Science on Ice

Neil Shubin’s stories of polar exploration tell us about the losses ahead.

By Marissa GrunesJanuary 13, 2026

• Science & Technology

• Environment

“IF YOUR KNEES hurt after this hike,” said a member of our team, “You can thank your fish ancestry.”

I was following a group of geologists down a rocky hillside, trying to keep up while watching where I stepped. You don’t mess around in Australian snake country. How would my fish-derived patellae fare in a race with a death adder?

The idea caught me off guard. Of course, we all come from the ocean. But I’m used to thinking of Homo sapiens as primates. It wasn’t the “Scopes Fish Trial” that brought evolution into American classrooms. We’re the smartest monkeys—not the bipedal fish. Occasionally, a cute fish-adjacent axolotl (really a kind of salamander) reminds me that I’m descended from four-legged fish. Most of the time, though, I don’t think about our former fish selves at all.

Neil Shubin, the paleontologist whose team discovered Tiktaalik—the earliest known “fishapod,” or footed fish—is here to tell us that things we don’t often think about can still make a big difference in our lives. In Shubin’s previous books, those things were fish skeletons or sea squirt larvae. In his new book, it’s ice.

Ends of the Earth: Journeys to the Polar Regions in Search of Life, the Cosmos, and Our Future takes us literally to the ends of the earth, telling scientific stories about the Arctic and Antarctic. Shubin has been on multiple field excursions to both regions, starting with Greenland in 1988. His team found Tiktaalik in the Canadian Arctic, and he has been to the Antarctic twice in search of even older fossils.

These places seem almost impossibly remote. Yet, like our ancient fish ancestors, the polar regions shape our lives today. Through eight wide-ranging chapters, Ends of the Earth surveys many branches of polar research, from the thawing of viruses in permafrost to the climate record locked in ice cores. We meet creatures great and small—from the polar bear to the woolly bear caterpillar—whose unique adaptations to the cold make them both fascinating and vulnerable. (We also learn that Unilever once planned to use an antifreeze compound from Antarctic eels to make ice cream permanently creamy. It was nicknamed “VanEELa.”) We visit sunless subglacial lakes, whose bustling microbial ecosystems hint at ways to look for life on icy moons. We learn why the water in Antarctica’s iconic Blood Falls flows scarlet red, and how a “musk-ox garden” (in less charming terms, a carcass) brings forth life from death in the Arctic tundra. We follow explorers past and present as they encounter wolves, deep crevasses, and fierce blizzards. Through it all, we see the upheavals caused by rapid change.

In some ways, this book is a departure for Shubin. His first three books drew more directly on his background as a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist to explore the quirks of how we came to be, well, us. Shubin’s first book, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (2008) guides readers through the evolutionary processes that produced humans—bad knees and all. His subsequent two books, The Universe Within: The Deep History of the Human Body (2013) and Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA (2020), go beyond our musculoskeletal development to look at how our bodies share the cosmic chemistry that forms stars and planets, and how that universal origin gave rise to the vibrant biodiversity around us.

Seen from another angle, though, all of Shubin’s books are about the scientific process: how researchers seek out those things that the rest of us don’t think about much. Shubin is a fossil hunter, which means going into the field, looking for clues carried within the planet itself. In that regard, he is fully at home at the ends of the earth.

For years, I’d heard about field scientists: researchers who swap lab coats for hiking boots and tramp around remote, sometimes dangerous places in search of answers about our planet. I’ve shared their stories as a science writer, and I’ve supported their work as staff at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. Wandering around the Australian outback this past summer, though, marked the first time I actually lived with a research team in the field.

That experience sharpened my appreciation for Shubin’s stories about crawling over rocks with your nose a few inches from the ground, squeezing every second of sunlight from the day, finding nothing on some days while on others stumbling onto a find so unexpected that you’re left stuffing every available pocket with rocks. It’s like treasure hunting, as Shubin remarks on the 2014 PBS show Your Inner Fish—only the loot is knowledge and the heroes are field scientists.

Where Your Inner Fish gave us a window into the dangers, frustrations, and joys of fieldwork, Ends of the Earth shows us why fieldwork is essential to understanding our world—and to planning for our collective future as a species. True to Shubin’s roots, the book takes us into the field with some of the world’s top researchers. One of these scientists—whom I met while working in Antarctica—is glaciologist Sridhar Anandakrishnan, whose favorite phrase serves as a guiding idea for the book. “Ice is hot,” Anandakrishnan explains: it has a relatively high melting point, just 32 degrees Fahrenheit. In most of the world, ice exists very close to that melting point. With the polar regions warming much faster than global averages—a phenomenon called “polar amplification”—both ice caps are flowing back into the ocean. Ten summers ago, it was still possible for intrepid explorers to walk to the North Pole; now tourists aboard Le Commandant Charcot visit the spot for a caviar lunch.

While this changing reality lurks beneath each page of Shubin’s book, it isn’t the whole story. Ends of the Earth is a love letter to ice—to the terrible beauty of its vast, austere expanses; to the blue cathedrals of its deep crevasses; to the resilient plants and animals that have created otherworldly oases in its lee; to the ways it tests human ingenuity and endurance.

Being a field scientist isn’t about going to a place and extracting knowledge. Good field scientists must also come to understand and respect the places where they work. As Shubin writes, “It is profoundly humbling to find our own vulnerabilities—as well as our capacities for resilience, growth, and discovery—in the most remote and delicate landscapes on our planet.”

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Fieldwork is expensive and resource-intensive. The planes, ships, helicopters, tractors, snowmobiles, and other conveyances that take researchers to the edges of the earth demand vast quantities of fossil fuels. In The Universe Within, Shubin notes that “the costs of Arctic helicopters can be as high as three thousand dollars per hour.” McMurdo Station, Antarctica’s largest, burns 1.4 million gallons of fuel a year.

Traveling through these places can also damage the fragile regions scientists hope to understand. Shubin recalls being sharply warned not to pitch his tent on a comfortable-looking spot in the Arctic tundra; a senior colleague had spotted a woolly bear caterpillar, whose survival depends on a critical feeding period.

One of Shubin’s primary field sites in Antarctica—the McMurdo Dry Valleys—poses similar problems. As the name suggests, the Dry Valleys are arid and ice-free: perfect for fossils. In fact, the valleys are a hot spot for research of all sorts, ranging from glacial history to desert nutrient cycling to soil creation. Biologists seeking to understand how life adapts to severe constraints have studied the Dry Valleys continuously since the 1990s for one of Antarctica’s few Long Term Ecological Research Projects. Wernher von Braun even visited the Dry Valleys in search of sites to test technology headed for the moon on the Apollo missions.

Yet this region is as fragile as it is scientifically valuable. “When we’re there, we all can have an impact,” the pioneering soil ecologist Diana Wall told me a few years ago. “It can be even a footfall, or loss of a plastic bag, or approaching a penguin. […] It is such a place of beauty, just sheer, stark, raving beauty, that every time I go there I feel the responsibility to try to keep it that way.”

To protect such places, “remote sensing” technology presents an increasingly powerful alternative to fieldwork. Satellites populate our skies with ever more sensitive instruments capable of observing large portions of the planet in high resolution. Their data, coupled with machine learning and AI tools, are transforming what researchers can do without ever leaving their desks. Shubin mentions some examples: the glaciologist Eric Rignot, for example, generated the first reliably precise measurements of glacial flow rate and ice loss using satellite-based instruments in the 1990s and early 2000s. More recently, researchers have applied machine learning algorithms to satellite images of penguin colonies in order to study how the colonies are growing or shrinking, and even how penguins move around within a colony.

But satellites can’t do everything: some observations can only happen at close range. In The Universe Within, Shubin relates the groundbreaking discovery of a tiny tooth—a fossil “no bigger than a sesame seed”—that he spotted in a rock in Greenland. After “three years, countless dollars, and many sprained ligaments,” his team determined that they had found a 200-million-year-old tooth belonging to an ancient, rodent-like animal, the Haramiyavia (from the Arabic word for “trickster” and the Latin term for “grandmother”). This tiny fossilized creature presents one of the earliest bridges between reptiles and mammals.

In other cases, remote data is helpful but unreliable. While traveling through Australia this summer, our team consulted maps on Google Earth and aerial surveys color coded to match presumed geologic formations. Yet when we walked through the landscape, we often found the maps to be rough approximations at best. They led us to potentially useful areas, but the geological reality was often so complex that the team needed to see the rocks—examine their texture, crack them open, and even scrutinize their interior structure under a high-powered magnifying lens—to identify them accurately.

Fieldwork is messy and confusing. Peer-reviewed scientific papers don’t tell the stories behind the findings, so the process may look streamlined: you go, find something important, and explain it. The reality is far more complicated. As Shubin explains, researchers choose research locations using maps (including ones generated by satellite or aerial surveys, like those we used in Australia) and their own background knowledge. The goal is to identify places most likely to have useful samples—while also being legally accessible and, ideally, not involving too much dodgy off-road driving or steep hikes or digging. Sometimes you find what you want, and other times you trek two miles through thick vegetation carrying heavy drilling equipment, get caught in a rainstorm, and turn around with nothing. (That happened to us.)

Striking out is common, and a team might not know until they get back to the laboratory whether they found anything useful. What’s uniquely thrilling about fieldwork, though, is something that no machine learning algorithm can replicate: serendipity.

Take a story Shubin tells in his first book, Your Inner Fish. His team was looking for the fossilized remains of fish transitioning out of the ocean. In 2004, after three failed excursions to the Canadian Arctic, they decided to return one final time. It was “do-or-die,” he writes: they could not afford another fruitless trip. One day, while flipping rocks and cracking ice around a quarry, Shubin and a colleague noticed an unusual assortment of scales and bones. When they pieced the skeleton together back at the laboratory, it became clear that they had found a fish with teeth, elbows, and even proto-wrists—it had been on the verge of leaving the ocean. They called it “Tiktaalik.”

Serendipity doesn’t just happen. Behind every lucky find are years of experience and training. Discussing his first field excursions, Shubin confesses his embarrassment at returning to camp empty-handed day after day. It took years for him to identify tiny gleams as promising fossils, and to build the intuition that let him “respect the sensation triggered by these moments” (as he puts it in The Universe Within).

The geological team I joined in Western Australia has had similar experiences. The principal investigator, Roger Fu, is an inveterate explorer who prefers to cover as much terrain on foot as possible. And with good reason: A few years ago, Fu’s then-graduate student, Alec Brenner, identified a previously unknown impact crater during a casual roadside stop. He had pulled over to teach new field assistants how to identify different kinds of rocks. While wandering around, Brenner noticed a structure called a shatter cone. Shatter cones, which result when shock waves from a massive impact deform surrounding rock, are easy to miss. Less-experienced observers—like myself—are liable to confuse their telltale markings with any number of similar, feathery-looking patterns. In this case, the impact is of special importance because it would have struck the world’s oldest confirmed fossils, which are within the crater limits. It therefore provides an analogue for seeking life on Mars, whose surface has been heavily shocked by meteors. (It turned out that another team had also found the site, although both groups kept the discovery under wraps until this year.)

So much research still relies on direct human observation, physical endurance, and ingenuity in the face of obstacles—from frozen machinery to visits by polar bears (or snakes). Yet, as research budgets tighten across the United States, scientists are losing the freedom to follow their curiosity into the field—and are thus unable to train the next generation of researchers to do the same. You can’t learn how to conduct fieldwork from a book. You have to go there, get flat tires, nurse blisters, come home empty-handed again and again. Without opportunities to learn from senior colleagues, as Shubin himself did, young researchers will not gain those specialized, hands-on skills. Rebuilding that practical knowledge could take years.

Polar research has been hit especially hard. This fall, the National Science Foundation retired the RV Nathaniel B. Palmer, the United States’ only icebreaking research vessel capable of traveling through the dangerous, ice-choked waters around Thwaites Glacier (sometimes called “The Doomsday Glacier”). Notoriously unstable, Thwaites Glacier may be the key that unlocks over 15 feet of sea level rise in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. The NSF had already retired the other research vessel devoted to the Antarctic, the RV Laurence M. Gould, in 2024. Both of these vessels were at the end of their expected 30 years of service, yet no long-term replacements have been identified. To conduct Antarctic marine research, the NSF must now bring research ships down from the Arctic, a solution that not only reduces research capacity in the Far North but also means that the ships may spend two to three months in transit, doing no science at all.

As Sridhar Anandakrishnan said, “Ice is hot.” This is particularly true in the coastal regions around Antarctica and Greenland, where ocean water is devouring glacial ice at accelerating rates. To reach critical coastal regions in Antarctica without the Palmer, US researchers will need to rely on the good graces of international collaborators willing to share their vessels. The Americans will be guests, unable to direct the vessel’s research agenda. Nor will they have the same scope to train younger scientists.

Yet, as Diana Wall put it to me, “You can’t keep humans away. Our activities are going to shape and transform the region no matter how far away we may be.” That transformation goes both ways: as the fringes of Antarctica melt, ocean dynamics are bringing disproportionate sea level rise to North America. Whether or not we go to the Antarctic, it will come to us.