Lab have been going south every summer.

Most recently, a team returned from a trip this past spring, reporting on their efforts to continue various kinds of research, some aimed at the condition of Arctic ice shelf areas, including projects using low-cost sensors to see what is happening in this hard-to-access part of the world.

I liked how Ariana Gaines wrote about this on the Lincoln Lab’s web site just a couple of weeks ago:

“Beneath the Arctic Ocean is an orchestra featuring natural and human composers, from cracking sea ice and whistling beluga whales to humming shipping-vessel engines,” Gaines wrote. “Researchers from MIT Lincoln Laboratory saw some of this cacophony when analyzing data from commercial off-the-shelf sensors that they integrated and deployed in 2024 during the U.S. Navy’s Operation Ice Camp (OIC). This past March, during OIC 2026, the researchers returned to the Arctic with a higher-fidelity version of one of the sensors, a geophone, which detects vibrations in the sea ice.”

Gaines documents how “acoustic signatures” from cracking ice help with surveillance, including keeping tabs on any international activity by countries classified by the U.S. as “adversaries.”

To be clear, the U.S. government is also down there. There’s Fort Wainwright, where the U.S. Army’s 311th Military Intelligence Battalion maintains an Army Counterintelligence presence year-round. But the MIT program is helpful in a number of ways, including in presenting a clearer picture of possible ecological effects.

Here’s how David Whelihan, one of the key people involved, explained this in an interview in 2025:

“Spanning approximately 5.5 million square miles, the Arctic is huge, and one of its salient features is that the ice covering much of the Arctic Ocean is decreasing in volume with every passing year,” Whelihan said. “Melting ice opens up previously impassable areas, resulting in increasing interest from potential adversaries and allies alike for activities such as military operations, commercial shipping, and natural resource extraction. Through Alaska, the United States has approximately 1,060 miles of Arctic coastline that is becoming much more accessible because of reduced ice cover. So, U.S. operation in the Arctic is a matter of national security.”

Challenges in the Frozen Land

Whelihan also opened up about some of the things that explorers have to deal with in Arctic journeys:

“The Arctic is an incredibly harsh environment. The cold kills battery life, so collecting sensor data at high rates over long periods of time is very difficult. The ice is dynamic and can easily swallow or crush sensors.”

Then, too, Whelihan said, there’s the challenge of getting “boots on the ice,” given that the Arctic climate is generally inhospitable to humans, and explorers have to eat more because they’re burning a lot of calories just to keep warm.

“One of the technological limitations is how to deploy sensors while keeping humans alive,” he noted.

This year’s trip, Gaines reveals in the latest installment of reporting on this, was particularly challenging.

“Temperatures persistently plunged to -25°F (-32°C), and winds blew at 25 to 30 miles per hour (40 to 48 kilometers per hour), with gusts of 40 mph (64 kilometers per hour),” Gaines wrote, also mentioning multiple “back to back” blizzards, and whiteouts. “Although the team … had intended to complete two stints on the ice—one to deploy the sensors and the other to retrieve them after a few weeks—the weather had other plans. Their initial trip to camp was delayed by a week as windblown snow halted all inbound and outbound flights.”

There’s more in the report, chronicling how some of these intrepid folks bored holes in the ice to install magneto-inductive transmitters, in aid of a new method involving magnetic fields.

But it wasn’t all hard work; apparently, there was time for some fun and games.

“While in Utqiaġvik for a week in mid-April, they participated over the weekend in the Piuraaġiaqta annual spring festival, watching a harpoon-throwing contest and proctoring a kids’ snowmobile race,” Gaines wrote. “With eighth-grade students at the local middle school, they discussed their Arctic R&D and engaged them in a game teaching sonar concepts.”

“Connecting with the Arctic community is an important aspect of our work,” said Ben Evans, one of the team members as quoted. “Every time we come here, we cross paths with someone we don’t expect to, learn about their work, and think about how we may be able to collaborate.”

I’m proud of these MIT folks, as an alumnus, reading about their repeated forays into subzero temperatures and everything else, to keep us informed about what’s really happening in the ice regions that act as bellwethers for the biosphere. Stay tuned.