I woke up at 4:30 AM today eagerly anticipating our freight shipment, which contains the bulk of our cold weather gear (my down coat, our goggles, our snowmobiling and safety gear…) and all of our scientific equipment. I drank three cups of coffee to garner the energy to haul all 16 boxes to the research station and the field site. Then, about 10:00 AM, I heard the bad news…

The Air Inuit cargo people in Montreal bumped our shipment in favor of 1500 kg of AVOCADOS!!!!!  Avocados, people! Someone actually decided that it was more important that 1500 kg of avocados reach the Nunavik region – a collection of fourteen isolated Inuit communities in northern Quebec (of which this is the southernmost) than our scientific equipment and outdoor gear. 

Where’s the Avocado Festival? I want to be airlifted in!

So, full of coffee and angst, I started to ponder the following:

a. Who introduced avocados to the Inuit diet, and how important are they?

b. So much for the local foods movement!  Just how far have these avocados travelled anyway? Are these native avocados from Mexico, Central America or Guam, cultivated avocados from California or Florida, or hothouse avocados grown somewhere in the Northeast U.S.? Am I the only one questioning the cost to the environment of transporting 1500 kg of subtropical fruit, in this case about 3000 avocados, a minimum of 4500 miles across the North American continent? I can’t imagine what an avocado costs here, but I am going to find out!

c. Is the Nunavik market clamouring for avocados, or is this supply side driven? Did you know that after the NAFTA (Northern American Free Trade Agreement) treaty was signed in 1994, there was an avocado-related trade war? At issue was the danger of importing fruit flies to the U.S. along with the avocados. As a solution, the Mexican government proposed to sell avocados only to the northeastern U.S. in the winter (fruit flies cannot withstand extreme cold). The U.S. government accepted this arrangement only when the Mexican government threatened to block imports of U.S. corn. I kid you not! Look it up! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avocado#Avocado-related_trade_war

I have begged the cook, Ginette, not to served anything containing avocados. If she does, I think I will weep.

With no freight to unload, Helen and I decided to burn off our frustration by walking up the frozen river 10 km to the rapids, and back. The Great Whale River is about half mile wide where it joins the bay, and the ice is flat there and very thick. We followed snowmobile tracks up the river as far as we could. About 8 km upriver, they begin to hug the shore. Here, the ice on the river, which is covered with several feet of snow, is warped into great rolling dunes. A bit further on, we reached a point where there was open water in the middle of the river, and the ice around it was only about 2 inches thick. Beyond this we could see great expanses of open water, with steam rising off it. We’re told there’s a waterfall a bit farther upstream and we may return sometime to hike up the shore to it.

The snow on the river had been piled into enormous drifts, all covered by a crust about 1 inch thick. When we were lucky, we were able to walk on the crust. When we broke through though, we found ourselves wading through snow up to our knees, and in some places our hips. To make this even more fun, the snow hid the cracks in the ice below. (No, there was no open water showing.) Some cracks have opened to 6 inches or even a foot in width, so occasionally we found ourselves lurching into a crack and a sudden change in snow depth. I got my boot stuck in a crack at one point, and thereafter we took to warning one another to, “Mind the Gap,” whenever the person breaking trail found one.

I’m still laughing.

So is Helen.

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Thank you to all of you who have left comments, especially ‘My Greatest Accomplishment in Life’, Theo. Don’t worry, I am being careful!

Today it was -26ºC with winds of 22 km/hr and gusts to over 30 km/hr. (Apologies to those of you who use mph, I will try to include those units next time).

Hilke Oetjen and Anoop Mahajan from John Plane’s research group at the University of Leeds have deployed a long-path DOAS (Differential Optical Absorption Spectroscopy) instrument to monitor the IO and BrO radicals in the near surface atmosphere. They have installed a reflector on Bill of Portland Island, which lies 2-3 miles west of our field site on the shore of the Hudson Bay. They were unable to detect a reflection today, so assumed windblown snow had partially covered the reflector. I helped them assemble a ‘cage’, or protective box to fit around it, and the four of us (Anoop, Hilke, Helen and I) made another trek to the island.

The high south-southwesterly winds have set up a gyre that is peeling the sea ice away from the coast.  Although the area just off our field site is somewhat protected by the island, a zone of active, or moving, ice has formed 300 meters out.  The ice is still very thick, but is shifting and the topography of the surface between the site and the island had changed noticeably, due to the rafting and ridging that had occurred in the two days since we’d last crossed it. On the far side, a tide crack had formed about 20 meters off the east side of the island (see photo).  Seawater admitted by the crack flooded the surface of the ice, but was hidden under the windblown snow. By shovelling away the snow, Helen was able to gather samples from the brine pools.

Open water and new sea ice were visible west of the island on a satellite photo we received two days ago, and we trekked across to the far side to assess its extent. The wind on the exposed side of the island was quite strong, and our breath froze in our balaclavas, hair and eyelashes. To the west, a channel of open water at least 1 km wide lay about 300 meters offshore. Steam was rising from the open water (the water is warmer than the air) and being driven north by the wind. This will be an excellent place to find frost flowers when new ice has formed, provided we are very careful!

We are still awaiting delivery of our equipment, which got hung up in Customs in Montreal as the result of a paperwork error. I saw this headline in the local Inuktitut-English newspaper, the Nunatsiaq News, today, and – despite my frustration – had to laugh. (No, it really isn’t about us!)

The same article in Inuktitut:

Despite minor annoyances, I am really enjoying just being here. It is peaceful and wild, and reminds me a lot of home, Vermont, 1000 miles to the south. I have crosscountry skied at dawn and at dusk out of town to the north, into the hills, and to the southwest, across the river and up into the hills there. It is quiet, calm, and still, but not lifeless. There are numerous animal tracks … the ubiquitous local dogs of course, but also rabbit, fox, and something small, marten perhaps, or squirrel. I have seen a red fox twice now and hope to eventually get his picture. Today I also saw a ptarmigan.

Tonight, a Cree boy of 10 and his father came to the Research Station dorm selling crafts. I bought a dreamcatcher from the boy, Johnny Wapachee. I hope it brings dreams of the wild.

 We have a laptop computer which is needed to collect data in the field. Yesterday we discovered that the laptop screen is impossible to see outside in the daylight. Even in the absense of bright clear skies or direct sunlight, the reflectivity of the snow makes everywhere too bright. We built a device we call our “mobile lab” out of a cardboard box and a black rubbish bag – a la the old time cameras with hoods. Not very high tech, but it works! We took some experimental photos yesterday just outside the research station.   

Since the majority of our equipment is still on its way, we are using this time to collect samples. Today we took snowmobiles out to an island about 6 km offshore, with Anoop and Hilke (Leeds University) who had equipment to place there.

We found frost flowers today, so now the science can begin. Frost flowers, for those unfamiliar with them, are small (3 cm tall) dendritic crystals that grow on the surface of sea ice (and sometimes fresh water ice). Conditions (e.g. air and water temperature) must be just right for them to form, and they are commonly found on the surface of leads, where the sea ice has cracked and spread before refreezing. Cracks can form as a result of temperature, tides and wind, and are often found where the water meets the land.  Off the east coast of the island, we found leads which had long frozen over. You could see that frost flowers had once existed but had since been covered with falling or blowing snow. The Inuit guide who was travelling with us confirmed my suspicions that a good place to find leads is the southermost point of the island, in the presence of winds from the SSE and preferably warmer temps than we have seen recently. We saw no open leads there today, but will check again out there when the conditions are right.

We found fresh frost flowers near the shore, just off the experimental site, the results of leads produced by tide. We took digital photographs and samples.

Unfortunately the laptop was dead from cold by the time we tried to use it with our portable high magnification camera, despite being kept close to my body. (I have to keep my camera inside my bib overalls, or it dies too.) We have not been able to heat the laptop because some of the heating equipment is in the missing air freight. We will try preheating the laptop tomorrow in a warm lab and then using it out on the ice immediately. We also collected samples from the underside of slabs, which were clearly accretion ice, where we saw dark streaks and patches that may contain diatoms that Helen will study.

Our freight didn’t arrive from Montreal today as expected. I hope it will arrive tomorrow, as we need to get our equipment unpacked and assembled. Meanwhile Helen, our PhD student, and I have been helping the people from Leeds and York Universities move their boxes from the airport to the research station and the site.

The airport is down by the Bay, and its single runway runs North-South along the shore. Our research site is a couple of miles north of the end of the runway, so the planes pass right over us. This has made it difficult to get permission to fly the tethered balloons and kites that carry our meteorological sondes at the research site, so I spent some time looking for alternate sites. The buildings and electric lines here on the edge of town make the research station itself a bad place to fly the instruments, but to the northeast is a barren hill that might be a good location.

Kuujjuarapik-Whapmagoostui is located at the mouth of the Great Whale River (Poste de la Baleine).

The research station is at the southeast edge of town, just uphill from the river. On the website is a photo of the research station, taken last summer. The two storey building is where we live and work. The top floor has rooms with bunk beds, and downstairs are labs. The building to its right is the mess hall, where we take our meals.  http://www.cen.ulaval.ca/english/station.html

Also in our missing freight is my really heavy expedition coat, about 20 pounds of down in a parka that reaches almost to my knees. I haven’t been cold yet, but I’ll need it for snowmobile travel or extended periods out on the ice. Today it was warmer than yesterday, about -15◦C midday, but the high winds made it seem much colder. Current weather where we are can be found here

http://www.weatheroffice.gc.ca/city/pages/qc-105_metric_e.html 

I wear three long sleeve shirts under my coat, running tights and polarfleece sweatpants under my snowpants, two pairs of wool socks, two pairs of gloves, a balaclava, and a hat. The hat is leather with rabbit fur earflaps, so every time I see it lying on my bed, my first instinct is to pat it and say “Good dog”, because I think it is alive!

After two days of travel, we have arrived in Kuujjuaraapik-Whapmagoostui, Quebec, the southernmost Inuit community and northernmost Cree community in the Hudson Bay area of the subarctic. We flew from London, Heathrow to Montreal, then caught the 900 mile Air Inuit flight north to Kuujjuaraapik-Whapmagoostui the next morning. The cross-Atlantic flight was nearly empty, thus we left a trail of enormous carbon footprints in our wake. Hopefully our work, the data we gather and the insights into climate – past, present, and future – we produce will help offset this.

Kuujjuaraapik-Whapmagoostui is a village of approximately 500 Inuit and 800 Cree accessible only by air most of the year – and by boat for one month in the summer. The rugged landscape of low hills is covered with subarctic tundra and taiga – lichen covered rocky outcroppings and scrub pine – and is pockmarked with ponds, rivers, and sand dunes. The village itself is located where the Great Whale River enters the Hudson Bay. The river itself is just downslope from the research center where we bunk, Centre détudes Nordique. Lined up along the bank are 50 or 60 identical green canoes resting upside down on supports.

While we awaited the forklift that would move our shipping containers, I walked down to the river. On my way I passed a group of local children with a red plastic sled. We greeted each other, they were friendly and enthusiastic, but only one – the oldest, a girl of 12 – spoke enough English to communicate with me. I tried my poor French, but when that produced quizzical looks, I assumed that they spoke Inuktitut or Cree. No matter, the language of children is universal, and we had fun when I took video clips of their sled runs down the hill toward the river and then played them back for them. As with children everywhere, this produced a lot of laughs, attempts to upstage one another, and occasional annoyance when someone was unseated by a playmate.

We went out to the research site, 8 km north of town on the shore of the Bay, to see our work spaces (transport containers) placed. I took panoramic images of the site which I will try to attach to this blog. Internet service is slow and intermittent here, the low temperature (-32 C) seems to affect the satellite communications.