More than 1,500 students attended the unique Arctic and climate science workshop with experts in physical and chemical oceanography, sea ice optics, marine mammals, remote sensing, contaminants, and oil spills.

Scientists from the Centre for Earth Observation Science (CEOS) in the Clayton H. Riddell Faculty of Environment, Earth, and Resources at the University of Manitoba gave seminars, demonstrations, and answered students’ questions live through Zoom.

This digital edition of Arctic Science Day was even more accessible than years prior, through a format that allowed more students to participate. The new virtual experience was viewed by students throughout the entire province, including Frontier School Division which hosts Manitoba’s northernmost young learners.

This year’s event didn’t include live ice auger demonstrations, but students had a mixed schedule of information seminars and hands-on learning activities. They asked insightful questions throughout each session, displaying their interest and literacy in science topics. Teachers approved as well.

“The activities provided for Arctic Science Day were great,” says Diane Nickel, French Immersion Teacher 7e année, École Communautaire Leila North. “My students were engaged and loved the connections that were made while having fun.”

Physical oceanography lessons came from faculty research professors Karen Alley and Juliana Marini Marson, as well as postdoctoral researchers Erica Rosenblum and Laura Gillard.

Students learned about sea ice and optics from postdoc Aura Diaz and PhD candidate Lisa Matthes, including lessons on instruments and technology used in the field, and principles like sunlight reflection, scattering, absorption and transmission, with functions like the albedo effect where more light is absorbed by dark colours than bright colours, resulting in rising temperatures from polar ice melt.

Aura Diaz showing how liquid enters an ice core using a colour dye

PhD candidate Tonya Burgers taught aspects of chemical oceanography like how much dissolved carbon is in the Arctic Ocean, and how much carbon in the Arctic Ocean is absorbing from the atmosphere. Burgers also taught concepts like temperature effects on air volume using household materials.

“What happens when CO2 dissolves in water, it reacts with the water and forms carbonic acid,” Burgers tells students, explaining how the process impacts water quality indicators like pH levels.

Students took a break from chemistry for whale watching as they learned about marine mammals and remote sensing methods with researchers Maddie Harasyn, Elizabeth Worden, and Emma Ausen.

Harasyn showed how she pilots drones to study sea ice properties like surface elevation, or to find areas of land slumping, or permafrost melt where indicators of climate change can be found. Harasyn also showed students the Sea ice Environmental Research Facility (SERF) on UM campus, where researchers study different ways of monitoring sea ice with satellites, and what happens to microplastics in sea ice. Students also learned how researchers like Harasyn train machine learning algorithms to identify marine mammals in drone footage.

Ausen described the processes of researching marine mammals, from data collection to analyzing key indicators like abundance and distribution. Worden told students about the impacts of climate change on communities and traditions.

Worden describes “a whole cocktail of climate change” taking place in the Arctic, including “strong storms, earlier ice break-up, changing the timing of migrations, rivers changing their paths, so access to the ocean getting harder, coastal erosion, unpredictable weather conditions,” she lists. “And then there’s also social change which is more complicated and more personalized.”

Postdoc Diana Saltymakova led a session on oil spills with PhD candidates Durell Desmond and Kasia Polcwiartek where students learned about the impacts of oil in the ocean through interactive demonstrations that students followed along with on their own.

Kasia Polcwiartek leading students through activity teaching oil spreading with household items

CEOS Technician Debbie Armstrong wrapped up the day’s programming teaching students the difference between a contaminant (a substance in greater concentration than normal in an environment) and a pollutant (a contaminant that results in adverse health effects within ecosystems). General types of water pollutants include nutrients, decomposed algal blooms, trace metals, pesticides, oil, microplastics, zebra mussels, acid rain, and more.

Students finished Arctic Science Day with the starter tool kit for Arctic science research, having learned, participated, asked questions, and received answers from scientists conducting world-leading research into important environment and climate topics.

More than 150 middle-and-high school learners met with climate researchers on March 5 for Arctic Science Day. Students learned how new knowledge is developed from working in Arctic conditions, and how the learning process can be a lot like playing video games.

Arctic Science Day is a partnership between FortWhyte Alive and the Centre for Earth Observation Science at the University of Manitoba. It connects students from grades 6-12 with climate scientists involved in various forms of environmental research, from physics to chemistry to playing with video game joysticks.

But first, the kids had to learn the basics.

Over 100 grade 6-8 students from three schools learned about the challenges of oil spill clean-up in the Arctic. After PhD candidates introduced students to the interactions between freshwater and saltwater in the Arctic Ocean, students got engaged in an oil-spill response workshop.

Next, Postdoctoral Research Fellow Dr. Michelle McCrystall initiated the youth with climate models with a computer simulation. “Climate modelling is the process which aims to allow us to further understand important interactions in the climate system and to project these in to the future to predict potential changes in Earth’s climate,” she says.

“The predictions are based on a number of factors such as future energy sources, population size, projected socio-economic growth and land use change of varying degrees to give a range of possible future climate scenarios,” Dr. McCrystall adds.

More than 60 high school students from 15 schools spent the day visiting research stations on FortWhyte’s Lake Cargill, learning about sunlight reflection and absorption through sea ice, remote sensing of ice thickness, and how to take ice core samples.

Students also learned how to age a narwhal by counting the growth lines on its tusk, and about technology used in marine mammal research. Other topics included impacts of ocean acidification and contaminants like methylmercury.

Research Associate Maddie Harasyn showed how drone piloting is part of collecting climate data through remote sensing. Harasyn operates a drone like a real-life video game to collect land surface data.

“The students were really interested in the technology, and how cool and exciting drones are. And then they were even more excited to learn about how scientists apply the data to mapping vegetation or finding caribou in the forest,” Harasyn says.

Maddie Harasyn showing the sensors on a drone used in Arctic research

It’s not only drone pilots like Harasyn who get to operate joysticks for science. High-scoring gamers couldn’t help but hear PhD candidate Lisa Matthes compare the underwater navigation methods of her research to playing a video game.

“When we visit the North for field measurements, we no longer only drill small ice holes for single measurements. We want to study larger scales to understand what is happening to the Arctic sea ice under a climate change scenario. To do so we use underwater drones, called remotely operated vehicles, or ROVs, that are equipped with large sensor arrays and can be driven below the ice for hundreds of meters. ROVs are connected through a long tether to a computer and a joystick, sitting in a tent on top of the ice,” Matthes explains.

“My job as a researcher is now to play a three-dimensional underwater video game by driving a very expensive ROV along sampling transects without bumping into ice chunks or getting off-course.”

Students left 2020’s Arctic Science Day with a sense of some of the career opportunities in Arctic science – and not just the ones related to gaming.  In the words of some inspired high school students:

“I learned how many different branches of science are present in Arctic research –a wide variety of careers.”

“Environmental science must be studied from different angles – biology, chemistry, physics – to gain a full understanding.”

“I realized that Arctic research is going to be forever on-going and with the research we are doing today, we can use it to determine how we should be acting or supporting actions around climate change.”

Announced today in Montreal by Minister of Science Kirsty Duncan, research teams led by the University of Calgary’s Casey Hubert, associate professor in the Faculty of Science and Campus Alberta Innovation Program Chair in Geomicrobiology and University of Manitoba’s Research Professor Gary Stern, Centre for Earth Observation Science, will combine their expertise in the areas of genomics, petroleomics and sea-ice physics to investigate the potential for native microbial communities to mitigate oil spills, as warmer temperatures and melting sea ice usher in increasing shipping throughout Arctic waters.

This crucial environmental research will be undertaken at the Churchill Marine Observatory, a unique research facility the U of M is building in Churchill, MB, and on board the Canadian Coast Guard Ship, Amundsen.

As temperatures warm and shipping and resources exploration in the North increases, oil spills will be inevitable in the Arctic.

The University of Manitoba has long been a global leader in sea ice research and its Churchill Marine Observatory supports the technological, scientific, ethical, environmental, economic, legal and social research that is need to safely guide (through policy development) the unprecedented Arctic marine transportation and oil and gas exploration and development throughout the Arctic.

“The expertise that we bring to the table are in the areas of petroleomics and sea ice physics, and a new facility located in Churchill,” says research professor Gary Stern.

“The expertise that we bring to the table are in the areas of petroleomics and sea ice physics, and a new facility located in Churchill that will allow us to study oil degradation process under controlled ambient Arctic conditions,” says Stern.

“The idea is that we will be able to emulate different thermodynamic states of the sea-ice and how, under these conditions, different crude and fuel oils will interact with native microbial population in a controlled environment,” says Stern.

The 2015 LSARP competition aims to support applied research projects focused on using genomic approaches to address challenges and opportunities of importance to Canada’s natural resources and environment sectors, including interactions between natural resources and the environment, thereby contributing to the Canadian bioeconomy and the well-being of Canadians.

“The addition of this research partnership between our two institutions will expand our respective teams and their capacity to advance our knowledge about impacts on the Arctic ecosystem and effects of the changing climate on all aspects of the North,” says Dr. Digvir Jayas, vice-president (research and international) and Distinguished Professor at the U of M.

About the partners

The project will be managed by Genome Alberta in conjunction with Genome Prairie and with an international collaboration of funding partners that have shown the desire to protect the complex Arctic environment:

Genome Canada, Alberta Economic Development and Trade, University of Manitoba, Natural Resources Canada, Arctic Institute of North America, Arctic Research Foundation, Stantec Consulting Ltd., National Research Council of Canada, Research Manitoba, University of Calgary Petroleum Reservoir Group, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, Georgia Institute of Technology, Churchill Northern Studies Centre, Amundsen Science Inc., Environment and Climate Change Canada, Genome Quebec, Aphorist, and Aarhus University.

Stern and Hubert are co-presenting at ArcticNet’s Annual Scientific Meeting in Winnipeg this week. Close to 700 leading Arctic researchers, students, indigenous leaders, policy makers, northern community members and private sector representatives are gathered to address the numerous environmental, social, economical and political challenges and opportunities that are emerging from climate change and modernization in the Arctic.

More on sea ice and microbes

Did you know microbes live inside the sea ice? Søren Rysgaard, Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) in Arctic Geomicrobiology and Climate Change at the University of Manitoba, explains this focus of his research.

Quite a different working environment than the Amundsen

Scatterometer mounted on the platform, continuously scanning snow-covered sea ice. Credit: Alexander Komarov.

By Alexander Komarov, PhD Candidate (CEOS, University of Manitoba)

In the field we stayed in a hunter’s cabin with a great view at the frozen ocean! The experimental site was located on the ice about six km away from the cabin; so, we drove there by a snow mobile. Everyone who lived in the cabin had to do different chores which included cooking, collecting snow for washing dishes, filling up and running a power generator, keeping the diesel furnace running, and feeding our cabin husky dog Junior! Quite a different working environment than on the Amundsen!

To read the full story, click here.

Equipment blown out to sea

Sergei Kirillov, research scientist (CEOS, University of Manitoba) working with moorings. Credit: Vlad Petrusevich

By Sergei Kirillov, research scientist (CEOS) and Vlad Petrushevich, PhD candidate (CEOS)

Despite our best efforts we were not able to recover all of our equipment: one of them was lost in December – blown out to sea when the ice it was deployed on was broken off in a storm. Moreover, the unusually snowy winter weighed heavy on the ice and flooded the surface layer burying the top parts of many moorings in a thick layer (40-50 cm) of slush and ice. We spent hours chipping away at the ice to free our equipment!

To read the full story, click here.

About the Arctic Science Partnership

University of Mantioba researchers and grad students are involved in the Arctic Science Partnership and have documented their first-hand accounts of life up north. The project between three internationally-recognized Arctic research centres (University of Manitoba’s Centre for Earth Observation Science (CEOS), Aarhus University (Denmark) and the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources) brings academic and research capabilities into joint research campaigns and integrated academic programs. The participants’ experiences go far beyond the science behind the project, the collaborative nature of ASP nurtures a love of the barren north, personal growth, and many new friendships. Below you’ll find the first two stories reposted  for UM Today. For more, visit asp-net.org.

To do the job I do, you need to be a little bit crazy

Ice sampling. Nicolas-Xavier Geilfus with the ice corer. Alexis Burt and Kerri Warner taking temperature readings from ice core. Credit: Bruno Delille

By Kerri Warner, Research Associate (CEOS)

Life in the field is not for everyone. There are certain luxuries that of course you miss; such as showers, clean laundry, dry clothes and your own bed. When I try to explain how my job brings me out the field to incredibly remote locations to my friends and family, I usually get the same puzzled look. I have been asked “Why would you want to leave the comfort of your own life, your routine, your friends, your family, etc. for 6 plus weeks at a time?” I usually respond that to do the job I do, you need to be a little bit crazy. You need to be an adventure seeker. You need the desire to push yourself out of your comfort zone. You need to be completely passionate about what you do.

To read the full story, click here.

A memorable first field experience in the Arctic!

Nariman Firoozy (CEOS) at the snow and ice sampling site. Scatterometer in the background. Credit: Nariman Firoozy

By Nariman Firoozy, PhD candidate (CEOS)

The cabin is shaking. It’s 3 a.m. There is a storm with very intense wind. I wake up in a great fear, for our equipment at measuring site. Later in the morning and we are still trapped inside. The flame in the old furnace blows out and we are cold. We have little food and drinking water.

To read the full story, click here.

The Centre for Earth Observation Science opened at U of M in 1994. Arctic Science is a major research focus of the centre; it studies the physical, chemical, biological, and human systems of the Canadian and Cirumpolar Arctic.

The Arctic Science Partnership is a Memorandum of Understanding was signed at a meeting in Nuuk on June 8, 2012 between the Aarhus University, Greenland Institute of Natural Resources and the University of Manitoba. Its vision is to be a leading consortium on climate, cryosphere, ecosystems, and human interactions through research, monitoring and education.

Rysgaard wrote a fascinating first-person report on his time there this spring.

May 13, 2014

We are approximately 1000 km north of the Polar Circle.

Spring is getting here even though the temperature is -15C. Small flocks of snow bunting are arriving and today we spotted the first barnacle geese. There is a lot of snow this year and in some places you can walk directly onto the roofs of the buildings. Actually, several places you have to dig a tunnel to get into the buildings. The fjord is in some locations covered by up to a meter of snow that overlies a meter plus of sea ice. The sun is shining from a clear blue sky and for days there has been no wind whatsoever. Seals are emerging on the sea ice enjoying the return of the sun. Everything is quiet as it can only be up here.

We are back at fieldwork. Our team will concentrate on snow and sea ice and how it interacts with the atmosphere and ocean.

Last autumn we deployed several moorings collecting various parameters in the atmosphere (irradiance, temperature, wind speed direction, carbon dioxide concentration etc.), snow (thickness, temperature), sea ice (thickness, temperature, salinity, permeability etc) and ocean (temperature, salinity and currents, irradiance, turbidity etc). Several of these transmit their data via satellite. Unfortunately, we lost contact with one of the ocean mooring positions during winter. We have now localized all moorings, but one is missing.

The area outside Young Sound is interesting because of the presence of a polynya. A polynya is a site where sea ice is produced and frequently blown away from the area thereby allowing new ice to form again. It is a kind of sea ice fabric. There are different kinds of polynyas but this one is a wind-driven one. The function of a polynya and its influence on deep-water formation and greenhouse gas exchange between the atmosphere and ocean are not well understood. In order to obtain the expected signal in the water column (cold and more salty water) we need to be close to the site of the polynya. Unfortunately this mooring was too close. It is irritating as sea ice broke off just 100-200 m inside the mooring position. We hope to find it when the sea ice melts in the fjord.

We have started to recover the other moorings and download data. We will deploy them again and capture the signal of the melting sea ice as we approach the summer thaw.  It is going to be a wet season due to all the snow and the scientists following us need to bring rubber boots and other waterproof clothes when working on the melting sea ice cover. The idea is to study melt ponds as they develop and disappear just before the sea ice breaks up.  On this leg, scientists are characterizing snow and ice texture, gas content, biological and chemical processes. In addition, we collect measurements from across and along the fjord from the Greenland Ice Sheet into the Greenland Sea in order to understand the variation of snow and ice thickness and its interaction with the atmosphere and ocean and to provide data for up scaling.

We also cover measurements in the water column below the sea ice to the sea floor.  It is a hard work to make these graphs; our transects extend for hundred of kilometers and each site ( 2-3 km apart) involves clearing 30-100 cm snow, drilling through meter thick sea ice, setting up a tripod to get our instruments into the water without freezing and then by lowering it (by hand) down to the sea floor that is 350 m deep in some places. We are operating from skidoos inside the fjord, but have also airboats that can fly over snow, ice and open water when melting advances.

Days are long in the field. We start early and work often to midnight. Often there are long evenings in the laboratory here in Daneborg. And just before going to sleep, notes have to be made and the day’s data saved. People are looking tired in the evenings but it is difficult to get to bed as the sun is up day and night.

We take turns in the kitchen and right now it smells of fresh baked bread. Time is 1 am and people are still working. Looking around the table we have people from Greenland, Canada, Denmark, Russia, India, Belgium. What a team!

See here for more information on the Arctic Science Partnership and the 2014 Young Sound Campaign.

Glacial ice trapped in sea ice.

Background

Polar Regions play a vital role in the global climate system. Past and on-going climatic changes are amplified at high-latitude areas. Current climate change, associated with large-scale anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases, results in a dramatic warming of the Arctic leading to sea ice retreat, melting of glaciers and thawing of permafrost. These processes are not only causing changes in the Arctic systems but will also have implications globally. Despite the urgency and importance of addressing problems posed by climate change, we have only fragmentary understanding of the coupling of atmospheric processes, particle and cloud formation, sea ice retreat, glacial melt, permafrost thaw and biogeochemical processes. Current models predicting climate change and its cascading effects on ecosystem and society suffer tremendously from this lack of understanding.

The aim of this program is to provide this scientific knowledge. Only by providing integrated measurements and scientific understanding of the feedback mechanisms it is possible to make realistic assessments of regional and global impact and, consequently, map and implement adaptation needs in society.

Project Description

The Zackenberg, Daneborg and Cambridge Bay research stations are ideally located to address these atmosphere-cryosphere-land-ocean feedback mechanisms and impacts on ecosystems and the climate system.

The major scientific challenges to be addressed are:

• Effect of warming and sea ice retreat on atmospheric particle and cloud dynamics.
• Effect of sea ice biogeochemical processes on gas exchange between the atmosphere, and deeper ocean.
• Coupling between sea ice retreat and land based abiotic and biotic processes.
• Ocean-glacier interactions.
• Effect of increased runoff from land on ocean circulation
• Effects of reduced ice cover and altered ocean circulation on biological production, biogeochemistry and greenhouse gas exchange.
• Impacts of warming on High-Arctic biodiversity and ecosystem services.

An interdisciplinary scientific team using state-of-the-art assessment techniques in a comprehensive four-pronged approach of laboratory, ice tank, in situ, and modeling studies will carry out the project. Combining laboratory experiments simulating atmospheric processes, experimental ice tank and in situ studies will provide important new insight into the regulation of atmosphere-snow-ice-land-ocean processes, their seasonal and geographical distribution, and their variation over geological time through paleoclimatic proxies in lakes and seafloor.

***

David Babb is a M.SC student in physical geography who also just returned from the Zackenberg Research Station in Daneborg, NE Greenland (74N). There, he participated in the 2014 Young Sound field campaign, a research  initiative of the Arctic Science Partnership that involves researchers and graduate students from U of M, Denmark (Aarhus University), Greenland (Greenland Institute of Natural Resources).

His project is a case study on the seasonal transition of geophysical parameters of different ice types in Young Sound, on the northeast coast of Greenland.

He says that what he enjoys many things about field research. “I enjoy the adventure of working in remote places in sometimes harsh conditions and studying something that perhaps nobody has studied before.” he says.He also likes it because “it relies upon team work, whether it’s helping someone with their work or cooking dinner/reheating dinner for people who have been out on the ice all day, its important that everyone pitches in.”I also believe that scientifically its important to go to the field and get your hands wet/cold as you try and take notes or collect samples,” he adds. “I guess you could say it makes you appreciate the data more and provides more context than just looking at a dataset on your computer.”

Read more about his part in the 2014 Young Sound Campaign.

HOW IT STARTED: The U of M’s Canada Excellence Research Chair in Geomicrobiology and Climate Change (CERC) initiated the partnership to address the need for international efforts to answer today’s complex questions about how changes in the Arctic impact our planet. The collaboration recognizes that local knowledge and continuous dialogue with northern communities are key.

HOW IT WORKS: The partnership brings together the academic and research capabilities of three internationally recognize Arctic research centres in joint research campaigns and integrated academic programs. It creates unique opportunities for training and knowledge exchange by having U of M students participate in courses, field campaigns and field schools with students from other provinces and countries. In 2014, the partnership (along with the ArcticNet Student Association) hosted the first annual ASP field school in Kuujjuarapik (northern Quebec). The school brought together 16 graduate students from Canadian and international universities, in an experiential and cross-curricular program that included Arctic security, ecosystem dynamics, engineering and geology.

THE GOAL: “[Arctic Science Partnership] research seeks to understand the complex interrelationships between different elements of Earth systems and how these systems will likely respond to climate change,” says Søren Rysgaard, CERC.

“ASP education inspires students interested in the Arctic system to exchange ideas with other students in an attempt to not only broaden their knowledge, but expand their research,” says John Iacozza, a senior instructor at CEOS. “The basic motivation for our work is: as a group we can answer more questions than we can individually.”

FUNDERS AND SUPPORTERS: The field school is funded by ArcticNet; Arctic Science Partnership; the Clayton H. Riddell Faculty of Earth, Environment and Resources Endowment Fund; Centre for Earth Observation Science; and the Department of Environment and Geography at the University of Manitoba. In kind support was provided by CEN and Air Inuit.

LEARN MORE

• Arctic Science Partnership
• Canada Excellence Research Chair
• Centre for Earth Observation Science