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.

New ice, old ice

Peter Calamai

Chief scientist Tim Papakyriakou hauls garbage bags filled with snow to serve as markers for a make-shift runway on a remote ice floe where a Twin Otter is scheduled to land Wednesday to set up a day-visit research camp.

ABOVE AMUNDSEN GULF—Peering down at the frozen Arctic Ocean from a skimming helicopter is somewhat like lying on your back and looking at clouds scuttling overhead.

There’s a never-ending progression of phantasmagorical shapes, limited only by the viewer’s imagination and experience.

Someone who has spent time in southern Africa might find that the irregular checkerboard patterns formed by pressure ridges remind them of kraals, the rural mud enclosures for cattle.

Then there are the ridges that stretch to the horizon, some lines straight enough to pass for railway embankments but most resembling wandering cow paths. Elsewhere the surface patterns echo the way family farms got divvied up into thinner and thinner slices under the seigniorial system in medieval Europe.

For more than two hours today this icescape of the imagination unrolled beneath the Coast Guard’s rented Bell 212 helicopter after it lifted off from the research icebreaker Amundsen, which is temporarily wedged into an ice floe just south of Banks Island in the Western Arctic.

I joined five others on the flight: the two pilots, Bob Pelletier and Trevor Dewin; the Amundsen’s captain, Lise Marchand; the chief scientist for this leg of the expedition, Tim Papakyriakou; and Pierre Larouche, a phytoplankton researcher with the federal department of fisheries and oceans.

All of them were scanning the frozen vista with eyes much more practiced and practical than mine.

Someone experienced in reading the ice could tell that everything below during the entire 425-kilometre journey was new, formed only this winter. The clues are topography, colour and – if you get close enough – taste.

New ice is too salty to keep in your mouth but most of the salt has leached from multi-year ice and it can be safely sucked.

From the air, however, the best tip-off is the topography or surface contours. Melting and refreezing during summer smoothes the characteristic jagged landscape of new ice into more gentle hills and dales of multi-year ice.

Where wind has blown away the snow, the colour of the ice can also help. New ice is much bluer in the surface layer than multi-year ice. Scientists would cringe at my simplistic explanation but let’s just say the older ice gets, the more the top portion looks worm-riddled.

This is only a kindergarten introduction to the manifold varieties of sea ice. To truly immerse yourself look at the ice codes pages on the website of the Canadian Ice Service. And you might also be fascinated with sastrugi.

That’s an Antarctic word that Tim imported to describe the snow surface on the remote ice floe in Prince of Wales Strait where a day-visit research camp will be set up later this week.

Today we marked a make-shift runway there for the aircraft that will try to land to deliver a large tent and other equipment. If you happen to be flying over the Strait and spot a dozen black garbage bags more or less in a straght line, you’ll be able to see sastrugi first hand.

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.

 

 

A lesson in vulnerability

 

PETER CALAMAI/TORONTO STAR

The initial wave of evacuees from the Amundsen huddle on the ice in a General Alarm drill. Several score more would join after checking lifeboats and manhandling the ship's helicopter out of its hanger.

ABOARD CCGS AMUNDSEN–The claxon sounded its seven short and one long blasts right on schedule at 2 in the afternoon. If it had been a real General Alarm someone would likely have slung me over their shoulder and bundled me rapidly off the Amundsen icebreaker.

But since it was merely a drill the Coast Guard crew and scientists indulgently allowed the old-guy reporter to edge down the ship’s gangway, picking my way so slowly you’d have thought that the humongous Baffin boots (guaranteed to minus 60 C) came with stiletto heels.

I tried rationalizing that the ship was riding higher in the ice – and therefore the gangway was at a much steeper angle -- than when I managed the same feat far less tentatively in 2004.

And later, Captain Lise Marchand kindly agreed that the Amundsen was light on fuel and would ride higher. But she also agreed, with a smile, with my analysis that four more years and 20 extra pounds probably did not help my ability to quickly evacuate a ship supposedly threatened by a fire.

Another lesson which the drill brought home is the vulnerability of the cozy ship that is home to 40 scientists and roughly the same number of crew. When you’re onboard it’s a self-contained community offering warm beds, three hot meals a day, both satellite and closed-circuit TV, Internet access, lounges, a workout room (claustrophobic through it may be) and your name printed on a card outside the cabin door.

But when four score individuals are huddled on the ice for almost an hour, guarded against polar bears by several men with guns and against the cold only by their parkas and Baffin boots, you appreciate just how fragile is the bubble that protects us from hypothermia, frost bite and possibly death.

The nearest help is at least a hour-and-a-half flying time away and the planes that would come usually hold about 15 passengers.

If there were a real fire, lives would depend on whether the ship’s personnel could put it out quickly. If not, the crew would have to get the emergency supplies down to the ice right away. And an overweight, arthritic 64-year-old would have to move a lot faster.

Filling the cupboards

PETER CALAMAI PHOTO

Fresh supplies are hoisted aboard the Amundsen icebreaker after being ferried by snowmobiles from a shuttle of small planes landing on an airstrip prepared on the ice.

ABOARD CCGS AMUNDSEN–When the nearest store is a 90-minute flight away, it can be a big job ensuring that the cupboards don’t become bare.

In an impressive display of logistics an entire tractor-trailer of vital supplies was airlifted here today from Inuvik, which is a 90-minute flight each way across the frozen vastness of the Arctic Ocean.

Call it the Nelson Head Airlift, echoing the famous Berlin Airlift of 1948-49.

A grey smudge on the horizon, Nelson Head is the closest point of land to where the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Amundsen is frozen into the western Arctic ice south of Banks Island.

The low cliffs are the first break in expanse of white and snow for the pilots from Aklak Air in Inuvik who ferried much-needed supplies to the Amundsen, the first major resupply since the ship left Quebec in July on an Arctic scientific odyssey that will last until the fall of 2009.

These supplies had started their journey in Quebec, loaded onto a semi which drove to Inuvik. Then the boxes had to be hand-loaded on and off the small twin-engine planes like the DeHavilland Twin Otter, a famed workhorse, and the newer Bandeirante from Brazil’s Embraer.

Once the laden planes arrived at the landing strips groomed from the ice here, a shuttle of snowmobiles pulling sleds whisked through minus 40C air (with the wind chill) to bring the supplies alongside the ship where they were winched aboard.

Every few hours the ship’s public address system would blare with calls for volunteers to help in unloading stacks of boxes, containing everything from engine room essentials to canned goods. Human chain gangs shifted the supplies down flights of stairs from the outside deck.

The airlift had already transferred 150 crew and scientists on and off the Amundsen on Friday, plus about 5,000 pounds of scientific equipment that arrived on a charter flight.

Today another 20,000 pounds was safely and efficiently brought on board.

The astonishing aspect for any homeowner who has an garage, attic and basement stuffed with surplus junk is that those boxes have already mostly disappeared, their contents cunningly stowed away in the nooks and crannies of a vessel that is only 98 metres long from bow to stern.

The contents of a few more cartons may well disappear tonight, one of three nights a week when the ship’s small bar opens for a few hours.

Finally aboard

ABOARD CCGS AMUNDSEN–Twelve hours, two airplanes, and a chilly snowmobile ride after leaving Winnipeg, I finally clawed my way up the steeply inclined gangplank of the Coast Guard icebreaker Amundsen, a floating science laboratory.

PETER CALAMAI PHOTO Boarding the Amundsen is usually done by nosing it into some solid ice and clearing a serviceable runway nearby, as seen in the upper right of this photo from 2004.

It felt good to be back. In the winter of 2004, I’d spent almost two weeks aboard the same ship when it was deliberately frozen into the ice of the Beaufort Sea.

But now the Amundsen is roaming the open waters around the southern tip of Banks Island, the first time any Canadian ship has been mobile in the Arctic Ocean in the wintertime. (Maybe ANY ship, although you’re never quite sure about the Russians.)

For the next three weeks I’ll be roaming with it.

First priority is to reacquaint myself with the ship’s confusing internal geography, where everything always seems to be up or down a set of stairs from where you’re starting out. I have, however, figured out where cafeteria is located – in the stern on level six. And I’m headed there now for dinner.

There’s nothing like travel for building up an appetite.

Waiting in Winnipeg

The most predictable aspect of travel in the Arctic is that it's unpredictable. So often is travel there and back.

A bleary-eyed group of Arctic researchers turned up at 4 a.m. Thursday at a commercial hanger here in Winnipeg only to learn that their charter flight – scheduled to depart at 5 a.m. – was still at its starting point in Quebec with mechanical problems.

The aircraft is ferrying a change of crew and scientists to the Coast Guard ship Amundsen, which is providing a floating laboratory for a year-long investigation of vanishing sea ice around Banks Island in the western Arctic.

The plane is now expected to arrive here no earlier than 4 a.m. Friday. The 24-hour delay gives the dozen scientists joining the flight here time to deal with another perennial problem of research in the Arctic – two much cargo for the available space.

Fortified by coffee and freshly baked pastries, University of Manitoba professor Tim Papakyriakou, chief scientist for this leg of the expedition, began sorting out the cargo problem with his colleagues.

I snuck back to the room I had just vacated in an airport hotel. Fortunately it was still available, since all other hotel rooms in Winnipeg are taken because of the Brier curling championship here this week. Maybe I’ll be able to take in the Alberta-Ontario matchup before the flight leaves?

Modern Arctic explorers

The Star's science reporter, Peter Calamai, joins the Coast Guard icebreaker Amundsen (picutred below) in the Western Arctic Ocean to chronicle the adventures of Canadian scientists who are probing causes for the rapid disappearance of the polar ice cover. He follows the experts as they investigate huge gashes in the sea ice and also explains experiments carried out in the ship's specialized laboratories.

PETER CALAMAI PHOTO

The bow of the Amundsen, a Coast Guard icebreaker that houses Canadian scientists, is seen in the Beaufort Sea in 2004.