Thunderous creaks and crashes reverberated throughout the lower decks of the Kapitan Dranitsyn in February as it carved a course through 1,000 miles of dense Arctic ice pack toward the North Pole.

The sound was incredible, said Jeff Bowman, a biological oceanographer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, like steel being shredded. Its the sound of every shipwreck movie that youve ever watched but amplified. Its quite a horrific sound, and that never ceases so long as the ship is moving.

For four weeks, the Russian icebreaker inched at a walking pace through the ice to deliver Bowman and 60 other scientists and engineers to the Polarstern, a 400-foot ship that had been lodged within the sea ice for nearly five months. Once aboard, they would join in an unprecedented yearlong research mission to the northernmost reaches of the Earth, collecting data crucial to understanding and predicting climate changes affecting the entire globe.