Hauke Trinks and the Idea That Life Began in Ice 

In 1999, Hauke Trinks sailed alone from Hamburg to the northern coast of Spitsbergen in his steel yacht Mesuf and let the boat freeze into the ice for the winter. There, at Mushamna, he spent months in darkness among polar bears while carrying out experiments on sea ice and the origins of life.

Trinks had once been president of the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, but by then he seemed far more drawn to the Arctic than to academic life. He had become convinced that life on Earth may not have begun in warm oceans, as many scientists assumed, but in ice. Sea ice, in his view, was a constantly changing structure filled with channels, salt, pressure and microscopic pockets where molecules could collect and react.

The overwintering at Mushamna was harsh even by Svalbard standards. Supplies ran low. Polar bears damaged equipment. According to a later profile in Nature, Trinks at times survived on dog food and seal meat during the expedition. But the experience only strengthened his attachment to the north.

When he planned another overwintering expedition a few years later, authorities reportedly refused to let him go alone again. Around that time, Trinks met the British-Scottish former librarian Marie Tièche in a bar in Longyearbyen. Shortly afterwards, she agreed to join him on a new expedition to Kinnvika on Nordaustlandet.

Together with two dogs, they spent more than a year in a small hut through the polar night while Trinks continued his research on sea ice. The work later resulted in a scientific paper arguing that the structure of sea ice could have created favorable conditions for the formation and replication of RNA molecules, one of the central questions in origin-of-life research. 

Life at Kinnvika, though, was not only about science. In her memoir Champagne and Polar Bears, Tièche describes the routines, tensions and companionship of overwintering in isolation. The book offers a rare glimpse of daily life in a remote place where there was little privacy, nowhere to leave and no way to escape each other.

Trinks kept returning north for the rest of his life, spending periods in Iceland, Norway and Svalbard. The Arctic had become more than a place for fieldwork. It was where he chose to live out many of his ideas about science, solitude and freedom. In December 2016, he died on Svalbard after travelling there once more to spend the winter in a hut near Longyearbyen.

Léa Zinsli, PolarJournal