IQALUIT – There are more than 60 words to describe sea ice in Inuktitut.
For the hunters of Nunavut, the words are critical when traveling a snowmobile or dog team on a frozen ocean road.
In Pond Inlet, on the north of Baffin Island, Andrew Arreak spends a lot of time putting those words and their definitions together. He says he plans to share his list with the community and local schools to help people stay safe.
“I’m trying to get all of these words right so they know what to expect when they’re on the ice.”
Arreak leads the Nunavut business of SmartICE, an organization based in the area and the Nunatsiavut region of Newfoundland and Labrador. It combines local knowledge of sea ice with modern technology, using sensors to determine ice thickness and collect data on ice conditions that communities can use when they hit the ice.
While SmartICE has continued its research during the COVID-19 pandemic, thanks to Nunavut-based staff, other southern scientists and researchers have been locked out of the territory this year.
“SmartICE never missed a moment during COVID,” said Trevor Bell, a professor at Memorial University in St. John’s, NL, and the founder of SmartICE.
He says research has always been designed to be conducted locally.
“We have put our monitoring tools in the hands of the community members from the start. They can generate and generate the information about the sea ice… without any intervention from us.
“It’s run by communities for communities in the north. You see the benefit of that in a year like this.”
Nunavut is a hub for research all year round, but especially in the summer months. For example, in 2017, the Nunavut Research Institute licensed 136 research projects involving 662 people.
In March, Nunavut’s chief public health officer restricted travel to the territory for residents only. Travel between communities was virtually unlimited, apart from lockdowns in the spring and November.
Milla Rautio, a researcher at the Universite du Quebec, has traveled to Nunavut every summer since 2014 to study changes in Arctic lakes around Cambridge Bay and Victoria Island.
This year, in light of travel restrictions, Rautio turned to members of the community to conduct her research. She sent sampling equipment to Cambridge Bay and remotely supervised a small investigation team.
“I was able to get everything I needed and even more.”
Rautio says that by having Nunavummiut take samples, she could also continue her research year-round.
“Instead of me and my students going to Cambridge Bay once a year, usually in August, to take this snapshot of sampling, we now have the chance to understand what’s going on in the North all year round”, she says.
“I didn’t have to go there myself.”
Rautio worked for years connecting with students and other community members in Cambridge Bay. She says those connections have been crucial to her research that continued in the midst of the pandemic.
Thanks to local knowledge, Rautio’s research team also discovered something they probably didn’t come across on their own. A once crystal clear lake used for fishing near the community had suddenly turned cloudy.
“I’m not sure I would have known this without them”
Heidi Swanson, a professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, usually spends time in the summer in all three territories studying fish. This year too she conducted her research with the help of residents.
“In Kugluktuk (Nunavut), we let our northern research partner do better than ever before,” Swanson told the annual Arctic Net conference on December 9.
Like Rautio, Swanson has made connections in several northern communities.
“Where the relationships are stronger, we had more adaptability.”
This report from The Canadian Press was first published on December 26, 2020.