Canadian Arctic Snow School hopes to boost climate fight

Reporting for this story was made possible by the Persephone Miel Fellowship from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting.

Iqaluktuuttiaq, Nunavut, Canada – Marie Dumont’s face is red. It’s a windy Tuesday afternoon in the small hamlet of Iqaluktuuttiaq, in Nunavut, Canada’s northern part, and the outside temperature is about -25 degrees Celsius (-13 degrees Fahrenheit).

In these sub-zero temperatures, Dumont has spent most of the past week working with a dozen young scientists and students to better understand Arctic snow and what it can say about how to tackle climate change challenges. addressed.

She is part of a group of 40 researchers, students and Inuit scholars participating in the first-ever Arctic Snow School, held at the Canadian High Arctic Research Station (CHARS) in early April.

“I love it … some people know more about snow than I do,” said Dumont, a research scientist and head of the Snow Research Center at the National Center for Meteorological Research in Grenoble, France.

“The school is super diverse and everyone here comes from different countries, different backgrounds and different fields of science.”

Study snow

The Arctic Snow School is a joint project of two institutions in the Canadian province of Quebec: Sentinel North at Universite Laval and the Groupe de Recherche Interdisciplinarye sur les Milieux Polaires (GRIMP) at the University of Sherbrooke.

The aim, the organizers say, “is to educate a new generation of scientists capable of solving the complex problems of a changing North”.

Changes in this vast area also have global implications; as Greenpeace explains, “the Arctic helps regulate global temperatures, so the more polar ice melts, the warmer our world gets.” Understanding how the environment is changing, and how quickly, can help devise solutions, experts say.

Alexandre Langlois, co-leader of the initiative and a professor at the University of Sherbrooke, said studying arctic snow could help researchers better assess how arctic vegetation is changing, what access animals such as lemmings and caribou will have to food and safe habitats. , and new challenges for Inuit who travel the region to hunt and fish.

One of the field campaigns at the school involved using a radiometer to better understand rain-on-snow events, which occur when rain falls on existing snow and freezes, creating an ice layer. The radiometer measures energy emanating from the snow, indicating how much rain has fallen and how it changes the different layers of snow that make up the larger snow pack.

Langlois said the Arctic is seeing more rain-on-snow events, but it’s unclear what causes it due to a lack of on-the-ground data. For caribou, he said, this means it’s difficult to forage for lichens buried under the frozen ice. In the long run, these events can also cause damage to infrastructure not designed for frequent rainfall.

Measuring the probability and effect of rain on snow in arctic conditions is an important first step in brainstorming solutions to the problem, Langlois told Al Jazeera.

“We developed a method with the radiometers here on the ground to detect the presence of liquid water on the surface when it rains, and with that data we can then apply it to satellite images,” he said of the process.

“By doing that, you can create maps about the occurrence of rain or snow events — to see if a year has had more rain on snow than usual, if there are hot spots where we know there are more of those events, and what causes.”

Studying arctic snow specifically could also fill a knowledge gap, said Florent Domine, one of the snow school organizers and a professor specializing in snow physics at Université Laval, because it is “little studied compared to alpine snow.”

According to Dumont, the French researcher who has been studying snow in the Alps for more than a decade, there are significant differences between alpine and arctic snow – starting with the differing properties between the two.

In the Alps, researchers often work in more than 1 meter of snow, and higher temperatures can lead to rain and melting, she told Al Jazeera. But in the Arctic, the snow is shallower and “evolving” due to more extreme and fluctuating temperatures — over the course of the week, Dumont and her team conducted field surveys in temperatures ranging from -30C to -13C (-22F to 8.6 F). ).

Arctic conditions also affect the tools researchers can use; this week, Dumont said, a computer and a spectrometer — an instrument that measures “albedo,” or light reflected from a surface — stopped working after 30 minutes because of the cold. “This is new to me,” she said.

Intercultural exchange

Meanwhile, training young scientists to conduct field research on snow is also an opportunity to harness the power of local Inuit communities experienced in changing snow conditions rather than relying solely on data gathered through the use of technology.

“Hopefully, the legacy of this school will be to improve the way collaboration is conducted and we’ll move more towards co-managing research projects,” said Langlois, the school’s co-leader, “rather than just being western scientists who are supported by traditional knowledge.”

Annelise Waling and Juliette Ortet, two snow school students, said going to Iqaluktuuttiaq was an opportunity to gain hands-on experience – digging snow pits, examining the surface of snow grains and understanding snow layers and the weather changes they cause.

Waling, a master’s student at the University of New Hampshire in the United States, studies atmospheric rivers around the Greenland ice sheet, while Ortet is a PhD student at universities in France and Canada focusing on changes in Arctic permafrost using remote sensing. Neither has focused on a better understanding of snow before.

Waling and Ortet also said they wanted to better understand climate change in relation to Indigenous communities. “Our exchanges with Inuit elders and community members [are] super important to me,” said Ortet.

Three Inuit students from the environmental technology programme at Nunavut Arctic College, as well as five Indigenous hunters and knowledge-holders, are participating in the school, hoping to shed light on how climate change has affected their culture, traditions and way of life.

For Sharlyne Fay Umphrey, a student at the college, it has been heartening to see participants, both young and old, who are not Inuit and not from Nunavut, share the same interests and passions.

“It’s nice to see that you have people from all over the world that have the same interest in snow,” she said. “Just seeing snow in their perspective — that people think of it in many different ways and how it’s important.”