At the High Arctic’s most extreme research base, it’s more than science that gets a little weird.
By Jessa Gamble
The technician looks at his watch and nods. It’s 6 p.m., pitch-black, and excruciatingly cold. He starts running. Trailing him out of the hydrogen shack is a white balloon, six-feet high but so limp it looks like it might slump to the ground. I begin snapping photos as man and balloon accelerate. The balloon flops crazily as he sprints across the snowpack in his enormous extreme-weather work suit, reflective strips flashing in the darkness, mouth gasping in the minus-46 air.
But he gets the job done. The balloon creeps skyward, eventually tugging its tiny instrument-package from the technician’s grip. The smooth liftoff is a triumph, and in silence we watch the giant white jellyfish pulsating into the darkness. It will rise 30 kilometres or more – so high that in the feeble air pressure the balloon will gain 10 times its current volume. On the way up, the instruments will make dozens of atmospheric measurements. Eventually, the latex will rupture and the box will drop to the ground.
The box, I’d noticed, reads “This is a harmless weather device,” but I’m not so sure. I’m not allowed anywhere near the shack it emerged from – the air’s so dry and charged a spark from my digital camera could ignite the hydrogen gas and kill us all. Hopefully, we would all die instantly, because the nearest real hospital is 2,000 kilometres south by airplane. Though I’d had some concerns about braving conditions at the Eureka High Arctic Weather Station, massive fireballs were not on my list of worries.
Once the balloon vanishes, I check my photos. Nothing. The whole time, the camera was dead, flash-frozen by the polar cold. It’s never seen temperatures like this -- and, I realize, neither have I. I stow the camera and plunge my burning fingers back into their mitts.
**
Atmospheric measurements are just one of scores of research projects that are the raison of far-flung Eureka, the epicentre of Canadian Arctic science and the strangest place you could hope to find in the absolute middle of nowhere. Roughly 1,500 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle on Ellesmere Island’s Fonsheim Peninsula, the base welcomes dozens of scientists throughout the year, along with housing eight semi-permanent staff, who cycle through on a three-month-in, four-month-out rotation, flying on an Environment Canada charter jet two hours from Resolute Bay, Nunavut.
Eureka’s lonesome cluster of buildings – a state-of-the-art, 16,000-square-foot accommodations facility, a huddle of shipping containers, a fuel and water tank-farm, and a few outlying labs -- is a world unto itself. Until I notice the dimness of the energy-saving lights and the pulsing thrum of the ventilation system, there’s little clue that, for all this place takes from its immediate surroundings, it might as well be a space station. Only the run-off water, collected in a reservoir in summer and forced through a reverse-osmosis purifier for drinking, supports the living bodies on the station. The rest is shipped in once a year on a Coast Guard icebreaker or flown in on a bi-weekly re-supply from Resolute.
The base is so isolated and the environment so hostile that something as simple as a power outage could be deadly. All visitors are briefed on elaborate safety systems and directed toward the garage that would likely be the last to cool down should the heating fail. For lesser malfunctions, all hands work together to serve as plumber, electrician, radio operator and IT specialist, regardless of their official job description. As our plane arrived at Eureka’s runway, for example, the airstrip lights were on the fritz, so we landed between flaming pots of kerosene flickering on either side of us.
The first High Arctic Weather Station in history, Eureka was established in April 1947 at 80-degrees north latitude in the vicinity of two rivers, which provided fresh water to the six-man United States Army Air Force team that parachuted in. They erected Jamesway huts to shelter themselves and their equipment until August, when an icebreaker reached Eureka – as it has every year since – and brought permanent buildings and supplies. For decades after that, small, all-male crews would hunker down for entire winters, going a little stir-crazy from the isolation.
The resourceful men who gave their first weather report from a tent on this spot 60 years ago wouldn’t recognize Eureka now. “I think we’ve almost made things too cushy,” station manager Al Gaudet says. He’s dubbed the accommodation complex the Sheraton of the North. “We get people complaining about crummy Internet bandwidth and I have to remind them where they are.” He gestures out the window at the icebergs embedded in the frozen Slidre Fiord. Across the ice the 825-metre-high Blacktop Ridge glows pink from the low circling sun.
During my visit in mid-March the station’s cooks and administrators are working overtime to accommodate an influx of scientific visitors. The sun has only recently peeked over the horizon and it’s the perfect time to measure the ozone depletion that builds up over winter months when no sunlight comes in to replenish the supply. Prime real estate for ozone research, Eureka is well-positioned under the polar vortex which keeps the atmosphere circulating around the High Arctic. Every morning the ozone team suits up, leaving not an inch of skin exposed, and piles in a pick-up truck to make the half-hour crawl up the hazardous road to the Polar Environmental Atmospheric Research Laboratory. For safety, they radio into the weather station at the beginning and end of the trip. Often, they’ll spot an Arctic fox or the local pack of wolves on the way.
Tom McElroy is up from the Atmospheric Environment Service in Toronto to work with his ozone-measuring device, comparing his findings to those from a similar instrument mounted on Canada’s scientific satellite. He takes me up to the roof of the bright red, metal-sided building perched on a hill 600 metres above sea level.
A thick carpet of ice crystals coats the roof’s railings and it’s hard not to get lost in the striking polar scenery as McElroy braves a gloveless few seconds to remove the cover from his instrument. It’s one of a collection of boxes on the roof – each piece of equipment is one scientist’s pride and joy. He sees me gazing off at the pink-tinged snowy ridge on the horizon and smiles. “It’s hard to explain to people back home why it’s actually fun to be out in minus-40 weather,” says McElroy, echoing my thoughts. Living at Eureka is a far cry from the hectic commutes to Toronto’s Downsview area where he works the rest of the year. He’s been looking forward to this High Arctic shift since the last one ended.
Ozone is a tiny proportion of the atmosphere – compressed to surface pressure, there’s eight kilometres of air in the atmosphere and only three millimetres of ozone. Even so, it’s enormously important for life on Earth, because it controls the amount of UV coming in. It’s not fully known how more UV will affect ecosystems, but the immediate effects on human health have already been observed: skin cancer is among the worries, as are cataracts. In fact, McElroy recently had to have the lenses in his eyes replaced with plastic ones – a lifetime of experimenting with UV led to cataracts. His newly minted eyes glitter with enthusiasm in a smiling face framed by long gray hair.
Though chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), chemicals that break down the ozone layer, have been banned from refrigerators and aerosol sprays for 20 years, McElroy says there has been no ozone recovery. Depletion has slowed but not reversed. So until that time, McElroy’s team will be watching for signs of promise.
Returning back to the weather station, we scurry to the meat-locker-style door that opens into the accommodations building. Here, just 1,100 kilometres from the North Pole, I take a hot shower. The water pressure is better than at my apartment down south. It’s so dry up here in the polar desert that striding across a carpet builds up an intense static charge. Staffers come down with pounding headaches if they forget to drink plenty of water. Meal times are a highlight of the day, as the two full-time chefs work miracles, even weeks after the last fresh-food airlift. There’s a full English breakfast served every morning and a freezer packed with ice cream, free for the taking at any hour. This place is dangerous for me in more ways than one.
In the rec room, atmospheric physicists are doing pilates exercises and playing pool. A graduate student watches Survivor while an Environment Canada researcher surfs the web on a wireless connection and sips the scotch I was requested to bring up with me. “We’ve noticed scotch evaporates particularly quickly at high latitudes,” wrote physicist Pierre Fogal. Staying up one evening with the team, I start to see why.
A Turkish post-doctoral fellow, two small red blotches of mild frostbite dancing on his cheeks, is talking about barber shops back home, how child apprentices practice by scraping shaving cream off a balloon, trying to give it a clean shave without popping it. I look at the faces hunched around the fully-stocked bar and notice something strange – they’re all bearded. Is this some sort of Eureka tradition, a la Stanley Cup play-off beards? I’ve caught them at the end of a three-month Arctic stint, after all. But each man insists he’s had a beard for years. In trying to piece together what makes a Eureka man, I secretly wonder whether their beards somehow brought them to this place.
When the sun’s gone down, there’s no more data to collect – I get the feeling these folks would work around the clock otherwise. So a handful of us pile in the truck to help a graduate student on a mission. As part of an Internet database called the Confluence Project, PhD candidate Annemarie Fraser wants to contribute photos of a specific spot on the tundra, the point where 80-degrees north latitude meets 86-degrees west longitude.
A couple of kilometres out, the truck gets stuck in a ditch and we soldier on by foot, armed only with a temperamental Global Positioning System whose screen keeps fading in the subfreezing air. We trudge through the crunchy hard-packed snow, following the device’s numbers in circles and not minding in the least – our surroundings are breathtaking and we’re just out for the hike anyway. The Sawtooth Mountains are mauve, striped with soft shadows, and my sense of distance is skewed by the emptiness. Finally the satellites triangulate to approve our position, out of sight of any manmade structures. Just as the digital cameras come out to mark the occasion, we notice a small tin pot on the ground.
It’s a geocache – a container of treasure complete with a logbook for finders to sign -- left by a major corporal with a yearning to create a mystery for travellers. After adding their own tokens to the stash, the team turns back toward the stranded truck. There’s an odd scraping sound coming from the direction of the weather station, more than two kilometres away, and it’s a while before we realize its source: Someone’s cleared off the drinking-water pond and they’re playing hockey. The air is so cold and crisp, the sound of blades on ice carries to our ears and calls us back to the station with the promise of hot drinks and warm company.
