Lessons of the Arctic

PETER CALAMAI PHOTO

A victim of cabin fever, freelance journalist George Tombs emulates Patrick McGoohan's character in the classic television series, The Prisoner.

OTTAWA – There was barely time for a visit to the bar Thursday before a Bandierante aircraft from Kenn Borek Air arrived on the ice airstrip having dodging the freezing rain which had scrubbed an earlier flight. A little more than 24 hours later, Air Canada delivered me back here.

More reflection on the experience will no doubt come with time. But here are 10 valuable lessons I learned during three weeks aboard the Canadian Coast Guard’s icebreaker Amundsen:

1. It’s not a good idea to use the last dregs in a helium cylinder to inflate a weather balloon. They’re likely diluted with nitrogen and the radiosonde won’t ascend.

2. Drinking coffee before a long helicopter flight is a really, really bad idea. Unless there’s an empty water bottle.

3. Muskox meat is available free at Sachs Harbour on Banks Island¸ providing you have some way to take it away. The muskox are killed for qiviut, the unshrinkable underwool that’s eight times warmer than sheep’s wool and which sells for high enough prices to recoup shipping costs. The meat doesn’t.

4. Cabin fever is a real danger. The photograph shows journalist and Conrad Black biographer George Tombs shouting “I am not a number” as he unsuccessfully tries to escape from the airport at Sachs Harbour. Burlap bags of qiviut can be glimpsed behind to his right.

5. The afternoon crew break at three o’clock is when fresh-backed cookies appear  in the Amundsen cafeteria. The chocolate chip are better than anything in Toronto at any price. Trust me on this. 

6. The best Arctic clothing and gear is made in Norway, except for boots where Canada excels. The really neat Norwegian item are the armoured gloves used by the fishery workers, which were great when hauling rope and grasping frigid metal parts out on the ice floes here

7. The pilots and planes of Kenn Borek Air deserve their stellar reputation for flying in dicey conditions at both ends of the Earth.

8. Running boards are a wonderful idea that should be reintroduced. Try getting on or off a snowmobile with an artificial hip and Baffin boots and you’ll discover how useful that step-up is.

9. Woman truly get the chance to show their mettle in the Canadian Coast Guard, from “matelots” (seamen) through logistics officers up to captain. It’s a much better career choice for a young woman than the Canadian merchant marine. You’ll have to trust me on this as well. I don’t want to get anyone in trouble.

10. Home is best.   

Make that a double

STILL ABOARD CCGS AMUNDSEN—“The flight from Inuvik has been cancelled. All those people who were scheduled to leave will still have to vacate their rooms. Please see me about finding some place to sleep.”

That was the unwelcome inaugural announcement by Dave Barber, the new chief scientist on the Amundsen research icebreaker.

The ever-efficient Amundsen office staff did find me — and the half-dozen others also marooned here — a place to lay our heads for the night.

But it could be more than one night. The forecast is for the poor weather to continue, after three weeks of nothing but sunny skies.

Such delays are par for the course in the Arctic. As well, we were a day late getting here three weeks ago because of mechanical problems with the charter flight that brought a crew change and a new team of scientists to Inuvik.

So the Arctic is simply getting that day back. Luckily it’s bar night on the Amundsen, and I believe new stock arrived on one of the two charter flights that did make it in earlier today.

 

A steady hand on the wheel

AT THE HELM CCGS AMUNDSEN—For 20 exhilarating and anxious minutes yesterday, I got to steer a 6,000-tonne icebreaker knifing through the Arctic ice floes.

Photo by Amundsen captain Lise Marchand

Peter at wheel -- Star science reporter Peter Calamai stares ahead intently as he tries to steer the icebreaker Amundsen on a steady course.

Like most things that you watch experts do, it was nowhere as easy as it looks.

The anxiety was mostly on my part. The Amundsen’s captain Lise Marchand, who was taking my photograph, remained her usual placid and reassuring self.

The real helmsman on that watch, Vincent Gagnon, stood beside for a few moments to emphasize some of the trickier points of the job but soon wandered off.

Then it was an aging reporter alone against the hostile frozen Arctic Ocean.

(So long as you forget about the captain, quartermaster and another bridge officer, not to mention Vincent and his replacement Eve Guilbault who later took back the wheel.)

For anyone who knew what they were doing, this would have been a cakewalk. The Amundsen was retracing a path it has broken earlier in the day through relatively thin ice. We were making a mere 2.6 knots (“slow ahead”) to give scientists and crew time to clean up from a messy coring of bottom sediments. No one wanted that mud tracked back to our home berth in the ice. There was very little wind.

All the amateur helmsman had to do was keep the Amundsen centred in the already broken track. It’s not as easy as it sounds.

Remember the old joke about stopping the Queen Elizabeth II liner? Start before you know you have to.

Well it’s true with a 98-metre-long vessel as well, even one that’s just puttering along well below the potential top speed.. When you turn the wheel everything happens in slow motion.

PHOTO BY AMUNDSEN CAPTAIN LISE MARCHAND

Vincent Gagnon, one of the Amundsen's real helmsman, keeps his gaze on the ice while Star science reporter Peter Calamai looks down to check the ship's bearing on an engraved brass scale on the wheel.

The problem is that it keeps on working. I can’t remember whether the correct term is understeer or oversteer but you crank the wheel 20 degrees to port and the bow of the ship just keeps going straight ahead. Then, slowly the whole mass starts to swing left. Before you realize it, however, you’ve pointed one of the Canadian Coast Guard’s Class Three icebreakers right into an endless vista of unbroken ice. Maybe not that thick ice, but an awful lot of it.

Crank back frantically to starboard and wait anxiously for the response. Again, in slow motion, the bow swings back towards straight ahead … and then keeps on swinging, so now the ship is crunching along the right-hand margin of the path cleared that morning.

So for the first 10  minutes or so, the Amundsen slalomed its way south of Banks Island in the Western Arctic. If any of the other crew or scientists not on the bridge noticed, they were kind enough not to say anything.

Once the vessel was going more or less in a straight line, I got cocky and began chatting about photographic gear with Captain Marchand who, like me, shoots with a Nikon D200 single lens reflex camera.

The ice floes had other ideas. Something nudged the side of the ship (or maybe one propeller whacked a frozen chunk) and suddenly we were doing a marine imitation of a dog walking, at a five-degree angle off the perpendicular.

I’m fairly sure of that statistic because the person at the helm faces a panorama of electronic information displays, at least three showing the ship’s bearing. That bearing is also engraved on brass circles down at the centre of the wheel. Strangely I found myself looking more at that old-fashioned display more often than the modern LED readouts.

After 20 minutes I asked Eve Guilbault to please take over the task. Already my shoulders complained about keeping them tensed and my eyes ached.

Real Coast Guard wheelpersons may have to keep their concentration at a peak for an entire four-hour watch and often operate in the foulest weather. Whatever they’re paid, they earn every penny. And more.

 

Left on an ice floe with guns and chicken-baited traps

PETER CALAMAI PHOTO

Stig Falk-Petersen, of the Norwegian Polar Institute, finds his chicken bait didn't lure any tiny amphipods to a trap lowered through the ice.

ABOARD CCGS AMUNDSEN – Here are the names of the four men and two women left behind today on the ice south of Banks Island: Luc Michaud and Pascal Massot, both of Laval University; Stig Falk-Petersen of the Norwegian Polar Institute; crewman Philippe Guillot; Andrea Rossnagel and Alexis Burt, both of the University of Manitoba. The parka-clad party rapidly dwindled to invisibility as this Coast Guard icebreaker shrugged free of its most recent frozen parking spot and sped west.

Nobody waved goodbye.

That’s because this isn’t some deep-freeze version of marooning Captain Jack Sparrow in the film Pirates of the Caribbean. The plan is for the sextet to get back on the ship when the Amundsen returns to its starting point this evening.

The scientists on board for the current leg of the 10-month climate-change expedition asked the Coast Guard to shift the ship several kilometres to the west so they weren’t fouling their own nest by plunging a steel grab bucket into the ocean floor about 200 metres below.

At the same time, other researchers were getting anxious because several days of trawling through holes in the thick floe had netted little of consequence. So the sextet stayed behind to continue that heavy-duty ice fishing.

They have radios, food, water, snowmobiles, a Bombardier snow-grooming machine with a large heated cab and two tents erected earlier on the ice for shelter if the ship had to be evacuated.

The shore party (floe party?) also boasts a higher ratio of Canadian-certified gun-handlers than most groups who venture onto the ice from the Amundsen. Three of the six are qualified to try to bring down a polar bear with a 12-gauge shotgun or .308 calibre rifle.

Despite such assurances, right now with a wind gusting between 10 and 15 knots it feels like minus 35 C out on the ice.

Stig won’t mind. Stig is my cabin mate. He’s a tall, trim, 58-year-old marine biologist from Norway but he leaves here garbed in multiple layers and looking like a dark version of the Michelin tire man.

“I don’t like to be cold and on the ice it is always cold unless you dress right,” he  explains.

Stig is a senior scientist with the venerable Norwegian Polar Institute which began life in 1928. His curriculum vitae (.pdf) runs for 25 pages. He could sit back and let more junior researchers do the grunt work.

Yet Stig is forever finding reasons to go out on the ice even though he doesn’t have to. Today’s fishing party is a case in point.

Stig’s research centres on tiny, tiny critters known as amphipods which he’s been trying unsuccessfully to lure into ultra-fine mesh traps baited with chicken (I am NOT making this up.) The nets used by the ice-fishing party have holes far too large to catch any amphipods.

Yet Doctor of Philosophy Falk-Petersen volunteered to spend at least nine hours in strenuous physical labour on the frigid floe with the nearest real comfort – this ship -- 3.6 nautical miles away, I’ll report back later after everyone is safely back on board.

UPDATE: After 11 hours on the ice, our sextet is safely back on board the Amundsen, triumphant in netting the first Arctic cod larvae of the season. A ruddy-faced Stig says it was cold but a "wonderful day."

The Amundsen in words and pictures

Here's an audio slideshow that gives an overview of the mission, life aboard the Amundsen and the work that his being done aboard the ship. You can watch a larger version here.

Scientists disentangle expensive gear

PETER CALAMAI PHOTO

Heidelberg researcher Denis Poehler gets an atmospheric gas detector ready for moving day on the Amundsen.

ABOARD CCGS AMUNDSEN – Denis Poehler is happy. The German researcher is heading back to the University of Heidelberg (via a Vancouver stop-over) and he’s shipping DOAS back too.

DOAS stands for Differential Optical Absorption Spectroscopy, a technique for measuring atmospheric gases at levels as low as tenths of parts per billion. Heidelberg boasts the world’s most sensitive long-path DOAS apparatus, which has been churning away for weeks from an upper level of this icebreaker.

More importantly, Denis is taking valuable data home as well, those ultra-precise measurements of the atmospheric levels of ozone, bromine oxide and – just possibly – iodine oxide as well. These may reveal just what causes the concentrations of ground-level ozone to plunge precipitously during the spring here.

“The quality of the data exceeded my expectations,” Denis confided this afternoon as he was packing DOAS up for moving day Thursday.

The German PhD student isn’t alone. Seven other researchers (and three journalists) are scheduled to leave the icebreaker Thursday. It’s called a mid-leg change because it falls half-way through one of the six-week legs into which this 10-month expedition is divided.

A better name might be the “has-anyone-seen” change.

The laboratories in research institutions on land have long been communal affairs, with researchers borrowing equipment and reagents from the next bench or the lab down the hall. This spirit operates even more in a floating research set-up, because there isn’t a central store to call on and courier delivery isn’t really an option.

But that means everything has to find its way back to the original owner when a charter aircraft is due to land on the ice in less than two days time. Often one of the biggest hassles here is finding the original packing cases, which have been squirreled away in the most unlikely parts of the ship.

(Although it’s not widely recognized, even among the British scientists on board, the Amundsen is actually the latest manifestation of the TARDIS, the time-travelling machine of Dr. Who which is much larger inside than out.)

Another danger of moving days is that vital apparatus which should stay on the Amundsen mistakenly gets packed up and shipped off. That’s what happened to a minicomputer which was supposed to automatically adjust a sophisticated mercury detector out on the ice.

For now the researcher is coping by making regular excursions to manually flip switches. But you can bet that one pair of hands will be eagerly pawing through the boxes when they’re unloaded from the aircraft Thursday.