Dallas Murphy

I’ve published four novels, two plays, and three books of nonfiction about the ocean. During the past five years, I’ve had the privilege and pleasure to go to sea aboard research vessels from WHOI, NOAA, and the U.S. Coast Guard on oceanographic expeditions to the Iceland, Greenland, Irminger, and Beaufort seas and the western Indian Ocean. I’m going back to the Iceland Sea aboard r/v Knorr in August 2011 and to the Greenland Ice Sheet next summer. My role is to write daily outreach essays to the respective websites. That work is collected on my website Dallasmurphy.com. I’ll be doing the same work for the Polaris Project, my first land-based expedition.

I teach annual writing workshops for young scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, RSMAS at the University of Miami, the Bergen (Norway) Geophysical Institute, and the University of Hamburg.

Blog Posts

Dallas and Kate in the Denmark Strait

I just got a nice note from 2010 Polaris student Kate Lewis who was writing from Reykjavik harbor. Kate graduated from WWU and has been working at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute as a Summer Student Fellow. Kate wrote that she had just finished one trip to Iceland with Chris Linder and was waiting for the R/V Knorr to depart on another cruise – this time with writer Dallas Murphy….
- By Andy Bunn
- August 22, 2011
Time Passing

We’ve come as strangers from all points of the compass to live in very close quarters, on a barge in this case. We’ve grown not merely to accommodate each other’s foibles and eccentricities, but to enjoy them as an aspect of our common purpose and shared experience. We’ve become friends. And then, abruptly, we part.
- By Dallas Murphy
- July 29, 2011
To the North

The tundra is beautiful in its sheer strangeness, an exotic environment, and vaguely haunting for that. Here summer seems not a season, but an exception.
- By Dallas Murphy
- July 25, 2011
What Scientists Do

When you get right down to it, scientists, no matter their particular professional concentration, seek to understand how the natural world works.
- By Dallas Murphy
- July 22, 2011
Just a Matter of Time

“Four times more carbon is contained in permafrost,” Max said this morning, “than in the entire biomass in the rest of the world.”
- By Dallas Murphy
- July 20, 2011
Duvannyi Yar, Part Two

Dissolved organic carbon samples collected last year by Polaris Project scientists from here at the bottom of the cliff were radiocarbon dated at 30,000 years old. We immediately began finding the bones of big animals that died sometime around then.
- By Dallas Murphy
- July 15, 2011
Duvannyi Yar, Part One

“Don’t go wandering off by yourself,” Max warned. “Stay with your group.” There are a lot of ways to get hurt at Duvannyi Yar.
- By Dallas Murphy
- July 15, 2011
Bugs, Aii-ee!

Slapping, clapping, waving, scratching—these are common, if not constant signals of life in Siberia.
- By Dallas Murphy
- July 10, 2011
The Carbon Bomb

Just a couple of meters beneath this visible surface the ground is frozen solid down some 1,400 meters. This is permafrost.
- By Dallas Murphy
- July 08, 2011
We Arrive, Finally

We’ve traveled better than halfway around the globe, through fifteen time zones, twenty hours in the air, nearly as many waiting in airports, and now we’re here, delighted, if disoriented.
- By Dallas Murphy
- July 06, 2011
Welcome to the Polaris Project

“I didn’t think anyone went to Siberia willingly,” a friend replied when I told him I was going there with the Polaris Project.
- By Dallas Murphy
- June 27, 2011