If global warming is altering the Arctic, the polar ocean will be the first to feel the heat. An icebreaker full of scientists is on the case.By Michael Ganley

On a cold, wet morning in July the Canadian Coast Guard Ship Louis St. Laurent is adrift in pack ice near the 18-kilometre-long, fjord-like Bellot Strait. A group of scientists are having problems launching an eighty-metre “mooring” off the starboard bow. Normally the floats and instruments are fed out first, to rest on the surface of the water, and then the anchor is pitched overboard to drag it all down. But the ice pressing against the hull has prevented that approach, so they’re doing it backwards, anchor first. To complicate matters, the ship’s crane is only 20 metres high, so they’re assembling the contraption one section at a time as it dangles overboard. The ship’s captain is upset about how long it’s taking.

After a couple of hours, however, all the pieces are linked and set loose – a strand of scientific pearls disappearing into the cold, inky blackness. It will be left there, in about 100 metres of water, for a year, with its dozens of devices listening for whales and seals, measuring ocean temperature, salinity and ice cover, and monitoring currents and nutrient levels. Next year the scientists will return, hoping to find it, haul it up and harvest the information it collected.

The mooring is part of “Canada’s Three Oceans,” or C30, an International Polar Year project designed to tell us what’s happening to the waters around Canada. As politicians, policymakers and the public debate the extent -- and in some cases the very existence -- of climate change and what to do about it, and wonder what the North will look like in 2050 or 2100, the scientists aboard the Louis are doing some of the dirty work, gathering data to inform our decisions. I’ve joined them for a week on the 1,500-kilometre leg through the Northwest Passage from Resolute Bay to Kugluktuk, to learn about the intricacies and hardships of Arctic research.

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As the helicopter from Resolute whisks me over the Barrow Strait, the Louis St. Laurent looms into view. She’s the queen of the fleet, Canada’s biggest icebreaker. She left her home port of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia three weeks ago, on July 4th. From there, she headed up the west coast of Newfoundland, through the Labrador Sea and Davis Strait, along the west coast of Baffin Island and into Lancaster Sound on her annual voyage, serving as a platform for science, asserting sovereignty by her very presence, performing search and rescue if necessary, and re-supplying the lonely communities along her path.

After we touch down on the aft-deck I receive a quick tour of the vessel from the logistics officer, who then assigns me a cabin at the bow -- a so-called “boom-boom” room, he says, because of the thundering racket I can expect when we begin smashing through ice. Sure enough, the next morning at 5 a.m. an ungodly thunder awakens me. I head for the bridge (I have unimpeded access to the ship) to discover not the towering ice floes I’d imagined, but a foot or two or slushy “deteriorating” ice.

Nonetheless I’m mesmerized. As the Louis crashes through, the ice cracks and rolls. The captain, Stewart Klebert, says the ship can crash through ice seven metres thick. Fifty metres behind the ship, broken ice presses into the open water, closing the slim path we’ve made in the vastness.

C3O is led by Eddy Carmack, a veteran oceanographer with the Institute of Ocean Sciences in Sidney, B.C. He’s eager to explain the mission: “You can’t understand climate change by sitting in one place any more than you can understand the Atlantic by taking measurements in Lisbon,” he says. “The whole system is one unit and we’re trying to study it as such.”

In understanding C3O it’s helpful to think of Canada’s oceans not as three but as one, linked by currents. The waters of the Arctic Ocean come from three sources: the Atlantic, which enters from the east side of Greenland; the Pacific, one million cubic metres of which flows into the Arctic through the Bering Strait per second; and fresh water from rivers and melting ice. Much of C3O is about measuring currents, where they come from, where they go, and -- when enough information is in -- how they’re changing. Currents are crucial players in global climate as energy conveyor belts. They are the reason you likely prefer wine from Bordeaux to that from, say, Nova Scotia. The two regions may be at the same latitude, but energy carried by the warm waters of the North Atlantic Drift caress the coast of Europe, giving France its wine-growing regions, England its fog, Norway its fishery. Change the current, change the climate.

Sarah Zimmerman, also of the IOS, elaborates on the ocean and its subtle environmental clues. She explains that currents are actually quite easily distinguished as they make their way around the world. “Just like a person coming from a certain country, water has an accent,” she explains. “So you look for that accent in the water.” Aside from relative temperatures and salinities, the accent might come from nutrients (the Pacific is nutrient rich) and from trace elements of CFCs or isotopes emitted by nuclear power plants.

Curtis Suttle, of the University of British Columbia’s microbiology department, shows a professor’s grasp of both students and metaphor when he likens currents to a B-52 shooter. As with a B-52, where the Kahlua, Bailey’s and Grand Marnier remain distinctly apart because of their relative densities, so with the oceans. Atlantic water is salty and therefore dense. Pacific water is less salty and less dense, tending to stay above Atlantic water. Melt and river waters are the least dense and will be on top.

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One of the places those currents meet is here at the Bellot Strait, which separates the northernmost tip of continental North America from Somerset Island. It’s a spot rich with history: On one shore sit the two remaining buildings from Fort Ross, a not-so-successful Hudson’s Bay Company post that was abandoned in 1948. Going further back in time, the Strait was missed by explorer John Ross in 1829 when he ventured into the Gulf of Boothia. Had he noticed it, Sir John Franklin might well have travelled through it on his fateful voyage, forever changing that line of history.

But it’s the strait’s rich ecosystem, and what it might tell us about the future, that makes it popular with scientists. In a sense, the Bellot is the intersection of Canada’s three oceans. Nutrient-rich water from the Pacific streams eastward through the strait and crashes headlong into Atlantic water. A sill at the eastern edge of the strait causes the water to upwell. The mixing of the waters makes the area a nutrient pump, a focal point for production of food for marine life and therefore one of the Arctic’s most biodiverse spots.

In addition to the mooring that the scientists had such difficulty launching off the Bellot’s eastern approach, they drop one in the middle of the strait and we stop for three “science stations” in close proximity. As the engines idle, members of the scientific crew lower a “CTD” into the water near the stern, to measure conductivity (the saltier the water, the better it conducts electricity), temperature and depth. Off the bow, others let down nets to catch plankton. A small scoop takes a “mud grab” from the seabed.

From a crane on the ship’s starboard side the most impressive instrument in the scientists’ toolkit, the rosette, is lowered. The rosette is a ring of 24 cylinders, each able to hold 10 liters of water. When it reaches a desired depth, the cylinders can be closed at the top and bottom, capturing the water the scientists want to study. As soon as it is brought back to the surface, the scientists hasten to get their water, taking it to be sieved, measured, classified and bagged as quickly as possible, before samples warm to the point that contents are modified.

As usual, Curtis Suttle is one of the big users of rosette-water. He takes 200 litres from each dip for his study of viruses. These microorganisms –100 million per teaspoon of seawater – are a perfect example of humankind’s limited understanding of the oceans. Twenty years ago, we didn’t know they existed in seawater. Now they’re recognized for playing a fundamental role in ocean ecosystems, a crucial component of the food web and of the cycling of carbon, nutrients and energy. “It turns out viruses are responsible for killing 10 to 20 percent of the living material in the ocean every day,” says Suttle. “It’s like a fast spinning wheel.”

Diana Varela, a biology professor from the University of Victoria, is another big user. She takes about 120 litres from each dip for her research into phytoplankton, tiny organisms that consume carbon and produce oxygen. “The more carbon taken up by the phytoplankton the more CO2 will dissolve into surface waters,” she explains. When they die and sink, they sequester CO2 – the primary greenhouse gas – in the sediments on the ocean bottom.

The scientists, many of whom will admit to being motivated by concern over climate change, are cautious in offering any answers. Zimmerman does proffer a broad educated guess. “We’ll see a huge export of fresh water if the sea ice melts,” she says, “and having an ice-free area in the summertime will change the air pressure above, which changes the weather patterns everywhere, not just for the person living in Tuktoyaktuk. It’s all interconnected.”

The Louis and her sister ship – the CCGS Sir Wilfred Laurier of Victoria, B.C., which steams up the west coast and into the archipelago – make excellent platforms to study that interconnectedness. Taken together, the two ships allow C3O to cast a 15,000-kilometre information net around the country.

The information C3O is providing is largely baseline. Carmack hopes the Canadian government can be convinced of the importance of a sustained monitoring program. “The extraordinary value will come by looking at this as it develops,” he says. “Then we’ll actually have something real telling us that the ocean is changing.”

C3O has funding through 2008 (a total of $6.4-million from the Canadian government) but Carmack says that’s just a beginning. “If the climate models are predicting to 2050 then we as a nation are obliged to carry out measurements to 2050 to track what actually is happening and adjust climate prediction models as we go.”

As the low-slung structures of Kugluktuk heave into view and the end of my journey approaches, I can’t help but think that the North remains unknown and undervalued. Even now, with stories of melting icecaps and dwindling polar bear populations making news in the south, our collective ignorance is astonishing. Suttle agrees. “If Canada’s going to have anything to do with the Arctic then we’d better start understanding a little bit about what’s up here,” he says. “Right now we have absolutely no idea.”