Sean Rushton
Travelling by foot, car, canoe, train, airplane and helicopter, from the Yukon to Labrador, Canadian researcher Roger Brown made history by gathering the most detailed and extensive surveys of permafrost in Canada to date. The problem is, however, the North has changed dramatically since his measurements were taken in the mid-1960s: sea ice is disappearing, glaciers are shrinking, bushes are sprouting on the tundra...and permafrost is melting.
“We know the Arctic is very sensitive to climate change,” says Antoni Lewkowicz, a permafrost researcher with the Department of Geography. “If there is a 1.5°C change in the Earth’s overall temperature over the next 50 years as some models predict, the increase is expected to be double this in the Arctic. It’s the proverbial canary in the coal mine.”
Lewkowicz intends to go back over the next two years to some of the spots where Brown took his pioneering measurements in the 1960s in order to document changes in Arctic permafrost over the past 40 years. He is confident that he and his collaborators, Chris Burn of Carleton University and Sharon Smith from the Geological Survey of Canada, will find areas devoid of permafrost where Brown found frozen subsoil years ago.
While the University has a long tradition of working in the North – indeed, every year approximately 20 graduate students and their professors from the Departments of Geography, Biology and Earth Sciences go there – Lewkowicz anticipates that his current ambitions to head up north will be enhanced by a small portion of the $150 million in funding that the government has set aside to finance International Polar Year (IPY) projects in Canada.
The International Polar Year is a large, international scientific effort researching the polar regions of the planet. As of March 1, 2007, polar researchers from around the world will commemorate the 125th and 75th anniversaries of the first and second IPY and the 50th anniversary of the International Geophysical Year (IGY). The "year" will actually cover 24 months of collaborative research, ending March 1, 2009.
Among those participating in IPY projects already funded by NSERC will be Konrad Gajewski, an expert on past environmental change in the Arctic, and Luke Copland, a glaciologist, well-known for his recent report on the collapse of the Ayles Shelf off Ellesmere Island. Both are professors in the Department of Geography. None of this might have happened without the efforts of Peter Johnson, who retired from the department last month. Johnson was Chair of the Canadian Polar Commission from 2002-2005 and worked tirelessly on the Canadian and international stages to make the IPY a reality.
Organized around the conviction that the remote polar regions of the Earth have profound implications for the Earth’s climate, ecosystems and ultimately human society, IPY 2007-2008 is expected to involve over 200 projects, with thousands of scientists from over 60 nations. It will offer researchers a chance to collaboratively examine a wide range of physical, biological and social research topics and build on existing programs. The goal is to engage the Canadian public and attract the next generation of polar scientists.
With IPY funding, Lewkowicz has already been able to recruit three additional graduate students to join his team.
“The IPY money is going to be invaluable for our new graduate students,” he says. “They will have the opportunity to feel part of something bigger, to present work at international conferences and to do follow-up research that will extend away beyond the two years of IPY itself.”
In the tradition of IPY’s collaborative spirit and in tandem with the Official International IPY Launch in Paris, uOttawa and Carleton University jointly launched their IPY projects at Carleton University on March 1.
