At work in coldest office on earth

Edmonton Journal
Monday, February 16, 2004
Page: A1 / FRONT
Section: News
Byline: Nathan VanderKlippe
Column: Nathan Vanderklippe
Dateline: ABOARD THE CCGS AMUNDSEN
Source: CanWest News Service

ABOARD THE CCGS AMUNDSEN - When you're getting ready to spend weeks aboard an icebreaker frozen like a Popsicle stick into a massive sheet of ice, the best you can hope for is that your first impression won't count for much.

At first glance, the Arctic landscape appears frighteningly bleak, an endless expanse of snow surrounded by lifeless cliffs. In the winter, the sun doesn't shine and the icebreaker looks small and lost.

"You're just like, 'Oh my God, we're going to be living on that thing?' " said Christina Blouw, a master's student at the University of Manitoba.

"Totally different inside -- it's like a whole little world in here. But from outside you feel scared."

For an entire year, the Coast Guard ship Amundsen will serve as a floating Arctic science laboratory for 70 scientists from nine countries. The ship provides a rare chance to do extended sampling and data collection in the Far North -- and it's a fair cut above other Arctic accommodations. In the past, scientists lived on the ice in heated tents.

"(Here) you've got the benefits of a kitchen and showers. (In) ice camps, you don't shower," said Owen Owens, a master's student from Winnipeg.

Owens has draped Christmas lights around the walls, a reminder of the holidays and the many weeks already spent on board.

Many of those working on the Amundsen are students in their 20s making their first forays into Arctic research.

For them, it's an unparalleled adventure -- a chance to do science in an exotic environment that's at once thrilling and dangerous.

"When I'm out on the ice, it's the biggest and most beautiful office in the world. It's the coldest, too," laughs Alex Langlois, a PhD student from the University of Manitoba.

Once, Langlois was working on the ice when the ship's wildlife observer, an Inuit man who is paid to fend off dangerous animals, gunned his snowmobile to chase a nearby polar bear.

"The bear starts running and decided to change direction -- it was running straight at me. It was maybe 250 metres, 300 metres," he said. "So I just took the gun and loaded it and was just waiting."

The bear was eventually scared off, and Langlois added another story to accompany the thousands of pictures he will bring home. "That's what it's all about," said Owens, who shares a small cabin with Langlois.

Both students boarded the ship in November, and will stay on for at least three months. Their cabin glows from the Christmas lights Owens has draped on the walls, a reminder of how tough it was to be away from home at Christmas.

"A lot of people just wallowed in the sadness of being away from family," said Owens.

The ship is not without amenities or a social scene. Broomball games on the ice are a chance to unwind in the outdoors.

Indoors, the crew lounge opens as a bar four evenings a week -- just $1.75 for a can of domestic beer, twice that for an import like Guinness. Biologists brag about downing Arctic shooters -- a shot glass filled with liquor and topped with a floating sea critter, like a tiny zooplankton or copepod.

The food is abundant and sumptuous. One Sunday night menu featured smoked salmon terrine, rabbit served with a white wine and mustard sauce, and a seafood casserole. For dessert, the French chefs created a two-layer mousse cake served with a platter of French cheese and fruit, including mango.

"It definitely tastes damn good," Owens said.

The closest community is 120 kilometres by snowmobile, but technology keeps the ship connected to the outside world. Satellite phone calls home cost $1.10 a minute, while e-mails are sent and received once a day for about 50 cents a message.

"You don't feel like you're in the Arctic because you've got a TV and you've got all the Quebec channels," Langlois said. Yet the monotony of ship life can begin to grate on those confined to the same walls and halls for months on end, making irritation levels rise as the weeks pass.

And the sheer distance from home makes tinges of longing unavoidable. On a ship where supplies are tight and loved ones are far away, people crave long showers -- "Every drop of water is a drop of fuel" is the ship's conservation motto -- sunlight, sex , swimming and the tastes of home.

"Poutine -- I'm missing the poutine," Langlois said.

nathan.vanderklippe@globaltv.ca

Canada commits to renewed role in Arctic science: Icebreaker provides project's foundation

Edmonton Journal
Monday, February 16, 2004
Page: A2
Section: News
Byline: Nathan VanderKlippe
Dateline: ABOARD THE CCGS AMUNDSEN
Source: CanWest News Service

ABOARD THE CCGS AMUNDSEN - Rob Peirson's breath freezes onto his New York Yankees tuque as he screws together the metal skeleton of a heated tent. As he works, the horizon brightens to a thin ribbon of blues and pinks that cast a pastel tint over the endless ice of Franklin Bay, at about 70 degrees North latitude. It's the dead of winter. Temperatures drop into the -30s and the sun won't appear for another few weeks.

"People at home, they always thought I was crazy because I'm coming up here," said Peirson, a University of Alberta student who is working for the Meteorological Service of Canada aboard the Canadian icebreaker Amundsen. "It's -50 C with the windchill, but this is so much fun. ... This is our country, so we have to explore it."

Behind him, the fire-engine-red ship is the sole splash of colour as far as the eye can see across the snow. And it's not moving. Frozen into a vast plain of thick sea ice, the 98-metre-long icebreaker is a unique experiment in Arctic research, one that has drawn the attention of the world's scientific communities.

As one of the most expensive places to undertake scientific research on earth, the frigid and remote Arctic is one of the least-studied areas of the planet. It's also becoming one of the most important. Already, data show that Arctic temperatures have climbed 1.2 C per decade since the 1960s, while some studies show that ice cover in the area has thinned by almost 40 per cent in the last 30 years.

Arctic warming has already begun to affect the normal way of life for both the natural and human residents of the Canadian North. As those effects become more dramatic, researchers are rushing to study how the Arctic works and how it is changing.

"The Arctic is one of the last frontiers, and I think for biologists, the wintertime processes are a big black hole," said Jody Deming, a University of Washington microbiologist who is serving as a lead scientist aboard the Amundsen. "We just sort of assume that everything dies down, but we don't have a clear understanding of who the survivors are to start the process again in the spring."

Funded by the Canadian government, the icebreaker is the perfect vantage point for observing the fragile Arctic ecosystem.

The Amundsen is actually a two-decade-old ship, formerly called the Sir John Franklin, that had been mothballed by the Coast Guard in the mid-'90s as a cost-saving measure. It was saved from the auction block by a $41-million infusion of federal money that transformed it into a floating -- and frozen -- platform for Arctic science and research.

It set sail for the Arctic Ocean last September on a year-long science expedition called the Canadian Arctic Shelf Exchange Project (CASEP). The ship, which Ottawa has committed to summertime research for the next 15 years, is the first Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker ever dedicated to science, joining similar vessels owned by the Americans and Germans.

For Canadian scientists, it is opening up huge opportunities.

"It's like playing in a sandbox as a kid -- if you have your own toys, you're more popular than if you just borrow from the others," said Louis Fortier, the CASEP project leader. "It's really improved Canadian participation in foreign programs."

The research is being led by 70 scientists from nine countries and 15 Canadian universities and government departments. The project is unique, as it brings together various research fields into a common setting, allowing physical oceanographers to interact with marine biologists -- and explore the interactions between different parts of the natural environment.

Named after the Norwegian explorer who first sailed through the Northwest Passage, the Amundsen has been equipped with 11 labs and research stations. One is specially designed for radioactive research. Another is kept at -22 C to allow scientists to study ice that is still frozen.

A "moon pool" has been cut out of the ship's hull to allow researchers to lower equipment into open water from inside the vessel, rather than braving the Arctic cold to cut holes in the sea ice.

Scientists working on the ice are studying what makes snow fly into the air to create whiteouts and blizzards, developing climate models that could someday be used on Mars and recording polar bears' tracks to assess their habitat.

Barren as the ship's surroundings appear, they are surprisingly alive. Biologists are dredging up samples of sea mud -- and even thick chunks of ice -- teeming with microbial life; physical scientists have lost equipment to Arctic foxes chewing through cables; and the moon pool is frequented by seals who use it as a breathing hole.

Many of the faces on the science crews are young, as interns and graduate students collaborate on projects that will earn them degrees and mentions in scientific journals. They are drawn by the sense of adventure and the growing importance of the Arctic to understanding the world.

"We are starting a new era where we are building up expertise for Canada for polar research science," said the ship's captain, Germain Tremblay.

At $26,000 a day, the Amundsen is an expensive lab. Just 10 years ago, such an investment in Arctic science would have been inconceivable. But Canada's commitment to Arctic science has surged in recent years.

Between 1997 and 1999, Canadian scientists used this country's icebreakers to study the North Water polynya, an enormous body of water on the eastern coast of Ellesmere Island that remains ice-free year-round. Now the Amundsen, with its state-of-the-art suite of instrumentation, is propelling Canada onto the world stage for Arctic research.

"Canada is on the map again as a leadership country for Arctic research," Deming said.

"Without this icebreaker, without this facility, our level of understanding would still be very, very primitive," said Tim Papakyriakou, a University of Manitoba geographer who is studying the Arctic Ocean's ability to absorb greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. "We've learned a tremendous amount since the late '90s, when these programs have become more or less regular."

The CASEP mission ends in September, when the Amundsen will return to the St. Lawrence to escort ships through the frozen river for the winter. However, Ottawa has already committed $25.7 million to devote the Amundsen to summertime Arctic science for the next four years under a project called Arcticnet.

Fortier hopes that money will be renewed for decades more. Despite the new wave of funding, Canada is still a long way from meeting its Arctic research obligations, he said.

For example, despite its limited northern coastline, the United States spends $300 million and uses three icebreakers for Arctic research. A third of the Canadian land mass is located north of 60, but Canadian scientists are still playing catch-up when it comes to northern research.

nathan.vanderklippe@globaltv.ca

Arctic research makes greenhouse-gas find: Scientist shocked at rate northern ice draws down carbon dioxide from atmosphere

Edmonton Journal
Tuesday, February 17, 2004
Page: A1 / FRONT
Section: News
Byline: Nathan VanderKlippe
Dateline: ABOARD THE CCGS AMUNDSEN
Source: CanWest News Service
Series: The New Arctic Explorers

THE NEW ARCTIC EXPLORERS

A five-part series

In a joint project of The Journal and Global Television, CanWest reporter Nathan VanderKlippe travelled to the Canadian research ship Amundsen amid the ice of Franklin Bay, N.W.T.

TODAY: How arctic ice may cool global warming. ON GLOBAL TV at 6 p.m.: Talking to the scientists.

- Wednesday: Links to the search for life on other planets.

- Thursday: Researchers rely on Inuit know-how.

- - -

ABOARD THE CCGS AMUNDSEN - When Tim Papakyriakou first saw the data he had collected high in the Canadian Arctic near Cornwallis Island, he refused to believe them.

After all, what he was discovering flew in the face of everything science had hypothesized. If the results were true, they could radically alter science's understanding of how the Arctic Ocean fits into the world's climate cycles.

Papakyriakou is a professor of environmental science at the University of Manitoba. He is studying what is called the "carbon flux," or how greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide travel between the air and the water -- and, in the Arctic, ice.

Much like tropical rainforests, the world's oceans are teeming with life that depends on carbon dioxide, a worrisome greenhouse gas that humans produce in huge volumes through the burning of fossil fuels.

Rainforests draw the gas out of the air, then store it away -- effectively removing it from the atmosphere.

Land-based plants suck down about a third of the human-produced carbon dioxide in the air, and the ocean removes another third.

The Arctic Ocean is a different question. A huge body of water that covers the top of the northern hemisphere, half of the ocean remains frozen year-round; the other half melts only for a brief period during summer and fall. For decades, scientists thought the crust of ice prevented the water below from exchanging gas with the atmosphere -- the ice was simply too thick and too solid to let anything through.

But when Papakyriakou began gathering his results, he was astonished to find the complete opposite: it appeared that carbon dioxide was actually slipping into the solid ice at a dramatic pace.

His results, which have not yet been published, showed that the ice-bound Arctic Ocean he was sampling is actually more effective than the North Atlantic at absorbing greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. Even more striking, data show that the frozen waters are actually drawing down carbon at "roughly 50 to 60 per cent of what you'd expect over a temperate wetland or marsh during its growing season," he said.

Oddly enough, the carbon dioxide didn't look like it was going into the ocean. It seemed to be disappearing into the ice itself. Recent studies had showed that bacteria and phytoplankton actually live inside the ice layer -- perhaps, he surmised, they were using up the gas.

"We don't know whether it was representative or a fluke," said Lisa Miller, a research scientist at the Sydney, B.C., Institute of Ocean Sciences, who collected the data with Papakyriakou.

"If what we saw was representative of what's really going on around the Arctic, it has astounding implications.

"It means those estimates about how much of the atmospheric carbon dioxide the ocean absorbs are way off."

Because more study is required to verify the results, Papakyriakou and a graduate student, Owen Owens, came aboard the Coast Guard icebreaker Amundsen. The vessel is a specially outfitted research ship that has been frozen into the water of Franklin Bay, about 2,000 kilometres north of Edmonton, for the winter.

Using gas chambers, water samples, silicone tubing embedded in the ice and syringes full of air, they are measuring the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and throughout the ice. The aim is to figure out where the carbon dioxide goes and what it is being used for.

The problem is, Arctic ice is disappearing -- and quickly. Studies have shown that ice thickness in the Arctic has dropped by 40 per cent in the past 30 years, while total ice cover is disappearing at a rate of about 34,000 square kilometres a decade. By 2050, some scientists predict, the entire Arctic will be ice-free during the summer. Loss of ice suddenly becomes much more problematic if that ice is actually helping to filter greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. Less ice could mean less drawdown of carbon dioxide, leaving more in the air where it can cause a

spiralling problem of higher Arctic temperatures.

"That will just make our (global warming) problem worse," said Owens.

Here is where today's science becomes guesswork, however. Less ice could actually be better. Scientists still know very little about how the Arctic Ocean processes carbon, and a competing theory holds that open water could actually pick up more greenhouse gases.

If human activity is turning "much of the Arctic into a polynya (a body of water that doesn't freeze in winter), then the Arctic or polar seas may

become much more effective at removing the atmospheric carbon than they currently are," Papakyriakou said.

"There's lots of different scenarios which may come into being and there's no way you can anticipate ... what may happen in the future if you don't understand how those processes operate under current conditions," he said.

"There are really no numbers (on carbon exchange) for the polar seas at this point and this is something that we're trying very hard to fix.

"We're heading into a very interesting stage of polar science," he said.

nathan.vanderklippe@globaltv.ca

Key to one of the great mysteries of the universe lives in Arctic ice: Bacteria help scientists search for signs of extraterrestrial life

Edmonton Journal
Wednesday, February 18, 2004
Page: A1 / FRONT
Section: News
Byline: Nathan VanderKlippe
Dateline: ABOARD THE CCGS AMUNDSEN
Source: CanWest News Service
Series: The New Arctic Explorers

THE NEW ARCTIC EXPLORERS

A Five-Part Series

In a joint project of The Journal and Global Television, CanWest reporter Nathan VanderKlippe travelled to the Canadian research ship Amundsen in the ice of Franklin Bay, N.W.T.

Today: Links to the search for life on other planets. ON GLOBAL TV at 5:30 p.m.: Why the Canadian Arctic is like the Amazon rain forest.

- Thursday: Researchers rely on Inuit know-how.

- - -

ABOARD THE CCGS AMUNDSEN - The ice is alive.

It's hard to believe, looking out over an endless frozen stretch of brilliant ice and snow, packed almost a metre thick atop the waters of Franklin Bay. The air temperature hovers around -35 C, and the top layers of ice are about as cold.

But it's not dead -- far from it. In the last three years, scientists have discovered an entirely new habitat in one of the most extreme places on Earth.

Using MRI scans and frozen microscopes, scientists have found that the winter sea ice is filled with a network of millions of criss-crossing tunnels and pockets teeming with life.

Though it looks solid and impenetrable, the ice is actually a microscopic ant hill, packed with bacteria.

The discovery could one day help scientists unlock one of the great mysteries of the universe: whether life exists on other planets. What researchers learn in the Canadian Arctic will help them design experiments and probes on future NASA missions to look for life far away from Earth.

Jody Deming and Eric Collins are astrobiologists. Deming is a professor at the University of Washington; Collins is a master's student studying under her.

Both are researching the Arctic from aboard the Amundsen, a Canadian Coast Guard research vessel frozen into the sea ice at 70 degrees north.

For astrobiologists, the best hope of finding life on other planets doesn't lie in discovering cities of little green men. In fact, both Collins and Deming doubt we will find intelligent life elsewhere in our solar system.

But there is water in the polar ice caps on Mars and the thick, frozen ocean on Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, and both could support microscopic bacterial life.

"The actual environments that we can explore in my lifetime, in the lifetimes of my students and maybe the three next generations, are frozen environments," Deming said.

To find extraterrestrial life, Deming and Collins want to first understand how bacteria live and thrive in Earth's most extreme conditions. So they came to the Arctic Ocean, looking for the most inhospitable place on Earth for life to grow.

"As humans we think it's a terrible environment, but these bacteria don't. They die if it warms up," Deming said. "We're looking at the possible extinction of these ice organisms if we lose the ice cover."

Deming has spent her entire career finding life in impossible places.

In 1983, she co-authored a paper showing that bacteria discovered near undersea hydrothermal events could live in extraordinarily hot conditions. In lab experiments, she found that the "bugs," as she calls them, thrived in temperatures as high as 250 C and pressure 250 times greater than the normal atmosphere.

Unlike her work on bacteria in extreme conditions inside the laboratory, Deming says Arctic research is particularly satisfying. The pervasive cold and hostile environment place her in the same conditions as the bacteria, allowing her, in a way, to think like the bugs, she says.

The work itself is brutal.

His beard and eyebrows frozen into icicles, Collins uses a hand-powered auger to pull up an ice core, a tubular cross-section of the ice, which he then saws into 10-centimetre lengths for individual study. To avoid contaminating the samples, Collins exchanges his polar mittens for thin latex gloves -- the hot packs he slides into the gloves are hardly enough to keep his fingers from freezing.

"We'll melt it all here and filter it on the ship (to isolate the bacteria) and then we'll take everything back to analyse at home," he says.

The bacteria don't live in the ice itself. As seawater freezes, the ice crystals squeeze out tiny amounts of concentrated liquid salt, called a brine.

As much as eight per cent of the ice is actually made up of the brine, which can be 10 times saltier than normal water and remains liquid throughout the winter.

Scientists have discovered bacteria living in the brine even as temperatures drop to -20. And there's a lot of them: bacteria counts have found as many as a million bacteria living in a single millilitre of ice. Most are extreme-adapted bacteria that only live in very cold or very hot places.

Their ability to survive appears to depend on a curious cold adaptation: supple innards.

Deming and her colleagues have completed a complete gene sequencing of a strain of one bacterium and discovered that its enzymes are unusually flexible, allowing them to function even in very cold temperatures.

Much more needs to be learned, and in their work from the Amundsen, the researchers are trying to find out how the bacteria populations evolve as winter progresses and discover more about what allows the bacteria to live in such frigid temperatures.

As they do, they keep an eye to the sky, both certain that humans will find life elsewhere.

"The ubiquity of life on Earth is really amazing," Collins said.

"Life can live anywhere that there's sufficient water, basically, and some form of energy to take advantage of. And those factors are present in lots of places in the universe."

nathan.vanderklippe@globaltv.ca

Traditional knowledge helps point way for new science

Edmonton Journal
Thursday, February 19, 2004
Page: A1 / FRONT
Section: News
Byline: Nathan VanderKlippe
Source: CanWest News Service
Series: The New Arctic Explorers

A FIVE-PART SERIES

In a joint project of The Journal and Global Television, CanWest reporter Nathan VanderKlippe travelled to the Canadian research ship Amundsen in the ice of Franklin Bay, N.W.T.

- TODAY: Researchers rely on Inuit know-how. ON GLOBAL TV at 5:30 p.m.: Life abounds in and under the Arctic ice.

- - -

ABOARD THE CCGS AMUNDSEN - It's late in the morning but the northern lights are still playing in the sky as Francis Ruben walks down a precipitous gangplank onto the frozen waters of Franklin Bay.

Dressed in heavily insulated military gear and a snow-white balaclava against the -34 C cold, Ruben makes his way alongside the hulking port side of the icebreaker Amundsen to a neatly assembled group of snowmobiles.

In his mittened hands he carries a hair dryer. Plugging the dryer in, he swings open the front cover on one of the snowmobiles and points the dryer at the engine block.

A few minutes later, he tugs on the pull-cord. The snowmobile roars to life. He takes the hair dryer to the next in line.

An Inuvialuit elder from Paulatuk, Ruben is one of several wildlife observers on rotating duty aboard the Amundsen, Canada's first icebreaker dedicated to scientific research.

The newly christened ship is spending the winter parked in the thick sea ice of Franklin Bay, about 2,000 kilometres north of Edmonton.

That places it right in the backyard of Paulatuk, a town of 300 located 120 kilometres to the southeast.

Although it's been 12 years since Ruben was last out on the ice, it's an area he knows well: "It's cold and it's nice being on home ground."

As scientific interest in the North has grown, so too has the realization that traditional knowledge is an important resource in understanding the land and the changes it is undergoing.

The Inuit have inhabited this land for thousands of years. Through oral traditions passed on by elders they have developed a detailed insight into the Arctic and the plants and animals that inhabit the region.

Wildlife observers like Ruben are paid to monitor for dangerous wildlife and to aid researchers with their knowledge.

As he helps scientists haul equipment for an insulated tent, Ruben points to a spot on the distant cliffs on the horizon, a place known as the Smoking Hills, where seams of coal have been smouldering for centuries.

"It's not foggy but you know just like when you have a little fire there's a little mist," Ruben said. "It's the only one recorded around this country, anywhere in Canada."

"We're working in an environment where we're foreigners, where we're very naive," said Tim Papakyriakou, a University of Manitoba researcher studying greenhouse gases in the Arctic. "(The Inuit) have such an intuitive sense for the environment that certainly we don't have."

Traditional knowledge and Inuit collaboration are expected to play a vital role in Arcticnet, an ambitious new Arctic research program that will use the Amundsen to study the Arctic's climate, health and society over the next four years, and perhaps into the next decade.

"It's to have some integration of Inuit expertise and knowledge into what we're doing," said Louis Fortier, the project manager for Arcticnet. "If we're looking for some kind of fish and how to catch it, they will know about it."

Ruben is a walking guidebook to living and surviving in the Arctic. His hair dryer trick saved long minutes of arm-wrenching attempts to cold-start research snowmobiles.

As he works, he explains the surroundings to the researchers and Coast Guard crew; some are seeing the sea ice and barrenlands for the first time.

Each day Ruben is assigned to accompany scientists who travel from the ship to ice research camps located as much as 10 kilometres away. A rifle slung across his back for protection against polar bears, he nimbly guides his snowmobile through dense fields of ice blocks heaved up by the sea.

His eyes continually scan the horizon looking for polar bears. At this time of year, the bears are on the move, he said, and can amble over as much as 80 kilometres of ice in a single day. Ruben can read the bear's tracks to tell the gender and size of the animal.

"When they make a step they're usually four feet from one step to the next," he said.

"But the smaller bears, the eight-footers, they're about three feet from touch to tip. So it's quite tricky sometimes."

Previous wildlife observers have had to use their snowmobiles to chase polar bears away from researchers, who are thankful they haven't had to resort to using their own rifles in self-defence. In this part of the world it takes less paperwork to account for a dead human than for a dead bear.

Although he has hunted polar bears before, Ruben is looking forward to seeing one just so he can take photographs.

A carver who lives off the proceeds of his art, he says working outdoors is a chance to reconnect with the land.

"Out on the land I get myself reacquainted with reality again," he said.

"When I go back to town I can readjust myself to that in an instant. But readjusting yourself out on the land takes time."

It's also a chance to dig into the wealth of knowledge found in the researchers on the ship.

"What I'm really interested about is what they find underwater," he said.

"Most of us northerners don't really have the picture yet about what's under the water and what's keeping all the seals alive and the fish. So to us it's pretty important.

"When I get home I'm going to have a presentation to the hunters' and trappers' association on what I learned. I'm sure they'll be surprised."

nathan.vanderklippe@globaltv.ca