"Gary Comer knew something wasn't right. John Franklin and 128 companions had famously tackled the Northwest Passage in 1845, and none of them returned. Roald Amundsen finally conquered the passage in 1906; it took him 3 years. Yet in the summer of 2001, Comer was motoring unscathed through open Arctic waters that should have been ice-clogged. He made the transit over the top of North America in just 19 days. "We were able to do it, and so many people had failed," he says. "Something had happened."

"Comer's entrepreneurial career as well as his foray into science funding really began on Lake Michigan. Born to a working-class family and raised on the South Side of Chicago, he began sailing small boats off Chicago at age 14. By age 30, Comer had sailed his 7-meter Star Class Turmoil to second place in the world championships. At the same time, he was having second thoughts about his 10-year advertising career as a copywriter at Young & Rubicam, a job he had approached through sailing friends. So he started a sailing-gear supply company, Lands'End Yacht Stores (misplacing the apostrophe by typo), which morphed into the huge catalog and Web apparel business of Lands'End Inc."

"It starts at the narrow Bering Strait between Alaska and Siberia, where cold and relatively less salty water from the Pacific Ocean enters the largely enclosed Arctic Ocean. In winter, frigid winds from the icy Alaskan interior blast over the shallow Chukchi Sea. The cold air freezes coastal seawater into sea ice and then pushes it farther out to sea, leaving new pockets of seawater available for freezing. This is "the ice factory," which, in the process of manufacturing ice, also transforms the seawater left behind."

"When seawater freezes, it releases salt into surface waters. These cold, salty waters become denser and sink, spilling over the continental shelf into the basin of the western Arctic Ocean. They create a layer known as a halocline (from the Greek words for "salt" and "slope"). Halocline waters lie atop a deeper layer of saltier, denser‹and warmer‹waters that flow into the Arctic from the Atlantic Ocean."

"The halocline provides a barrier that shields the sea ice cover from contact with deeper, warmer waters," said WHOI physical oceanographer Al Plueddemann. "This protects Arctic ice from melting."

Follow the water: Cold, relatively fresh water from the Pacific Ocean enters the Arctic Ocean through the Bering Strait. It is swept into the Beaufort Gyre and exits into the North Atlantic Ocean through three gateways (Fram, Davis, and Hudson Straits). Warmer, denser waters from the Atlantic penetrate the Arctic Ocean beneath colder water layers, which lie atop the warmer waters and act as a barrier preventing them from melting sea ice. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution scientists have launched a variety of missions to explore how global climate change is affecting the Arctic, and how changes in the Arctic, in turn, could spill out and cause further climate change well beyond the polar region."