In Germany, in New Zealand, in the Canary Islands and at 21 other observatories around the world, instruments called infrared spectrometers are teasing apart sunlight to measure greenhouse gas levels in the Earth’s atmosphere.
Two dozen spectrometers make up the Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON). The one in Eureka, Nunavut, is the most northerly of them all — a sentry in the Arctic, where extreme effects of climate change are rapidly altering the environment.
“They see our site at Eureka as being a key site,” says University of Toronto atmospheric physicist Kimberly Strong, who oversees the instrument.
Last April, federal funding to Eureka lab dried up; the spectrometer dropped from 150 measurement days a year to around 30.
The Arctic is a core part of this country’s identity, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper is eager to assert Canada’s sovereignty in the North. Last Thursday, the government signed a $288-million shipbuilding contract for new Arctic patrol vessels.
Yet increasingly, the basic science that would let us understand changes occurring in our own backyard — and either mitigate or take advantage of them — is being neglected by Canada and assumed by other countries, Arctic researchers say.
“If we Canadians don’t do the work, it’s not like other people are just going accept that internationally,” says Antoni Lewkowicz, a permafrost scientist at the University of Ottawa. “You can only so often have maps presented at conferences of the circumpolar area and big blanks gaps over Canada before the people who are in Sweden or Germany say, ‘Oh, well I guess somebody better do that work, then.’ ”
Strong remembers the first TCCON conference after the funding cuts, when all the international members met in Switzerland last June to share their results, as “kind of embarrassing.” While other spectrometers are running continuously, Eureka's collects data for a week here and there.
“People want to know, ‘Why are you not getting support to do this? You’re doing good science,’ ” says Strong. “It sends a message that Canada isn’t as serious about keeping an eye on its Arctic.”
The lab in Eureka that houses Strong’s spectrometer and 26 other instruments — the Polar Environment and Atmospheric Research Laboratory (PEARL) — is merely the highest-profile of a slew of Arctic science stations and programs to expire quietly, be axed outright or suffer paralyzing budget cuts.
The Northern Research Chairs program, designed in the late 1990s to reinforce a scientific presence in the Arctic, ended on schedule last year and was not renewed. The ice cores unit at Natural Resources Canada was recently dismantled. Yukon’s Kluane Lake research laboratory last year saw all of its federal funding — a third of its budget — withdrawn.
In a statement provided in response to the Toronto Star’s inquiries, Leona Aglukkaq, the cabinet minister responsible for the North, said: “The Harper Government’s continuing commitment to Arctic science remains strong.” The statement lists a half-dozen government-funded science programs, some of which scientists applaud, and others that are considered poor replacements for cancelled programs.
“The government will tell you they’ve put a lot of money into the Arctic, which is fine until you look at the size of it,” says Jim Drummond, PEARL’s principal investigator and an atmospheric scientist at Dalhousie University. “It’s not fair to say the government is doing nothing. They just could be doing more.”
A few believe that cuts to PEARL are part of a Conservative war on science, and in particular on the environment. More scientists chalk up the closures to flagging political appetite for expensive research in an era of budget challenges.
There is broad agreement, however, that Canada’s current scientific presence in the Arctic is diminishing its stature on the world stage, and damaging its claims in the North.
“The science community sees understanding what is happening in the Arctic as one of the major scientific challenges of the day — and it is bemused that Canada, which claims sovereignty over much of the terrestrial Arctic and wants sovereignty over much of the ocean as well, simply shows no real scientific interest in that territory,” says University of Alberta glaciologist Martin Sharp.
The hobbling of PEARL has drawn the most attention. PEARL was one of the few stations tracking changes in pollution, ozone and climate data in the Arctic year-round, thanks to a multimillion-dollar investment in 2005.
In 2011, numerous international observatories detected a massive ozone depletion event, the biggest in the northern hemisphere since modern record-keeping began. PEARL was directly beneath it and made crucial, continuous measurements.
“When the papers came to be written, it was Canadian data and Canadian scientists’ names on them. That was a big thing,” Drummond said. “If you wait until ozone depletion appears, it will be gone before you get there.”
PEARL requires $1.5 million to keep operating year-round. Much of that came from the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, which was set up by the previous Liberal government. The foundation also funded science on Arctic storms, northern carbon flux and glacier melt. The Conservatives stopped injecting new funding into the foundation, and doled out its last grant in March 2012.
In the 2007 speech from the throne, Harper announced that Canada would spend $188 million on a massive new research station in Cambridge Bay, hundreds of kilometres south of Eureka. The Canadian High Arctic Research Station (CHARS) is one of the investments touted by Aglukkaq’s statement. It will be completed in 2017, and will receive $46.2 million for science and technology research — more than 30 times the total operating budget of PEARL.
Drummond and others are puzzled by this development. They argue that vastness of Canada’s Arctic makes the current network of smaller, cheaper, already-operational stations more effective than one expensive centre.
At 80 degrees latitude, PEARL also sits in the true high Arctic, where climate changes are more accelerated than in the rest of the region. Cambridge Bay is at 69 degrees latitude.
“The distance between Eureka and Cambridge Bay is the same as between Toronto and Atlanta, Georgia,” Drummond says.
The Arctic scientists the Star spoke to are all quick to give credit where it’s due. Some are enthusiastic about CHARS and other programs. And during International Polar Year, a global initiative that ran from 2007 to 2009, Canada was one of the most active contributors of any country involved, invested more than $150 million.
But while Canada’s International Polar Year funds have petered out, other countries have boosted theirs. According to Cynan Ellis-Evans, who heads the U.K.’s Arctic Office, funding for Arctic research has increased from £1 million to £2 million ($1.5 million to $3 million) a decade ago to £6 or £7 million ($9 million to $10.7 million) today. This summer, his office will be undertaking two permafrost research programs in the Northwest Territories.
“Our contributions from U.K. are relatively small, but we’re ramping up, year on year,” Ellis-Evans says.
At a conference two years ago, Antoni Lewkowicz remembers learning of a string of American research stations running north from Alaska into Canada’s high Arctic.
“It’s going too far to say that’s an invasion of foreign scientists, because we welcome them and we collaborate with them, absolutely,” he says. “But I still think it’s very worrying that Canada is not producing, or doesn’t have the resources to support, the science that should be taking place in its own backyard.”