Home sweet home

Though I have been back for a few weeks already, I thought I’d do one last post – sorry it’s so late in coming, I’ve been up to my eyeballs in work since I got back.

The last few days on the ship were fairly uneventful, filled with many powerpoint presentations, delicious cookies, and general lounging about. On Friday, the last day of scientific operations, we had a big celebration in the evening. We, scientists and students, served supper to the crew and officers, and I had the special duty of “serenading” them with some rousing fiddle tunes. Much to my delight, I discovered that the head scientist, Sam Bentley (whom I must add is the absolute picture of a seafaring man), is also accomplished in the field of traditional stepdancing. We did a few classic numbers; Whisky Before Breakfast, St. Anne’s Reel, etc. and everyone was in high spirits late into the night (I’m sure the wine had nothing to do with it…).

Steaming down the St. Laurent towards Quebec, we encountered some monstrous waves, much to my stomach’s dismay, and I was once again confined to bed for an entire day, where I became extremely familiar with the back of my eyelids.

The day of our arrival in Quebec City was very merry; many of the scientists had been on board for months without seeing their family or friends. We could see Quebec for a long time before we actually arrived; a hazy silhouette of skyscrapers and old cathedrals.

When we finally got to the dock, there was a small crowd awaiting us, and the ship pulled up so close, we could have stepped right off the boat, if it wasn’t completely illegal. When they finally lowered the gangplank, it looked quite comical; as we were right against the shore, it reached past the people far into the parking lot. Nonetheless, the captain looked very smart in his fancy uniform as he disembarked, followed by the officers, and then us, the lowly crew.

As the scientists and crew greeted their loved ones, we Schools On Board students stood close together, watching and feeling a little lost. It was actually quite touching to watch some of the reunions taking place around us; one of the crew met his new baby boy, born while he was away, for the very first time. David, one of the scientists, was immediately set upon by his four very excited little daughters. It definitely made me realize what kind of sacrifices these scientists have to make to carry out their research. People who claim that scientists are “a bunch of quacks” who are “in it for the money” are themselves quacks, and should go do something good for the world rather than ignorantly accusing those who are doing so.

After saying our goodbyes to the scientists, we took a walk around touristy but beautiful Old Quebec, enjoying the stillness of the ground underfoot. Rosalie, one of the girls on the trip, lives in Quebec City, and she showed us around in classic “Rosalie” fashion; saying, as she points to the ruins of an old stone house, “Dis eez my family’s winter cottage…”, gesturing to the fireplace, “…here eez where we like to sit and shoot toureests.”

We spent the rest of the afternoon shopping, or in mine and Rebecca’s case, getting embarrassingly lost and having to get out the map, instantly labeling us as tourists (as if the camera around the neck wasn’t enough of a giveaway). We had supper at the Cochon Dingue (Crazy Pig) and then went back to the ship for the night, where we went to bed at 10:30 for the first time in the history of our 10:30 bedtime.

Bright and early in the morning we went to Rosalie’s school to do a presentation we had prepared together while on board the ship. It went splendidly well (standing ovation!), but our success was quickly overshadowed by the exciting prospect of more shopping, so we quickly hurried to the mall, where we spent the afternoon. We had our first goodbye that afternoon; we had to bid farewell to Mandy, Germaine, Jobey, and Caitlyn, all of whom were headed back to Labrador. That first goodbye was the most difficult; it suddenly set in that we really had to leave eachother, that this incredible experience had to end. And so it was a very subdued group that headed back to the ship to collect our bags.

The remainder of our group spent our last night together in a beautiful old hotel, where we attempted to stay up all night. My memories of that night are somewhat hazy, due to exhaustion and shock at the prospect of saying goodbye in the morning. I do seem to remember walking around Old Quebec at midnight wearing pajamas and steel-toed boots, and eating sour skittles (which, by the way, are not at all sour). Around three o’clock in the morning we said our goodbyes to Quebec with coke and mentos, and then we all slept for a couple of hours before heading off to the airport.

This whole experience has been truly, truly amazing; I have learned more in two weeks than I would in two months at school, made a horde of new best friends, and completely fallen in love with the Arctic. I am so thankful to have had this opportunity, and thank you to all who helped to make it possible, and to those who posted comments while I was on board; you can’t imagine my excitement – oh my goodness, people actually read my blog – at reading them. Thank you thank you thank you and I wish you all a Happy Chanukah and Merry Christmas.

Zooplankton and madness

Thursday, November 12th was the last day of science operations onboard the Amundsen. We were all over the ship, helping out where we were needed and sometimes hanging out where we weren’t. After supper we all went out on the front deck to see the nets being deployed. The lowdown on zooplankton nets:

Horizontal net : 2 large nets and one small. Takes zooplankton samples from one layer in the water column, is pulled horizontally through the water (go figure).

Vertical net : 4 large nets and one small. Collects zooplankton the entire length of the water column, is lowered to the bottom and then pulled up (vertically).

Hydrobios net : 9 nets which can be deployed independently at various depths.

Rectangular Mid-Water Trawl Net : Basically the same as the horizontal net, but collects larger organisms, and is bigger.

Each net has a different sized mesh to collect different sizes of zooplankton. Each net has a bottle attached to the end in which the sample is collected, so you end up with a high concentration of zooplankton in each sample bottle.

So there you have it; more than you ever wanted to know about zooplankton nets. Now join me in the zooplankton lab (the one that smells strongly of fish) where I spent 4 hours straight sorting through tiny, colourless zooplankton… which was so much fun! Basically, we poured the samples into glass casserole dishes so that we could see them better, and then used tiny little forceps to sort them onto Petri dishes. Then we put them in test tubes, labelled them, and preserved them in ethanol.

Coolest zooplankton on the block: Sagitta elegans – a very small, completely transparent arrow worm which is apparently one of the most aggressive predators at the top of the plankton food chain. Never underestimate the small; they may eat you for supper…

Agassiz net : This is the most exciting net of them all. Used for catching benthic invertebrates, it is lowered to the ocean floor and then dragged through the mud for 5 minutes. After being hauled up, we open it from the bottom and catch the ensuing stream of mud, rocks, and creepy crawlies in a big bucket. Then the fun part; sticking your arms elbow-deep in dark, gooey, delicious mud and scooping up anything that wriggles. In our last Agassiz trawl we got a couple of really big crabs and a sweet sucker fish that would suction onto your finger, along with the usual starfish, worms, snails, etc. I personally love mud, it’s a truly delightful substance, and definitely brings out my inner 5-year-old.

Okak

On Wednesday, November 11th, the crane on the front deck of the Amundsen broke down, so science operations were put on hold until it could be repaired. Turned out to be a blessing in disguise; because of all the free time, we got to take a helicopter to what used to be Okak village, another abandoned Inuit settlement with a tragic past.

Okak was settled by Moravian missionaries, much like Hebron, but the community was destroyed by a different evil; the Spanish Influenza. In the fall of 1918, a merchant ship came into Okak Harbour carrying goods to trade with the people of Okak and the deadly Spanish Flu. Within days of the ship leaving, nearly the entire community was dead. The only survivors were the Moravians and a handful of young children who were immune to the disease.

The Moravians gathered the surviving children and a few supplies and barricaded themselves in one of the buildings. Nobody could go outside unless they were armed with a gun, because the dogs had gone wild from starvation, as they had nobody to feed them. The neighbouring communities did not know what had happened until December, several months later, when the ice was thick enough for them to travel across.

One little girl survived on her own for 2 months in her home, where her parents were both dead, because their lead dog protected her from the other dogs and they looked after eachother. She also had a baby brother, but she did not know how to feed him, and one day she put him down beside her and the dogs grabbed the baby… the stories from Okak are just horrific. The survivors of the Flu buried the dead in mass graves, then burned down the village and left the site of such immense tragedy.

When we arrived at the site of Okak village, I was immediately struck by the beauty of the place. It was a clear, sunny day, and the ground was blanketed in several feet of pristine white snow, with a few stunted trees and grasses waving in the faint breeze. We walked down to one of the old graveyards, and read “In Flander’s Fields” in honour of Remembrance Day, followed by a moment of silence. It was very peaceful to just stand silent for a moment and listen to the sounds all around us; the water lapping against the shore, the breeze blowing the trees. I imagined how Okak village must have been when it was full of life.

All that is left of the village are the stone foundations of the houses, some colourful bits of pottery in the water, and old gravestones. We walked down by the shallow bay, where siguak (new ice) was forming on the water. Many people think of the North as a barren place, but to me it is the most beautiful landscape I have ever seen (and this includes the tropical rainforests of Costa Rica). It is a harsh place, that is true, but Northern Labrador certainly deserves to be called Nunatsiavut – Our Beautiful Land.

Expedition to Hebron

On Tuesday, November 10th, we stopped in the harbour of Hebron, an abandoned Inuit community on the Labrador coast. Hebron was an Inuit settlement established by Moravian missonaries, who first made contact with the Labrador in Inuit in the 1760s. The first thing we saw as we neared the shore was the huge wooden Church (shipped over from Germany in the 1800s) silhouetted against the snow-covered mountains. The Church was the center of community life in Hebron; the school, hospital, post office, and gathering place. It was also the scene of an announcement which would ultimately shatter the community:

In 1959, two ministers of the Moravian Church arrived by float plane, and the people of Hebron were told to gather in the Church. They were informed that the government would be withdrawing all support from Hebron, as it was too remote, and that the residents would be split up and sent to the more southern communities of Hopedale, Nain, and Makkavik; the only choice they were given was which families would go to each. The elders of the community did not argue, because it was forbidden to argue in Church, and so the people of Hebron resigned themselves to their fate.

The families from Hebron were promised houses and support from the government, and told that they would never go hungry in their new communities. When they arrived, however, their houses were not finished and they were forced to live in tents in the bitter cold, and they were starving because they were in unfamiliar hunting territory. The new communities were so foreign to them, they could have been in China. Because they were Inuit and did not speak English, the newcomers were often treated with hostility, which was especially hard on the children – one woman, in an interview many years later, describes being teased mercilessly because she was Inuk and having to run home in big groups because the other children would throw rocks at them.

The move out of Hebron completely destroyed the community; many elders died within a year of moving, from depression, illness, and starvation. Adults, suffering from depression, often resorted to alcoholism and drug abuse, and families fell apart. The children, ashamed of being Inuit, lost their language and turned their backs on their own culture. Finally, forty years after Hebron was abandoned, the government issued an apology to the people affected by the move. Elders and adults revisited Hebron in 1999, and reclaimed the church, which is currently being restored to its historical state.

All that is left now of the healthy, thriving community of Hebron is the church and a few dillapitated old houses. My friend Caitlyn has a special connection to Hebron; her grandmother grew up there. As we were walking up to the church, Caitlyn said to me that every time she comes here, she can’t help imagining how different her life would be if Hebron had been allowed to thrive and she had been born there rather than Nain. She said she can feel a presence when goes there; she can almost see the people of the community going about their business as they would have done 50 years ago. As we walked through the church, and breathed in the musty air, I felt the same way, as though generations of people were watching us. It was both very spooky and very powerful.

After looking in the church, we gathered outside by a monument erected to remember what happened to Hebron and which has the names of the displaced families on it. Caitlyn read the government’s apology letter and then Germaine, the other Inuk girl on our trip (who has an uncle from Hebron), read the response from the people. Germaine then surprised us with some amazing throat-singing; she did a love song with Mary, an Inuk woman whose mother is from Hebron. By this point in time, the snow was really blowing, so we had to hurry back to the ship, but it was amazing to be able to visit such an important historical place.

Sea creatures and other shenanigans

Sorting out sea critters was really fun; I felt like I was 5 years old again, poking the worms to watch them squirm and pestering Maeva (the scientist we were working with) with questions; “what’s this shrimpy thing called?” and “what are those hairy tentacle bits for?”, “what is that goobery-looking wormy thingamabob?”. Among the most bizarre creatures we saw were:

The sipuncula worm: A lot bigger than your average earthworm at about 15cm long and 1 inch in diameter, this guy’s skin is completely see-through, so you can see all its guts. From what we could see, its diet consists of mud with a side of mud and some mud for dessert. Yummy!

Unidentified fish: We caught 3 small fish that looked like they missed out on evolution; they had giant “heads” and hardly any body, big bug-eyes and clear skin, the better to admire their innards.

We also sorted tube worms, which build conical homes out of sand and mucus, various shrimpy things (technical term is isopods), clams, snails, worms (huge, gross ones), sponges (actually a sponge, we only got one), anemones, polychaetes (these kind of look like centipedes), and a few other things that I don’t know the name of.

In the afternoon, we watched a piston core from the top of the bridge (the highest level of the ship), which is a big metal pole with a weight (of many tonnes) that, when triggered, dropd down and shoves the core into the bottom of the sea to take a sediment sample. All I can say is, you know you’re a science nerd when you voluntarily spend several hours standing out in the cold staring at a metal pole…

At about 10:30 last night, a few of us went out on the deck to take water samples using a rosette, which is a round contraption with 24 sample bottles that can be fired independantly, so you can take samples from several different depths. We took our samples to the lab, where we had to work by the light of green lamps, which gave the whole scene a very eerie atmosphere. The reason for this is because we are studying phytoplankton (little plants that float in the water), and we didn’t want to cause photosynthesis by exposing them to light, which could contaminate our results. In any case, it made me feel like a mad scientist (insert commentary here – “but Ameena, you are a mad scientist, dear”). Without going into too much detail, we basically pumped the sample water through 2 different sized filters, then put the filters in vials of acetone, and then put those in the fridge, to be tested 18 hours later. By this time, it was 1:30 in the morning, so I dragged myself to bed and fell into a deep sleep, full of strange dreams involving phytoplankton and large worms…

 

First few days on the CCGS Amundsen

Sorry there hasn’t been a post in a while… hard to get internet time when you have to share 2 computers with 50 other people. Today is my third full day onboard the ship. To bring you up to speed:

Friday afternoon we took the helicopter from Iqaluit to the ship, which was pretty much the best ride of my entire life! We flew over the ice-bound Frobisher Bay, then landed on the deck of the ship, which looked quite frighteningly postage stamp-sized from the air. The ship is pretty huge, bigger than I thought it would be. There are 6 different levels, and a gajillion (yes, this is a number) different decks; I can’t remember half of them. Mostly I just wander about like a lost sheep until I end up where I need to be (pure luck, mostly). The first day we just had a medical exam, then we got settled into our rooms, which consist of 2 bunkbeads, a sink, a desk, and closet. We did some orientation stuff, which clearly didn’t help me any, and met the captain and most of the scientists.

Day 2 can be summarized in one word; seasick. The water was really choppy (at least to a landlubber such as myself), and by midmorning we were all sprawled about the ship, wishing a polar bear would just eat us and end our misery (or at least, that’s how I felt). I slept for most of the day, and when I wasn’t sleeping, I was eating ginger and soda crackers and trying not to throw up (with limited success). Happily, by midafternoon things had calmed down, both in the ocean and in my stomach, and I was so happy I daringly ate a celebratory chocolate bar! At 3:15 (which I must remind you is sunset here), we had our first fire drill. It lasted an hour and a half! Longest fire drill of my life… it was actually really fun; we spent most of it sumo-wrestling in our lifejackets and playing stupid games on the flight deck. In the evening, we had a lecture about “Nunatsiavut Nuluak” fiord ecosystem study (nunatsiavut means “beautiful land” and nuluak means “net”, as in a network of information). Basically, we’re taking samples from four different fiords and gathering info about the critters that live in the mud in order to assess the impacts of climate change and human activities on the fiord ecosystems. Very cool stuff for an environerd such as myself!

Yesterday was the best day of my life onboard the ship. First thing in the morning, I was put to work de-icing the front of the ship, which got soaked during crazy winds the night before. By “de-icing” I mean whacking the ice off with giant wooden mallets, cartoon-style (so satisfying!). After that, I got to work in the benthos lab, which is affectionately named “Florida” because there is a warm air vent right in that spot which keeps the lab toasty warm (“toasty” being a relative term meaning warmer than freezing). “Benthos” are all the creatures that live on the ocean floor. We collected them using an “agassiz net”, then poured the resulting bucket of mud and organisms through a sieve, which we then rinsed until nothing but critters remained on the sieve. Next, we roughly sorted them by putting similar looking creatures together on trays, and threw back any extras (for example, if we had a gazillion shrimp, we would just keep half a gazillion). We then sorted them into containers according to species, then labelled them and covered them with 95% ethanol to preserve them. Then, we sent them off to different scientists for testing. I have to go now and learn about the geology of the fiords (woohoo! and I’m not kidding!), so I will hopefully do another post later today…

Iqaluit

At noon today we finally arrived in Iqaluit after a three hour flight, of which I remember very little as was in state of extreme sleep-deprivation. I was awake for landing though, and the landscape was absolutely incredible… a vast sea of whites and greys and blues, and we even saw our ship, the CCGS Amundsen, from the air! The airport in Iqaluit is an extremely vibrant shade of yellow, which contrasts quite sharply with the surrounding whites, greys, and blues. Iqaluit itself is fairly small; the population is approximately 7000. All the buildings here are raised off the ground, because the land underneath is constantly shifting, and some of the older buildings don’t have windows because whatever material they used to make windows from would shatter in a storm. Also, all the signs and also the newspaper are bilingual (English and Inuktitut, rarely french).

One of the first things we did here was go to the grocery store to buy our breakfast and lunch for tomorrow, and it was a real eye-opener. A carton of juice costs $5-$12, a box of cereal $10-$15, a can of soup $6-$8, a bag of apples $12-$15, just to name a few. Oh, and a box of Kraft Dinner? $1. It is more expensive to buy milk than coca cola. No wonder obesity is such a problem in the North… the most healthy and cost-effective way to live is to hunt and fish. One of the girls on the program, Caitlyn, is Inuk (this is the proper term for one person; Inuit is plural) and her family hunts/fishes caribou, seal, Arctic char, ptarmigan, and other animals which make up the majority of their diet, because all the food for her community (Nain, Labrador)  has to be flown in and it is as expensive as here in Iqaluit.

After shopping,  we went outside to take pictures of the sunset (at 3:30 in the afternoon) on Frobisher Bay, which was beautiful. Frobisher Bay has some of the biggest tides in the world; the tide was completely out when we took pictures and all that was left was a sea of choppy ice. Because of the constant freezing and breaking up of the ice in the bay, nothing actually lives in it, so when the tide is out it is truly a barren wasteland. The most beautiful barren wasteland I’ve ever seen…

After photos, we visited the museum and then the legislative assembly. Both were full of breathtaking works of art; soapstone, antler, and bone carvings, tapestries, paintings, prints, etc. The system of government here is really neat; the “chamber of commons” is shaped like an Igloo, with all of the seats arranged in a circle, and no seat higher than another, and there are seats for elders in a circle around the government’s circle. Everyone is equal to everyone else, and it is a non-partisan system, so there are no parties. Citizens vote for representatives, who in turn vote for 8 people to make up the government, which is always a minority (there are 19 members of the opposition). The whole system is based on equality, respect, and sharing, with everyone working together instead of fighting against eachother.

Anyways, I need to go get ready for supper (shall I try the caribou?). This is all so surreal… I feel like I just stepped into someone else’s life. And, for those of you who are wondering; yes, it is cold. Should have worn my long underwear.