Katherine Dow chats with University of Manitoba, assistant professor and glaciologist Karen Alley about her research and work studying a massive ice shelf in Antarctica.

To watch the full interview, visit CTV Winnipeg. 

The Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science, and Industry announced $6.7 million in new funding today to a University of Manitoba (UM) research team to support GENICE II – a Large Scale Applied Research Project funded through Genome Canada and Genome Prairie. The project team will critically evaluate monitored natural microbial biodegradation as a reliable response to oil spills in an ice laden Arctic marine environment.

Drs. Gary Stern and Eric Collins lead GENICE II. The duo are members of the Centre for Earth Observation Science in the Clayton H. Riddell Faculty of Environment, Earth, and Resources. The multidisciplinary research team includes collaborators at McGill University and the National Research Council Canada.

“I congratulate the GENICE II team on their success in receiving this competitive national funding,” said Dr. Digvir Jayas, Vice-President (Research and International) at UM. “This research will inform effective policy and governance to ultimately prevent, prepare and respond to Arctic marine spills.”

The field of genomics has advanced rapidly over the past two decades as new technologies have led to a tidal wave of DNA sequencing, supported in part by Genome Canada and Genome Prairie.

“Policymakers will gain evidence and learn from this unique partnership project to more accurately inform preparedness and emergency response in the event of an oil spill in the Arctic,” said Lisette Mascarenhas, Chief Scientific Officer at Genome Prairie. “Microbes play an essential role in the Arctic Ocean ecosystem due to their place at the base of the marine food web and as natural filters for cleaning up contaminants, but fully understanding their roles requires genomics.”

Oil spills in the Arctic are an international problem that are only likely to worsen in the future. In May 2020, a spill of 17,500 tonnes of diesel oil occurred into a Russian Arctic river that led to the contamination of nearly 200 kilometers of shoreline, with ongoing cleanup costs estimated at US $2 billion.

Gary Stern

“The research involves the co-development of a community-based monitoring program with our Inuit partners from the Northwestern Kivalliq communities of Baker Lake, Arviat, Chesterfield and Rankin Inlet,” says Stern. “As part of the project, we will be conducting a series of controlled oil, sea water and sea ice experiments in the Ocean Sea Ice Mesocosm located at the recently completed Churchill Marine Observatory.” An official opening of CMO will take place in 2022.

Cutting edge portable DNA sequencing technologies from Oxford Nanopore Technologies will be implemented in collaboration with Inuit communities to monitor natural populations of microbes that may be impacted by the presence of oil.

“I know well that our community is very concerned about the impacts from increased shipping in our area, including the possibility of a major oil spill,” says Barnie Aggark, Mayor of Chesterfield Inlet, Nunavut and recent Chairman of the local Hunters and Trappers Organization. “We are especially concerned about ship traffic for the gold mine northwest of us, which travels past our community on the shores of Hudson Bay and up Chesterfield Inlet, a narrow and risky shipping route to Baker Lake. The inlet is a rich and sensitive ecosystem that is a highly important area to our community and any spills would flow down the inlet and through our hunting and fishing areas, damaging the environment and our marine mammals that are already impacted by the shipping.”

Eric Collins

This project will train a new generation of Canadians in large-scale applied genomics research and benefit Canada through advances in policy and governance of marine oil spill prevention, preparation and response.

“Hundreds of billions of base pairs of DNA sequence will be generated during the course of the project, to identify the naturally-occurring microbes responsible for cleaning up oil in the Canadian Arctic,” says Collins, a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Arctic Marine Microbial Ecosystem Services.

This project was funded through Genome Canada’s 2020 Large-Scale Applied Research Project Competition: Genomic Solutions for Natural Resources and the Environment. The Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry announced this on July 22, 2021.

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.”