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Canadian Military Support for Arctic Science?

Posted by William Colgan on April 14, 2016
Commentary, Communicating Science, Glaciers and Society / 1 Comment

I wish Canada would seriously consider developing a stronger civilian-military partnership in the areas of Arctic science and defense. The highly efficient partnership between the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the US Air National Guard (ANG) in Greenland provides an impressive example.

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A US Air National Guard ski-equipped C-130, here dropping off researchers and equipment at Dye-2 on the Greenland Ice Sheet, costs approximately CAD 9000 per flight hour.

The 109th ANG wing essentially transports scientists and their equipment from the continental US to research bases in Greenland, and sometimes even on to the ice sheet, in return for full-cost payment from the NSF. The NSF-ANG full-cost special airlift arrangement (SAAM) delivers one C-130 transport plane flight hour for about CAD 9000.

In Canada, by comparison, High Arctic researchers generally travel to the main Polar Continental Shelf Project (PCSP) research base in Resolute, Nunavut, via commercial flights. A single Ottawa to Resolute round-trip ticket is about CAD 4000. But this ticket only comes with a 32 kg baggage allowance, and researchers are generally heavy packers. With checked bag penalties reaching almost CAD 200, it is easy to spend another CAD 1000 on baggage over above ticket price. Often, there is also an institutional overhead of about 40% on commercial purchases, meaning funding agencies ultimately pay close to CAD 7000 to get a single Canadian researcher and their equipment to Resolute; not far off a C-130 flight hour.

Flights to Resolute might seem like an esoteric topic, but Canada sends a lot of researchers there. The PCSP supports approximately 850 field researchers each year. That means at least CAD 3.4M in the direct cost of commercial air tickets, or closer to CAD 6.0M when indirect (overhead and baggage) costs are factored in. The NSF-ANG partnership seems to suggest that Canada could be getting more bang for these bucks. For example, while commercially flying ten researchers and equipment roundtrip between Ottawa and Resolute is about CAD 70K (incl. indirect costs), the ANG can fly more than twice that payload on the same route for about 81K. The ANG can even land that payload “open field” far from any airport.

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Researchers and equipment in a US Air National Guard C-130, en route to the Greenland Ice Sheet Dye-2 ski-way, during the Arctic Circle Traverse 2013 (ACT13) campaign.

Adopting a civilian-military partnership for Canadian Arctic research would clearly improve the return on expenditure for Canadian research agencies, while also providing an almost zero-cost mechanism for increased military presence in the Canadian Arctic, which translates into enhanced standby transport or search-and-rescue capacity. The NSF-ANG partnership also shows that in addition to producing tangible benefits, “soft” benefits associated with direct, widespread, and meaningful interaction between military and civilian personnel can be cultivated.

So, I am delighted to hear that the Canadian military is learning how to build ski-ways on which ANG C-130s can land. For an Arctic researcher like myself, the next ideal step would be getting skis on a Canadian C-130 (technically converting it into an LC-130), and then getting research agencies to pay the military to fly that ski-equipped C-130 to some useful field sites throughout the Canadian High Arctic!

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New Book: Iluliaq – Isbjerge – Icebergs

Posted by William Colgan on September 22, 2015
Climate Change, Communicating Science, Glaciers and Society / Comments Off on New Book: Iluliaq – Isbjerge – Icebergs

I was very pleased to have the opportunity to write a preface for Iluliaq – Isbjerge – Icebergs, which contains 100+ pages of watercolours and photographs depicting diverse icebergs around Greenland, along with accompanying Danish/English narration about the iceberg lifecycle (ISBN 978-87-93366-34-3 | available here). I am very supportive of projects like this, which seek to bridge the arts-sciences chasm. It was actually science-editing the iceberg factoids in this book that compelled me to start providing mass loss rates in equivalent tonnes per second in my subsequent publications. I now find saying that Greenland is losing 262 gigatonnes of ice per year, is more abstract than saying it is losing 8300 tonnes per second. Evidently, my perspective was shifted by this delightful project! Below I provide the preface in full.

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Preface for Iluliaq – Isbjerge – Icebergs:

“While an individual iceberg is ephemeral, icebergs are a ubiquitous feature of Greenland’s landscape. The shifting nature of icebergs, a constantly drifting and capsizing population, makes them challenging to observe. As they are partway through the transition from glacier ice into ocean water, icebergs are somewhat peripheral to both glaciology/geology and oceanography. Despite these intrinsic difficulties in their study, however, icebergs have never been more important to society than today. Due to climate change, Greenland’s glaciers are now flowing faster than a century ago. The resulting increase in Greenland’s iceberg production is now raising global sea level by 2 cm each decade.

In contrast to the iconic climate change indicators of diminishing sea ice area and glacier volume, there are now more icebergs being produced than a century ago. This provides a very strong motivation to understand the iceberg lifecycle. This lifecycle begins with a thunderous calving at genesis, followed by years of slow drifting and reduction, and quietly ends when the last ice melts into water. In this book, Pernille Kløvedal Nørgaard, Martin von Bülow and Ole Søndergaard provide visually compelling insights on selected aspects of this lifecycle.

By ensuring they not only communicate the natural majesty, but also climatic importance, of Greenland’s icebergs, the authors are helping icebergs assume a rightful place in contemporary public consciousness. The sense of humility evoked by the icebergs depicted here will be familiar to Arctic enthusiasts. These photos and watercolours represent multiple expeditions and extensive travels around Greenland. Similar to documentarians and artists who have accompanied polar expeditions since the Victorian Era, the authors have intentionally sought out a harsh environment, and invited confrontation with adverse conditions, to encapsulate a unique feature of Earth that most people could otherwise never appreciate. Society benefits from such hardy souls, whose passion for nature allows bleak and inaccessible landscapes to be transmitted into our civilized homes.”

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