Photo by acacia.johnson / At work under the full moon, Joe Kigutaq searches for polar bear tracks on the November sea ice near Arctic Bay, Nunavut. Twice a week, he drove his snowmobile 30 kilometers (about 20 miles) to a former mine site to check that bears hadn't broken into the facilities, and during the winter I lived with his family, he sometimes let me tag along. These drives were the first time I really came to grasp how the sea ice—a stark, lunar landscape often envisioned as desolate—is in fact a rich marine ecosystem, the living ocean just underfoot. Follow me at acacia.johnson for more stories from the Arctic and beyond. #arctic #seaice #nunavut #inuit