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We've got bigger problems than Rangers, or a few icebreakers, can solve.
Frozen out
BYLINE: Joseph Brean
SOURCE: National Post
DATE: Saturday, February 15, 2003
RESOLUTE BAY, Nunavut - Amidst the paranoia of the Cold War, when the Arctic was a vulnerable border with the Soviet Union, Canada's Minister of Defence pulled an ironic stunt in the skies over the Arctic Ocean.
Barney Danson was flying out of the Alert military base over frozen islands in the spring of 1977, with the bothersome knowledge that somewhere below him a team of Soviet scientists was conducting research, which probably meant equal parts oceanography and espionage.
The Soviets had established a research base on an iceberg, complete with living and working quarters and an airstrip, and it had been dubbed Ice Island 22 by the Canadian soldiers at Alert. These drifting research bases -- there were several -- were tolerated by Canada's military only insofar as they could be monitored and they stayed outside Canadian and U.S. waters.
Ice Island 22, however, had drifted too close to Canada and Danson, escorting a planeload of journalists, wanted to make a point. He instructed the pilot to fly low over the Soviets and open the plane's rear hatch, and as he passed overhead, he tossed a beer stein full of Canadian flags into the cold, white air, watching proudly as they fell over our territory.
Although he included a friendly note -- "Welcome to our Soviet visitors" -- the underlying message was clear: Even in this barren land, where little grows and few live, we are here. This is Canada.
Danson's symbolic assertion of sovereignty seems comical today, even quaint, but the philosophy underlying it -- that sovereignty can be claimed simply with a flag -- is today jeopardizing our national claim to the North.
The irony of the flag stunt is that scientific research has turned out to be a key measure of who reigns over the Arctic, a measure by which Canada has faltered and failed to deserve its claim.
Federal funding for Arctic research has been in precipitous decline since the mid-1980s, even as the costs of working there have risen. Airfares have more than doubled, while the government agency that is supposed to ensure safe logistics for scientists has had its budget reduced to less than half of 1989 levels, and thus supports less than half as many projects. In Resolute Bay, Nunavut, a building of the Fisheries and Oceans lab is quite literally falling into the sea.
"Professors are stopping going up, they're not training graduate students," says David Hik, a University of Alberta biologist who holds a Canada research chair in northern ecology. "When we get together, all we talk about is whether we're going to make it another year."
The dwindling and greying community of Canadian Arctic researchers is rife with anecdotes of having to hitch rides on foreign projects, such as when Norway's government paid to fly the science advisor of the Nunavut Cabinet, Bruce Rigby, to a key overseas gathering of researchers.
"When we go to international meetings, you pretty much want to put a bag over your head," Dr. Hik says.
At stake is not simply pride or good science, but political and economic control over the Northwest Passage. When the warming trend in the Western Arctic opens a viable summer shipping route through the Arctic archipelago -- predictions suggest this will be in a matter of years -- international marine law says this route will be an international strait, linking two oceans and thus owned by no country.
Without a significant research presence or scientific understanding of the region, experts say Canada's desire to make the rules for passing ships will be ignored. Arctic environmental policy will be seen as the business of Japan, Germany and the United States, countries with rich Arctic research programs and powerful economic interests in the shipping route.
"All of a sudden, we will lose our claim," says Rob Huebert, an expert in marine law at the University of Calgary's Centre for Military and Strategic Studies. Already, Canada has made compliance with our marine environmental regulations voluntary for foreign ships, a decision Dr. Huebert attributes to a fear of appearing to challenge the United States.
Other countries, some of them entirely south of the Arctic Circle, fund Arctic research at levels up to 15 times more per capita than Canada. Even Italy, a Mediterranean country, has an icebreaker devoted to polar research, while Canada's scientists have been saving their funding pennies and pestering the government to outfit a retired Coast Guard ship, the Franklin, as a research vessel. This project appears to have been grudgingly approved late last year, around the same time Ottawa mothballed an ozone monitoring station at Eureka, on Ellesmere Island.
Next month, Canada's flagship polar research station, the only one in the high Arctic built specifically for science, will end its charade as a multidisciplinary lab for university researchers. Once the site of top-level research in genetics, linguistics, archaeology and all manner of natural science, the Igloolik research station is now empty but for its director and a minimal local staff.
The orphan laboratory -- the federal government passed it off to the territorial government in the budget cuts of the late 1980s -- will be passed off once again, this time to host the Nunavut Department of Sustainable Development's polar bear monitoring unit, where local mammals will be studied by government workers.
A decade ago, however, more than 120 university scientists from every discipline would fly to Igloolik each year to do their field research, and the small bunkhouse would overflow into tent villages down by the shore. Spontaneous co-operation blossomed with the locals, including high school credits for Inuit students who helped on archaeological digs of their ancestors' camps.
Two years ago, the number of visiting researchers had plummeted to four. Last year, it was two.
"This is nothing short of a tragedy," says Paul Hebert, a professor of zoology at the University of Guelph and one of the last scientists to work at Igloolik.
The lab's saving grace is the director's project to document the oral history of the area's Inuit population, but this hardly requires such an elegant facility; it can be done with just a few rooms for interviews and office work.
Today, the lab's fume hoods are cluttered with empty bottles, some from as far back as 1994. The microscope is covered in plastic and, in a specimen freezer, a funny-looking and dried-out lumpfish sits forgotten next to a jar of jam.
A few kilometres from the hamlet of Resolute Bay, Nunavut, past the end of the airport runway, in a windswept valley surrounded by low hills, is a little house known to locals as Solar Wind.
To the U.S. research institute that runs it, SRI International, it is the Early Polar Cap Observatory, the "early" meaning it is only a hint of what it is to become. Washington supports the station under the Arctic Research and Policy Act of 1984, legislation that ensures funding for Arctic research in the long term, for which Canada has no counterpart.
Inside, more than a dozen computers run throughout the year, recording data from delicate cameras that peer up at the heavens through domed skylights.
Compared with the Igloolik lab, which looks like a giant white doorknob and won a design award from Canadian Architect magazine, Solar Wind is nondescript. From the outside, it resembles a suburban bungalow more than a research lab, and even the multi-million-dollar equipment inside looks jerry-rigged.
But the lab is active, and although it is paid for by the United States' National Science Foundation, a government agency, almost half of its projects -- four of 11 -- are Canadian. So, though it is often praised for helping to generate the costly findings of esoteric science, Solar Wind is also seen as an example of the piggybacking forced on Canadian researchers by underfunding.
In one of the lab's darkened research rooms, with glass bubbles overhead, is the University of Calgary's Auroral All Sky Imager, a fish-eyed camera that detects extremely faint glowing in the sky. Changes in this glow can reveal patterns in how solar wind interacts with the Earth's magnetic field. Brian Jackel, who monitors the device from Calgary, says his goal is to establish an array of such cameras across the Arctic, which would achieve the same results as satellite cameras, which are far more expensive. For this work, the Arctic is a good substitute for space, he said.
York University also runs an airglow detector here, and the E-Region Wind Instrument, which measures the shifting wavelengths of light from 100 km up in the sky. The University of Western Ontario has radar equipment to keep track of meteors.
Outside, an array of antennas stretches out across featureless, snow-covered ground, gathering data that would otherwise be out of reach for Canadians.
A local maintenance staff is on contract to keep the building warm, the computers running and to mail the collected data on compact discs to the various scientists.
"Without the SRI building it is unlikely that we would have been able to operate our camera at such a northern location," Dr. Jackel says. "It is also free, which is important."
A similar device, he points out, used to run at the now-closed Eureka lab.
The high overhead cost of Arctic research is unavoidable. In addition to the machinery scientists need to make their observations, there are the ever-present risk of cost overruns caused by harsh weather and the frequent need for support from Twin Otter aircraft, at prices ranging around $1,000 an hour. All supplies, from food to gasoline, cost about 30% more than in the south, and airfares from southern Canada to the Arctic on the little-travelled routes are more expensive than flying almost anywhere on Earth. A bad, deep-fried meal in a Nunavut restaurant costs $25.
Of course, it is also very cold most of the year. Resolute Bay, for example, holds its Polar Bear Dip on the August long weekend, and last week, the 200 residents sat out a two-day blizzard with winds up to 90 km/h and temperatures around -65C with the windchill.
Despite the hardships, Arctic research is popular because of a reputation for being frontier science. Its attractiveness and importance have only grown as climate-change studies reveal the North and South Poles to be global moderators of weather and the first regions to show the effects of pollution.
Arctic science has many unanswered questions to work on: The archaeology of five millennia is largely untapped; the pre-contact culture of the indigenous population is fading and remains largely undocumented; and wildlife on the land and in the water is rich. But apart from all this, Canada is not managing to adequately monitor the status quo.
Underfunding has been brought to the government's attention before. In a 1999 report, the Auditor-General criticized Canada's "piecemeal" approach to implementing its obligations in the Arctic, especially those dealing with pollution.
"There is no overall Northern strategy," the report reads, "to guide federal departments and agencies in fulfilling their science, monitoring and other responsibilities more effectively and efficiently. The absence of a co-ordinating strategy leaves these activities vulnerable to decisions by individual departments that could have detrimental effects in other areas."
In 2000, the government asked the two major scientific funding agencies, NSERC and SSHRC, to form a joint commission to report on the state of Arctic research.
To date, the commission's recommendations, such as establishing 12 senior and 12 junior research chairs in Arctic science, have not been implemented (there are six senior chairs), and only one-eighth of the recommended $25-million funding level has been provided.
The number of expeditions in Nunavut, which include the high Arctic regions, has fallen by 25% over the last six years.
Tom Hutchinson, a professor of environment and resource studies at Trent University and the author of the commission's report, says the funding climate has become even worse since he studied it in detail.
"It's downright embarrassing," he laments. "We're the worst, along with the Russians. I can understand their failure but not ours."
He said polar bear research is generally well-supported, in part because they are seen as "cute," despite being vicious. Birds fare less well, and archaeology is "not even on the radar," he said.
Late last year, the Arctic Stratospheric Ozone Observatory (ASTRO), which was established near the Eureka military station by Environment Canada in the early 1990s because of worry about the thinning ozone layer, was mothballed for an annual savings of $300,000.
Kimberly Strong, an associate professor of physics at the University of Toronto who ran one of the monitoring devices there -- a grating spectrometer -- said she may try to move her equipment to the U.S. lab at Resolute Bay, although the location, farther from the pole, is less suited to the delicate measurements.
In the United States, the federal government guarantees support for Arctic research over the long term and is approaching US$300-million a year.
In Canada, there is no such guarantee, and funding sits at less than $7-million. Per capita, that means the United States spends roughly five times what Canada does studying the Arctic, and much of that money is spent on Canadian soil. This ratio is even higher in comparisons with Sweden, Germany and Denmark.
"The Danes have also developed some lovely research facilities and have provisioned them with proper boats," says Dr. Hebert, the University of Guelph professor. "Meanwhile, we work out of canoes and Zodiacs and bring our specimens back to a lab that is ready to fall into the ocean." Since helicopters ceased to be available, Dr. Hebert says he has abandoned his Arctic zoological projects out of concerns for safety.
"Igloolik and Inuvik [Canada's two multidisciplinary labs] are pretty much moribund in terms of modern facilities," Dr. Hutchinson says.
Other minor Canadian stations are neglected and decaying, and the only Western Arctic base of the Polar Continental Shelf Project (PCSP) at Tuktoyaktuk, which provides crucial logistics support for science, has been closed since 1997. Just like the Igloolik lab, no one could afford to use it.
Meanwhile, the PCSP's budget fell to $3.4-million this year, down from $7.4-million in 1989.
The PCSP has two other stations, the main one at Resolute Bay, which has a lab and a bunkhouse, and another station in disrepair at Eureka. The PCSP's director, Bonni Hrycyk, said nearly half of all Canadian Arctic research trips go through Resolute Bay, with its 37 all-terrain vehicles and 32 snowmobiles.
Hrycyk says improved scientific equipment has enabled more remote data gathering and has thus reduced the need for expensive on-site analysis.
For the Canadians forced to appeal to SRI International for research space, however, it hardly helps to know that nearby, on Devon Island, NASA runs a multi-million-dollar project each summer to simulate life on Mars. The Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station has been around for seven years, so locals are accustomed to the sight of NASA Hummers driving through town, students in space suits and cargo planes dropping off insectoid landing pods designed for living on the Red Planet.
Marc Boucher, president of the Mars Society Canada, jokes about the time a parachute failed to open during an airdrop of a crate containing food and a construction crane. The impact destroyed most of the contents, but for the U.S. researchers -- so well-supported that they fly out their urine to protect the integrity of their soil analysis -- a replacement was on its way within hours. For Canadians, such an accident could scuttle a season's plans.
Last month, in the lead-up to next week's federal budget, a group of 42 Arctic researchers, including five fellows of the Royal Society of Canada, petitioned the Prime Minister. They hand-delivered a letter asking the government of Jean Chretien to put in place the commission's recommendations, and argued, among other things, that the failure to do so has far greater consequences than embarrassment to scientists.
Arctic scientists cannot afford to train the students who are to become their successors, they said. Some leave the field, others leave the country.
This week, Mary Ellen Thomas, Nunavut's science administrator, arrived in Ottawa to hand out scholarships to the undergraduates who applied to work in the North. Of the $1.2-million in requests, about half is available: $635,000, a number that does not go very far and has stayed static for years, she says.
A major complaint among scientists is that, even if the funding floodgates were to open tomorrow, Arctic research in Canada has been so thoroughly compromised that there would be too few qualified students to take up the work.
"There's a lot of pessimism about," Dr. Hutchinson says.
BYLINE: Joseph Brean
SOURCE: National Post
DATE: Saturday, February 15, 2003
RESOLUTE BAY, Nunavut - Amidst the paranoia of the Cold War, when the Arctic was a vulnerable border with the Soviet Union, Canada's Minister of Defence pulled an ironic stunt in the skies over the Arctic Ocean.
Barney Danson was flying out of the Alert military base over frozen islands in the spring of 1977, with the bothersome knowledge that somewhere below him a team of Soviet scientists was conducting research, which probably meant equal parts oceanography and espionage.
The Soviets had established a research base on an iceberg, complete with living and working quarters and an airstrip, and it had been dubbed Ice Island 22 by the Canadian soldiers at Alert. These drifting research bases -- there were several -- were tolerated by Canada's military only insofar as they could be monitored and they stayed outside Canadian and U.S. waters.
Ice Island 22, however, had drifted too close to Canada and Danson, escorting a planeload of journalists, wanted to make a point. He instructed the pilot to fly low over the Soviets and open the plane's rear hatch, and as he passed overhead, he tossed a beer stein full of Canadian flags into the cold, white air, watching proudly as they fell over our territory.
Although he included a friendly note -- "Welcome to our Soviet visitors" -- the underlying message was clear: Even in this barren land, where little grows and few live, we are here. This is Canada.
Danson's symbolic assertion of sovereignty seems comical today, even quaint, but the philosophy underlying it -- that sovereignty can be claimed simply with a flag -- is today jeopardizing our national claim to the North.
The irony of the flag stunt is that scientific research has turned out to be a key measure of who reigns over the Arctic, a measure by which Canada has faltered and failed to deserve its claim.
Federal funding for Arctic research has been in precipitous decline since the mid-1980s, even as the costs of working there have risen. Airfares have more than doubled, while the government agency that is supposed to ensure safe logistics for scientists has had its budget reduced to less than half of 1989 levels, and thus supports less than half as many projects. In Resolute Bay, Nunavut, a building of the Fisheries and Oceans lab is quite literally falling into the sea.
"Professors are stopping going up, they're not training graduate students," says David Hik, a University of Alberta biologist who holds a Canada research chair in northern ecology. "When we get together, all we talk about is whether we're going to make it another year."
The dwindling and greying community of Canadian Arctic researchers is rife with anecdotes of having to hitch rides on foreign projects, such as when Norway's government paid to fly the science advisor of the Nunavut Cabinet, Bruce Rigby, to a key overseas gathering of researchers.
"When we go to international meetings, you pretty much want to put a bag over your head," Dr. Hik says.
At stake is not simply pride or good science, but political and economic control over the Northwest Passage. When the warming trend in the Western Arctic opens a viable summer shipping route through the Arctic archipelago -- predictions suggest this will be in a matter of years -- international marine law says this route will be an international strait, linking two oceans and thus owned by no country.
Without a significant research presence or scientific understanding of the region, experts say Canada's desire to make the rules for passing ships will be ignored. Arctic environmental policy will be seen as the business of Japan, Germany and the United States, countries with rich Arctic research programs and powerful economic interests in the shipping route.
"All of a sudden, we will lose our claim," says Rob Huebert, an expert in marine law at the University of Calgary's Centre for Military and Strategic Studies. Already, Canada has made compliance with our marine environmental regulations voluntary for foreign ships, a decision Dr. Huebert attributes to a fear of appearing to challenge the United States.
Other countries, some of them entirely south of the Arctic Circle, fund Arctic research at levels up to 15 times more per capita than Canada. Even Italy, a Mediterranean country, has an icebreaker devoted to polar research, while Canada's scientists have been saving their funding pennies and pestering the government to outfit a retired Coast Guard ship, the Franklin, as a research vessel. This project appears to have been grudgingly approved late last year, around the same time Ottawa mothballed an ozone monitoring station at Eureka, on Ellesmere Island.
Next month, Canada's flagship polar research station, the only one in the high Arctic built specifically for science, will end its charade as a multidisciplinary lab for university researchers. Once the site of top-level research in genetics, linguistics, archaeology and all manner of natural science, the Igloolik research station is now empty but for its director and a minimal local staff.
The orphan laboratory -- the federal government passed it off to the territorial government in the budget cuts of the late 1980s -- will be passed off once again, this time to host the Nunavut Department of Sustainable Development's polar bear monitoring unit, where local mammals will be studied by government workers.
A decade ago, however, more than 120 university scientists from every discipline would fly to Igloolik each year to do their field research, and the small bunkhouse would overflow into tent villages down by the shore. Spontaneous co-operation blossomed with the locals, including high school credits for Inuit students who helped on archaeological digs of their ancestors' camps.
Two years ago, the number of visiting researchers had plummeted to four. Last year, it was two.
"This is nothing short of a tragedy," says Paul Hebert, a professor of zoology at the University of Guelph and one of the last scientists to work at Igloolik.
The lab's saving grace is the director's project to document the oral history of the area's Inuit population, but this hardly requires such an elegant facility; it can be done with just a few rooms for interviews and office work.
Today, the lab's fume hoods are cluttered with empty bottles, some from as far back as 1994. The microscope is covered in plastic and, in a specimen freezer, a funny-looking and dried-out lumpfish sits forgotten next to a jar of jam.
A few kilometres from the hamlet of Resolute Bay, Nunavut, past the end of the airport runway, in a windswept valley surrounded by low hills, is a little house known to locals as Solar Wind.
To the U.S. research institute that runs it, SRI International, it is the Early Polar Cap Observatory, the "early" meaning it is only a hint of what it is to become. Washington supports the station under the Arctic Research and Policy Act of 1984, legislation that ensures funding for Arctic research in the long term, for which Canada has no counterpart.
Inside, more than a dozen computers run throughout the year, recording data from delicate cameras that peer up at the heavens through domed skylights.
Compared with the Igloolik lab, which looks like a giant white doorknob and won a design award from Canadian Architect magazine, Solar Wind is nondescript. From the outside, it resembles a suburban bungalow more than a research lab, and even the multi-million-dollar equipment inside looks jerry-rigged.
But the lab is active, and although it is paid for by the United States' National Science Foundation, a government agency, almost half of its projects -- four of 11 -- are Canadian. So, though it is often praised for helping to generate the costly findings of esoteric science, Solar Wind is also seen as an example of the piggybacking forced on Canadian researchers by underfunding.
In one of the lab's darkened research rooms, with glass bubbles overhead, is the University of Calgary's Auroral All Sky Imager, a fish-eyed camera that detects extremely faint glowing in the sky. Changes in this glow can reveal patterns in how solar wind interacts with the Earth's magnetic field. Brian Jackel, who monitors the device from Calgary, says his goal is to establish an array of such cameras across the Arctic, which would achieve the same results as satellite cameras, which are far more expensive. For this work, the Arctic is a good substitute for space, he said.
York University also runs an airglow detector here, and the E-Region Wind Instrument, which measures the shifting wavelengths of light from 100 km up in the sky. The University of Western Ontario has radar equipment to keep track of meteors.
Outside, an array of antennas stretches out across featureless, snow-covered ground, gathering data that would otherwise be out of reach for Canadians.
A local maintenance staff is on contract to keep the building warm, the computers running and to mail the collected data on compact discs to the various scientists.
"Without the SRI building it is unlikely that we would have been able to operate our camera at such a northern location," Dr. Jackel says. "It is also free, which is important."
A similar device, he points out, used to run at the now-closed Eureka lab.
The high overhead cost of Arctic research is unavoidable. In addition to the machinery scientists need to make their observations, there are the ever-present risk of cost overruns caused by harsh weather and the frequent need for support from Twin Otter aircraft, at prices ranging around $1,000 an hour. All supplies, from food to gasoline, cost about 30% more than in the south, and airfares from southern Canada to the Arctic on the little-travelled routes are more expensive than flying almost anywhere on Earth. A bad, deep-fried meal in a Nunavut restaurant costs $25.
Of course, it is also very cold most of the year. Resolute Bay, for example, holds its Polar Bear Dip on the August long weekend, and last week, the 200 residents sat out a two-day blizzard with winds up to 90 km/h and temperatures around -65C with the windchill.
Despite the hardships, Arctic research is popular because of a reputation for being frontier science. Its attractiveness and importance have only grown as climate-change studies reveal the North and South Poles to be global moderators of weather and the first regions to show the effects of pollution.
Arctic science has many unanswered questions to work on: The archaeology of five millennia is largely untapped; the pre-contact culture of the indigenous population is fading and remains largely undocumented; and wildlife on the land and in the water is rich. But apart from all this, Canada is not managing to adequately monitor the status quo.
Underfunding has been brought to the government's attention before. In a 1999 report, the Auditor-General criticized Canada's "piecemeal" approach to implementing its obligations in the Arctic, especially those dealing with pollution.
"There is no overall Northern strategy," the report reads, "to guide federal departments and agencies in fulfilling their science, monitoring and other responsibilities more effectively and efficiently. The absence of a co-ordinating strategy leaves these activities vulnerable to decisions by individual departments that could have detrimental effects in other areas."
In 2000, the government asked the two major scientific funding agencies, NSERC and SSHRC, to form a joint commission to report on the state of Arctic research.
To date, the commission's recommendations, such as establishing 12 senior and 12 junior research chairs in Arctic science, have not been implemented (there are six senior chairs), and only one-eighth of the recommended $25-million funding level has been provided.
The number of expeditions in Nunavut, which include the high Arctic regions, has fallen by 25% over the last six years.
Tom Hutchinson, a professor of environment and resource studies at Trent University and the author of the commission's report, says the funding climate has become even worse since he studied it in detail.
"It's downright embarrassing," he laments. "We're the worst, along with the Russians. I can understand their failure but not ours."
He said polar bear research is generally well-supported, in part because they are seen as "cute," despite being vicious. Birds fare less well, and archaeology is "not even on the radar," he said.
Late last year, the Arctic Stratospheric Ozone Observatory (ASTRO), which was established near the Eureka military station by Environment Canada in the early 1990s because of worry about the thinning ozone layer, was mothballed for an annual savings of $300,000.
Kimberly Strong, an associate professor of physics at the University of Toronto who ran one of the monitoring devices there -- a grating spectrometer -- said she may try to move her equipment to the U.S. lab at Resolute Bay, although the location, farther from the pole, is less suited to the delicate measurements.
In the United States, the federal government guarantees support for Arctic research over the long term and is approaching US$300-million a year.
In Canada, there is no such guarantee, and funding sits at less than $7-million. Per capita, that means the United States spends roughly five times what Canada does studying the Arctic, and much of that money is spent on Canadian soil. This ratio is even higher in comparisons with Sweden, Germany and Denmark.
"The Danes have also developed some lovely research facilities and have provisioned them with proper boats," says Dr. Hebert, the University of Guelph professor. "Meanwhile, we work out of canoes and Zodiacs and bring our specimens back to a lab that is ready to fall into the ocean." Since helicopters ceased to be available, Dr. Hebert says he has abandoned his Arctic zoological projects out of concerns for safety.
"Igloolik and Inuvik [Canada's two multidisciplinary labs] are pretty much moribund in terms of modern facilities," Dr. Hutchinson says.
Other minor Canadian stations are neglected and decaying, and the only Western Arctic base of the Polar Continental Shelf Project (PCSP) at Tuktoyaktuk, which provides crucial logistics support for science, has been closed since 1997. Just like the Igloolik lab, no one could afford to use it.
Meanwhile, the PCSP's budget fell to $3.4-million this year, down from $7.4-million in 1989.
The PCSP has two other stations, the main one at Resolute Bay, which has a lab and a bunkhouse, and another station in disrepair at Eureka. The PCSP's director, Bonni Hrycyk, said nearly half of all Canadian Arctic research trips go through Resolute Bay, with its 37 all-terrain vehicles and 32 snowmobiles.
Hrycyk says improved scientific equipment has enabled more remote data gathering and has thus reduced the need for expensive on-site analysis.
For the Canadians forced to appeal to SRI International for research space, however, it hardly helps to know that nearby, on Devon Island, NASA runs a multi-million-dollar project each summer to simulate life on Mars. The Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station has been around for seven years, so locals are accustomed to the sight of NASA Hummers driving through town, students in space suits and cargo planes dropping off insectoid landing pods designed for living on the Red Planet.
Marc Boucher, president of the Mars Society Canada, jokes about the time a parachute failed to open during an airdrop of a crate containing food and a construction crane. The impact destroyed most of the contents, but for the U.S. researchers -- so well-supported that they fly out their urine to protect the integrity of their soil analysis -- a replacement was on its way within hours. For Canadians, such an accident could scuttle a season's plans.
Last month, in the lead-up to next week's federal budget, a group of 42 Arctic researchers, including five fellows of the Royal Society of Canada, petitioned the Prime Minister. They hand-delivered a letter asking the government of Jean Chretien to put in place the commission's recommendations, and argued, among other things, that the failure to do so has far greater consequences than embarrassment to scientists.
Arctic scientists cannot afford to train the students who are to become their successors, they said. Some leave the field, others leave the country.
This week, Mary Ellen Thomas, Nunavut's science administrator, arrived in Ottawa to hand out scholarships to the undergraduates who applied to work in the North. Of the $1.2-million in requests, about half is available: $635,000, a number that does not go very far and has stayed static for years, she says.
A major complaint among scientists is that, even if the funding floodgates were to open tomorrow, Arctic research in Canada has been so thoroughly compromised that there would be too few qualified students to take up the work.
"There's a lot of pessimism about," Dr. Hutchinson says.
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