On a sunny, windless day above the Arctic Circle, a ribbon of smoke twisted into the sky above Toolik Field Station. Everyone who works at Toolik has a favorite chore. Sally Anderson’s is burning trash. All the waste produced by the station’s seasonal residents has to get trucked out — or burned.
“It's helpful because it gets all of this waste gone, and it's kind of easy,” she said as she hurled a plastic bag filled with soiled toilet paper into a car-sized incinerator. Orange flames flickered with the impact of each new bag.
Nestled in the foothills of the Brooks Range, Toolik Field Station is one of the world’s premier Arctic research stations. It’s open year-round. But at the peak of the summer season, about a hundred people from universities and research institutions all over the world gather there to study things like permafrost and tundra ecology.
But none of that can happen without the dozen-or-so employees who keep the station running. Many of them work year-round, supporting similar research stations in places like Antarctica and Greenland.
Like many of her coworkers, Anderson took a winding route to get into the business of supporting polar research stations. She has a degree in food science.
“I was the microbiologist for a bigger chocolate company,” she said. “And then that was sucking my soul, and I hated corporate life. I was like, I'm leaving a temperature-sensored kitchen area where I taste chocolate every hour — and I'm going to the tundra to get eaten alive by mosquitoes.”
An oasis in the Arctic: three hot meals and a sauna
Jonathan Carcache is a PhD student at Florida Atlantic University. He spent part of this summer at Toolik to study tundra plants. After spending a grueling day out in the field collecting wildflower pollen by hand, he’d make a beeline to the station’s dining hall to load up a plate with ziti.
Carcache said he’s better fed at Toolik than he is back home.
“I come here and I get three square meals a day,” he said. They're all hot. "I mean, at home, I'm lucky if I eat more than pasta with a little bit of sauce and a can of sardines.”
Amanda Fear is one of the cooks.
“The learning curve is tough — scaling the recipes and figuring out what everybody likes,” she said. “But I do cook and bake a ton at home, and I always try to try more increasingly complicated recipes.”
Fear said her workdays start painfully early, but she usually has time in her schedule to hike out into the tundra or bask in the station’s sauna. She said there’s a strange rhythm that accompanies working from pole to pole — some people are employed all year, while others have gaps they use to travel, visit family, or do side gigs.
Before Fear was feeding scientists, she was an accountant in San Francisco. She got her start on the other side of the planet, at McMurdo Station in Antarctica.
“As somebody who has lived in that corporate America zone for a good five-to-six years, I didn't feel inspired every day,” she said. “I like feeling inspired out here and feeling like each day is new and fresh.”
For some workers, the path north started in grief or hardship
Fear said she had the idea to pack up her life and go work for a polar research station for years. And then, right after the peak of the pandemic, her grandfather, her dog, and a close friend all died in quick succession.
“It was just like… bam, bam, bam.” Fear said. “And I was just like, ‘Oh. I need to just be gone for a bit.’”
Many Toolik staff described hardships that prompted them to reevaluate their lives — like Manny Prince, who works as a sort of generalist at Toolik. He fixes things, helps out with search and rescue, and just fills in wherever he’s needed.
Prince said he left behind a warmer, easier life in Texas after he lost both of his parents.
“Six years ago, if you would have told me I'd be doing this, I’d think you were insane,” he said. “But this has probably been one of the coolest turns in my life that I didn't know I needed.”
Prince said, over the last year or so, he’s seen how sweeping cuts to science funding have left many in the Arctic research community uncertain about what comes next. But that’s made his job keeping scientists safe and housed feel more important than ever.
“People need to understand that the science is continuing,” Prince said. “It's not going anywhere. And neither are we.”