Research mission aims to fill in the many blanks of Arctic climate change

Scientists are loading a converted crab fishing boat in Dartmouth, N.S.,with sophisticated instruments for a mission to measure climate change in the Canadian Arctic.

The scientists are testing their equipment in sea trials off Halifax before heading to Southampton Island in northwestern Hudson Bay later this summer.

Southampton Island is one of Canada's largest gathering places for Arctic marine mammals and a place where people have lived for millennia.

"The communities up north, there's marine mammals and fish that they depend on and we want to know if the food web is going to be able to continue to support those specific species," saidAndrea Niemi, a Department of Fisheries and Oceans research scientist based in Winnipeg.

The ship being used is theWilliam Kennedy, a 20-metre boat owned by the Arctic Research Foundation,the non-profit co-founded by philanthropist Jim Balsillie, former CEO of Research in Motion.

Gathering data in an area never surveyed in detail

Niemi is part of the Southhampton Island Marine Ecosystem Project, a three-year study led by the University of Manitoba and co-funded by the federal government and theMarine Environmental Observation Prediction and Response (MEOPAR) network, a Halifax-based research centre of excellence studying marine environmental risk.

Government and university scientists from many disciplines are examining the region's oceanography, productivity and sea life in an effort to predict changes to the ecosystem.

The retreat of sea ice and longer open-sea seasons has made a warming climate visible in Canada's North.

For example, beluga whales are entering Hudson Bay earlier and staying longer.

But the mission must confront one of the ironies of climate change in Canada: where it is most dramatically present todaywas the least studied in the past.

The difficulty of quantifying changes

Unlike Canada's Atlantic Ocean, where scientists have measured marine environmental conditions for decades, there is little or no baseline information in the Arctic.

That makes it difficult to quantify changes in the ecosystem, saidNiemi, an expert in tiny marine organisms known as zooplankton.

"I'd really like to be able to say what's changed or has not changed, but the issue we have is that we just don't have the old information to compare it to," she said.

Niemi said the energy-rich zooplankton at the base of the food web are present off Southampton Island and the species changes depending on water depth.

"But to say is this different from 10years ago, we just don't know," she said."To see if there are changes over time we can't say right now, but we want to keep building up and looking for that because it does have effects throughout the food web."

Arctic ocean report expected after next election

Niemi is an author of DFO's next big publication on climate change, a report on the state of the ocean in the Arctic.

Earlier this year, the department released its first assessment,The State of the Atlantic Ocean,which summarizedthe overall health and trends in the Atlantic Ocean based on scientific research and monitoring from DFO and Environment and Climate Change Canada.

It said warmer sea temperatures, less ice cover and changing currents in Canada's Atlantic Ocean are the result of global climate change.

The Arctic version will lack the detailed baseline data available in the Atlantic.

Looking back 2,000 years

Micropaleontologist Audrey Limoges from the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton is studying core samples taken around Southampton Island, which reveal natural variability over time.

Limoges saidlooking at what happened in the past could help measure changes in the present.

"If we can go back in time 2,000 years ago, we have these transitions from colder to warmer episodes and we can see how this system reacted to those changes," she said in awharfside interview in Dartmouth.

Limoges said climate-relatedchanges are not always easilyperceivedby most Canadians living in urban areas in the south.

She said Canada's Northshows climate change is occurring and coming our way.

"This kind of mission is extremely important," she said.