Gov’t puts climate change trend archive on ice

Glaciology research scientist Christian Dzanowicz, from the Geological Survey of Canada, is shown cutting samples from the Mount Logan ice core in the cold room lab in Ottawa. (HANDOUT PHOTO BY DAVID BARBOUR)

RANDY BOSWELL
Postmedia News

A one-of-a-kind archive of ancient Canadian ice cores, collected over 40 years by federal scientists as evidence of climate change and pollution trends, is scheduled for “shutdown” within months because of “strategic budget compressions” at Natural Resources Canada, Postmedia News has learned.

The plan to put the ice archive on ice, and the “radical downsizing” of an associated Geological Survey of Canada research lab, are revealed in a message issued to fellow scientists last week by federal glaciologist Christian Zdanowicz, who has appealed to universities or other scientific bodies to consider taking over management of the targeted research resource.

The GSC ice-core collection consists of hundreds of metres of cylindrical shafts of ice gathered from High Arctic glaciers and frozen mountaintops, including Canada’s highest peak, Mount Logan, as well as Ellesmere, Baffin and Devon islands.

“Before we proceed with destroying the collection,” says Zdanowicz’s email missive, “we wish to ensure that the core holdings be made available to researchers with an interest in using them for climate and atmospheric studies.”

But a senior Natural Resources Canada official strongly disputes Zdanowicz’s interpretation of the collection’s fate, insisting that it will neither be destroyed nor given away.

David Scott, manager of the GSC’s northern research branch, acknowledged that the department — facing “hard choices” and limited resources — is ending its use of the ice cores for the kind of climate-focused research conducted during the last several decades.

Instead, he said, NRCan’s priorities for research on Canada’s cryosphere have shifted to understanding changes to permafrost — the melting of which is affecting many northern residential communities, as well as projects such as pipeline construction — and the monitoring of annual changes to glacial ice masses.

Scott said GSC officials have merely begun “brainstorming” toward a plan to “extract additional scientific value” from the collection by arranging greater access for outside researchers to ice cores that have already served their immediate purpose for GSC research projects.

He insisted that the ice archive is a valuable resource that took decades to create and that it would not be destroyed, even as the GSC itself winds up its own ice-core research program.

At the same time, Scott conceded that shifting priorities can be “frustrating” for “passionate” scientists who have invested years in ice-core research and are now being directed to other fields of study.

The apparent end of the collection as an active focus for federal research comes at a time of mounting concern among Canadian researchers about the future of publicly funded science under a Conservative majority government determined to rein in overall spending.

And the issue may feed into an emerging opposition narrative that casts the federal Conservatives as generally hostile to government science, a line of attack highlighted last month by Liberal accusations — later refuted by the Environment Minister Peter Kent — that planned job reductions in his department were a sign that the government is “turning its back on climate science.”

Stored in metre-long sections in a walk-in freezer at a commercial refrigeration facility in Ottawa, the ice-core collection preserves up to 80,000 years of Canadian climate history and has been a showcase project for federal scientists, who probe the samples with microscopes and other instruments to reconstruct temperature, precipitation and contaminant patterns from recent centuries back to the last Ice Age and beyond.

Several government websites feature educational modules about the ice core collection as a tool for science teachers to show the link between historical climate research and present-day concerns about human-driven global warming.

“In the past 30 years, ice cores have become very important tools for informing and guiding environmental policy in international affairs,” notes one Yukon government website. “This is because they provide critical evidence of the human influence on the Earth’s climate and atmospheric composition.”

Zdanowicz was part of a federal team of researchers that collected cores from the glaciated ridges of Yukon’s Mount Logan during a federal science expedition in the winter of 2001-2002.

The iconic mountain, as it happens, was named for the 19th-century founder of the GSC, William Logan.

Those rods of Mount Logan ice, amounting to a 186-metre-long time capsule of Canada’s climate over the past 12,000 years, are kept frozen with the other cores at -20 C in the Ottawa freezer. The full collection is described in Zdanowicz’s letter as being worth “several million” dollars in replacement costs.

“The core holding facility at GSC is now scheduled for shutdown, and there are at present no plans to rebuild a similar facility,” he states.

“The scientific findings from the study of these ice cores have been disseminated in dozens upon dozens of specialized journal articles, reports, book chapters over the years,” Dzanowicz adds, urging any institutions interested in maintaining the collection to come forward by Nov. 30. “Although no firm timeline has been set for the ice-core laboratory final shutdown as yet, we expect this to be a matter of a year at most.”

Scott disputes the sense of urgency conveyed in the letter.

Dzanowicz told Postmedia News on Tuesday that the purpose of his appeal to fellow Canadian climate researchers was to “ensure that the legacy of this line of research be passed on to other players, so to speak, as at present it does not seem to align with departmental priorities.”

Noting that the ice cores have become “a very important tool for improving understanding of climate change and global pollution issues,” he added that GSC has “received several encouraging responses” from universities and colleges that may be interested in giving the federal collection a new home.