Polar PROSPECTS

There's little to associate global warming with Utqiagvik (formerly Barrow), Alaska, a remote North Slope hub with roughly 4,600 residents and unpaved, permafrost streets. Yet this northernmost U.S. outpost, which lies 360 miles inside the Arctic Circle, draws researchers from around the world. Their mission: Study and protect the planet from the ravages of climate change. Leslie Field, an engineer, inventor, and consulting professor in electrical engineering at Stanford University, is among the visitors field-testing potential interventions. Spurring the current research is a precipitous decline in polar ice. In a study published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scholars from the University of California-Irvine and Utrecht University in the Netherlands used precise satellite records to evaluate the Antarctic Ice Sheet over the past four decades and found an accelerating rate of loss, surging from 40 billion tons melting into the ocean each year from 1979 to 1989 to 252 billion tons annually beginning in 2009-a six-fold increase.