Return from the Arctic - Summary of Climate Change at the Arctic's Edge

I have recently returned from my adventure participating in Earthwatch’s expedition Climate Change at the Arctic’s Edge based at the Churchill Northern Studies Centre east of Churchill Manitoba along the western coast of Hudson Bay.

Before I left last month, I posted an outline of the areas of concern in the arctic and sub-arctic regions, particularly permafrost, sea-ice melt, treeline shift and habitat degradation threatening many species, including, of course, the polar bear.

Our work last month focused on monitoring and recording snowpack conditions in a variety of ecosystems. Churchill is an ideal location for such work since the region ranges from sub-arctic boreal forest to peatland to arctic tundra. This sub-arctic/arctic transition zone is particularly vulnerable to changing environmental conditions, and has been an area of study for Dr. Peter Kershaw, the project’s lead scientist, starting in the 1970’s in the MacKenzie Mountain range of the Yukon Territories. Heading back after sampling a With the assistance of Earthwatch, Kershaw is able to bring to bear a team of data gatherers to help bring the same focus to Churchill and the surrounding environment.

There’s an irony of going to such a cold place to study “global warming” (an irony entirely lost on some people: While up there I recieved an email from a visitor of my blog at globalwarminisreal.com questioning the reality of climate change because of the “three feet of white global warming” outside his front door… sigh). To come back with a few frostbitten fingers (all expected to fully recover) acquired from digging around in the snow in -50C wind chill helps bring that irony home.

Snow Pits:
Examining snow crystals So what exactly, did our team do up there? As I said earlier, our goal was to monitor and record conditions through the transition of forest to arctic tundra. When Dr. Kershaw began his work in the Churchill region, he chose 11 sights that best represented that transition.

Each day we would “ride out” (in what I now call the “dread sled”) to a one of those sites. If it was a long ride, we’d stay out all day and take lunch in the field (fortunately, there was a hunting cabin available for those days so we could warm up a bit) before moving on to the next site. Otherwise, we would work one site in the morning and one in the afternoon, with lunch back at the CNSC, our base of operations.

Some days the weather didn’t permit us to go out at all (yes, it can actually get too cold to send mere mortals out). The first two days of the project blizzard conditions prevented any field work, setting us back from the outset. We did what we could to maintain an aggresive pace afterward, but by the end of the project we had to leave one site unsampled.

The group of 12 volunteers was broken down into five teams of 2 or 3 people. In addition to Kershaw, the “principal investigator”, the team was also assisted and directed by CNSC scientific coordinator Dr. LeeAnn Fishback, technical coordinator Carley Besler, and Krista, an assistant and masters student-in-residence at CNSC (my apologies to Krista for not remembering her surname).

Each team was responsible for digging at least two snow pits per site. Each pit was dug to the ground surface. For each pit we recorded a variety of data including pit depth, the number of snow “layers”, layer depth, snow crystal type for each layer, temperature from the ground and every 5 centimeters to the snow surface, air temperature, snow density, and snow hardness.

At each site, 11 snow core samples were taken, measured, and weighed. Three samples from each site were bagged and returned to CNSC, where it was melted and tested for conductivity and pH levels.

All data recorded in the field was entered into a master spreadsheet. At the end of the project, the team’s data was added to Kershaw’s ongoing dataset, helping to set a baseline of environmental conditions and thus better assess how those conditions are changing.

Science is slow, methodical, and painstaking work. As such no groundbreaking revelations came forth from our project. With every bit of data collected and recorded, however, the picture of environmental stability and change in the north gets sharper. And what happens in the north effects directly and is a harbinger of change globally.

The experience gave me a much better understanding of this process, of science conducted on the ground (literally), that helps forward our understanding of climate change.

My hat’s off to all those that spend their lives doing this work.

Carley Bassler – technical coordinator at CSNC
Video produced by William Berry