FOR 27 straight years, University of Manitoba geoscientist David Barber has studied Arctic sea ice, originally staying in tents and packing a gun in case a polar bear decided to wander by and chow down on a professor.
When he first started noticing more open water in the northern seas, he chalked it up to natural variations in the climate. He certainly didn't believe global warming was real.
But during the '90s, Barber could no longer ignore what his data were telling him: Arctic sea ice was melting at rate equivalent to the loss of one Lake Superior every year.
Now, the man in charge of one the most ambitious and expensive climate-change research projects on the planet is predicting the entire Arctic basin will be completely free of summer sea ice some time between 2013 and 2030 -- a phenomenon that has not graced the planet since homo erectus was hammering stones in eastern Africa.
"We've had sea ice in the summer in the high Arctic for one million years. Let that sink in for a minute," said Barber, the scientist in charge of the Circumpolar Flaw Lead System Study, a $40-million research project taking place aboard a custom-renovated Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker overwintering in the icy waters off the coast of Banks Island, N.W.T.
"The system is totally out of whack. The whole climate is changing, and organisms that have evolved over millions of years to take advantage of the natural conditions of the ice (are) going to disappear.
"I used to be one the skeptics, but I've seen the changes for myself, and they are very real."
The Arctic basin is a big, bald guy
The CFL study -- no relation to Canadian football -- involves almost 300 scientists from 15 countries. It's also part of a larger, multinational effort called the International Polar Year.
But the University of Manitoba is playing a large role in the massive effort, which places rotating teams of geographers, biologists, engineers and other scientists on board the Canadian Coast Guard Ship Amundsen in the middle of a stretch of sea known as the Amundsen Gulf for an entire year.
This patch of polar property is considered special because it never entirely freezes up during the winter, and not because of global warming.
Entirely natural interactions between the air, land and sea keep some of the waters open south of Banks Island, even in the middle of February.
Scientists call these places circumpolar flaw leads, because they're found across the Arctic Ocean, appearing off the coast of Canada, Iceland, Norway and Russia.
And they exist because the Arctic Ocean and its pack ice behave kind of like a big, bald guy wearing a giant tuque.
I'm serious. When winds and other atmospheric conditions push the pack-ice "tuque" away from one edge of the big, bald ocean, it exposes some skin -- that is, open water -- near the bottom of the oversized head.
That's why there's always been some open water in the winter off the coast Banks Island -- and nobody ever used to get upset about it.
But the flaws are getting bigger and bigger, providing scientists with a perfect place to watch climate change unfold before their very eyes.
"The flaw lead actually represents what's happening at the planetary scale," says Barber, explaining that conditions in the upper atmosphere are connected to the ever-widening flaws.
"This physical characteristic is very conveniently placed for us to study and understand what's going on in the Arctic and relate it to the entire globe."
Of course, "convenient" is a relative term. For starters, placing a 98-metre, diesel-electric ship in a corner of the Arctic and supplying it with enough food, fuel and equipment to support 80 scientists, 10 guests, nine officers and a crew of 22 all winter requires the logistical skills of a military field commander. The Amundsen may be a tricked-out icebreaker, but it was not intended to serve as a floating hotel when it was originally commissioned as the Sir John Franklin in 1979.
Keeping all those scientists safe is also a concern, as you don't want people with little or no naval experience wandering off on to the sea ice, only to lose their way in a whiteout, expire from hypothermia or get eaten by one of the rare polar-grizzly hybrid bears known to inhabit the area around Banks Island.
And the money required to fund this project -- again, $40 million -- approaches the gross domestic product of Kiribati, one of those small Pacific-island nations that will disappear if ocean levels continue to rise as a result of global warming.
Getting on board the ship, meanwhile, involves a 2,850-kilometre flight from Winnipeg to Inuvik, N.W.T., followed by a ride on a small plane to (hopefully) solid sea ice and finally a short climb up the side of the boat.
Yet the Winnipeg Free Press is paying the ship a visit, as photojournalist Wayne Glowacki and I plan to spend 14 days aboard the Amundsen, beginning later this week.
Our plan is to hang with the scientists, learn a little about their work and get our hands dirty for the sake of climate research. As far as assignments go, this ranks somewhere between "opportunity of a lifetime" and "chance to annoy people conducting some of the most important research on Earth."
Yes, we're going to the Arctic
You don't need to be a student of geography to notice most Canadians live close to the U.S. border. The vast majority of Canada's 33 million people live within 200 kilometres of our southern neighbour, while a combined total of only 104,000 reside in Nunavut, the Northwest Territories and the Yukon, according to Statistics Canada.
While the northern mainland remains unpopulous, the Arctic archipelago is even more remote and exists in the minds of most Canadians as merely a concept -- which is something the Americans, Russians and Danes have keenly observed in recent years.
Although the Amundsen is a scientific vessel, there's a statement being made by placing the ship in Arctic waters all year round. And it's not really a subtle statement: It's a big red boat with a maple leaf hanging from the mast.
So the $40-million project actually fulfils more than an environmental role, as Canadian sovereignty over the Arctic is asserted in a tiny way each time somebody from the southern reaches of the nation is exposed to the vastness of the North.
"It's a fantastic experience," says Dustin Isleifson, a University of Manitoba graduate student who's made three trips to the Amundsen and plans to return for a fourth later this month.
"It's amazing, the opportunity we have to go to a part of Canada very few people see -- and not just visit, but do some science that impacts the rest of the world."
Isleifson is an electrical engineer who works on a remote-sensing project that compares sea-ice data gathered by both radar and manual measurements. In a nutshell, his goal is to improve the quality of information scientists can gather from satellites, which are cheaper to deploy than 98-metre boats.
He'll be joining a climatologist who studies cyclones, a oceanographer investigating how oceans "talk to each other" and an Inuit wildlife monitor on the Amundsen -- as well as a 17-year-old student from Winnipeg's Sisler High School.
Alysa Almojuela, who secured a berth on the boat by winning a Canada-wide contest, is looking forward to learning more about Arctic micro-organisms, many of which face extinction or extirpation because of the retreat of summer ice -- but rarely get the kind of press enjoyed by charismatic creatures such as polar bears.
"I'm interested in knowing more about how everything is interconnected," she says. "I think that's part of the problem. We need to dig a little deeper, beneath the surface."
Dave digs deep -- and gets depressing
David Barber, of course, has been studying the depths of the polar ice for most of his adult life. But the multi-year ice that used to be a source of wonder -- hard, dense stuff that's tough for icebreakers to crack -- is about to disappear before his eyes.
Every summer, as more sea ice melts away, less energy from the sun is reflected back off the Earth and into space. That means the Arctic water absorbs more energy and grows warmer on its own -- which in turn melts more ice and allows the water to absorb even more energy the following summer.
Scientists such as Barber used to believe this feedback loop would create ice-free summers in the Arctic by 2100, based on the rate of melting. But they failed to take account the way ice behaves on the open sea when there's less other ice to keep it in place.
Basically, huge ocean currents are essentially spinning ice floes right out of the Arctic basin and swinging them out between Greenland and Iceland into the Atlantic Ocean, where they melt once they hit the warm Gulf Stream.
This is why the Arctic is losing its ice much faster than Barber expected. He only recently reached this conclusion -- and is frightened because the rate of change does not bode well for the warmer parts of the world.
"The Arctic is a bellwether for the rest of the planet," he says. "We've been using models to make policy decisions about how quickly governments should react to climate change, yet we're finding these models are very, very conservative, because they don't deal with the physics necessary to get the rate of these changes correct."
The implication is that whatever the world is doing to combat climate change is far too insignificant.
While melting sea ice won't affect ocean levels all that much -- look what happens when ice cubes melt in your drink -- the disappearance of glacial ice from land masses would be disastrous.
Oceanographers believe sea levels have already risen 10 to 15 millimetres because of climate change. Barber says if the Greenland ice sheet goes, you can make that rise six metres, which is high enough to submerge southern Florida, much of Bangladesh and... well, the homes of hundreds of millions of humans.
"We're into a risk management situation now. The decisions we make today will dictate how bad things get in the future," he says, referring to the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and live more sustainable lives.
"We can't change on a dime. It's not possible, because we need to have our economies functioning.
"But there needs to be an adjustment to this, and that adjustment is going to take time to do. We should have started making these adjustments 20 years ago, but we didn't."
Barber says he takes some consolation ordinary people now know about climate change are prepared to possibly do something about it. But as a first-hand observer of changes in the Arctic -- and especially how those changes have affected the Inuit -- he doesn't paint a pretty picture of the future.
"When I sit down with a glass of wine and think about this from a philosophical perspective, I take a lot of solace from the fact that if we keep screwing up, the consequences are not very significant. Humans as a species (will) disappear from the planet, but the planet will continue on, as it's always continued on. We just won't be here as this high-level predator that we are now.
"So when you think about it from a biological perspective, what kind of organism destroys its own habitat?"
No, we're not cockroaches
David Barber will not be aboard the Amundsen at the same time as Wayne Glowacki and me. But my head will be spinning for entirely different reasons.
As you read this, I should be leaving southern Florida, after completing a (hopefully) successful paddling trip in Everglades National Park, a fragile ecosystem threatened by rising ocean levels as well as increased hurricane activity.
Within three days, I expect to fly more than 6,000 kilometres and cross 45 degrees of latitude as I travel from the southeastern tip of North America to Canada's northwestern corner.
The motivation to paddle in Florida was to see the Everglades before they degrade further or even disappear. The same motivation factors into the Arctic trip.
On a very personal level, I'm exhilarated but also frightened by the prospect of packing two climate-change adventures into the very same month, separated by mere days.
If I can make some sense out of this, all the better. Keep reading the Free Press and I will try to do my best.
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