Mombetsu, in northern Japan, is the southernmost place where the sea brings drift ice and is believed to be the first to lose it to the climate crisis. But without ice, what will happen to the city, the sea – and the earth?
There are two versions of the story of how Shuhei Takahashi became an ice explorer. One long and one short. The long one begins in 1958. Shuhei Takahashi was ten. His father, a weather service official, was transferred from Sendai on Japan’s main island of Honshu to Hokkaido, on the frigid northern island. The father took over the management of the weather office in Abashiri on the Sea of Okhotsk. The new parents’ house was on a hill. From there, Shuhei Takahashi saw for the first time how the ice reached the coast and how it turned sea and land into a silent white desert from one day to the next.