International Polar Year breathes life into Arctic science, and Canada is finally taking a leadership role. By Jessa Gamble

Back when the Canadian government still spent money on Arctic research, David Hik landed his first science job, which in turn landed him deep in a blizzard on the west coast of Hudson Bay. The Queen’s University undergraduate eagerly hopped out of the Twin Otter, feeling the crunch of a gravel esker for the first time, and turned toward the drone of a snowmobile he couldn’t see for the driving storm. Only the tops of willows were showing above the snow. It was May in the early 1980s, and this was the start of his summer job.

Hik loaded the snowmachine with his gear – equipment and supplies he’d need to study the lesser snow goose and its main food, the Puccinellia plant. His boss, renowned ornithologist Fred Cooke, pointed the way to the research station, a distant brown blob Hik assumed to be a building. “You take this stuff in and start up the stove. I’ll go back for the rest of the gear,” Cooke said. Simple enough – he could do that. He felt a key thrust into his mitt and heard the snowmachine’s comforting hum disappear in the howling wind. As he approached the cabin, Hik realized there was no need for a key. A bear had ripped the door from its hinges and the building was full of snow. Worse still, the stove answered his efforts with a discouraging silence – the fuel was frozen.

In retrospect, Hik says, the experience was profound. After spending hours to get the heat going, and days to set the building right, he filled a euphoric summer with polar research and returned to the station for four successive seasons. Nowadays, as the University of Alberta’s Canada Research Chair in Northern Ecology, he deploys his own grad students to the Arctic. “Seeing them make that first landing in the North is the great thing about being a professor,” he says. “I know it’s something they’ll never forget.”

Yet, for a generation of science grads – those who came after Hik in the 1990s – a Northern research stint was out of the question. Canada’s federal government had pulled the plug on Arctic study, leaving polar scientists disgruntled, out of work, and – embarrassingly – upstaged by temperate nations like Japan, Germany and the Netherlands. Research projects withered; students turned away from the field; stations like Hik’s on the Hudson Bay coast sat abandoned, battered by the winds. Only now – at the dawn of a worldwide Arctic research effort called International Polar Year – are the taps re-opening, heralding what’s hoped to be a Canadian renaissance in Arctic research.

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Canada’s Arctic is substantial. Polar expanses comprise a quarter of our land mass – a space big enough to swallow Western Europe. Canada’s polar plants and animals exist in greater abundance, and in a more pristine state, than most anywhere. And arguably, it is here that native Arctic cultures reached their brilliant xenith, thriving in lands no one else, even now, has mastered. By almost any definition, Canada is the world’s most polar nation. And yet, for much of the past two decades, our Northern reaches were, when it came to global Arctic research, a big black hole.

For Canadian scientists, the irony was inescapable – and humiliating. They talked of wanting to put bags over their heads at international conferences where far balmier countries were putting them to shame in their own backyard. The problem lay in Ottawa, where there was no political will to back Northern research. “Why work in the Arctic? No one lives there,” a former head of the Geological Survey of Canada once famously declared.

“That was the sort of attitude pervasive at the time,” remembers Greg Henry, a tundra ecologist at the University of British Columbia. “In the late 1990s things were quite dismal in Canadian Arctic science.” But things are looking up for Henry, who is gearing up for International Polar year with a $13-million research proposal on tundra ecosystems’ response to climate change.

On March 1, Canada, along with dozens of other countries, will participate in the fourth International Polar Year. In this effort, Canadian researchers will split a $150-million federal contribution – the largest amount of public money ever made available for Northern scientific research, and a figure that far outshines other nations’ budgets.

International Polar Year – actually 24 months long – has a history of providing baselines from which to launch future work, and it’s hoped this one will leave a legacy for a generation of Northern scientists. The bold funding announcement has bolstered Canada’s reputation on the world stage as a nation of strong Arctic research. But 10 years ago, such a cash commitment into Arctic study would have been unthinkable.

Seeking to balance the budget without ruffling too many feathers, finance minister Paul Martin, under Jean Chrétien’s Liberals, had gutted funding for every research agency supporting Arctic science. The implications were staggering. Federal infrastructure that used to be available to share with universities was gone. “We were looking at losing an entire generation of Canadian scientists,” Henry says. “Graduate students realized there weren’t going to be positions waiting for them, so they drifted away from Arctic research.”

To make matters worse, universities were downsizing just as all the major federal research agencies withdrew from Arctic science. The Polar Continental Shelf project, part of John Diefenbaker’s Northern vision, could barely fly scientists around the High Arctic, where access and mobility are the key challenges. The Geological Survey of Canada pulled out of an extensive mapping program that had provided logistical support since the 1960s.

For scientists, fighting back was hard. Divisions within the research community made a coordinated response difficult – but eventually, as the severity of the cuts sank in, researchers banded together in rebellion. A group of biologists, geologists, meteorologists and other scientists launched letter-writing campaigns to all of the Northern ministers before every budget. They wrote things like “deep crisis” and “urgent need” and “collective failure.” They lobbied with the National Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC). But support had all but disappeared: It felt as if they were shouting from the Arctic itself, far from the ears of policy-makers. Among the group, most of the discussion revolved around the feeling they wouldn’t make it another year.

The first breakthrough came in 2001, when their unrelenting petitions were met with the announcement of six Northern chairs from NSERC, to be matched by six more positions from universities. Next, a big coup: the reassignment of a coast guard icebreaker – the Amundsen – to full-time research purposes. “We named it after a Norwegian, of course,” Henry jokes. “Typical Canadian thing to do.”

For the past few years the Amundsen icebreaker has made annual three-month science expeditions to the Arctic. Each August the mammoth ship steams down the St. Lawrence from Quebec City and then heads northward to Baffin Bay, where the researchers recover instruments left in the Northern waters year-round. Taking the readings, they measure temperature, salinity and other annual cycles under the ice, then toss the equipment back overboard for redeployment. Next, the crew ventures through the Northwest Passage to the Beaufort Sea, making more measurements along the way. Six weeks after having left Quebec the crew rotates in Kugluktuk, Nunavut for the return journey.

Even bigger plans for the Amundsen are being hatched. As part of International Polar Year, Laval University’s Louis Fortier and his colleagues at ArcticNet – a network of Arctic researchers – are preparing a full-year expedition, starting in the autumn of 2007. Fortier has just returned from a visit to the Amundsen with Nunavut officials and is still raving about the excellent food cooked and served by the Coast Guard – he recommends the smoked ostrich and pickerel, in particular. Bearded, with quizzical eyebrows and an imposing intellect, the 52-year-old Fortier is a strong proponent of stepping up Canada’s Northern research program. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has plans to build three polar-class icebreakers for the military, and Fortier has urged him to give them a research mandate. That way, he says, the vessels could do double duty. “So the ships are up there with a minimum military capability – nuclear subs would think twice about going there, and we could get some research done.” The gregarious Fortier grew up close to the St. Lawrence River and remembers walking on the ice floes with his friends, to the horror of his mother. He was fascinated by this strange world of cold and still likes to be lost in the immensity of the Arctic.

As part of International Polar Year, every high school student in 14,000 classrooms across Canada will be encouraged to do a science fair project on a Northern or Arctic topic, and those who do can be partnered with researchers in the appropriate field. Youth will have a chance to produce 90-second clips for the Weather Network, and a group of artists will travel the country with exhibits focusing on the Arctic. It’s a far cry from David Hik’s high school experience: “The maps on our classroom wall always lopped off the Arctic islands,” he says. “We’re the only country anchored at the North Pole and yet we don’t even include all our own territory on the maps. I don’t know any other nation that does that.”

In contrast to the pure science funded by most other nations, Canada will emphasize the health and wellbeing of Northern communities. Climate change and Northern peoples are the two official focuses of the year. “You could drive a truck through those,” Hik says, “and that’s intentional.” The hope is to promote Northern resilience, working to understand how people might adapt to a changing environment. Hik, also the director of the International Polar Year’s Canadian Secretariat, argues the human element should be central to the concerns of all eight circumpolar countries.

Hik also hopes International Polar Year will be used to have the discussion about the legacy of Arctic science – investment in Northern colleges, research institutes and icebreakers – rather than an excuse for a brief pulse in funding. “Research stations are still few and far between and they last saw a coat of paint in the 1960s,” he says. Greg Henry agrees: “We’ve stretched the dollars as far as possible and we’re still very concerned, but this is a massive injection of support,” he says. “At least now, we can stop bitching and start working.”

In the aftermath of a catastrophic assault, Canadian Arctic scientists have seized on a process of renewal that likely will gain even more steam with the onset of the International Polar Year.

Jessa Sinclair is Up Here’s associate editor. Her defection to journalism (after earning an undergraduate science degree) hasn’t quelled her passion for research.