The Arctic, to the new eye, looks like a barren place, an empty place. But in fact this apparently desolate landscape, and seascape, have rich stories to tell; you just have to know how and where to look. This means seeing a little clump of twigs with red leaves the size of oat flakes as a forest; this adjusts the scale of everything. Major archeological finds have been discovered because a pile of rocks suddenly looks more than random.

Yesterday in Hoare Bay on the Cumberland Peninsula on Baffin Island, there were three small icebergs, clearly settling in for the winter. Someone asked Chris (assistant expedition leader, an exuberant Brit in an Aussie hat with a passion for ice) where those icebergs might have come from. (Icebergs follow the currents once they are unleashed from the glaciers, which means they travel north up the coast of Greenland and then south along Baffin Island, and can take as long as two years to reach the coast of Newfoundland. Like the ships of the British explorers, icebergs too overwinter in bays like this.) So where did these icebergs come from? The only way to tell, says Chris, is to find a bit of rock or gravel, imbedded deep in the glacier, and analyse that.

Walrus Arctic Dialogue #3

John Smol is a limnologist, which means he is obsessed with small bodies of water. He is a distinguished scientist and teacher, author of more than 400 scientific papers and 17 books, head of a Paleontology Lab at Queens, and in 2006 was given the Herzberg Gold Medal for being Canada’s top scientist—an underachiever, and on board as a passenger. He is a barrel-shaped man who charges around the ship in a big red down jacket, on a busman’s holiday. Almost every summer for the past twenty-six years he has come to the High Arctic to deconstruct lakes, ponds, streams. He stood, squarely planted in knee-high rubber boots, in the shallows of one such lake that we discovered during a walk up a broad, flat river valley in Hoare Bay, to explain what he does. He scrapes minute quantities of whatever plant material is clinging to rocks into vials. He takes samples of the water from the edge, the surface, the middle surface and the various depths of a lake. He takes core samples of the lake bottom. He records the smallest shifts in temperature, water level, air temperature, water quality over many years. He has an intimate relationship with a handful of ponds.

John Smol knows a lot and he is a very worried man about global warming. He speaks in bullets.

MBF: What’s the best thing that has happened in the Arctic over the past decade or two?

JS: The high level of recognition of the Inuit as masters, well, let’s say partial masters, of their own destiny. Southerners know about the Arctic, they know there are people here, with problems and with aspirations. There’s guilt, and also goodwill.

MBF: And the worst thing?

JS: Things are going to hell. The situation is far, far worse than I thought it was. The changes are happening far faster than even I thought. I’ve been working on ponds at Cape Herschell on Ellesmere Island, ponds that only started to change about 100 years ago. In the 90s they were evaporating; by 2005, they had dried up completely. So ponds that used to be permanent have become ephemeral (meaning seasonal) and ephemeral ponds have dried up completely; they have become dry land. My eco-systems have dried up.

MBF: What would you most like to see happen in the Arctic in the next ten years?

JS: Action instead of rhetoric. We need very strong leadership to deal with this. This means we actually have to cut the actual amount of gases going into the atmosphere. Individuals making changes—that helps, no question. But we need strong regulation. If you want to lose weight, you actually have to cut back on the calories. And what’s the cost of doing nothing? We are mortgaging our children to our own selfishness.

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Posted on Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 at 12:22 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.