CAPE LAMBTON, N.W.T. -- Viewed from the bridge of the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Amundsen, the Arctic panorama at the southern edge of Banks Island is a scene of almost unfathomable beauty.
The sheer white expanse of the partly frozen Amundsen Gulf is broken by the stark grey cliffs of Nelson Head, which rise up 725 metres to the flat summit of Durham Heights, the highest point in the western Arctic archipelago.
Scientists watch the northern lights move through the sky from the roof of the bridge on the icebreaker Amundsen.
Add in a brilliant blue sky and a few wispy stratus clouds and it's tough to think of this stunning place as a landscape in peril.
Yet this part of the world is warming at a rate three times that of the rest of the planet.
The entire Arctic ecosystem, so little of which is understood by science, stores up enough of the planet's carbon to dictate the future pace of climate change.
That's why it's been inspiring to spend two weeks aboard the Amundsen among scientists trying to learn more about the air, water, ice, plants and animals of this awe-inspiring place.
But it's also been frustrating, because the scientific research I've observed will only bear conclusive fruit six or 12 or even 18 months down the road.
There are no "Eureka!" moments. There's only the mundane stuff of data-collection and a mind-numbing series of repetitive tasks that are collectively known as analysis.
This fieldwork ranges from back-breaking, finger-numbing chores such as carving a hole in metre-thick Arctic ice to the intensely picky little tasks like placing small samples of seawater in tiny, little vials.
There is no glory in this work, which demands a form of discipline known only to assembly-line workers -- with the added commitment that comes with knowing contaminated samples mean corrupted data and the need to perform the whole damn task over again.
In other words, in two weeks aboard the Amundsen, living among 27 scientists from Canada, Spain, Belgium, Germany and the United States, I have learned an awful lot about the nature of scientific fieldwork but precious little about what this labour will eventually mean for the Canadian Arctic, and by extension, the entire world.
The delay between data-gathering and deriving any concrete conclusions from this information is frightening, considering the actual pace of environmental change.
Climate-change projections are almost always out of date the moment they're published. That's partly because climate-change models do not even come close to approximating the complexity of the planet and all of its component systems, from the rotation of air masses in the upper atmosphere to the transportation of carbon dioxide through the oceanic food chain to the respiration of every organism on Earth, including humanity and all of its automobiles and oil wells and factories.
University of Manitoba climatologist Dave Barber, the scientific leader of the Amundsen's year-long mission in the Amundsen Gulf, demonstrated the lag between climate-change modelling and climate-change reality this past January.
Observing the loss of 1.3 million square kilometres of polar ice cover in 2007, he concluded summer sea ice is retreating from the Arctic much faster than previously thought.
That conclusion means all climate-change models fail to incorporate the effects of completely ice-free Arctic summers, which are coming to this planet sometime between 2013 and 2030, Barber predicts.
The implications are immense, considering a bloom of life in the Arctic Ocean could mean far more carbon dioxide -- or possibly far less, depending on a complex set of variables that include the future biomass of algae and the numbers of every marine organism from viruses and bacteria on the way up to ringed seals and beluga whales.
No scientist on board the Amundsen claims to know what the future has in store for the Arctic, never mind the rest of the planet. I've simply observed them gathering data, working in shifts as short as two hours or as long as an entire, sleep-deprived day.
Although this ship is engaged in the largest and most ambitious polar research project on the planet, the work being conducted is only scratching the Arctic surface. And my personal fear is the research being conducted may constitute far too little, far too late.
Doomsaying predictions from climate-change researchers are typically received with skepticism by the very politicians and civil servants who fund their research.
Only last month, Friends Of The Earth published a devastating paper that concluded climate-change researchers routinely engage in self-censorship in an effort to be taken seriously.
If this group is right, then the global climate-change prognosis is far worse than even the most alarmist reports suggest.
Staring out the stunning scene south of Banks Island, it's tough to imagine anything is wrong.
But I leave this place less comfortable about the future nonetheless.
bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca
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