Doing Science at the Edge of the Earth

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Short Wave – "Doing Science at the Edge of the Earth"

Date: October 8, 2025
Hosts: Emily Kwong & Regina Barber (NPR)
Featured Guests: Alejandra Barunda (NPR’s Climate Desk), Brian Buma (Ecologist), Jeff Kirby (Ecologist), AKA Simonsson (Indigenous Greenlandic Archaeologist)

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Episode Overview

In this captivating episode of Short Wave, Emily Kwong and guest reporter Alejandra Barunda recount a daring scientific expedition to Inuit Kerkatat (also known as Coffee Club Island) — the northernmost landmass on Earth, at the very top of Greenland. The team’s goal: to identify the northernmost living plant, using boots-on-the-ground fieldwork to fill critical gaps in our understanding of climate change’s impact on the remote Arctic. Mixing wonder, humor, and scientific rigor, they explore what life persists at “the edge of the terrestrial world”—and what it tells us about a rapidly changing planet.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Go to the Edge? (00:17–03:15)

• Purpose of the Trip:
  The expedition was motivated by the need to document plant life in the extreme north where few surveys exist, and to establish a baseline for future ecological change.

  • Brian Buma: “There's just something fascinating about the edge of things, like the last thing.” (00:32)
  • Jeff Kirby: “We still have really fundamental gaps in understanding how things work. Satellite images and fancy tech doesn’t solve all the problems that boots on the ground can.” (01:56)

• The Quest:
  The group traveled to Inuit Kerkatat/Coffee Club Island to answer: “What’s the northernmost plant living up there right now?”

  • The island is remote, largely undocumented, and named comically by Danes who loved coffee.

• Significance:
  Determining the northernmost plant would create a scientific record for future measurement amid the uncertainty of how accelerating Arctic warming is transforming the region.

2. Assembling the Team & The Journey North (04:42–07:08)

• Expedition Roster:

  • Brian Buma (expedition lead, ecologist)
  • Nat (geophotographer)
  • Jeff Kirby (ecologist)
  • AKA Simonsson (Greenlandic archaeologist)
  • Alejandra Barunda (NPR reporter, former climate scientist)

• Challenges in Transit:

  • Initial scramble in Iceland to recover lost gear, including crucial supplies like food and a boat.
  • “We run around frantically trying to find a ton of gear that had somehow gotten lost in transit—like, you know, our food. Oops.” (05:42, Alejandra Barunda)
  • Hopped north in tiny planes over a stunning but desolate landscape.

3. The Hike to the Island: Climate Change on the Ground (07:08–08:45)

• Unexpected Difficulties:
  • The hike was far tougher than anticipated: “I will say that it was basically the hardest eight miles I've ever hiked. And that was mostly thanks to climate change.” (06:48, Alejandra Barunda)
  • Thawing permafrost and unusually warm temperatures (near 60°F) turned the ground spongy and created unexpected rivers, complicating the trek with heavy packs.
  • What used to be firm, frozen ground had become a boggy morass, a direct observation of warming’s impact.

4. Arrival and First Impressions of Coffee Club Island (08:45–09:11)

• First Sighting:

  • The island comprised “two big mounds of gravel” topped by cairns from previous adventurers.
  • AKA Simonsson jokes about its resemblance: “She started laughing and pointed out, yeah, the island looks similar as breasts… Inuit people would have had a good name for it.” (08:32, Alejandra Barunda)

• Final Approach:

  • Inflated a portable raft and snowshoed through sea ice to reach the island.
  • Moments of camaraderie and exhaustion as the group finally lands on the fabled ground.

5. The Scientific Search: Pop Quiz—What’s the Northernmost Plant? (09:11–11:45)

• First Finds:

  • Immediately, Brian Buma spots: “I see a puppy. There’s at least one.” (09:33, Brian Buma)
    • Translation: an “electric” yellow Arctic poppy flower, initially thought to be the northernmost plant.

• Not Quite the Winner:

  • Further longitudinal sweeps and field notebook geometry lead to the realization:
    • “It was actually next to a moss, which is just a little bit… Actually the moss is still winter.” (10:21, Brian Buma)
  • It turns out the true winner is a patch of unnamed moss even further north.

• Tangible Moment:

  • The team’s celebration includes a freezing swim, dubbing themselves the “Kappakluban Swim Club.” During this, Alejandra accidentally discovers another even more northern patch of moss with her bare feet.
    • Alejandra Barunda: “And then when I stepped out, I actually uncovered with my bare feet another tiny patch of moss. And so that actually ended up being the winner—the northernmost plant on Earth.” (11:30)

6. What Does It All Mean? (12:00–14:01)

• Surprising Diversity:
  More plant life than expected. Climate change appears to be enabling greater plant survival, even this far north.

• Unexpected Wildlife:

  • An unafraid stoat (“tube sock-sized weasel”) named Randall, who tries to eat the microphone:
    • “We actually also ran into this little stoat… That’s him trying to eat the microphone.” (12:18, Alejandra Barunda)

• Scientific Legacy:

  • The core achievement: establishing a baseline record.
    • “The main goal of this trip was really just to put a line in the sand, you know, to witness and to catalog what's up there now… So that when scientists go back in 20 or 50 or 100 years, they'll know what else has changed.” (13:09, Alejandra Barunda)

• On Exploration for its Own Sake:
  Both Alejandra and Brian reflect on humanity’s drive to seek out the unknown:

  • Brian Buma: “Just basic curiosity, I think. What's over the next hill up until there's no more hills. And so there's a question of what's that last hill? That right there is the last hill.” (13:48)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Satellite images and fancy tech doesn’t solve all the problems that boots on the ground can.” — Jeff Kirby (01:56)
• “There's just something fascinating about the edge of things, like the last thing.” — Brian Buma (00:32)
• “It is a gorgeous little poppy. Again, gorgeous being in the eye of the beholder…Actually the moss is still winter.” — Brian Buma (10:21)
• “If you hadn’t done that, you wouldn’t have known.” — Emily Kwong, on discovering the moss after the swim (11:48)
• “You were out there for the sake of science, but is there value in just going for the sake of exploration, just to know?” — Emily Kwong (13:24)
• “Just basic curiosity, I think. What's over the next hill up until there's no more hills. And so there's a question of what's that last hill? That right there is the last hill.” — Brian Buma (13:48)
• “Thank you so much for taking us there, us Short Wave listeners.” — Emily Kwong (14:06)

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Key Timestamps

• 00:32 — Brian Buma on the fascination with "the edge"
• 01:56 — Jeff Kirby on “boots on the ground” fieldwork
• 05:42 — Barunda on logistical mayhem in Iceland
• 06:48 — The brutal hike, made harder by thawing permafrost
• 08:32 — AKA Simonsson’s lighthearted view of the island’s "appearance"
• 09:33 — Brian Buma sights the first Arctic poppy
• 10:21 — Moss, not poppy, is the northernmost plant
• 11:30 — Alejandra’s accidental moss discovery during the Arctic swim
• 12:18 — The fearless stoat, Randall
• 13:09 — The purpose: a scientific baseline for the Arctic’s future
• 13:48 — Brian Buma’s reflection on human curiosity

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Tone & Takeaways

The episode blends scientific seriousness with humor, awe, and personal reflection. The team's sense of discovery, the raw physicality of Arctic science, and occasional comic relief (from the “D&D”–style team-up to the “Kappakluban Swim Club” plunge) make this an engaging listen.

Final Message:
The edge of the world is not just a geographic boundary but an open question—a place where human curiosity, rigorous science, and the realities of climate change meet. The findings here are seeds for decades of future Arctic research. And sometimes, a swim in the Arctic Ocean is exactly what science requires.

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Transcript

[NPR Announcer]

This message comes from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer center this October. For a short time, your gift to MSK will be triple matched to help support breast cancer research, treatment and care. Donate [e-mail] match.

[Emily Kwong]

You'Re listening to Short Wave from NPR. Two summers ago, a team of scientists set out on an epic journey. Journey to the northernmost place on Earth. You could even call it the edge of the terrestrial world.

[Brian Buma]

There's just something fascinating about the edge of things, like the last thing.

[Emily Kwong]

That's ecologist Brian Buma who led the expedition, and he was joined by our very own alejandra Barunda from NPR's Climate Desk. Hi.

[NPR Announcer]

Hi, Emily.

[Alejandra Barunda]

It is so great to be here.

[Emily Kwong]

I am so intrigued by this trip you went on to the edge of the Earth, but where is that and why?

[Alejandra Barunda]

Yeah, it's a great question. So the main goal of this trip was about going all the way up to the northernmost landmass on Earth, which is this tiny gravel island surrounded by sea ice, way at the top of Greenland. It's called Inuit Kerkatat. It's also known as Kafkluben island, which literally means Coffee Club Island.

[Emily Kwong]

Coffee Club Island. Take me there.

[Alejandra Barunda]

Yeah, it was named by some Danes who really loved coffee. Okay.

[Emily Kwong]

Why did you all want to go there?

[Alejandra Barunda]

Yeah, so I was up there with some ecologists who think a lot about how climate change is reshaping the Arctic. So in other parts of the Arctic, like Alaska, plant life is changing really fast, and that's changing how the permafrost works, the amount of carbon that gets stored in the ground, and a ton of other stuff. Yeah, but no one really knows if that's happening in northern Greenland as well, because it's so hard to get to. And like, that means that there's very few plant surveys at all. Here's what ecologist Jeff Kirby, who was another person on the questing party, here's how he put it.

[Brian Buma]

We still have really fundamental gaps in understanding how things work. Satellite images and fancy tech doesn't solve all the problems that boots on the ground can.

[Alejandra Barunda]

So we were up there to be those boots on the ground.

[Emily Kwong]

That's very cool. Okay, so what kind of research were you all doing and what were you.

[NPR Announcer]

Looking for up there?

[Alejandra Barunda]

Yeah, so the question for this expedition was, what's the northernmost plant living up there right now?

[Emily Kwong]

Like the final plant? Like the plant at the edge?

[Alejandra Barunda]

Yes, the final plant. And we wanted to know that so we can see what it is today so we could keep track of how that changes in the future.

[Sponsor Voice]

Wow.

[Alejandra Barunda]

And Brian, he's the ecologist who led us on the whole quest.

[Brian Buma]

We'll be the first to truly document scientifically what's growing on the islands, what the island looks like in high detail, and create a record that can be followed up on in the future.

[Alejandra Barunda]

And so this was actually pretty fun. There was a bedding pool going. Some people thought that the northernmost plant would be this tiny electric yellow poppy. Others were voting for this little purple flower called a saxifraj, and others thought it might be a moss. But the real point of all this was just what Brian says here.

[Brian Buma]

It's great to have a few blank spots on the map still, in many ways.

[Alejandra Barunda]

So that was what we did. We went off into the blank spot.

[Emily Kwong]

Today on the show, we find out exactly what is growing in the northernmost blank spot and what the landscape there tells us about how the world is changing. You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from npr.

[Sponsor Voice]

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[Emily Kwong]

All right, Alejandra, the adventure begins to find the plant at the edge of the world. And you said something about this being a blank spot on the map. You all were going to a place that we don't really know what's there. How does one even get to a blank spot?

[Alejandra Barunda]

Oh, my gosh. So, so slowly. So it started like this. Four of us met in this little tiny town in northern Iceland. So it was Brian, who is this really hardy marathoner from Boulder, Colorado. Then there was Nat, geophotographer and ecologist Jeff Kirby, who you heard from already. And then there was AKA Simonsson, who's an indigenous Greenlandic archaeologist. And there was me.

[Emily Kwong]

Journalists. We should be a part of the adventure. Always.

[Alejandra Barunda]

I mean, this is my main goal in journalism. Yeah. But also I was a climate scientist before. I was extremely down to help do some cool science while also recording a radio story.

[Emily Kwong]

This is like a D and D team up. Okay, so the traveling party is assembled. Arctic Dungeons and Dragons can begin. What happens?

[Alejandra Barunda]

So, yeah, then things start to go off the rails a little bit. We run around frantically trying to find a ton of gear that had somehow gotten lost in transit. Like, you know, our food, Oops. And this little boat that we would need to cross some water. And that was a little bit stressful, but eventually found it all. And then we started going north. And so we bunny hopped up the whole eastern coast of Greenland in this teeny, tiny plain. And honestly, this was a beautiful part of the trip. It was gorgeous. All the sea ice was sparkling below us. These giant mountains were covered in glaciers to our left. It was just this super dramatic landscape and there's pretty much no one up there. So it took us like two days, but we finally made it up to the northernmost airstrip on the planet. Welcome to Bliss. That is our pilot, Kitty.

[Brian Buma]

Nice work.

[Emily Kwong]

Thank you.

[Brian Buma]

That was a. That was a landing.

[Emily Kwong]

Go, kitty.

[Brian Buma]

195 meters. You used 194 of it.

[Emily Kwong]

That pilot needed all that Runway, but he sounds. Sounds like you landed fine.

[Alejandra Barunda]

Oh, yeah. But after we landed, our final destination was actually still 8 miles away and another mile out across the sea ice. I run a lot, so I thought eight miles, that's like, not that big a deal. But I will say that it was basically the hardest eight miles I've ever hiked. And that was mostly thanks to climate change.

[Emily Kwong]

Oh, wait, how did. How did climate change make your job of covering this ground harder?

[Alejandra Barunda]

Yeah, so, you know, we thought that this ground was going to be totally firm and like frozen permafrost, because past explorers, that's what they saw. But the week before we arrived, it had been nearly 60 degrees Fahrenheit up there, and we were carrying these 70 or 80 pound packs and dragging a.

[Emily Kwong]

Bunch of our other gear.

[Alejandra Barunda]

And we were just sinking into this boggy, squishy permafrost, which was thawing because of global warming. And then there were all these rivers. We expected little streams. That was what was on the maps. But a lot of nearby ice and snow was melting because it was so warm. And instead we had these really wide rivers to cross.

[Sponsor Voice]

Yeah.

[Emily Kwong]

How long did it take in the end to get there?

[Alejandra Barunda]

So we thought that we would be able to do this in like a day, and instead it Took basically three. But finally we. We got close. And when we woke up one morning, we got our first good view of the island. And that's when everyone started laughing. Basically what we saw was this island, which was two big mounds of gravel and there were these little cairns on top of the mounds built by other travelers like us in the past. And a.k.a. simonsson, the Greenlandic archaeologist, she started laughing and pointed out, yeah, the island looks similar as breasts. And she said Inuit people would have had a good name for it. Could be the name.

[Emily Kwong]

Well, you know, you call it like you see it and then what happens?

[Alejandra Barunda]

So then we inflated this little raft that we'd carried all the way from Iceland. Remember that one that we lost? And we paddled across some water and then we snowshoed across this absolute maze of sea ice. We even had to help each other jump across some of the bigger puddles of meltwater.

[Brian Buma]

One, two, three.

[Alejandra Barunda]

And then after a really long walk, we got there.

[Brian Buma]

You go on the island first. Your island. We're just visiting.

[Alejandra Barunda]

Yeah.

[Brian Buma]

You make me cry.

[Alejandra Barunda]

Nice.

[Brian Buma]

She's on.

[Emily Kwong]

I'm crying.

[Alejandra Barunda]

And then literally the moment we step onto the island, Brian spots something.

[Brian Buma]

I see a puppy. There's at least one.

[Emily Kwong]

A flower.

[Alejandra Barunda]

So that was really exciting. Also, they're really cute. Arctic poppies are these cute little electric yellow flowers. They're just a few inches tall and they can be so pretty.

[Emily Kwong]

So was that it? That was the northernmost plant?

[Alejandra Barunda]

Not quite. We kept walking north on the island and we were doing these longitudinal sweeps along the way to like make sure we were capturing everything. You know, we were actually doing geometry in Brian's notebook for a while.

[Emily Kwong]

Yeah. Scientists.

[Alejandra Barunda]

And eventually.

[Brian Buma]

And we have a real contender.

[Emily Kwong]

What was it?

[Brian Buma]

An arctic poppy. So tired looking Arctic poppy.

[Alejandra Barunda]

It was just like popping out of the gravel and it looked like it was gonna be our winner.

[Brian Buma]

It is a gorgeous little poppy. Again, gorgeous being in the eye of the beholder. There's actually. It's actually next to a moss, which is just a little bit. Actually the moss is still winter.

[Emily Kwong]

It was. It was not a flower. It was a. It was an unnamed moss. That's the northernmost plant.

[Alejandra Barunda]

Yeah. Who was not hoping for an unnamed moss? What can you say?

[Emily Kwong]

It's not as epic, but it's the facts.

[Alejandra Barunda]

So Brian pulls out the GPS to double check where we are.

[Brian Buma]

For anyone who ever wondered how far north life goes, we're at 88.665030 North.

[Alejandra Barunda]

To celebrate, we were like, obviously we have to jump in the water. That's right. Next to us at this northernmost piece of land on Earth. And so we take off our clothes and run screaming into the Arctic Ocean.

[Sponsor Voice]

All the way in.

[Alejandra Barunda]

You gotta find. We called it the Kappakluban Swim Club.

[NPR Announcer]

Oh, God.

[Alejandra Barunda]

And then when I stepped out, I actually uncovered with my bare feet another tiny patch of moss. And so that actually ended up being the winner. The northernmost plant on Earth.

[Brian Buma]

Oh, that's funny. Oh, it's a different moss.

[Sponsor Voice]

Nice find.

[Emily Kwong]

Swimming for science. If you hadn't done that, you wouldn't have known.

[Alejandra Barunda]

Yeah, years of planning, weeks of travel and swimming gave us a cute poppy and another unidentified moss.

[Emily Kwong]

It seems like actually there was quite a lot of plants up there at.

[NPR Announcer]

The edge of the world.

[Alejandra Barunda]

Yeah, there really was, honestly, more than we expected. And that's probably partly because climate change is making it easier for plants to survive, especially in the summer season. Like what we were in. Plants weren't all we saw. We actually also ran into this little stoat, which is like a tiny weasel living in a pile of rocks on the island. And he was the size of a tube sock, and he was completely unafraid. We called him Randall. This is Randall attacking the audio recorder. That's him trying to eat the microphone.

[Emily Kwong]

I can hear his little mouth.

[Alejandra Barunda]

Oh, yeah. He had no fear at all. He was cool.

[Emily Kwong]

Taken together, what does this tell us about the present state of the Arctic and its future? You mentioned what? Obviously, it's clearly warmer, there's more life. Climate change has a lot to do with it.

[NPR Announcer]

What else?

[Alejandra Barunda]

So this is one of the fastest warming areas on the planet, and that warming is driving huge ecological change across the Arctic. But like Brian said, this was a blank spot on the map. And no one knew whether that warming and change was happening here, too. Oh, I see. And so the main goal of this trip was really just to put a line in the sand, you know, to witness and to catalog what's up there now. The poppies and the mosses and the sex badges. So that when scientists go back in 20 or 50 or 100 years, they'll know what else has changed.

[Emily Kwong]

You were out there for the sake of science, but is there value in just going for the sake of exploration, just to know?

[Alejandra Barunda]

Yeah, I think that's a really good question. And honestly, for me, it was just this moment to live in, this wonder about the world that we live in, to see this very, very special place, the edge of the terrestrial world. And I actually think that's a very human instinct. And Brian agrees.

[Brian Buma]

Just basic curiosity, I think. What's over the next hill up until there's no more hills. And so there's a question of what's, what's that last hill? That right there is the last hill.

[Alejandra Barunda]

And we went to it, that last hill.

[Emily Kwong]

Alejandra, thank you so much for taking us there, us shorewave listeners. It's been a blast. Yeah.

[Alejandra Barunda]

Thank you so much for listening.

[Emily Kwong]

This episode was produced by Hannah Chin. It was edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez and Burleigh McCoy, and it was fact checked by Alejandra and Tyler Jones. Beth Donovan is our senior director of podcasting Strategy. I'm Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to Short Wave from npr.

[NPR Announcer]

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