Researchers and crew make taffy using snow
blocks out on the frozen bay water surrounding the
icebreaker Amundsen, one of the do-it-yourself
events to avert boredom in frigid and isolated
surroundings.
Breaking the ice up in the Arctic Fun, food, friendship and science, too
Great
camaraderie aboard research ship PETER
CALAMAI SCIENCE WRITER
ABOARD CCGS AMUNDSENShould you ever get the chance to
spend two weeks aboard an icebreaker during the Arctic winter,
here are some tips:
Don't
lug along heavy tomes you've been intending to read. There
won't be much free time.
Expect
to gain weight, despite high-activity days. The meals are
imaginative and well-prepared but certainly not low-carb or
low-fat.
Consider
neck warmers an essential item of clothing. But also pack some
short-sleeve items because your cabin can get toasty.
Be
prepared to have some adventures, make new friends and learn
new skills.
A special camaraderie develops when more than 70 people
live together for six weeks on a vessel that's less than 100
metres from end to end, less than 50 metres side to side and
effectively three levels from top to bottom.
And that bonding is especially strong when the ship is
frozen into the Arctic Ocean, nine hours by snowmobile from
the nearest community and with the temperature outside seldom
rising above minus 20C.
That was the case on the Amundsen Canada's first
icebreaker permanently outfitted for scientific research
from mid-November until spring. With warmer temperatures, this
week the ship was freed from its icy moorage in Franklin Bay,
an indentation in the Northwest Territories' Arctic coastline
that's a 90-minute flight by bush plane from Inuvik.
The Amundsen has two rotating crews of 28 men and women
who work 12 hours a day, seven days a week for six weeks and
then have six weeks leave. The 40-plus researchers, students
and technicians are also usually on board for six weeks at a
time, although some manage 12 consecutive weeks. Many return
for a second, or even third, six-week stretch during the
year-long research mission.
Most people sleep in bunk beds, an upper and lower, in
cabins designed to maximize both storage for bulky winter wear
and the flat surfaces needed for laptops and piles of
technical papers. Toilets and showers are nearby on the same
deck, as are self-service washers and dryers.
Just like sleeping berths on trains, the ship's bunks
can be closed off with curtains, essential in the land of the
midnight sun and for people working shifts.
Then there are occasional visitors, like this writer,
who join for a mere two weeks, not long enough to qualify as a
true veteran but still enough time to get a glimpse of how
strangers manage to rub along together the devices,
diversions and demands of enforced closeness combined with
physical isolation.
"When you are all together on a ship like this, you
have to try to get along with people. You can't not speak to
someone for six weeks or avoid them in a place that's only 100
metres from one end to another," says Constance Guignard.
Guignard knows about life aboard a research ship. As a
long-time assistant to a McGill University geochemistry
professor, she's spent weeks working on two much smaller ocean
research vessels that lack this ship's high-tech amenities to
battle boredom and isolation.
The Amundsen might be cut off physically, especially
during the long Arctic winter nights, but its inhabitants are
electronically plugged in to the outside world in ways
impossible less than a decade ago: two satellite phone
systems, and e-mail and television via Bell ExpressVu. The
phone, e-mail and four of the many available TV channels two
French, two English are delivered to every cabin through a
ship-wide optical fiber network.
Yet people here aren't so well connected externally
that they lose the sense of being a community. For example,
the Coast Guard's e-mail system, called ShipNet, stores all
the outgoing mail for one transmission in the early morning.
At the same time it also downloads incoming messages
sent during the previous 24 hours.
The resulting two-day turnaround has an unintentional
effect: The delay means senior scientists are more likely to
participate fully in research and social activities on the
ship instead of devoting time to electronically overseeing
their laboratories or university departments back home.
After an initial withdrawal period, many researchers
onboard say they like being unplugged from incessant e-mail
and find more fulfilling ways to use the extra time gained.
One such way is conferring more with colleagues or
carrying out additional experiments. A pervasive air of
pushing back the frontiers of knowledge about the Arctic's
ecology means life on the Amundsen sometimes feels like the
high-energy encounters in the corridors at a large scientific
conference or the give-and-take of a university colloquium.
At least once a week, one of the researchers delivers
an evening talk explaining his or her specialized work. The
best-attended during my stay was an impromptu chat about polar
bears from a wildlife biologist forced down beside the ship by
a helicopter glitch.
The sense of community is also helped tremendously by
the inventive use of the closed-circuit television and the
computer network connection in every room. Anyone with a
reasonably up-to-date laptop can log onto a mammoth shared
drive where people post their latest research results or
prized digital photographs of Arctic scenes.
For a daily schedule of the experiments planned on the
ship or out on the ice, residents simply finger their TV
remotes. Other closed-circuit channels feature a half-dozen
views of the ship's deck, key installations on the ice and
the clear favourite seals frolicking in the moonpool, which
is a hole in the hull through which equipment is lowered.
Another channel relays that day's lunch and dinner
menus, birthday congratulations, candid photographs
(especially of newcomers) and announcements of special events.
These include film nights using the large projection screen
and ship's DVD library, after-dinner broomball and soccer
games on the landing strip cleared along the ice, a
six-week-long darts competition and pub nights on topical
themes.
Merely serving alcohol on a Coast Guard ship is
controversial in some quarters. The U.S. Coast Guard imposes a
strict 1920s-style prohibition on its ships both for regular
crew and for researchers. At least one of Canada's icebreakers
has already gone dry and, according to members of the
Amundsen's crew, there are pressures to apply that policy
across the fleet.
Judging from my two-week sojourn, closing down the bar
would be a bad idea. There are, in fact, two bars. A small one
beside the officers' dining room seems deserted. Most people,
including officers, congregate in the crew's lounge,
especially on the four nights a week when the bar is open.
It is a social crowd rather than a drinking crowd.
Graduate students trading tips about handling delicate lab
equipment, and sometimes equally sensitive supervisors.
Post-docs learning how a woman earned the bo'sun's job. Senior
researchers going down to defeat in the darts tournament.
And then there are the theme nights: national music
from the many countries represented on board, a May Day
celebration and for the final Saturday of the most recent
leg a Party From Hell with posters promising free beer for
anyone who signs away their soul.
Yet neither the technology nor the socializing would
alone knit the people onboard the Amundsen into a community
without a fortuitous mix of personalities. Among the
researchers, the tone is set by the chief scientist, a post
that usually changes with every six-week leg and sometimes
more often.
The two most recent incumbents were the University of
Laval's Louis Fortier and the University of Manitoba's David
Barber. Both are outstanding researchers in their specialized
fields. Just as important for life on the Amundsen, both are
also extroverts with an infectious zest for field work.
Among the crew, the lead comes from the captain. During
my two weeks on the ship, this was Germain Tremblay, an
icebreaker veteran who had been part of a previous Arctic
research expedition.
Tremblay takes an obviously genuine interest in the
work of individual researchers and in the overarching question
about how climate change will affect the web of life in the
Arctic. And this interest, shared by most of the crew, helps
avoid any risk of two solitudes on the ship.
Yet Tremblay himself credits the Amundsen's three cooks
for much of the bonhomie and sense of community onboard,
particularly head chef Michel Simonnet.
And with good reason. Here's a taste of what today's
Arctic explorers got to eat during one week, as described on
the ship's televised menus: Filet mignon with mushroom ragout
and port sauce, linguine carbonara, medallions of veal au
gratin et fines herbes, poached sole fillet with spinach,
pizza (vegetarian or all-dressed) with french fries, fillet de
truite homardiθre, walleye fillet with basil, sweet-and-sour
sliced turkey breast and for the special Sunday dinner
rabbit en papillote with cranberries, followed by the biggest
T-bone I have ever seen (known as bifteck d'aloyau in Quebec)
with creamed spinach.
The ingredients surface in no particular order as space
is cleared in a monster walk-in freezer stocked before the
Amundsen sailed last August, supplemented by fresh vegetables
and fruit flown in on the crew changeover every six weeks.
"We put a lot of effort into the food. People look at
the menus and say, `We're in the Arctic, are you serious?'
They expected hamburgers and other fast food," says Simonnet,
who ran a catering business in Laval for 14 years before
joining the ship.
Yet the cooks have to stay within a cost range of $3.50
to $5.50 per person for every meal, plus dish up lunch and
dinner for up to 70 people in no more than a half hour.
Simonnet says the enthusiastic response justifies the effort.
"We're a very important part of the day for all these
people. You're never respected so much as a chef as when
you're on a boat."
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Don't
lug along heavy tomes you've been intending to read. There
won't be much free time.
