BARROW, GEORGE'S HOME, probably has more scientists per square foot these days than any other town in America. "It's ground zero for climate change," one researcher told me. From the air, the town of 4,500 seems a muddy collection of ramshackle homes, most built on wooden blocks to keep them from melting the permafrost below. No roads lead to Barrow, and the vista south is of endless brown tundra.

But the town boasts the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium, where, year-round, researchers study carbon-dioxide emissions, Arctic animals, and sea conditions. They bunk, up to 150 at a time, on BASC grounds in an old Navy research laboratory. Spillover scientists sleep—as many as ten to a room—in "the Polar Bear Theater," a saggy, cold house in town. One night, when I was in Barrow, so many scientists were in town that they slept in cots laid out in a community gym between the basketball scoreboard and the climbing wall.

I ran into them in the cultural center and in the general store, where you can buy a snowmobile for sale in aisle three, or a $9 box of chocolate-chip cookies. In Pepe's Mexican restaurant, I overheard dinner conversations concerning "arctic winches" and lemmings. Like George Neokak, the scientists I met were trying to figure out conditions by counting things in different ways. Joe von Fischer, a friendly biologist from Colorado State University, drove me out to the tundra to meet his colleagues, who were measuring methane emissions. Dr. Matthew Sturm, a bearded, weathered glaciologist, told me at breakfast that he measured snow melt for the Army Corps of Engineers. Janet Clarke, a biologist who works for the Science Applications International Corporation, was counting marine mammals.

On the Healy, as in Barrow, the fortunate scientists—ones who get funding—have passions that dovetail with national interests. Matthew Alford is a 38-year-old oceanographer from the applied-physics lab at the University of Washington whose deep-sea research on the Healy is funded by the Navy. Alford, an acoustic-guitar player and surfer, is fascinated by undersea waves, immense masses of water moving separately from waves above. Beneath the sea, he says, "a breaking wave can scatter sound, which has implications for hiding submarines. The Navy wants to make better models of the ocean, to predict conditions under which their ships will operate." Today, Alford is working in a 20-mile-per-hour wind on the aft deck in his zip-up, blaze-orange mustang suit, blue hard hat, and steel-toed boots. If he falls in the water, the suit will protect him. If the 2,800-pound anchor that's about to drag the project's equipment under the water—where it will spend a year collecting data—falls the wrong way, the boots won't help much.

Chief cruise scientist Dr. Bob Pickart, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, is here to deploy mooring devices that measure ocean temperature, current, and salinity. Pickart's passion is the way in which ice and ocean interact, particularly during storms, and this part of the Arctic Ocean is stormy 50 percent of the time. Kate Stafford, a small, intense 41-year-old oceanographer from the University of Washington, will spend the next year "listening to sound below, like whales, ships, or guns from oil and gas exploration," she says. "When the water is ice-covered, it's pretty quiet. If the ice gets thinner or goes away, it will become more difficult for animals to communicate."

All three scientists say they aren't here to support or disprove global warming. All three feel challenged by how little is known about the Arctic. Ten years ago, the region was too inaccessible for research. Now, conditions are changing so fast that they might be different by the time the research is done. "In a way, it's like we started too late," says Stafford.