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."

Charging polar bear would gauge your nerve

ALONGSIDE CCGS AMUNDSEN—Until today I had fired two kinds of firearms in my life — a .22 caliber rifle (groundhog control) and a 9mm Parabellum Kommando (the Rhodesian copy of the Israeli Uzi).

Eve Guilbault Photo

Claude Lafrance, Amundsen first officer, instructs the Star's Peter Calamai in the use of a polar bear deterrent.

Against a charging polar bear, however, you need heavier artillery. Much heavier. Like the 12-gauge shotgun that I got to fire this afternoon.

The story starts four years ago when I was on the Amundsen icebreaker in the Beaufort Sea west of here. A misbehaving helicopter engine forced Andy Derocher, a top Canadian polar bear expert, to spend a night with us.

At the request of the researchers on board, Derocher gave an impromptu talk about polar bears. I’m sure there was all sorts of biological content but the part I remember vividly is how difficult it is to stop a 500-kilogram charging male polar bear with even the heaviest artillery.

According to Derocher you’d be lucky to get off more than one round at killing range and you shouldn’t even think of a warning shot. It was kill or be killed in the rare instance that a polar bear had you in his sights.

All I had in the sights of the 12 gauge was a plywood rectangle about 20 metres away over the ice at the stern of the Amundsen. Four targets of concentric circles had been hastily drawn by hand because the store-bought targets had been shredded in previous practice.

Every group that goes out on the ice any distance away from the ship is supposed to be accompanied by a “gun,” meaning a crew member or scientist who holds a Firearms Acquisition Certificate and has firearms experience. On past Amundsen expeditions, there’s often been a paucity of people qualified to be a “gun.”

It’s our good fortune on Leg 7A of this expedition to be favoured with at least two young women researchers from families where daughters learned how to use guns, One of these, Halagonian Lisa Delaney, was in a group headed out for target practice today and she tipped me off so I could take photographs.

Yet again on this trip, however, I morphed from detached journalistic observer to active participant when Claude Lafrance, the Amundsen’s first officer, offered a chance to fire the 12 gauge. At first I declined but then machismo triumphed. After all, if some mere slip of a young woman could manage, surely 240 pounds of well-aged manhood could.

I am relieved to report that I didn’t point a loaded weapon at anyone, remembered how and when to engage the safety and ensured the shotgun was handed over empty to the next user. Nor did I fall over backwards with the recoil, which wasn’t as powerful as suggested by the muzzle blast.

I probably also didn’t hit the targets with any of my three blasts. It’s difficult to know for sure since we were firing shot-filled shells instead of the slug-filled ones you’d use for really deterring polar bears. So every inch of the plywood was sprayed with tiny holes. Maybe a few were mine.

It should go without saying (but in today’s accusatory climate, who knows) that none of the researchers want the death of a polar bear on their conscience. Yet I think I could pull the trigger if the necessity arose to protect me or my companions.

But maybe the trigger of a .308-calibre rifle, the other firearm carried by the Amundsen’s  “guns.” The shotgun is best for close-in defence and I’m not keen on being that close to  anything whose claws can gouge furrows five centimeters deep into a skull.

 

Hockey day in the Arctic

ON THE ICE BESIDE THE CCGS AMUNDSEN – On the world’s largest outdoor ice surface – the entire Arctic Ocean - the scientists and crew of the Amundsen icebreaker put on the world’s cleanest hockey game this afternoon.

It must have been clean because there were no penalties during the two-and-half hours of spirited play. No referee nor linesmen either. Or blue lines or a centre line.

Yet there was a good-sized playing surface after the Amundsen’s plows had shoved snow off smooth ice that’s at least a metre and a half thick. As well there were creases and nets (wood frames with poly plastic) and a frozen orange ball that stung like blazes if you were hit.

And plenty of goals (no official scorer, though.) Plus lots and lots of fun, which was the whole idea.

Right beside the marathon hockey tournament, a smaller but equally energetic group mounted a virtuoso soccer display. An utterly unscientific survey suggested that the Europeans aboard the ship gravitated to the soccer while the Canadians preferred hockey.

But there was no curling, Canada’s national winter sport (pace lacrosse). This omission was especially unfortunate since in far-off Vernon, B.C. Canada’s Jennifer Jones was at the same time clinching the women’s world curling championship. Of course everyone knows that the Canadian rink is also favoured in the men’s world championships next month.

Well, maybe not everyone. There were quite a few quizzical expressions among the scientists when a former Ontario schoolboy curling champion (long since retired from competitive curling) proposed adding a sheet of curling ice to the snow-clearing chores.

The rocks? Fill some large discarded tin cans with water and insert a wooden handle as they freeze. Coloured circles for the house? There’s red hydraulic fluid and something called alcian blue that stains the lab glassware. Brooms? Plenty of those aboard, and not those new-fangled push ones either.

Adding pebbles to the ice surface would be a cinch. Even in today’s relatively balmy minus 22 C water drops would have frozen in minutes.

About the only serious problem is the lack of a sponsor. Hurry hard, Tim Hortons.

Wait for me!

Peter Calamai

Environment Canada research scientist Alexandra ("Sandy") Steffen and University of Manitoba research technician Debbie Armstrong collect samples of surface snow to analyze for mercury deposited from the atmosphere.

ON THE ICE – Black exhaust smoke suddenly began billowing out of the Amundsen’s funnel, a sign that the six powerful engines were being revved up.

The Coast Guard icebreaker was only a few hundred metres away. Nonetheless it’s an alarming thought that your cozy floating home is about to steam off when the temperature is minus 32 C out on an Arctic ice floe.

Of course, that wouldn’t have happened. Our trio was in radio contact with the bridge officers. As well, the captain had said she was merely trying to shuffle the stuck ship back and forth to clear floating ice from beneath the doors of the moonpool. That’s the hole cut though the hull in the stern where sampling and recording devices can be lowered into the water, as far as the ocean floor if necessary.

Nonetheless I’ll confess to some relief when shortly afterwards Debbie Armstrong announced that she and Environment Canada research scientist Sandy Steffen had finished gathering samples of surface snow from a pristine patch they’d marked with reflectors as off-limits to snowmobiles.

The two women are part of a group on board that’s researching how mercury moves through the air, snow, ice and Arctic food chain (.pdf)(And it does some very peculiar things. More about that in the Star later).

Debbie, an ebullient and impressively accomplished research technician from the University of Manitoba,  has a firearms certificate so she was toting the polar bear rifle. A close-up glance revealed something blue was stretched over the end of the barrel.

“It’s the finger of a latex glove,” Debbie explained. “There’s so much salt out on the ice that it was getting into the guns and they were rusting.”

That was the second surprise of the morning. The first came when we arrived to be lowered by a crane down to the ice in a metal cage, like miners going to work underground.

Amundsen crew members were busily scraping ice from the deck with choppers and shovels, just as Canadians do to driveways and sidewalks. But while spring has officially arrived across the entire country, conditions are going to remain wintry up here for weeks.

Hours of toil for a ship-length of progress

ABOARD CCGS AMUNDSEN—Vincent Gagnon, the Amundsen’ helmsman at the time, was the first to notice.

“Yes, it’s moving,”  he said just after 5 o’clock.

The icebreaker’s engines had been running at full for almost an hour, starting up after the crew members and scientists spent a second three hours outside in the minus 29 degree temperature to finish perforating the ice around the part of the ship wedged tight in a floe.

Initially the propellers were running in forward gear, churning water up onto the ice beneath the ship’s hull and clearing the path behind of floating ice. Then Captain Lise Marchand switched to reverse and the floating Arctic research laboratory inched slowly backward.

Now the ship is again stuck and the same manoeuvre is being repeated.

In between, however, those on board were treated to a half-hour of ramming -- something novice icebreaker sailors known about only from movies like Pirates of the Caribbean.

In this case it wasn’t another ship being rammed but a tough pressure ridge that stretched to the far horizon horizontally in front of the ship. (The not-so-far and much more curved horizon to be scientifically precise with my clichés.)

With several assaults the ship probed the snow-topped ridge. Then it backed up a half-kilometre or so and charged ahead with all 15,000 horsepower. The Amundsen bucked over the ridge, came down clear on the other side, and stopped dead.

For all that sweat in drilling hundreds of holes and for the thousands and thousands of litres of fuel expended, we’d moved forward about a ship-length.

But we know now that we won’t be stuck here indefinitely, The ship can be moved by some combination of such devices as flooding the ice with warm water, shifting ballast or  fuel between tanks and – in the extreme – transforming ice floes into Swiss cheese.

So the scientists met tonight to map out a campaign of experiments that will draw on their brain power as much as the last two days have drawn on muscle power.

A polar version of aerating the green

As in golf, so it is with icebreakers: the putting is the really tricky part.

After getting unstuck from last night’s stopping point, the Amundsen had the equivalent of two booming drives down the Arctic fairway today and a fabulous approach shot to the green.

But then we found our ship was stymied. The final destination, our version of the cup in golf, was only a few hundred metres away. But between the ship and the hole loomed a long pressure ridge. And running up to that ridge the ship stuck solid, like having your golf ball land in a deep divot.

So the crew began the polar version of aerating the green. With two crew members holding opposite sides of gas-powered augers that are head high and heavy and awkward, teams drilled a chain of boreholes along the starboard side of the ship. (It should be noted that some hardier scientists also drilled, such as Stig Falk-Petersen from the Norwegian Polar Institute).

From the relative comfort of the ship’s main deck, the operation looked something like adding perforations to the edge of a stamp.

The theory is that the perforations weaken the vise-like grip along that side. With its icy girdle loosened, the Amundsen will be able to tug itself free. We could back up and hook the ship around into another spot.

The engines have now been running full throttle for almost a half-hour and there’s been no movement. I’ll let you know how this works out.

Photo by Peter Calamai

Sweet symphony of ice breaking

ABOARD CCGS AMUNDSEN – As the song says in the musical The Man of La Mancha, it doesn’t matter whether the stone hits the water pitcher or the pitcher hits the stone, the result isn’t going to be good for the pitcher. So it is with a Class 3 icebreaker and Arctic ice that’s been formed only this winter.

Peter Calamai

Amundsen Captain Lise Marchard checks instruments on the ship’s bridge prior to moving the research icebreaker to a new position in the Western Arctic. Pull-down plastic shades provide relief from the glare of Arctic ice and snow.

The six diesel-electric engines of the Canadian Coast Guard Ship Amundsen deliver 15,000 horsepower to propel the 98-metre vessel with its 6,000-tonne displacement. Hit by that force at 10 knots, the ice peeled back like the old blistered paint scrapped from  my garage this summer. While the visuals aren’t much, the sounds will linger forever in the memory of any visitor fortunate enough to be aboard when an icebreaker lives up to its name. In the bowels of the ship, the grinding of ice against the hull is amplified into a deep rumble, like rocks being continually dumped onto a metal sheet just outside your front door.

Leaning over the ship bow, however, the assault upon the cryosphere has an almost lyrical aspect, a sliding between different pitches which a composer would mark as glissando on a score. And also resoluto, meaning to play boldly with energy.

The Amundsen was en route today to a new ice floe berth around the east side of Banks Island. But we stopped en route to gather samples of water and ice for scientific studies so we won’t be able to reach our intended destination in daylight.

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UPDATE: The musical duet of the ice and the icebreaker continued for another hour-and-a-half into the late evening and then stopped. The Amundsen is now stuck in a floe that's thick enough and binding enough to be second-year ice. We've tried wiggling without success. Now the crew is looking at pumping ballast water to raise the bow and lower the stern, giving the propellers a deeper bite. If that doesn't work, they may pump some warm water out onto the ice to soften it and lubricate the surface. I'm so confident that this will be solved that I'm turning in for the night.

A chilly data check

 

Peter Calamai

Two Environment Canada researchers crowd use a parka as a sun shield so they can read a laptop screen in the brilliant Arctic whiteness. The icebreaker Amundsen in three kilometres away in the background.

OFF CCGS AMUNDSEN—It was an ideal day for an excursion on the Arctic ice – brilliant sun, a cloudless sky, barely a zephyr of wind and a fascinating research project at the end of a short trip.

But I’d forgotten how unwieldy a body becomes encased in five layers of clothing. Without Ralf Staebler’s help I might never have managed to get my legs astride the snowmobile.

Staebler and fellow Environment Canada research scientist Alexandra (“Sandy”) Steffen were making one of the every-other-day runs from the coast guard ship Amundsen out to a suite of detectors that are constantly recording chemicals like mercury and bromine as they flit between snow, ice and the air.

It’s not quite a lab on a chip, but it is a lab on a sled. The whole instrument armoury is less than two metres long and draws a mere 100 watts.

That’s the same as a standard light bulb (of the old-fashioned incandescent kind). Even then it would take a long extension cord, since the Amundsen is 1.3 kilometres away.

In the crisp Arctic air the ship seems a lot closer, say within a Tiger Woods driver and mid-iron range. But Jacques Claveau, the bosun or maître d’équipage in the ship’s working language, points out that distances are easier to gauge from the deck, because the 800-metre runway provides a rough-and-ready ruler.

Jacques is the most crucial member of the four-person team; he’s armed with the rifle that might just stop a hungry polar bear. If he’s a very good shot, that is.

To keep the lab-on-a-sled ticking over, batteries have to be changed every two days. We’re not talking your household AAs or car battery either, but eight heavy, deep-discharge, 12-volt marine batteries.

Switching the battery connections requires doffing mittens and even cotton liners. Your fingers register the minus 25 C within a nanosecond. Maybe less.

The sled must also be repositioned to ensure that a guy rope isn’t interfering with a sensor. And since no one brought a hammer, Jacques fetches a hefty chunk of ice to drive the guy rope stake into the frozen surface.

Then comes the big moment – downloading the past 48 hours worth of precious data from the sled’s onboard computer. Sandy dramatically unzips her parka and extracts a laptop that’s been warmly nestled there.

The brand name may be ToughBook but the Environment Canada scientists have found to their sorrow that even these laptops don’t stand up well to Arctic cold. The one being used today is a spare of another make after the incumbent died and couldn’t be resuscitated.

The laptop links to the sled’s computer through a wireless connection, although there’s a metal box separating them. A far greater technical problem is being able to read the laptop screen in the stagelight glare of Arctic sun, snow and ice.

Sandy’s parka again comes to the rescue, used as a substitute for the dark cloth with which photographers shield the viewing screens of large-format cameras.

Jacques laughs at the sight of the two scientists huddled under the parka, saying it looks like one parka animal is devouring the other.

While Ralf keeps watch in the dark on the data transfer, the parka-less Sandy tries to keep warm by running in tight circles and performing calisthenics. After more than five minutes, she finally admits to feeling cold.

Fortunately the readings have successfully been retrieved and a few minutes later all four of us are back aboard the ship.