Yes. That's very true. That's fair to say.
During my first 10 years, the models that we were using at the time suggested that we should see the first and strongest signs of climate change in the Arctic. However, in the first 10 years that we were there, we didn't see it, so as any good scientist would do, I became skeptical. I thought, “No, this is not happening. We're not seeing these kinds of relationships.”
Then, as I went forward in my career, I started to see these things speeding up to a point where it's very dramatic. We overwintered our research icebreaker in the southern Beaufort Sea, north of Tuktoyaktuk, during the International Polar Year in 2007, and we kept the ship mobile all winter.
I went to the Coast Guard and said that we would be able to do this because of the change in climate, and they thought I was crazy. They said, “There's no way. We're going to be stuck in that ice, and we're going to circulate around, and the Russians are going to have to come and take us off of their side of the Beaufort Sea.”
I said that, no, we were going to be able to stay mobile throughout that year, and we did. We kept the ship mobile all the way through. That should not have been possible. Historically, that ice should have been much more consolidated than it was, and it's because there just isn't as much ice, even in the wintertime.