The Department of Management, Technology and Economics (MTEC) (2) invited a special guest speaker to its graduation ceremony last week. The 61 year-old physicist, Hauke Trinks, professor for over 20 years at the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg (3),spoke to a full Auditorium maximum. In his long scientific career Trinks has worked, amongst other things, on measurement techniques in astronautics. In recent years he has turned the focus of his research to a more fundamental theme: the genesis of life. Trinks is following the hypothesis that life did not begin, as is often assumed in an original cosmic soup, but in the polar ice.

Alone in the eternal ice

To strengthen his hypothesis, five years ago already, the physics professor spent a winter on his yacht-converted into a laboratory-in the pack-ice on the northern boundary of Spitzbergen during. The choice of Spitzbergen for his ice-lab was because this island is just 1,000 kilometres from the North Pole and 60 per cent of it is covered with ice the year round. The surface of this Norwegian islands group is about equal to the surface area of Switzerland. Thanks to the compensatory effect of the sea, the climate is moderately artic, with annual temperatures that vary between 4.5ºC in summer and minus 17ºC in winter.

Trinks and his dog sharing some rare rays of sunshine with a pair of lolling walrus. large

Although that isn't temperate enough to support trees, it allows lichen, ferns, grasses and even a few small blossoming plants to grow in summer. The surrounding sea, rich in plankton and fish, attracts seabirds, seals and ice bears. Discovered only in 1596, there are no indigenous people on Spitzbergen. Subsequent inhabitants lived by hunting whale and seal, later on, from coal mining and today, increasingly, from research stations and tourism.

From his experiments Trinks deduced that cold temperatures are not a limiting factor for the emergence of life forms and left for a longer and even more intensive expedition to the eternal ice fields. The governor of the island Spitzbergen granted Trinks permission to spend a whole year at a disused Swedish research station, situated on the unpopulated island of Nordaustland. The sole condition: in order not to succumb to loneliness and isolation he was not to go alone but had to find someone to accompany him. Whereupon Trinks appealed to a woman he met in a pub in Longyearbyen: the English woman Marie Tièche (4). She spontaneously agreed to accompany him on his expedition to the eternal ice.

Adventure-minded Marie Tièche shared a rewarding experience with Hauke Trinks. large

Intrusive ice bears

The governor's icebreaker brought them to the deserted research station of Kinnvika, together with two dogs and provisions for a whole year. They lived there on sixteen square metres in a wooden hut, without telephone, electricity or running water, locked into the ice for thirteen months, four of them through the pitch dark polar winter. Their lives in the summer months were made more difficult by intrusive neighbours, in the shape of more than a hundred ice bears.

On the lookout for ice bears from the roof of the snowed-in hut: ice researcher Hauke Trinks. large

A feeling for processes in the ice

Being strictly protected, this species has lost all fear of humans. A favourite pastime of the young ice bears was stealing the toilet role from the little outhouse. A fully-grown ice bear injured one of the dogs so badly that the only thing Trinks could do was to release him from his pain with a gunshot.

Despite all the sundry unpleasantness surrounding the eternal ice, the two companions devoted every day to their numerous investigations of soil and sea. "I wanted to get a feeling for the processes that take place in the ice," is how Trinks explained his motivation for holding out in the icy cold for more than a year.

Cold allows stability

The widely accepted theory of the origins of life arising from a cosmic soup entails a problem. Namely, that complex molecules, such as chains of nucleic acid, can arise from randomly unfolding reactions, but that they subsequently deteriorate quite rapidly into component parts. Trinks experiments on Spitzbergen showed that the cold oceanic ice and the porous structure of spongy salt water provide the necessary compartments and physical conditions for firm ice crystals and trapped gas bubbles to concentrate chemical building blocks to act as a catalyst.

The precise reactions and processes in the microstructure of the sea ice that Trinks documented were experimentally verified in a laboratory under realistic conditions. The Max-Planck Institute in Göttingen examined the processes of salt seawater basic molecules in a special "ice reactor". This ice reactor ran for an entire year under ever-changing conditions in accordance with Trinks's results. The analyses show that in the ice hundreds of nucleotides spontaneously build long strands, similar to the DNA double helix without the addition of enzymes. For Trinks these insights are a sensation in the search for the beginnings of life.

Visit from an ice bear mother with her cub. large

Washing powder and yoghurts

Trinks's colleagues were able to identify certain enzymes in the bacteria samples, which could be employed in a whole series of new industrial applications. Psychrophilic, i.e., cold-loving, bacteria could assist in the maturation processes of cheese and yoghurt or in cleaning up the environment in the Arctic in the wake of oil spills. Their enzymes are used in the washing powder industry to develop products that work efficiently at low temperatures.

Apart from the scientific aspect of their stay in the Arctic, Professor Trinks and his assistant Tièche also experienced a human adventure. "We agree that the year was one of the most strenuous but one of the best of our lives." They have processed their experiences in the polar ice in an interesting way with a number of books (5). Trinks promises that scientific publications on the work will not be far behind.