Feature

RANDALL HYMAN
A RIOT OF HIDDEN T
The R/V Helmer Hanssen cruises near the archipelago of Svalbard, studying the impacts of light on residents of the Arctic Ocean.

he Northern Lights dance across the

horizon in emerald and lavender
ribbons as the R/V Helmer Hanssen
cruises through one of the darkest

LIFE IN THE ARCTIC

regions of the planet in the heart
of winter. For more than a dozen
researchers on this two-week
voyage, the mission is simple but
profound: to disappear.

AFTER DARK
Gliding through inky waters, our captain
suddenly shuts off every exterior light on
the ship and we become invisible, a maritime
phantom. It is the ideal way to study marine
organisms that exploit darkness and cold as
few other forms of life can.
This is a new frontier for Arctic researchers.
Until 2007, it wouldn’t have seemed profitable
An international team braved the far north in January to to stage an oceanographic biology expedition
unlock secrets of how marine organisms tell day from in midwinter. Scientists thought that most
of the region’s marine ecosystem shut down
night during the polar winter. By Randall Hyman throughout the months-long darkness of polar
night. Without sunlight to power the growth of
photosynthetic plankton, there would be noth-
ing to eat for the larger zooplankton, which are
the primary source of food for seabirds and fish.
That was the conventional wisdom, at least.

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 It turned out to be wrong. A series of A gentle bear of a man, Berge has a legendary physiology of these organisms in the pristine
discoveries has shown that even in the absence reputation among polar marine biologists. polar night, but we were removing the pristine
of sunlight and food, some zooplankton “The work by his team has really changed our part of it by coming with our big ship full of
thrive throughout the winter. They mate and perception of how the Arctic system operates,” white lights.”
incubate eggs in the darkness — and all that says aquatic ecologist Andrew Brierley at the With human-made artificial light generating
activity plays a crucial part in fuelling the Arc- University of St Andrews, UK, who has not more concern worldwide, understanding it
tic’s massive explosion of rebirth each spring. participated in Deep Impact. in the Arctic is becoming increasingly impor-
But researchers eventually recognized they “He has shown us that the notion of tant, say researchers. Although artificial light
had a problem: how to study the wintertime dormancy in the polar night is a myth, that remains scarce in the far north, it is growing as
exploits of ocean life that depends on dark- many biological processes continue, and, vanishing ice opens new shipping lanes and
ness. I joined this international team of scien- more importantly, that what humans perceive enables exploitation of the seabed for fossil
tists on its cruise in January as they tested new as dark is not a showstopper.” fuels and minerals. Deep Impact’s findings
ways to monitor ocean life in the Arctic night Nearly a decade after Berge’s first discov- are also informing scientists from Norway to
— without altering its behaviour. ery, he and his team had another epiphany Alaska, whose winter inventories of fish stocks
Researchers are eager to get answers, in this same fjord aboard Helmer Hanssen: might be skewed by the lights of their ships.
because the Arctic is changing rapidly. Over Marine biologist Jackie Grebmeier at the
the past four decades, the region has warmed “What humans University of Maryland Chesapeake Biologi-
nearly four times faster than the rest of the cal Laboratory in Solomons, who participated
planet1, and its winter coating of sea ice is
perceive as dark in a separate research voyage last year to the
thinning rapidly, which means there is less ice is not a showstopper.” North Pole, says the Deep Impact expeditions
throughout spring and summer. At the same are timely. “As the Arctic opens up, so will
time, the retreat of the ice pack has opened human impacts and artificial-light influence,”
routes for shipping, tourist cruises and coastal their methods for studying marine life were says Grebmeier. “The only way we’re going to
development that all add light pollution to the disrupting it. They noticed that the DVM they have some protection and forecast impacts is
region. The combined changes mean that were detecting from on board our ship was to have these real-time data that Jørgen and his
increasing levels of light are seeping into the significantly weaker than the one detected team are collecting.”
Arctic Ocean, even during winter, which could by automated instruments left unattended To do that, the Deep Impact team has come
forever alter the ecosystem that has evolved during the winter3. They wondered whether up with innovative solutions to the problems
to take advantage of the darkness. light was the reason. posed by the ships’ lights. During our expe-
“Organisms seek darkness,” says marine In 2016, bioacoustics specialist Maxime dition this year, Geoffroy and his colleagues
ecologist Jørgen Berge at UiT The Arctic Uni- Geoffroy drove a skiff as far from Helmer focus on both technology and biology by
versity of Norway in Tromsø, who has led a Hanssen as he dared, and flipped on his head- lowering nets and circular steel frames called
series of winter expeditions to this region lamp, aiming it straight into the black waters. rosettes, brimming with optical and acous-
aboard the Helmer Hanssen. He sees darkness He watched in amazement as an echosounder tic instruments, into the sea. These record
as a limiting ecological resource, similar to showed biomass instantly dispersing in all reactions of marine life in this remote Sval-
nutrients or oxygen. “And that is why artificial directions down to 80 metres, even in the weak bard fjord to a lights-off, lights-on protocol
light has such an impact,” he says. beam of a single headlamp. — successive passes with deck lights doused,
“It opened a whole can of worms,” says followed by more passes with lights glaring.
In the darkness Geoffroy, who works at the Memorial Univer- The fjord sits on the western edge of the
It was a chance discovery that set all this sity of Newfoundland in St John’s, Canada. island of Spitsbergen, near Ny-Ålesund, the
research in motion. In 2006, Berge visited the “What we were looking for at first was the northernmost village in the world that is
Svalbard archipelago, mountainous Norwe-
gian islands several hundred kilometres east
of Greenland’s northernmost coast, to moor
instruments in a fjord during the autumn. He
had to get the equipment in place before the
fjord’s waters froze in the winter, so he could
record the rebloom of life beneath the ice the
following spring.
But when he retrieved data from the moor-
ing the next year, he noticed a mysterious
pattern during winter. A sonar instrument
revealed that biomass in the fjord’s waters
dropped to lower depths during the day and
ascended towards the surface at night — a
signal that marine biologists call diel vertical
migration (DVM)2. But that shouldn’t have hap-
pened in the dead of polar night, when the Sun
doesn’t rise above the horizon.
“It was an accident, a complete surprise,” he
RANDALL HYMAN

recalls. Since then, Berge has led expeditions

nearly every year to Svalbard to follow up on
his discovery. He is principal investigator of
Deep Impact, a project funded by the Norwe- A cage known as AZKABAN is lowered into the water to study zooplankton and fish.
gian Research Council and run by UiT.

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Feature
occupied year-round. After we dock there dark, and is unsure of the accuracy of its GPS. Can creatures such as krill really sense the
briefly, several scientists remain aboard The craft suddenly materializes from the difference between high noon and sunset
Helmer Hanssen to continue their work, while dark. From her distant driver’s seat, Vena- during the polar night deep below the surface?
the other dozen scientists conduct experi- bles deftly turns the USV to run along our Cohen and Last suspect so, but have lacked a
ments at the village’s marine laboratory. hull, recording the varying depths of fleeing sufficiently sensitive marine light meter.
Small boats launch from the harbour with zooplankton while a drone flying overhead This year, they are testing an ultra-sensi-
instruments such as a marine light meter to photographs the watery halo of our illumina- tive commercial light meter developed with
track the rise and fall of daylight, invisible to tion. support from NASA. During the week, Cohen
human eyes in the heart of polar winter. Robotic “My heart was racing,” Venables confides submerges the sensor deep in the fjord, and
surface and submersible craft run tracks that evening as the team gathers for a meeting it detects natural light changes between day
behind Helmer Hanssen’s path using echo- at the marine lab. and night at depths of more than 40 metres.
sounders to record how the ship’s lights alter It is one of Deep Impact’s many experiments
biomass in the water. Rigged with a separate aimed at understanding the effect of artificial Disorienting darkness
echosounder, a large fish enclosure outside light on marine life and the dynamics of polar- Aboard the Helmer Hanssen, polar night is
the harbour records biological responses to night biology. disorienting for the crew and scientists. With
on–off cycles of a glaring spotlight. “Every year we come back, there’s new no sunrise, daytime becomes meaningless,
equipment and new needs based on work from and there is little to see out of the ship’s win-
Surface swerve the last year,” says Jonathan Cohen, a biolo- dows except blackness. As the days pass, a hint
Before making port at Ny-Ålesund, I stand atop gist at the University of Delaware in Lewes. of light glimmers low in the southern sky at
Helmer Hanssen’s bow to witness a high-stakes When I was aboard Helmer Hanssen in 2016, noon, but it is fleeting. At any hour, a handful
trial of a new method for tracking zooplank- his research on the eyes of shrimp-like animals of scientists work in the ship’s upper-deck
ton’s response to artificial light. Somewhere called krill determined that they are orders of instrument room, while others are stationed
in the darkness, not far off, a US$500,000 magnitude more sensitive in darkness than in a lower-deck wet lab.
unmanned surface vehicle (USV) is speeding are our own4. During deployment of nets and instruments
towards us. Its skipper, Emily Venables, sits He and marine biologist Kim Last at the in the lights-out mode, everyone in the wet lab
in a darkened room at the Ny-Ålesund marine Scottish Association for Marine Science in glows a ghostly red. Beyond the vault-like steel
lab several kilometres away, using a computer Oban, UK, are now exposing krill to faint door lies the raw Arctic. On a quiet windless
to pilot a boat-shaped icon on her screen — levels of blue-green wavelengths that mimic night, the Northern Lights shimmer above
straight for our port side. the natural daylight in the ocean, which blocks Svalbard’s barely visible snowy mountains.
The test is this season’s first attempt using red wavelengths below the surface. They want Scientists return each year for these magical
the USV to collect real-time data about how the to know whether polar night DVM is triggered moments, despite frozen fingers, seasickness
ship’s artificial light affects zooplankton in the by dim ambient light or an innate circadian and the risk of serious injury.
nearby waters. But Venables has tried piloting clock, and how artificial light might alter these During lights-on operations, Helmer Hans-
the robotic craft only a few times before in the behavioural responses. sen works like a conventional trawler as it

RANDALL HYMAN

The Northern Lights dance over the science village of Ny-Ålesund, where researchers on the Deep Impact project conducted some studies.

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 collects fish. Large nets and heavy cables drag
across icy decks over massive steel rollers,
threatening to snag careless researchers and
flip them down the stern’s slippery open ramp,
to be swallowed by black seas and churning
propellers.
One of the more unusual instrument
rosettes is called Frankenstein because of its
ungainly combinations of instruments, which
detect how light affects the vertical distribu-
tions of zooplankton and fish. Another, named
Fish Disco, emits sequences of multicoloured
flashes to measure how they affect the behav-
iour of zooplankton.
In the harbour by the marine lab on shore,
Muriel Dunn, one of Geoffroy’s PhD students,
is tracking how zooplankton and fish move
when they react to light. She is also using
machine learning to identify creatures by the
RANDALL HYMAN

pattern of the sound frequencies they reflect.

At the other end of the wharf, a construction
crane dangles a submerged, bus-sized steel
cage that is wrapped with nets to ensure that Jørgen Berge serves as principal investigator of the Deep Impact expeditions.
zooplankton and fish don’t escape as research-
ers test their reactions to light. the frigid waters of the marine lab harbour of RNA produced by planktonic organisms
In 2022, the cage held zooplankton samples. in a bulky ocean-survival suit. After an entire called dinoflagellates under moonlight and
Each time Dunn flipped on a large searchlight, day of testing connections, she is stumped. in complete darkness.
an acoustic sensor showed biomass fleeing The next day, the communications problems This year, they are focusing on Calanus
to the bottom of the cage, similar to what mysteriously vanish and the maiden voyage of glacialis, an endemic Arctic copepod and a
Geoffroy observed from a skiff in the open the LAUV is a success. Running in tandem with key species in the food web, to see whether
ocean years earlier. But the machine-learning the USV, the vessels show matching rise and fall there is a difference in RNA activity connected
algorithm was not able to identify species from of marine biomass as they thread their way past to Moon phases. Their experiment simulates a
the acoustic data. Helmer Hanssen. It is a step towards expanding shortened version of the Moon’s unusual cycle
This year, she’s back to try the approach the use of coordinated autonomous vehicles to in the polar night — it sits constantly above the
again using two species of cod — Atlantic study the ocean ecosystems. horizon around full phase, and is absent when
(Gadus morhua) and polar (Boreogadus saida). “We often talk about this observational it shows less than half. “Our hypothesis is that
When a timer on her laptop alerts her, she hur- pyramid, from satellites to drones to sur- somehow some Arctic species utilize moon-
ries across the wharf and climbs up into the face vehicles to underwater vehicles to sea light that other species can’t.”
cab of the crane to shut down the searchlight Results are pending, but if Hatlebakk is right,
shining on the cage of fish. Returning to the “We were removing the her research will help scientists to understand
shack, she is excited that the algorithm is able whether small changes in light — such as from
to discern between the two cod species.
pristine part of it by thinning of the pack ice and more light pol-
When Dunn and Geoffroy dismantle the coming with our big lution — could have big consequences in the
cage nets that evening, a storm kicks up, raking ship full of white lights.” Arctic, one of Deep Impact’s main questions.
the wharf with winds and salt spray. Working With this year’s experiments concluding, the
by the light of truck headlights, they are chilled land-based team begins packing up. Helmer
and soaked, but buoyed by the day’s data. floor,” says Berge. “I think that’s the future, Hanssen’s captain radios the marine lab to
More than storms hinder the research- with a much stronger focus on autonomous report that the on-board team has completed
ers’ plans. Working shoulder to shoulder in platforms.” its final lights-out transects in another fjord.
cramped labs and enduring the Arctic chill Before packing up for the season, research- The next morning, a one-hour break in heavy
aboard small boats, team members battle ers must finish a few more experiments in the winds allows our ship to dock, and the marine
various illnesses. Sore throats and coughs are marine lab at Ny-Ålesund. lab team scurries aboard as crates and cases
spreading, but still no COVID-19. “Something allows the more Arctic spe- are loaded by crane. Helmer Hanssen manages
Other problems stalk the expedition: engine cies to make it through the winter,” says Maja to pull away just as the winds worsen. We sail
trouble forced Helmer Hanssen back to main- Hatlebakk, a marine biologist at NTNU, as she due south through rough seas, towards the
land Norway at the start of our journey and inspects small crustaceans called copepods distant glow of daylight on the horizon.
nearly cancelled the cruise. And computer illuminated by dim, eerie light in a darkened,
gremlins are blocking radio communications refrigerated vault. Randall Hyman is a freelance journalist in
for the expedition’s submersible, a roughly For some of the southern species that come St Louis, Missouri, and was embedded with
2-metre long, torpedo-like craft called a light in with currents during summer, she says, the Deep Impact mission in January 2023 and
autonomous underwater vehicle (LAUV). “they can’t make it through the winter here. January 2016.
“I’ve tried everything,” says Karoline Barstein, We want to know why”.
1. Rantanen, M. et al. Commun. Earth Environ. 3, 168 (2022).
a PhD student in underwater robotics at the Last year, she and Ane Kvernvik, a marine 2. Berge, J. et al. Biol. Lett. 5, 69–72 (2009).
Norwegian University of Science and Technol- molecular ecologist at The University Centre 3. Ludvigsen, M. et al. Sci. Adv. 4, eaap9887 (2018).
ogy (NTNU) in Trondheim, as she wades from in Svalbard detected variations in the amount 4. Cohen, J. H. et al. PLoS Biol. 19, e3001413 (2021).

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