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Ever since humans first set foot on polar landscapes, scientific insights have been gained by researchers often isolated in small field camps or stations, living in environments that can freeze flesh in minutes, and jury-rigging failed equipment to keep life and work going in adverse conditions. Scientific discovery itself has become the product of another kind of science—that of polar exploration. Success comes from employing techniques and ideas developed by Indigenous Peoples who first settled the region thousands of years ago and the European explorers who followed them centuries later. Across time, humanity has expanded its knowledge of the world at the poles through endurance, resilience, serendipity, and tragedy.

Antarctica and the Arctic are warming, and polar treaties are straining as fast as ice melts and species disappear. Our fragile window for understanding the cosmos, the planet, and ourselves is closing. The science of Earth's most remote places and the stories of the people who work there are becoming ever more urgent and relevant.

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Once on the ground in 1988, we did not have much time to savor the view. With the changeable polar weather, our first need was to establish shelter. Following the lead of my three companions, Farish, Chuck, and Bill, I started to break out the tents and gear, rummaging through supplies to find ropes, hammers, and tent stakes. Each of the three had a role to play: Farish, the senior professor and former Marine, made the executive decisions; Bill, the experienced field hand, could do everything from cooking a shrimp étouffée in a desert sandstorm to dressing suppurating wounds in the kitchen tent; while Chuck had the keenest eye for seeing fossils amid a field of rocks. My role, beyond bringing a library of Barry Lopez books, volumes on polar history, and field guides to birds, was not obvious.

With tents erected and supplies cinched down, the reality of my situation started to emerge. My relationship to the natural world had been formed 3,000 miles south, surrounded by the greenery of plants and the cycle of dark nights and sunlit days, as well as ready access to other people, food, and medical care. In this new landscape, the sensory cues I once relied on for perceiving time, distance, and the happenings around me were no longer relevant. My fate was now determined by whatever skills I brought, by the three other people with me, and by a long logistical chain to the nearest human beings. With strangeness and insecurity in the air—and my embarrassing lack of camping experience—my tent became a life raft in the immensity of the polar landscape. I found myself perpetually fiddling with the knots, ropes, and stakes in an obsessive quest for the perfect shelter. Somehow, I'd not only have to learn to live in this world but also do the scientific work that had led us there in the first place.

It quickly became clear that science, and in fact life itself, in the Arctic proceeds at the pace set by polar weather, landscapes, and logistics. Mud, boulders, and ice, particularly if there's a headwind, can slow a trek to a few miles a day. Gear that looked great in a catalogue or worked fine in tests in the university quads often fails in subzero temperatures and high winds. Helicopters, planes, and other motorized equipment break in unexpected ways, and spare parts can be half a continent away. Because of these challenges, each week of fieldwork involves several weeks at home planning. And still, wonderfully detailed itineraries, field lists, and objectives go out the window as soon as one sets foot on the ground. As Mike Tyson once famously said about boxing, "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face." When plans go awry in polar regions, patience becomes the best strategy—patience with the weather, the people on the team, and, most important, one's own emotional and physical limitations.

During high summer in polar regions, the sun never sets but makes a giant ellipse in the sky throughout the day. Since we arrived more attuned to the light-and-dark rhythms of early summer closer to the equator, a perpetual feeling of jet lag pervaded our first week in camp. With bodies active at night and hungry at odd times of the day, life felt out of sync. There is, however, a nuanced rhythm to polar days. As the light becomes oblique in the middle of the night, temperatures can drop by nearly 20 degrees Fahrenheit. Glacially fed rivers that roared as raging torrents at noon become silent trickles by three a.m. Life, too, recedes and stills. Bees that were buzzing among the plants of the low tundra in midafternoon take to the ground after midnight. Three thousand miles to the south, in places like Chicago, New York, or London, our cues to night and day are found in the levels of light. In polar regions, indicators of time are often sounds.

It's frequently said that we fill the unknown with our familiar experiences, expectations, and fears. In a similar way, the sights and sounds of polar regions initially evoke sensations from home. Melting water that rushes through glacial rivers produces a chorus of shrieks or high-decibel roars that recall sirens, elevated trains, or the din of Chicago's Loop. I am often startled by sounds that evoke sizzling bacon on a skillet when I hear glaciers move. Booms that sound like thunder make me reflexively look up to the sky until I remember that they actually emanate from below as ice ruptures. Rubble that was moved by flowing glacial water appears, at first, like a bulldozed construction site. The combination of snow, wind, and light has an almost supernatural effect on ice, etching beveled edges and sharp cornices to look as if they were carved by modernist sculptors. We conjure an informal cartography for the terrain that refers to familiar places: mesas, peaks, and ridges are named after campus buildings, bell towers, or caricatures of features of people, animals, or famous places.