The Rotten Ice Project

The boatful of scientists pulls up alongside a floe of sea ice. One large enough that, if we stood at its centre, ice would fill nearly half of the space between us and the horizon, but still allowed us to make out where the ice ends and water begins. Sunlight and ice motion have re-sculpted its surface so that a range of slight hummocks have emerged, interspersed by melt ponds that the team carefully negotiates. The team's first task is to drill a preliminary core. Based on this cross section of the floe, the scientists can assess its suitability for their research purposes. With ice corer in hand, we carefully cross, one-by-one, the gap between boat and ice floe.

Carie Frantz, the geomicrobiology post-doc working with the team, gently pulls a sample core up through the borehole and sets it gently down for our inspection.³ Silently, I rehearse the ice core's anatomy, its parts giving themselves away by their distinctive colours. A brown-green layer marks the bottom of the ice core where algae have attached themselves, offering food for marine life below the ice. Above, the core varies in translucency, adopting the colours of what we pass behind it: the black of a garbage bag, the pink of a mitten. Closer to the top, the core is capped by a layer of crumbly ice, whose snow-white colour helps reflect sunlight, preserving the ice.

I wait expectantly for the scientists’ pronouncement. Could this be rotten ice at long last? The rotten ice project sought to investigate whether algal communities – specifically, the polymers they produce – might contribute to the structural integrity of ice. Polymers, as molecules composed of many repeating units, encompass all manner of natural materials, such as hair and nails, as well as synthetic materials such as nylon and epoxy. Algal-produced polymers, the scientists hypothesised, could potentially accelerate or slow down ice melt by influencing the way fluid, heat and salt is transported internally within the ice microstructure. Understanding ice integrity, they argued, must take these biological constituents into account. This was especially important in light of the lengthening Arctic melt season due to anthropogenic climate change, which allows microbiological communities to grow, thrive and hence play a potentially greater role on ice-melt behaviour. For the last 40 years, the Arctic Ocean has had a significant amount of multiyear ice, or sea ice that has survived several melt seasons, and is anywhere between two and five metres thick. As the region warms, however, sea ice is growing thinner and younger. As the Arctic Ocean shifts into this new regime of sea ice, properly characterising the ice is important to ensure climate models accurately incorporate and reflect changes on the ground.

In the months since I had followed the scientists’ project, beginning in autumn 2014, however, rotten ice seemed to thwart the scientists at every turn. Before going to the field, rotten ice frustrated the team's attempts to grow it under laboratory conditions when the team could not resolve disciplinary differences. Rotten ice proved challenging to image, which in turn exposed interpersonal tensions that threatened the development of a common picture of rotten ice. And then, while conducting fieldwork in Utqiagvik, the microscope's lights failed – and with it, the scientists’ abilities to literally visualise rotten ice.

Rotten ice seemed to elude scientists’ grasp. As an anthropologist interested in how non-humans like sea ice decentre, derail and decompose human self-understandings, this resistance to human activities offered an instance of non-human agency at work. Field sites like the rotten ice project seemed anthropologically productive for bringing into focus scientific knowledge production as a distinctly human effort to develop a mode of understanding more-than-human worlds that is, at the same time, not reducible to human beings. What seemed remarkable to me on further reflection, though, was how the scientists responded to the challenges rotten ice threw at them – how they took the many mishaps in their stride and even handled them with humour and grace. I was struck by how they made tireless efforts to plan for every possible contingency while trying, at the same time, to open up their concepts to encounters with ice. Perhaps, it dawned on me, I could get at ice ‘itself’, not by theorising an icy vitalism inspired by a Deleuzean or Indigenous philosophy, but indirectly, by trying to understand how the scientists granted to sea ice a life of its own – not only as a social actor (Bravo 2010) or ensouled being (Tallbear 2017), but as a material-discursive entity that continually evolves beyond today's ways of constituting it, whether in terms of ‘vitality’, ‘rotten ice’ or something else.

How could I describe the ethos that animated the rotten ice project? What was sea ice becoming? What follows is an effort to find a language to describe the scientists’ way of responding to rotten ice. While a ‘vitalist ethos’ is my term, not the scientists’, this framework is deeply informed by my interviews with, feedback from and observations of the team; how they followed sea ice to the limits of scientific description and, in doing so, gave space to sea ice to make ‘itself’ known on its own terms.

Ice Capture

To characterise rotten ice, the scientists had to develop new concepts to ‘capture’ this object – not in the sense of finding a fit for an a priori Platonic ideal – but capturing something about rotten ice that granted them analytic purchase on this idea. When I asked Bonnie Light, the physical sciences expert, where the idea of ‘rotten ice’ came from, she responded by telling me a story about conducting fieldwork aboard the USCGC Healy icebreaker in 2010 for the ‘Impacts of Climate on Ecosystems and Chemistry of the Arctic Pacific Environment’ research expedition.

Someone on the ship had forgotten a key toiletry. Luckily, the five-weeks-long research expedition had just departed from Dutch Harbour, Alaska and the icebreaker was not too far from shore, so a family member could deliver the missing item. As the relative's skiff neared, Bonnie recalls her attention being drawn to the chunks of ice floating around at the base of the icebreaker. She shows me a picture on her computer. A discrete floe of ice fills the frame, surrounded by water. It is shaped like a toilet seat, half-submerged, white and olive-brown, pitted and eaten away as if corroded. It is not eye-catching like the fantastic forms of ice pictured in glossy National Geographic magazines or Romantic landscape paintings, which I imagine sit outside this photo's frame. Perhaps it would have not left an impression on Bonnie either if the icebreaker had not paused on its way. And yet, this ice floe, which Bonnie has framed like a portrait, has her full attention.

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Rotten ice. Photo courtesy of Bonnie Light.

Citation: Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 32, 1; 10.3167/saas.2024.320106

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The ice, Bonnie thought, looked ‘as if it were about to fall apart’. The term ‘rotten’ surfaced in her thoughts as she cast around for an adequate descriptor. The term ‘rotten’ captured in a word the way the ice looked and seemed to hold together. But how, exactly, did it stick together? It occurred to the team that perhaps bacteria and algae living in the ice might play a role, either by helping the ice stick together or by accelerating its demise. What if these microbiological components were not only an incidental component of sea ice, but integral to it?

These questions signalled a conceptual outgrowth of sea ice from scientists’ taken-for-granted conceptions of it. While Bonnie speculated that Indigenous circumpolar peoples have their own concepts of ‘rotten ice’, what she proposed was neither a recapitulation nor overwriting of Indigenous concepts. The apparently novel conception of ‘rotten ice’ was understood by the team to be a matter of perspective, which took the genealogy of Western scientific concepts of sea ice as one's referential frame. As mentioned earlier, in the process of freezing, salts, dirt and bacteria are pushed out of the ice crystal lattice proper. These components, Bonnie pointed out, were often called ‘impurities’ by physical scientists and treated as such; that is, they were ignored by physical scientists as ‘non-ice’. Rotten ice described a different concept of sea ice, one in which biological elements were seen as a constituent component of sea ice. Rotten ice, then, could not be put together by adding up its physical, chemical and biological components but required grasping it as a physical-chemical-biological whole. How to realise this concept in practice, however, was neither obvious nor easy. As a physical sciences expert, Bonnie sought out collaborators, including microbiologist Karen Junge and phytoplankton and polymer expert Monica Orellana. Together, they developed a proposal that combined labwork and fieldwork, classic and novel methods of characterising sea ice, which could reflect their concept of rotten ice.

In trying to understand the scientists’ receptiveness to sea ice, to their reworking of what sea ice could possibly be scientifically, I find it helpful to turn to the concept of a ‘vitalist ethos’. In her reading of Canguilhem (2008), Monica Greco (2019) argues that vitalism as an ethos, rather than a substantialist theory, is not a theory about the difference between living and non-living beings but about the relationship that people establish with the wider world they study, of which they are an inseparable part. In other words, rather than see science as the reduction of things into mere objects, setting human thinkers apart from a vital order in which they exist, a vitalist ethos sees science as part of the activity of living. A vitalist ethos further acknowledges that the knowledge and concepts scientists develop mediate one's relationship to the things they study, which, far from being certain, final and absolute truths, are partial, incomplete and provisional – not least because ‘knowledge abstracts from life but also because the universe evolves and changes, forever ahead of our descriptions’ (Greco 2019: 14 [original emphasis]). In this view, calling the resistance of things to human activities ‘vitality’ or some other name as a new foundation undermines the very vitality of such efforts by binding things into a fixed theoretical form.

A vitalist ethos, by contrast, ‘institutes the principle of a limit or a boundary to the relevance of [scientific] descriptions, and the importance of a dialogue between science and a relevant beyond’ (Greco 2019: 14, emphasis added). Here, I take Greco's untheorised ‘relevant beyond’ to mean the irreducibility of things like sea ice to the remit of positive knowledge. By letting go of the impulse to call this irreducibility ‘vitality’ or some other name, a vital ethos holds open what exceeds knowledge as an undefined, underdetermined opening through which things like sea ice ‘itself’ can make themselves known on their own terms. As Kirsten Hastrup (2013) contends, ice is its own self-sufficient argument whose power and effectiveness in social worlds does not depend on human conceptual frameworks. Instead, a vitalist ethos, as I develop it here, uses conceptual frameworks as a methodological departure point, rather than final destination, for tracing the outlines of what eludes them.

In the ways rotten ice escaped received scientific concepts of sea ice and the scientists’ plans to capture it, a ‘vitalist ethos’ provides a helpful analytic framework for making sense of the rotten ice project and how it unfolded. First, a vitalist ethos was required insofar as rotten ice required putting at stake scientists’ preconceptions – and related practices – of sea ice as not simply a physical, chemical or biological object, each of which had to be taken up in turn, but as an integrated whole in which physical structure and microbiology were mutually constitutive. Like meltwater slipping between one's fingers, rotten ice escaped disciplinary assumptions and practices. Second, to realise this concept of rotten ice, scientists had to work in a problem space unbounded by their individual disciplines. This interdisciplinary epistemic space, though, did not yet exist. It was the scientists’ primary task to give this space shape through a completely different configuration of equipment, standards of practice and disciplinary knowledge, which could realise their novel concept of rotten ice in a way that was still legible to existing norms in the field of sea ice science. That more-than-ice worlds matter was reflected in the interdisciplinary composition of the rotten team, which later came to include me unofficially as an anthropologist participant-observer.

When the team first submitted to the US National Science Foundation, however, their proposal was rejected. According to the team, the disciplinarity of individual reviewers could have impeded evaluation of their highly interdisciplinary proposal. Their idea of rotten ice exceeded existing ways of constituting this scientific object. It was precisely the goal of the rotten ice project to capture this conceptual outgrowth and give it definition. Indeed, when the team finally received funding for their proposal in 2014, how to capture rotten ice preoccupied the scientists in the months leading up to the 2015 field season in Utqiagvik. The problem of ice capture was, in one sense, a practical one. If rotten ice really was as rotten as they hoped, how would they physically handle the ice? What if it fell apart in the process of coring it? The scientists considered different sampling devices and strategies to literally capture sea ice from the field, from the use of conventional ice corers that could extract a one-metre column of ice, to the design of a custom ‘ice capture device’ that would attach to the side of a boat and scoop a piece of ice out of the ocean. Besides practical considerations, the idea of ‘capture’ foregrounded the epistemic hierarchy between laboratory and field that situated the field as secondary to the lab in terms of scientific rigour (Kohler 2002). As STS scholar Karin Knorr Cetina (1992) argues, the power of laboratories lies in the ability of scientists to remove objects from their original contexts – and associated vagaries of season or place that make field research practically difficult – into a space that facilitates their study on terms favourable to scientists (Kohler 2002). Capturing rotten ice, then, was a way to achieve this.

The challenges scientists experienced with ice capture suggested yet another escape from scientists’ conceptions and practices in which one could discern the shape of rotten ice ‘itself’. This escape became especially evident in the rotten ice team's discussions around field sampling plans, which were complicated by the need to transport not only all the specialised equipment – cold room microscope, centrifuge, microtome and ice corer – to the basic laboratory facility in Utqiagvik, but sundry items as well like pipettes and pipette tips, gloves, bags, bottles, buckets, weigh-scales, rulers and markers. To determine which items they needed and in what quantities, the post-doctoral researcher that the scientists hired, Carie, had worked backwards from the anticipated publication of ‘dream’ papers to determine the different sample types and amounts, the requisite equipment and supplies for each. These ‘dream’ papers were aspirational in the sense of providing a guiding vision of rotten ice for the scientists that could shape their intuitions and inform their object's conditions of possibility. They were also practical in that they situated the team's dreams of rotten ice within disciplinary forms, standards and conventions like measures of replication and reliability, which made their work on rotten ice legible to each of the scientists’ respective disciplines. Also implicitly informing their rigorous approach to resource allocation was the scientists’ sense of responsibility to a wider public, whose funds made their research possible. While the team had elected not to build a custom ‘ice capture’ device, the sampling plan that Carie generated seemed to perform the same function. By taking all the measurements and equipment suggested in the sampling plan, the team should be able to successfully capture rotten ice.

In total, Carie calculates that the team will need 324 measurements. The volume of measurements reflects the teams’ original proposal to understand the process of sea ice rotting, rather than taking a snapshot of its rotten endpoint. There is a moment of silence as the team takes it all in. Karen, the ice bacteria expert, treads lightly into the silence. She commends Carie on her ambitious plan, but also cautions that collecting all 324 data points may be too much. Perhaps, she gently suggests, they should break up their goals into more manageable steps. Their first goal, for instance, might be the collection of field data leading to an observational paper.

The other scientists chime in, trying to reassure Carie. They also want to take rigorous measurements. But even as they hold this principle in mind, they caution that they must design their methods ‘knowing that it may very well be different’. It is very likely that they will go to the field and come back with a different understanding of rotten ice than they arrived with.

‘We have to keep our approach open to that’, Karen explains. ‘We don't have a perfect hypothesis or question.’

The idea of ice ‘capture’ here seems to falter. Rather than ‘capture’, the scientists suggest that what's required, instead, is letting go. In particular, letting go of one's preconceived ideas about rotten ice and complete control over what could happen in the field. The scientists’ openness to the possibility that fieldwork may overturn their efforts – and, indeed, expected this – struck me as curious.⁴ This reworking of one's objects of study and, furthermore, the rotten ice team's expectation that they would have to rework their conceptual frameworks in light of findings from the field, brought into sharp focus a vitalist ethos. As the scientists suggested in the meeting, ‘rotten ice’ can, and likely will, exceed their preconceived frameworks. The team had to make it part of their work ethic to not let preconceived ideas of rotten ice – their ‘dreams’ for it – get in the way of finding rotten ice. By putting their own preconceptions of rotten ice at stake, the team sought to move away from ‘capture’ as an operational mode towards an attitude of letting go of strict definitions. One that would allow chance encounters – like the moment when Bonnie's attention came to rest on an otherwise unremarkable floe of ice – to make a difference to one's assumptions and, in doing so, permit ice to do work on scientists’ course of knowledge production. As Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (2005) notes, experimentation was central to Canguilhem's argument in that experiments not only materialised concepts in their application as experimental techniques, but put these very concepts at stake in the experiment itself. Concepts, in other words, offer a limit or boundary gesturing at what exceeds them. A vitalist ethos is one that therefore remains intentionally receptive and open to the difference that experimentation, or, for Greco (2019), ‘encounters’, make to concepts and vice versa.

Break-up

The day before we set out into the Chukchi Sea in July 2015, the six of us sit in the laboratory at the Barrow Arctic Research Center, considering potential ways of identifying rotten ice. Can one tell at a glance whether the ice is rotten?

Karen wonders out loud if the colour of the ice can serve as an indicator. As I have learned while following the team, the colours of a sea ice core can offer clues about its internal composition. Far from being uniformly white, sea ice can display a range of colours. The green-brown colour at the bottom of sea ice cores generally marked the presence of biology. Rotten ice as a rich harbour for microbial life, Karen surmised, might be identifiable by its colour. Her voice trails off as she notices the others’ expressions change.

The others warily interject. While they all acknowledged that microorganisms inhabit sea ice to varying degrees over the course of the year, and recent studies had shown surprisingly high biological matter and activity in Antarctic ice, in the grant proposal they had not explicitly stated that Arctic ice in July would be ‘teeming with life’. In fact, while on the 2010 scientific cruise that inspired the rotten ice project, Bonnie recalled one microbiologist describing the melt ponds on the ice surface as ‘sterile’. Typically, by late summer the algae layer that supports a flourishing micro-ecology on the bottom of sea ice has sloughed off. As for the discolouration, this was from sediment in the ice, not biology.

Hesitantly, incredulously, Karen repeats herself. But she thought that there could be all this biology – algae and bacteria – inside the ice . . . She thought that rotten ice would provide a rich harbour for life . . . 

Discussion dissolves into silence. The brief but intense exchange has revealed an unexpected difference in the team's visions of rotten ice. While it was normal, even expected, that each team member would bring their own hypothesis and assumptions to the project, it came as a surprise to me to learn that, perhaps, the scientists had been operating, unknowingly, with such different working pictures of rotten ice. In the silence that ensued, I was left to speculate about what to make of this moment. I wondered: Had we ever worked from the same shared picture of rotten ice? Which of the scientists’ pictures of rotten ice was correct? Were they all equally correct—or equally mistaken? Had I also made an erroneous assumption in presuming the team shared the same working picture of rotten ice? What does it even mean to be ‘mistaken’ or ‘wrong’ in scientific research – and what do such analytics potentially obscure? What attitude do errors in science call for?

Here, Canguilhem's work, particularly his interest in scientific error, offers a potential analytic inroad. The history of science, he argued, was not an account of “the progressive discovery of a ‘inscribed forever in things or in the intellect”’ (Foucault [Canguilhem] 1991: 14). Canguilhem (2008) was critical of approaches that read past scientific ideas through the lens of today's sanctioned knowledge, such that the history of science could be told as a continuous, progressive and linear chronology of achievements leading up to the present. According to Canguilhem, scientific thought is organised around particular norms of truth, or ‘distribution[s] of true and false’, that never ‘liberates’ a final and absolute truth from error (Foucault 1991: 22). The trajectory of science is instead characterised by discontinuities, as science corrects and revises not only its methods and contents but its very objects of study (Rheinberger 2005; Rose 1998). Today's truths may be tomorrow's errors. As if doing an anthropology of times past, the job of the historian of science is not to show how previous concepts, methods and objects were wrong, but to understand these practices on their own terms and, furthermore, how ‘outmoded notions or methods were, in their time, successful’ (Canguilhem 2008: 201).

The moment of surprise described above offered an opportunity to take up ‘error’ as an anthropological curiosity in real time and in the scientific everyday. Inspired by the attitude I observed among the scientists throughout their pursuit of rotten ice, in mobilising the concept of ‘error’ here, I want to expand its range of meanings beyond ‘right/wrong’. Using the rotten ice scientists’ own terms, which echoed Canguilhem's argument about norms of truth, there are more or less ‘dominant’ frameworks of understanding but no ‘right/wrong’ framework according to which one can judge initial assumptions as ‘incorrect’ or a ‘mistake’. Instead of taking up error to mean ‘right/wrong’, then, I draw on the word's etymological meaning ‘to wander, stray’ (Merriam-Webster Dictionary 2023). Wandering suggests a curiosity-based form of inquiry, one that allows for a non-teleological journey of learning. To wander further describes the dynamic of the rotten ice project, which did not follow a linear path. ‘To err’, in this sense, is neither good nor bad, right nor wrong, but describes a kind of movement that may even be instrumental to scientific knowledge production.⁵ In particular, I argue that error demanded a vitalist ethos consistent with that which animated the rotten ice project as a whole. As argued earlier, the rotten ice project demonstrated a vitalist ethos in that it posed conceptions of sea ice as an open problem subject to change and revision through new encounters and experimentation – and demanded that scientists be open to these changes. While the rotten ice project was not concerned with proving existing sea ice concepts ‘wrong’, it was arguably an attempt to show that concepts of sea ice could be otherwise.

A couple days after the team's discussion about how to identify rotten ice, I accompanied Karen on a walk along the beach. To the north stretched the Chukchi Sea, a molten steely expanse rolling out to the horizon. The icy surface that once supported the rotten ice team had finally disintegrated and turned to liquid. It was just the two of us on the beach. The others had declined to join, citing work in the lab that needed attending to or simply expressing a wish to spend some time on their own. Tentatively, in an effort to understand which of my own assumptions had been amiss as much as where the scientists’ pictures had diverged, I began to ask Karen about her ideas of rotten ice. Rather than defend her initial concept of rotten ice or suggest that any one member of the team was wrong, Karen seemed amused.

‘If it was all inside my head, it would be boring!’ she responds. The mix of surprise, relief, delight and curiosity I feel brings my line of questioning to a halt. Karen is remarkably good-natured and humble. Her comment could be called an admission of error, both in the sense of accepting the existence of differing, potentially contradictory, concepts of rotten ice, but also in terms of including error as part of scientific inquiry. Being in error offered an opportunity to ‘get outside one's own head’, to riff on Karen's expression, whether through conversation with others or through trial and error in experimentation and fieldwork. Error was a way out of an idealist cul-de-sac. At the same time, error made space for ice ‘itself’ to make itself known, understood as the possibility that it could be otherwise not only in this specific moment but in continued efforts to know sea ice more broadly.

As described earlier in their efforts to ‘capture’ rotten ice, the team anticipated that their expectations might be overturned by what they found during fieldwork. Error, in this context, was not necessarily a failure of understanding or a bug that required fixing, but diagnostic of difference, as neither good nor bad, and measured by the distance between one's preconceptions and findings through experimentation or fieldwork. As had become apparent in the meeting where team members reviewed Carie's sampling plan, the challenge of studying rotten ice was less about its capture, either literally or conceptually, than the break-up of their pre-existing concepts to allow for something different.

Error can thus be productive, not only from the perspective of historians looking back on past practices that were ‘successful’ in their own time, but generative in the everyday present moment as a tool through which difference could be introduced. Far from being fatal to scientific knowledge production, such flaws in one's ideas were vital in that they allowed things like sea ice to enter and rework scientists’ preconceptions. Error, in other words, plays a key role in a vitalist ethos insofar as it opens up scientific knowledge production to sea ice and the difference it introduces today to one's conceptions of it.

What difference, then, did rotten ice make to scientists’ concepts in the end? Did the team finally find rotten ice in the field? While asking such questions is valid, from the perspective of a vitalist ethos suggested here the answers themselves are secondary. It is less important what that difference consisted in compared to the possibility that a difference could be made by ice in the first place. A vitalist ethos recognises that answers are rarely final and challenges scientists to conduct inquiry into ‘the open’. This challenge echoes the call that Tobias Rees (2018) makes to do ‘research into the open’ as one possible form of anthropological inquiry interested in how non-human things like sea ice exceed or escape ‘the Human’ as a dominant but, importantly, historically contingent and therefore un-doable epistemic figure from Western European thinking (Jackson 2020; Rees 2018; Wynter 2003). In following the openings that sea ice introduces into scientists’ conceptual frameworks, or ‘the Human’ writ large, research into the open is just that – an inquiry that insists on remaining open-ended, refusing to establish a new foundation like ‘vitality’ or ‘materiality’ as doing so involves a form of closure or reduction of the possibilities that things could be otherwise. To be clear, Rees notes that ‘there is no open as such’, only a ‘nonteleological movement that reigns when an established form of knowing . . . is undermined while no new one has yet emerged that would give it direction (a telos)’ (2018: 44). A vitalist ethos is one that seeks openings, allows the break-up of one's concepts and emergence of errors to be a kind of discovery in itself, which leads to more questions not answers.

Conclusion

Sea ice does not stay still. Not only does it drift, thicken or break apart, but how it is conceived is also in flux. As the rotten ice team members experienced, sea ice is a constant source of surprises, its behaviour defying expectations and inviting new consideration. Rather than name this agentive capacity ‘vitality’ and theorise in what this consists, I have suggested adopting a vitalist ethos inspired by Canguilhem that remains interested in concepts without being reduced to human knowers or idealism. Vitalism in this approach is not a substantialist theory of matter in general or things in themselves but an attitude that sees science as part of the activity of living and relating to a more-than-human world. A vitalist ethos approaches concepts reflexively as a provisional and contingent mode of engaging things like sea ice. Conceptual break-up and error are therefore not failures but ways of decentring human scientists and creating an opening for things like sea ice ‘itself’ to introduce a difference into how scientists think of, and relate to, sea ice. Left open as an opening, a vitalist ethos sees such conceptual breakups as allowing sea ice to assert ‘itself’ on its own terms, as a multiplicity of possibilities that continually evolve and outgrow one's concepts.

In granting sea ice the possibility of surprising scientists while maintaining concepts as a crucial departure point for scientists to engage with sea ice, a vitalist ethos threads a path between privileging concepts or matter in itself, nominalism or realism. Instead, a vitalist ethos offers another mode of engaging more-than-human worlds, similar to Indigenous analytics, that decentres human knowers and knowledge production but does not subscribe to a spiritualist metaphysics.

A vitalist ethos is not limited to the study of sea ice. In trying to make sense of the rotten ice project and how it unfolded, a vitalist ethos challenged me as an anthropologist, as well as the sea ice scientists, to relinquish certain analytics that I brought with me. Notably, to let go of a substantialist ‘vitalism’ and material-discursive becomings as theoretical framings, both of which document objects of study as a positivity. A vitalist ethos pushed me to follow rotten ice as an opening without necessarily arriving at a final explanation, analytic or solution to what might be deemed conceptual ‘errors’. A vitalist ethos invites one to err; that is, to be open to the possibility that things could be otherwise and to the idea that the work of concept formation is a continual, always ongoing process. Inquiry in the spirit of a vitalist ethos, whether in anthropology or glaciology, stays alive to the challenge of staying open to phenomena that constantly outgrow how they are constituted in the natural and social sciences.