Helicopter landing in Sachs Harbour
Today was down time for most of the research teams, though for some of them not entirely by choice. We arrived in Sachs Harbour in the Northwest Territories at about 9 a.m. MT and the ship anchored. This wasn't supposed to happen, as the ship was supposed to be doing sonar mapping of the harbour's bottom. Unfortunately, a bearing on one of the propeller shafts has a problem and is going to need repair, so the ship will be at anchor until those repairs are complete.
One of the major activities on the ship today is the visit from some members of the town council of Sachs Harbour. ArcticNet, the research program that sponsors the Amundsen and many of the researchers on board, also has a mandate to involve local communities in the research they're doing. One reason for this is simple courtesy. The researchers on the Amundsen are working in the backyards of the aboriginal people of the North, who, of course, deserve to know what's going on.
Sachs Harbour's Main (and only) street
A second reason is that some of the research is specifically targeted at aboriginal concerns. For example, some of the sea floor and coastal mapping research is meant to help understand how they might be affected by rising sea levels, which could flood their communities or change the wildlife habitat dramatically — and thereby affect their ability to hunt and fish for food.
Another issue of major concern in the North revolves around chemical contaminants. Scientists have known for some time that chemical contaminants from the south accumulate in the North. These pollutants tend to accumulate in the food chain and end up most concentrated in top predators — including people. Studies have shown high concentrations, for example, of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in the breast milk of Inuit women. Similar high concentrations have also been discovered in another top predator — the polar bear. This is, of course, a major concern for people living here. Shifting to different kinds of food, even if possible, would be expensive and devastating to their traditional lifestyle.
Unfortunately, the most recent research, some of which is being pursued by teams on the Amundsen, is revealing that this problem is likely to get worse due to climate change. Dr. Gary Stern's group, for example, has discovered that through a complicated combination of circumstances, the recent warming in the Arctic has increased the amount of mercury in the food chain, even though there isn't really more mercury migrating north from southern industries and power plants. The concern is that this might be true of other environmental contaminants as well.
One final reason that it's important to have the local aboriginal people involved in this work is that they can help. To begin with, they have a lot of information that's critical to understanding the North and the changes occurring up here. We haven't studied the North in the past as thoroughly as projects like ArcticNet are allowing us to do now. As a result, we've actually missed the opportunity, in many cases, to have an understanding of what an unaltered Arctic looked like. The researchers working on the Amundsen with me now are, in a sense, studying a moving target — the changing Arctic — without always having a good sense of what it was like before those changes started to occur.
Children at the Sachs Harbour School
The traditional and historical knowledge of the people who have lived in this land for generations will be very valuable. Since they live on the land, as well, they will often seen changes or anomalies that researchers visiting for just a few weeks might not necessarily see. These can be targets for future study. From a practical perspective, of course, they're also the people available to monitor and maintain instruments that are left in the Arctic year-round, like tide gauges and meteorological monitoring equipment. They're also able to take and preserve samples from wildlife — the fish, land animals and marine mammals they hunt. This is all vital data for the researchers studying the Arctic.
Tomorrow the local schoolchildren will be visiting the ship. Maybe some of them will in the future be able to take the scientific investigation of the North into their own hands. Tomorrow morning I leave the Amundsen, and this adventure will be over — perhaps. People have been trying to scare me about the likelihood of my plane actually arriving in and subsequently departing from Sachs Harbour on Thursday for Inuvik. I'm hoping I won't be stranded there, though the chance to explore the community would doubtless be fun. It's time, however, for me to head south and start assembling all the interviews I've collected for broadcast on Quirks & Quarks. So you'll hear a lot more about this trip on the show. I'll also bring back a camera full of images to post on our website. I hope if you enjoyed the blog, you'll enjoy the program. Check it out on our web page: cbc.ca/quirks.
— Jim Lebans, en route to Sachs Harbour aboard the Amundsen
