ABOVE
FRANKLIN BAY - “I am not happy about your boots. We could be on the ice for
24 hours or more if there is trouble.”These are not words you want to hear from
a helicopter pilot. If a pilot does not consider your Arctic gear up to
scratch, you don’t get on the helicopter.
And the BO105 was about to take off and fly a triangular path around the Bay
that would cover 183.8 nautical miles. Most of that flight was going to be with
only 15 feet between the surface of the ice and the chopper’s skids, close
enough to count the rings on the backs of any basking seals.
I could see
seals aplenty on the ship that will be my home for two more weeks, the Canadian
research icebreaker Amundsen. Several are always frolicking in the moon pool,
the eight foot by eight foot hole deliberately cut into the bottom of the
ship’s hull to allow scientific measuring devices to be lowered into the water
at regular intervals.
You can also
hear barking from the ringed seals who gather alongside the Amundsen where heat
from the ship keeps open a narrow ribbon of water between the hull and the
two-metre-thick ice that stretches to the horizon in every direction.
Technically, the Amundsen is NOT frozen into the ice, as you may read in the
popular press, since the hull moves freely upwards as the ship grows lighter
with each day’s consumption diesel.
But from the
helicopter I might catch a glimpse of polar bears and would certainly have the
chance to learn about the many different manifestations of ice. Ice was the
reason for this flight, or more precisely, the Ice Pic was.
A
two-metre-long white condom with a canary yellow tip, the Ice Pic sticks out
from the front of the helicopter and makes the carmine red machine look like
Pinocchio. The Ice Pic holds sensors whose electromagnetic pulses, combined
with specialized software, instantly measure the thickness of the combined snow
and ice as the chopper flies above.
The Ice Pic
had to be calibrated by Scott Holladay, a geophysicist from a firm in Toronto,
before being pressed into full-time service. That was the reason for the flight
this afternoon, on which there was supposedly a spare seat.
But not for
someone whose winter boots didn’t pass scrutiny from Yvan Côté, 28 years a
rotary pilot for the Coast Guard and certified on more than a dozen different
helicopters.
Yvan was
right to be suspicious of my winter footwear. The supposed minus 40 boots,
bought on spring sale from an outdoors store in Ottawa called Bushtracker,
hadn’t kept my feet warm out on the ice for a mere three hours in minus 18 the
other day. I’d be guaranteed to lose toes to frostbite if the helicopter was
forced down far enough from the ship that we had to await rescue.
Yvan asked a
crew member to find me some better boots. (I’m not being politically correct.
The Amundsen’s bosun, the maître d’equipage, is a woman.) But there was fire
drill about to start and the ship’s two dozen crew were busy. Just when it
looked like the BO105 would leave without me, a matelot (deckhand?) appeared
carrying a formidable pair of military issue white Arctic boots.
“They are
from the captain. He asks that you return them.”
We took off
with the captain’s boots stowed under the seat (I didn’t have to wear them,
just have them available). The Pinocchio nose restricted our airspeed to 100
knots but even then the warm and cozy Amundsen had shrunk to a speck when I
finally took my eyes off the snow long enough to notice.
You could be
forgiven for thinking that flying 15 feet above a frozen bay at 90 knots
(ground speed) would quickly pale in the scenery stakes. Everywhere you look a
rumpled white surface is unrolling, like being shot along a few inches from a
poorly done stucco wall.
Not true. To
connoisseurs, ice can be as distinctive as the appellations controllés of wine
regions. First, there’s the matter of how much snow on top, and how old. Then
there are special features such as the long windrows of snow-covered ice,
called something like sascruggi. And the degree of blueness, indicating the age
of the ice.
Finally
there’s the different character of land-fast ice, which is relatively flat, and
pack ice, which has been sculpted by currents and winds into something
resembling a white rubble yard. Our calibration route took us north from the
Amundsen, out across the concave demarcation line where pack ice rubs up
against land-fast ice, like two grinding tectonic plates. The fracture ridges
formed by this collision can have keels extending 10 and 15 metres beneath the
surface (so the Ice Pic says).
Yet
elsewhere the surface can be as thin as 20 centimetres along the “leads” where
the ice had opened and then refrozen.
Those
refrozen leads are favoured by seals as locations for breathing holes. I
stopped counting after eight sausage-fat bodies. Not only did the thin ice make
holes there easy to maintain but the smoothness of the leads affords no cover
for polar bears stalking a seal dinner.
And there
were polar bears. We saw their tracks, fresh tracks into which no snow had
drifted (not that there has been any snow since I arrived April 18.) Likely
male tracks, since the females are with cubs in dens in deep snow. Tracks and
tracks and tracks walking off to the end of time, but no bears. When the
helicopter returned to the ship two-and-a-half hours later, Yvan obliged both
Scott and me by separate fly passes and hovers to snap aerial photos. I
appreciated how gracious that gesture was only after Yvan made a dash for the
toilet shortly after we landed on the Amundsen’s deck and the engines had cooled
down.
Oh yes, I
forgot and left the captain’s boots under the chopper’s rear seat. When I
trotted back to the flight deck in a panic, a crew member pointed me toward
them with a smile.
ABOARD
CCGS AMUNDSEN – The nine of us gathered at the foot of the gangway at 8:30 in
the morning (it could have been night, since it is light here until 11 p.m.)
for the skidoo ride out to the Takatuk sampling site, just over a kilometre
from the spot where the ship has been frozen into the ice of Franklin Bay since
last November. Bombardier divides these skidoos into two categories , the light
duty called “tundra”, and those for heavier work, called “skandic.” Every
mission out onto the ice is allotted the requisite number and class of skidoo,
plus wooden sledges to carry people and gear and someone with either a rifle or
shotgun to protect against polar bears.
Our group
had a tundra, a skandic, a sledge and a rifle. As well, four of us – me and
three of the many impressively sharp and competent young women researchers on
this mission – got a lift out to the site in the warm cabin of a treaded
tractor made by Bombardier and said to cost upwards of $100,000.
The
morning’s mission was to gather about three dozen ice cores that would be used
in at least five different experiments.
Some
researchers experienced with freshwater ice contend that coring Arctic ice is
child’s play by comparison because it is less dense and the gas-powered augers
can ripe through it like ripe Stilton. That may be, but there is still roughly
a metre and a half of ripe Stilton ice to drill in preparation for the final
hand coring. That means raising the spinning auger almost clear of the hole –
to neck height to clear out ice shavings – at least six times per hole. It’s a
two-person job and shoulders quickly numb from the motor vibration.
Once that
top metre and a half of frozen overburden is removed, two other team members
move in with something resembling barber poles, except that the main colour is
yellow with a orange-red stripe winding sinusoidally along the length of the
hollow cylinder. The bottom is tipped with cutting blades. The team members
work the coring tools down the last half-metre to the water with confident,
sure turns of cross-bar handles at the top. Then they lift up the icy bounty
and trot over to an assembly line operation that salvages only the very bottom
tip for storage inside ubiquitous Ziploc bags stored in a Coleman cooler for
transport back to labs on the ship. In some case the bottom of the core is
stained a pale brown, almost like a dog peed on the snow. That’s ice algae, the
holy of holies for some researchers.
Drawing upon
previous experience in ice coring, the team at Takatuk largely moved smoothly
with only occasional guidance from Andrea Riedel, a 27-year-old PhD student.
There were more senior researchers on the outing – including a member of the
Polish Academy of Sciences and also Riedel’s supervisor the University of
Quebec at Rimouski. -- but the young team members looked to her first for
guidance.
Riedel is
here because Richard Zuk, her biology teacher at Springfield Collegiate in
Oakbank, Manitoba, organized noontime classes in marine science. After
graduating from there in 1995 she studied biology at the University of Winnipeg
and did a masters in marine biology at Simon Fraser University.
One of
Andrea’s big thrills on the Amundsen mission was explaining her research to a
score of high-school students who visited in February (the Schools on Board
program) and discovering that one girl was from Springfield Collegiate where
Mr. Zuk’s extracurricular marine science class was now part of the regular
teaching schedule.
For her
research Andrea needs the ice algae alive, so she gathers the cores into her
midriff and runs in a crouch to the Coleman cooler where a stainless steel
surgical saw (to avoid contamination) and a composite kitchen chopping tablet
facilitate the circumcision of five centimetres from the core end.
“The algae
live in very low light conditions under the ice. If direct sunlight strikes
them they could draw all their pigmentation into the centre so fast that they
explode,” she says.
We’d only
been out about an hour and a half and it’s a balmy minus 25 Celsius (they’ve
taken cores in minus 45) but there are toes which I couldn’t feel anymore. I’m
sure the saleswoman at the Bushtracker store in Ottawa believed that these
boots were good for minus 40 when she sold them to me, but they obviously
aren’t. Michel Gosselin, Andrea’s supervisor at Rimouski, tells me to ask the
Amundsen’s crew for something better.
Back at the
ship I realize that I can’t borrow the captain’s boots again (see ArcticLog 5)
so I approach the logistics officer, Laure-Anne Déry. A half hour later I am
the (temporary) possessor of size 10 Canadian Armed Forces “Bootes Muckluk
Impermeables.” The felt liner bears an label with the heading “INSTRUCTIONS FOR
THE USE OF SOCKS MEN’S WOOL FRIEZE.” It’s a comforting bureaucratic competency
and – as I discover the next day – the boots keep my feet warmer longer.
ABOARD
CCGS AMUNDSEN – I’m getting too unobservant for this reporting racket. This
morning I tagged along with my icebreaker roommate, Gary Stern, a professor at
the University of Manitoba and an expert in contaminants like mercury and PCBs.
We skidooed with two research technicians, Nes Sutherland and Joanne Delaronde,
out a kilometre from the ship to an area called Takatuk where various measuring
devices are clustered. I’ll tell you later about the particle counters, blowing
snow sleeves and crab traps and what we did there.
The news in
this log starts with our return to the vessel two hours later, in good time for
lunch. Only when I’d pried myself stiffly from the komatik (Inuit for the
wooden sledge towed behind the skidoo) did I see the helicopter sitting on the
ice. Odd, I thought, since our icebreaker offers a warm hanger on the flight
deck. Why is the helicopter out here, I asked Gary.
“They had
engine trouble yesterday afternoon and had to land on the ice. It’s really
serious and they have to fly some parts in.”
I objected.
“Didn’t I see Scott listed on the schedule for a flight this morning?”
(Constant readers should refer to ArcticLog 5 for details).
“That’s not
our helicopter,” replied Gary with a pitying look.
And indeed
it wasn’t. Of course I can’t be expected to spot the difference between our
BO105, made by Messerschmitt, and a Bell Jet Ranger 206. However, the fact this
machine was a two-tone red-and-blue, rather than all red, should have been a
clue. As well as the fact that it lacked six-inch high letters proclaiming
Canadian Coast Guard on the side.
This
helicopter was chartered to the Canadian Wildlife Service for two wildlife
biologists who are surveying the polar bear population of the Beaufort Sea
region. One biologist, University of Alberta professor Andy Derocher, was on
board with the pilot and an Inuit guide. The other, Canada’s foremost expert on
polar bears, Ian Hamilton, was now alone in a cabin near the former DEW line
station at Brown’s Harbour south of Cape Perry, which is atop the eastern arm
of Franklin Bay.
The
helicopter was forced to land because bits of the engine were breaking off
inside, probably ball bearings. There’s a handy warning light for this problem
in helicopters. It’s triggered by a detector that consists of a strong magnet
stuck right through the engine wall into the hot circulating oil. Any metal
particles in the oil are drawn to the magnet. When enough bits of metal pile up
magnetically, that closes an electrical circuit and the “engine chip indicator”
lights up inside the cockpit.
When that
light comes on, you pull the plugs and clean them and also filter the oil. If
the indicator comes on again within a short time, you land the helicopter.
Those are the rules. The chip indicator had lit a couple of days ago when the
Jet Ranger was flying not far from Brown’s Harbour. After the requisite
cleaning, there hadn’t been any trouble, until Friday when Derocher and company
had flown over our bay looking for family groups, female polar bears with
new-born cubs or yearlings. The indictor came on. The Jet Ranger landed beside
the ship and everything was cleaned. Then the helicopter headed back for
Brown’s Harbour. It traveled about 10 kilometres before the engine chip
indicator came on again.
“We had to
decide whether to put down there and spend the night on the ice or try to limp
back to the ship,” said Derocher.
So that’s
how our icebreaker acquired a second helicopter, even if I didn’t notice it for
almost 18 hours (of which only seven were dark ) A replacement engine was
ferried out by Twin Otter along with two mechanics and is supposedly being
installed as I write this dispatch.
In addition
to gaining a second chopper, we also got a surprise lecturer for the informal
series of talks held weekly on the Amundsen. There was a good turnout for
Derocher because every research team that goes out on the ice MUST have a
person qualified to carry and use a .375 rifle or a shotgun loaded with heavy-duty
shot. That’s our polar bear protection policy and until tonight I thought it
was a bit excessive, since we had this hulking big ship right nearby and could
see for miles and miles in every direction.
But then I
heard Andy Derocher say that a healthy 500-kilogram male polar bear reaches top
speed of 35 kilometres per hour in about 100 metres and can jump over big spans
of open water.
“You have to
be ready to kill the bear. Don’t aim for the head, aim for the chest near the
shoulder.
What about
warning shots? In the first place, the bear may not realize that’s what it is
since they hear loud sharp cracks a lot, from ice. Only try a warning shot when
you are very confident of your ability to get off a second, or if you have
several guns in the group.
“One of the
things that I can’t stress enough is don’t take photographs when you see that
bear. You will never get the photograph like the one in National Geographic and
live to talk about it.”
The two
dozen researchers and few crew in the room were hanging on Derocher’s every
word. They heard him talk about the usefulness of carrying flares to frighten
bears (which we don’t have), of not cooking in the sleeping tent (keen
sniffers, those bears) and of having a knife inside the tent to cut your way
out when the polar bear snatches the canvass and starts walking off with the
tent and contents, like a bag of swag.
“If anyone
is spending a night on the ice you know to put a trip wire system around your
tent, right?
Two young
men, Alex and Chris, are scheduled to spend Sunday night at that site a
kilometre away in a cozy heated structure called a Parcol. It has canvas walls.
It does not have a trip wire system. Derocher explained how to rig one out of
fine wire and tin cans with rocks inside. I think Chris headed off to find the
cans almost instantly.
Derocher
also had many intriguing things to say about polar bears themselves. More about
that in the next installment.
ABOARD
CCGS AMUNDSEN – The saga of crippled aircraft, which began with the forced
landing of a helicopter on the ice beside the ship Friday, continues to unfold.
So do our glimpses into the lives of polar bears,
First the
aircraft. There was so much flying in and out of here today that the ship’s
bridge officers should have received extra pay as air traffic controllers.
The two
mechanics who flew in Saturday evening worked through the night and into
mid-day removing the metal-shedding engine from Bell Jet Ranger and replacing
it with a spare, which they had first had to strip from another helicopter back
in Inuvik whose airframe had suffered a prang. But the engine mounts did not
align so the job stretched more than 16 hours rather than the four to six
originally envisaged.
Meanwhile a
ski-equipped Twin Otter operated by Ken Borak Air* arrived here to fly polar
bear expert Andy Derocher the 33 nautical miles (multiply by 1.15 for statute
miles) east to a camp at the old DEW line site at Brown’s Harbour on the Perry
Peninsula where the gear had to be moved to a new camp at Tuktoyaktuk, which
lies about 135 nautical miles to the west of our position in Franklin Bay.
Those don’t
sound like long distances to someone zooming along a divided highway in
southern Canada. But they can take days up here. For instance, when the Twin
Otter landed at the camp and was taxiing, one ski pranged on a rock, breaking a
hinge. The plane couldn’t take off. So a mechanic left with a replacement from
Inuvik on a chartered Aklak Air Twin Otter. But that Twin was on wheels so it
had to come the 90 minutes here to the high-class ice runway at Amundsen
International Airport. When that plane arrived, the replacement engine had been
successfully installed in the Jet Ranger but another problem had developed
which required a replacement part. (A fuel pump, I think. The pilot, an
Icelander named Benedikt Gudmundsson really wasn’t eager to recount the tale of
woe yet again.) So instead the ski hinge replacement had to be flown to Brown’s
Camp using the Coast Guard helicopter. That chopper then came back here. So did
the Ken Borak ski-equipped Twin Otter. The gear was transferred to the Aklak
Air Twin Otter and flown on with Andy, Ian and Tony to Tuk. For the denouement
of the Jet Ranger saga, see future ArcticLogs.
Now to the
polar bears. In addition to frightening many researchers into thinking about
target practice with the firearms they’ve long been carrying for bear
protection, Andy Derocher’s expositions here also took these animals out of the
realm of environmental activist symbolism and into real life.
We’re likely
to see some polar bears soon, Andy told us. The mothers and cubs are on the
move and so are the mating males and females. Andy says they are energetic
lovers but also tender ones. Derocher and his Canadian Wildlife Service partner
Ian Stirling have seen mated males and females sleeping beside one another on
the ice. And when they recently downed a male with a tranquilizer dart from the
helicopter, they didn’t have to chase the accompanying bigger male as well. He
trotted over and lay down with his sedated mate.
There’s
quite a weight and size difference. Mature males typically weigh 500 kilograms
and females about 150. The females can bulk up to twice and three times that
weight to be ready to give birth in December and nurse the pups from their fat
reserves for three or four months.
The
tranquilizer dart used for polar bears is the same kind used to penetrate the
thick skin of elephants and rhinos. If the bear is not too fat, the biologists
aim for the rump since the drug itself acts intramuscularly. For big-bummed
bears, the neck or upper arm is the preferred target.
Derocher and
Stirling are in the second year of a three-year “mark and recapture” program
for the estimated two thousand bears of the Beaufort Sea region which stretches
from Point Barrow, Alaska, east to Victoria Island and then north to Banks
Island. To get a more accurate estimate you dart about 200 bears a year, mark
them with a black splotch, note age and general condition and then get the heck
out of there before the tranquilizer wears off. An adult male’s front paws can
easily measure eight inches across and the claws will rake two-inch furrows in
the skull of another bear. Dart another couple of hundred bears the next year.
Some will be ones you marked the first year. Then repeat for a third year. With
the percentage of recapture in the second and third years, plus estimates of
births and deaths, a formula will give a darn good idea of the total bear
population.
Now about
the age and general health. While the adult bears are tranquilized, Derocher
and Stirling reach past the curved razor-sharp canines and, using dental
pliers, yank out a premolar tooth about the size of a cribbage peg. Decalcified
in the lab, annual rings in the tooth reveal the bear’s age. Males in this area
live an average of 25 years, females, 29.
The Jet
Ranger helicopter isn’t powerful enough to hoist the bears for direct weighing
but past measurements provide a guide to height, fat thickness and weight. If
there are cubs, they stay with their sedated mother long enough for the
biologists to cast a rope around their furry torsos so they don’t scamper off.
The polar
bear’s goal in life, other than procreating, is to kill and eat seals. A
500-kilogram bear can take on roughly 100 kilograms of seal fat at one go and
it keeps this pace up as long as there are seals available. It has no choice.
In Hudson’s Bay and other parts of the Canadian Arctic, female polar bears have
nothing of consequence to eat from late June when they come ashore until March
when they head out onto the sea ice with their pups. During that eight-month
fasting period, they can burn almost a kilogram of fat a day.
For how the
polar bear builds up those fat reservoirs, tune in to the next ArcticLog.
*Calgary-based
Ken Borak Air is the company that rescues stricken Americans from the McMurdo
Sound base in Antarctica when no U.S. plane can do the job. The aircraft they
fl\y, the Dehavilland Twin Otter, is no longer manufactured. Another Canadian
high-tech success story!!
ABOARD
CCGS AMUNDSEN – You deserve an explanation for why I am going to roll off the
airplane next Thursday in Ottawa as a big butter ball. The explanation is
Michel Simonnet, the head chef on this ship. To be fair, Michel’s inventive cuisine
at 70 degrees north latitude is only partly at fault. The rest of the blame
lies with the an infinite supply of Dad’s oatmeal cookies and home-baked raisin
bread.
First to
Michel. Here is today’s menu on this ship:
Breakfast:
The usual --
fried eggs with bacon or porridge plus the Thursday special which is pancakes
with maple syrup. A few people have both eggs and pancakes. Of course there is
also fresh-baked bread, both white and raisin, and all the possible spreads
plus coffee in several strengths from a dispending machine that grinds each
cup. If you prefer, there’s an espresso machine as well..
Lunch
Artichoke
cream soup (also offered at dinner)
Coq au pork with tarragon sauce or mixed trout salad (which was superb)
Rice pilaf, carrots and small peas
Choice of deserts: fruit salad cake, blanc mange, ice cream (also offered for
dinner)
Dinner
Soup
Marinated leg of lamb or meatballs with veal beef and onion
Sauté potatoes, mixed vegetables
Choice of deserts
The lamb was
centre pink. You may think this is nothing special, because you manage that at
home or expect it when you order at some chi-chi big city restaurant. However,
WE are on a ship, eight hours by skidoo from the nearest Inuit village, 90
minutes by airplane from the nearest town with mint sauce is for sale. And
there are 75 people on board, all of them arriving to be fed within a half-hour
of each other.
Let me
explain meal times on the Amundsen (and on Coast Guard ships generally, so far
as I know.) Breakfast is served from 7:30 to 8:30, lunch from 11:30 until 12:30
and dinner from 5 until 6. Except service really starts five minutes before
those posted times for the people who are about to go on watch, so they don’t
get delayed. There are two eating areas – a cafeteria for the crew nand most
passengers, and on the deck above, the officers dining room for officers and
senior scientists. The menu is the same for both and the food comes from the
same kitchen. In the officers dining room, two stewards wait on the tables. In
the cafeteria, the diners line up at a counter and their order is put on the
plate right in front of them. Since many researchers are often rushing between
their labs and the ice, it’s not surprising that chief scientist Louis Fortier
often has to herd his colleagues upstairs for the more leisurely meal service.
But he
doesn’t have to entice them to eat. Michel Simonnet and his sous-chefs Jacques
Beaudet and Celine Chalifour provide plenty of reasons to tuck in, even if you
aren’t ravenous after burning calories out on the ice for more than three
hours. Coast Guard ships from what used to be the Laurentian Region (now
Quebec) start with a cuisine advantage. It’s accepted that those onboard ships
based in Quebec are going to eat better than those on ships originating in
Halifax or Victoria. As researcher Lisa Miller from Sidney, B.C. told me before
I joined this journey, on those ships you get wieners and beans; on Laurentian
ships, it’s roast beef au jus. And Lisa is a vegetarian!
But that
doesn’t do justice to the inventiveness of Chef Michel, who ran his own
catering company in Laval for 14 years before joining the Amundsen last August.
Consider these entrées since I came on board on April 18: filet mignon au
ragoût de champignons avec sauce porto, linguine carbonara, medallions de veau
au gratin and fine herbes, poached sole filet with spinach, pizza (vegetarian
or all-dressed) with pommes frites, filet de truite homardiére, walleye filet
with basil, sweet-and-sour emincé of turkey breast, and on and on. Then for our
special Sunday dinner -- CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS !!!!! My absolute favourite dish
as the appetizer – Rabbit, en papillote with cranberry, followed by the biggest
T-bone steak I have ever seen (called Alayau Steak in Quebec) and –TO DIE FOR –
creamed spinach.
If I don’t
actually roll down the companion way in Ottawa Thursday, it will be because
Michel told me today that there is more rabbit somewhere in the ship’s freezer
to be eaten on this leg of the mission. By now, some of you are muttering about
your tax dollars. In the first place, the Toronto Star is paying room and board
on the Amundsen. In the second, the ingredient costs for meals here is fixed
between $3.50 and $5.50 for special days. Sundays are truly special because we
can buy bottles of wine from the ship’s rapidly dwindling stock, at anywhere
from $8 to $20. On other occasions, the captain has a discretionary booze
allocation for the ship’s company. We had beer with the pizza, for example. I
figured that leg of lamb was pretty special too, so the Toronto Star treated
everyone to a glass of vin ordinaire tonight. (Such largesse will still make
the hospitality portion of my expenses the lowest ever for a three-week trip.)
It’s not all
smooth sailing, of course. Salad vegetables ran out at the beginning of the week
and I have it on good authority that tomorrow would be a smart day for my
weekly eggs-and-bacon breakfast. Michel is relieved that there is only one meek
vegetarian onboard for this leg and he has no idea how the kitchen would keep a
vegan healthy for six weeks. There’s always the all-desert diet, of course. As
Michel notes, it is impossible to overdose most of the passengers and crew with
sugar. Plates of maple fudge evaporate, as does sugar pie, blueberry croustade,
bread pudding, chestnut cake and even blancmange.
And you
probably didn’t know that Dad’s Original Oatmeal Cookies are available in a
self-dispensing carton that holds four dozen packets of two cookies each.
They’re in both the cafeteria and the small kitchen adjoining the officers
dining room.
CAMP
ANGAGUK, Franklin Bay, NWT – Only those with an obsessive interest in
the sins of journalism will recognize the term “toe-touching.” It refers to the
practice, favoured by some on the national reporting staff of The New York Times,
of inserting a placeline at the start of an article after only the briefest
possible visit to some locale – perhaps no more than a couple of hours,
augmented by extensive telephone interviews. I want you to know that the
placeline on this article is justified by bone-rattling rides of an hour and 20
minutes each way from the Amundsen and by seven hours at the site. Even with my
new military issue boots, at one point in the afternoon, I wasn’t sure there
would be toes to touch.
Angaguk is a
sampling area on the ice about 18 kilometres west by south-west from the
Amundsen. It lies about five kilometres offshore from the outlet of the Horton
River. The site is a scientific substitute. The researchers planning this
mission had wanted to measure what happened during the spring when the
Mackenzie River begins dumping its huge sediment load into the Beaufort Sea.
They needed a base camp at Tuktoyaktuk near the mouth of the Mackenzie and
money for helicopter flights out onto the ice where a huge freshwater under-ice
“lake” builds up behind an ice coffer dam than can stretch a hundred
kilometres. Eventually the pressure becomes too great and this carbon-laden
freshwater bursts out into the saline Arctic Ocean. That money wasn’t
forthcoming (which is a story in itself) and so Angaguk was born as a
substitute to at least look at the effects of spring freshwater flow into the
salt waters of Franklin Bag, minus the huge slug of sediments.
The
Amundsen’s captain Germain Tremblay said that Angaguk was a “restful place, white
all around and so little sound.” That’s in contrast to the ship, where the
white has been disturbed in lots of place and everything throbs continuously
from the engines that provide our heat and electricity. When I rest my hands on
this laptop while typing, I can feel the vibrations passing up through the desk
from four decks below. At Angaguk there is a red Parcol on the ice,
semi-circular hoops over which a plasticized fabric is stretched taut. It can
be extended to at least three sections and is fitting with wooden floor panels
and a wooden semicircular end with a door.
The Parcol
is warmed inside by a diesel-fired stove and electricity is provided by a
diesel generator in a tent nearby. Some expeditions from the ship spend the
night there, cozy in sleeping bags on thin air mattresses. They have been known
to switch off the generator and luxuriate in the unaccustomed absence of
mechanical noise. That was the case with the four – two men and two women – who
had gone out by snowmobile on Friday to prepare for today’s program. We other
four followed in the BR, that $200,000 Bombardier tracked snow hill grooming
tractor I’ve mentioned before. The BR comes equipped with everything – GPS, VHS
radio, heaters, rear-window wiper, moon roof – everything except a smooth ride
over lumpy snow and ice at its top speed of about 20 kilometres an hour. The
more powerful snowmobiles churn along much more smoothly at twice that speed.
But the BR
was needed at Angaguk because, once again, chief scientist Louis Fortier was trawling
for the snot-resembling larvae of Arctic cod. I taxed Fortier with the quixotic
nature of his scientific quest, a barely visible and very elusive creature
found only in ice-covered Arctic waters.
“Yes but Peter this is the keystone species, the key to understanding the whole
Arctic productivity cycle,” Fortier replied as he stood beside one of two large
net holes in the ice.
After a pause, he threw his hands in the air and added: “But why me, O Lord,
why me!”
The group
did three different trawls under the ice at Angaguk and the middle one –
oblique from halfway to the bottom – yielded so many of the near-microscopic
cod larvae that Louis Fortier came close to erupting with joy. This high yield
was presumptive evidence that the freshwater outflow from the Horton River was
having an effect. (When we returned to the ship later, Fortier dragged me to
the echo sounder display where multicoloured blobs had detached from the 150
metre level and ascended to around 100 metres. This is almost certainly the movement
of the cod’s main food, copepods, and likely the movement of the cod
themselves. You probably have to be a cod specialist to feel the burn.)
Back at
Angaguk, however, we were all thinking about lunch after a hour chopping
through ice nearly two metres thick and the first trawl with the fine-mesh net.
The Amundsen’s kitchen had packed sandwiches for the gang but 20-year-old
Michelle Pilote, a lab technician from Fortier’s lab at Laval, had made up a
sauce ragu the day before and precooked some fusili so they needed only to be
heated over the Primus stoves. When I later saw Michelle hop on a skidoo to run
an errand, a .375 rifle slung on her back, I couldn’t help thinking of
20-year-olds at Carleton University who will get a degree but never be half as
accomplished or independent as someone spends six weeks in the Arctic.
The active
role of these young women, our instant radio communications with the ship, the
GPS signals, electricity to run laptops and the Parcol’s coziness all made me
think of the Arctic explorers of more than a century ago who froze in unheated
tents, communicated by leaving letters in caches and dragged heavy sledges
across hundreds of miles of ridged ice after their ships were crushed in the
ice, only to die when food, stamina and, finally, hope gave out. What bold
adventurers they were and we are honoured to move across bays bearing their
names.
INUVIK - Our
return to land after two weeks on the ice was a day late and a tad prosaic.
Loyal readers will recall the original departure from Inuvik airport when the
Aklak Air twin Otter, three hours behind schedule, pulled up in front of the
terminal building and the seven travelers simply humped their hockey bags out
the door, without benefit of check-in, flight announcements or baggage
handlers.
On the
return flight today we reached Inuvik after 6 p.m and the Otter eschewed the
terminal to instead taxi up near the Aklak Air hanger. The pilot walked over
and fetched a crew cab, pick-up truck into which three of us again humped our
hockey bags, or smaller substitute in my case. To retrieve this personal
baggage from inside the Otter, we first had to unload most of the 10
high-impact polysomething cases holding the survival tents and suits which had
been on loan to the Amundsen from the Canadian Armed Forces (Land Division).
The cases may have been shit brindle brown in colour but at least they were
light. Shifting Gary Stern's seven Coleman coolers would have been a different
matter.
Stern's
coolers were packed with half-litre containers holding sea water retrieved from
various depths in Franklin Bay and at different times and under varying
conditions of temperature, salinity etc. They weighed just under 35 kilograms
each, the maximum which sissy companies like Air Canada would transport.
Sitting in the Twin Otter outside the hanger, this was already the costliest
water I'd ever seen in my life -- and that includes a cocktail party atop the
water tower in Riyadh (autre temps, autre place).
Still more
expense is on the way. Stern figures it will cost $400,000 over the next year
or so to look for and measure up to 200 contaminants in a total of several
tones of water that will eventually be brought back to labs in Winnipeg from
the entire 11-month mission of the Amundsen. Also to be analyzed are a couple
of hundred cod, goodness knows how many plankton and a pile of filters that
trap contaminants in the atmosphere AND also from thousands more litres of
water drawn through underwater pumps.
I need to
use the rest of this final dispatch to fill in some of what happened between
Saturday at Angaguk (ArcticLog12) and the flight here on Wednesday. What
largely happened was a blizzard which cancelled activity on the ice for Sunday,
Monday and most of Tuesday. This wasn't a blizzard in your southern Canada
sense where people in the Maritimes have to probe with long poles to locate
their vehicles beneath the snow or the mayor of Toronto calls in the army
(oops, Armed Forces, Land Division). Franklin Bay didn't receive much extra
snow and I don't think the temperature got down to 20 below Celsius. What we
got was wind, wind that didn't let up, wind gusting 20 to 20 knots and wind
that blew around a lot of snow.
Sergiy
Savelyev was a happy man. Sergiy is a very quiet Russian whose studies focus on
the chemical and physical characteristics of blowing snow. One of his devices
looks like a stack of windsocks, four fabric sleeves arranged one above the
other and extending maybe two feet off the ground. For most of the two weeks
I've been here Sergiy has glumly trudged out in the clear sunny weather to the
meteorological site to check his snow traps and trudged back even more glumly.
Starting Sunday he trudged out through the blowing snow with a big smile on his
face.
He was one of the few allowed on the ice. The blowing
snow combined with low cloud meant that the Coast Guard officers on the bridge
could not see even the experimental site nearest the ship. That meant they
could not warn anyone on the ice about approaching polar bears. For indeed,
just as polar bear expert Andy Derocher had predicted (ArcticLog 7), with the
warmer weather a lot of ring seals had hauled their sausage-shaped bodies out
onto the ice in the bay. For polar bears this is the equivalent of a Limited
Time Offer sign in the supermarket window. And if there were some crunchy
people to munch as well ....
Even when
the blowing stopped, the 100 per cent overcast made a trip out on the ice an
unnerving experience. There wasn't a ray of sun yet even behind sun glasses or
ski goggles you still had to squint from the flaring light. The ice blended
into the sky somewhere in middle distance and then switched back to ice as if
surface and sky were a Möbius strip. Skidoos slammed into ruts and veered down
slopes because the drivers simply could not make out features in the
all-enveloping glare. Your eyeballs felt like they were on stalks as you kept
360ing the landscape looking for fast-moving furry shapes.
Being
confined to the ship on Sunday was actually a God-send for some people who had
been ardent revelers at the May Day party on Saturday night, keeping the bar
open past 3 am. That's a bit hard on the crew members or researchers who have
volunteered to be bartenders. I must admit that I had counted on this May Day
aftermath when I volunteered to tend bar on the next night, Sunday, along with
two strikingly competent lab technicians Joanne Delaronde and Nes Sutherland.
But I underestimated the stamina of young modern Arctic explorers, with little
alternative outlet for their energies. I left the bar a little after the
official closing time of 11, pleading some typing and spelling that had to be
completed. Joanne and Nes, however, were there until after 1:30.
When it came
time to settle my accounts on Tuesday, the ship's logistic officer handed me a
$20 bill and some coins. Your share of the bar profits from Sunday, she said. I
turned the money back in, figuring that I owed the Amundsen a lot more than
that for all I have learned here.
Gradually
spreading to cover the entire Arctic, until the next installment, I’m
Peter
Calamai
Toronto Star National Science Reporter
Aboard CCGS Amundsen
Franklin Bay, NWT