|
 |
 |
|
|
| May 9, 2004. 01:00 AM | |
|
How Arctic diapers saved the day
Handlebar grips also useful when studying plankton Researchers must improvise a bit aboard icebreaker
PETER CALAMAI
SCIENCE WRITER
ABOARD CCGS AMUNDSEN—Although he's only 5 years old, Conrad Trela has already made a crucial contribution to pioneering research about underwater life in the frigid Arctic Ocean.Or more accurately, his long-unneeded disposable diapers have.If Conrad's father, Piotr Trela, hadn't stuffed several of those diapers into a vulnerable part of a special underwater camera, a unique experiment probably would not be taking place now aboard Canada's new research icebreaker.The diapers soaked up traces of sea water seeping into the battery compartment as the camera, called a plankton video recorder, was winched more than 200 metres to the bottom of Franklin Bay in the western Arctic, where the Amundsen has been frozen into the ice since November."The pressure was bending the canister that holds the gel-pack batteries and sometimes a little water would get in," explains Trela. "If that got on the wires, it would short out the batteries for sure and maybe even zap my camera."Before the Amundsen's mission winds up in September, that camera will have taken between 50,000 and 100,000 candid snapshots of the myriad underwater denizens that are part of a thriving web of life in an ocean once thought to be largely dormant under a thick ice cover.The story of Trela's video recorder exemplifies the difference between the chaotic make-do reality of scientific investigation in the field and the sanitized version presented in conferences and academic articles. And the diapers are just one of many examples of ingenuity and improvisation by the four dozen researchers who use this vessel as a base for six weeks at a stretch, cut off from their normal channels of supplying and repairing equipment.The saga began last year at Newfoundland's Memorial University, where Trela is a biological oceanographer at the Ocean Sciences Centre. Working with professor Don Diebel, his supervisor and a principal investigator on the Amundsen's current mission, Trela assembled his own video plankton recorder."This is the Honda Civic version," proudly proclaims the gangly and affable 44-year-old.Although these specialized cameras began cropping up in ocean research a decade ago, they have never been used extensively in the Arctic. At their heart is a strobe light that provides illumination for an underwater video camera to capture 30 images a second as the metal frame holding its components and other sensors is winched through the water column.Diaphanous creatures normally squashed into goo by the mesh of nets — the Old Faithfuls of ocean biology — can be captured on video in all their delicate beauty. With a picture transmitted every 10 or 20 centimetres, depending on winch speed, the camera also divides the water column into much thinner slices than nets do, letting scientists measure small-scale changes in light levels or the makeup of marine life.As the name implies, these cameras are primarily intended to photograph the two basic varieties of plankton — phytoplankton, which makes its own carbon through photosynthesis, just as grass does; and zooplankton, which acquires carbon by eating other organisms. Each category is further subdivided into a bewildering array of creatures seldom more than two centimetres long and often mere millimetres in length.There are holographic versions of plankton video recorders that produce three-dimensional images and sleek commercial models in which the digitized images are pre-sorted by proprietary software.And then there's Trela's model, which is neither sleek nor digital. His video camera and recorder come from an industrial security system. The strobe light is the handheld kind used in factories to measure how fast a machine is turning. Memorial's machine shop fashioned the hefty metal frame.Trela's son and 10-year-old daughter, Olga, contributed other vital protection from electrical short-circuits. The rubber tubes covering two crucial connections are actually handgrips from children's bicycles, made waterproof with epoxy cement.With a big dent in one side, where the frame lost an argument with a ship bulkhead, this homemade plankton video recorder might be laughable — except for one thing: It works. Which is more than can be said for the sleek commercial version, with its onboard computer boasting 27 gigabytes of memory, which was part of the $9 million worth of instruments loaded on to the ship. It developed software hiccups on the second leg of the voyage and now sits forlornly in a corner. "They didn't want me to bring mine because they had this brand-new recorder on board," says Trela. "But if I'd had to depend on the ship's apparatus, I would have been left sitting here, doing other people's research." The Memorial researcher didn't know for sure that his homemade recorder would work in the deeper parts of the Arctic Ocean because there had been time for only one rushed trial in the relatively shallow waters of Conception Bay. More importantly, he didn't know if there was going to be much underwater life that it could photograph."We turned it on for the first time and there were images everywhere," he says. "We were pretty excited."After four months aboard the ship, often making underwater recordings twice a day, Trela still radiates excitement as he points out grainy white flashes on the video monitor."That's a medusa, the thing that looks like a jester's cap. There's a sea arrow, a chaetognath. It's a predator. Those are ctenophores, which just become goo in a net. And that's an appendicularian, which we call appis for short."He also has some UUOs on tape, Unidentified Underwater Objects, but says it is far too soon to speculate whether the plankton recorder might provide the first inkling of a species previously unknown to science. Any such finding would require confirmation by actually trapping the creature."It's good to work on a ship with so many other researchers because we can compare data to help understand the bigger picture, the context," Trela says.The bigger picture here is understanding the fallout from the thinning of sea ice in the Canadian Arctic by examining what's happening in detail along the narrow continental shelf where the Mackenzie River annually dumps an immense load of sediment and freshwater.This Canadian Arctic Shelf Exchange Study (CASES) dovetails with an even more ambitious project called ArcticNet, which will try to unravel the potential impact of climate change across the entire Arctic. Federal agencies have pledged $66 million to support this research until at least 2008, with $30 million earmarked for refurbishing and outfitting the Amundsen for its research role.But the planners didn't think of everything. Piotr Trela has already e-mailed home for another batch of disposable diapers.
› Buy the Saturday Star and get Sunday to Friday FREE! |
|
|
|
|
|
|
