Far below the Arctic’s drifting ice, the seafloor has begun to change in a way few people ever see. Stones are falling out of melting icebergs, landing on soft deep-sea mud, and creating new places for life to take hold. That shift starts much farther north, where large glaciers in northeast Greenland and parts of the Russian Arctic are breaking apart more often than they once did. As those glaciers calve, they do not release clean ice alone. They also send out icebergs packed with rock fragments and sediment scraped up during years of travel. In the Fram Strait, between Greenland and Svalbard, scientists began noticing just how much debris some of those icebergs were carrying. During a 2021 expedition aboard the research icebreaker Polarstern, biologist Melanie Bergmann of the Alfred Wegener Institute spotted something striking from a helicopter. “Some of the icebergs were carrying unusually large amounts of debris and looked almost black from above.” Iceberg photo. (CREDIT: Alfred Wegener Institute / Christian R. Rohleder) The sight stood out even to seasoned Arctic researchers. …