Arctic scientist wants to use award money for new protected area

Wayne Pollard has been reading Arctic landscapes for more than four decades.

The heaves and slumps and subtle shifts tell a story of the land just emerging from the last ice age, but now being rapidly transformed by a climate crisis.

The McGill University geomorphologist has studied perennial springs that flow freely through permafrost due to high salinity, shifting the landscape as they go.

He was also recruited by the Canadian Space Agency to develop ground-penetrating radar for a Canadian mission to the moon.

And through McGill and Nunavut Arctic College, Pollard has worked to develop science and geography programs with Inuit teachers, and science camps for northern students.

This, and other work, saw Pollard awarded the Weston Family Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Northern Research. The award is worth $100,000 total, including $50,000 for a research fellowship to support his work.

Now, Pollard says, his research is at a transition point of shifting from the systematic study of the environment into something a little more political. Though he is, admittedly, not a political person.

“What I’d like to do with the support from the W. Garfield Weston Foundation is to start looking at trying to set aside specific parcels of land in the Arctic, basically, as wilderness preserves,” Pollard told Nunatsiaq News on Dec. 5, shortly after receiving the award at the ArcticNet Annual Scientific Meeting in Halifax.

Pollard isn’t envisioning a park with open access through tourism, but rather a terrestrial equivalent of the National Marine Conservation Area that was recently designated on Lancaster Sound: Tallurutiup Imanga.

“And I have in mind where I think it would be worthwhile,” he says. “Axel Heiberg Island.”

The island, west of Ellesmere Island, is just south of an interim marine protected area, Tuvaijuittuq.

Axel Heiberg, Pollard says, has many features that make it ideal for the continued scientific monitoring of climate change.

“It has ice caps, glaciers, fiords, it’s got ice-rich permafrost, it’s got viable populations of muskox and caribou. The Peary caribou are largely under severe stress right now,” he says.

“There is so much diversity and many unique features, like the fossil forest. I think it’s an ideal candidate.”

It’s also across a three-kilometre strait from Eureka, says Pollard, offering a point of entry to community members, and southern and northern researchers.

His first step is to enter into discussion with the Government of Nunavut, to see whether there would be an interest in this.

If the interest is there, his next step is to hire someone in the north to spearhead the project.

McGill University has a long history on Axel Heiberg, operating the only research station on the island since 1959.

Pollard became director of the station when he started at the university in 1988.

The aim of his work, and he says he’s got into some trouble for it, is parsing out what changes to the environment are the result of its natural evolution, coming out of an ice age.

One thing he says all current and future researchers should keep in mind is that “No matter where we are in Canada, it’s been less that 20,000 years since there was an ice sheet that was four kilometres thick over our heads.”

But that’s why it’s critical to understand the other side of change, that caused by humans.

One long-standing project of his has been a 20-year helicopter survey of erosion sites. He’s followed the exact same path every year.

“We use an observation technique I learned from caribou studies, counting features within a visual range,” says Pollard.

“It’s essentially a count of different types of thaw-based erosion and their distribution.”

Using this information, along with climate data, his team looks for landscape changes that may have been caused by unusual temperature swings in recent years, including three record-breaking hot summers and two record-breaking cold summers.

“We’re seeing this large variation and a climate that drives this permafrost instability,” he says.

One study site on Axel Heiberg had no evidence of thermal erosion seven or eight years ago. Five years ago, Pollard says, 87 large erosion features were identified there.

Other changes have been noted through logs of wildlife sightings, contributed by every person who visits the research station.

“When we first started working there, it was not unusual to have 15 to 20 caribou walking through the station. Now, we’re lucky to have one or two,” says Pollard. “Yet the muskoxen are everywhere.”

The idea of a protected area, Pollard says, is the end product of 40-odd years working in the Arctic and recognizing the need to have an uninterrupted place to study the impacts of anthropogenic or human-caused change.

And it came from his work with NASA of all groups, in Antarctica, of all places.

His work on perennial springs in the Arctic caught the attention of the space agency.

“The notion of liquid water in an extreme cold polar desert environment was very attractive to an astrobiologist,” says Pollard.

“Even though water is not a requirement for life, it is one of the most common characteristics where life occurs.”

Pollard’s expertise on ice-rich landscapes led him to work with the space agency in the southern polar desert, the Antarctic.

It’s a region unclaimed by a single country, and designated as a place of science and peace.

“If we as a global community can set aside a continent, why can’t we as Canadians set aside an island?” Pollard says.

Axel Heiberg Island falls under the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement and is a part of the Qikiqtani region of Nunavut.

This is critical to its future protection.

With the help of a research associate in the North, Pollard hopes to lay the groundwork for protection of this area with the Government of Nunavut and Inuit organizations.

Together, he sees them drawing out a roadmap to Axel Heiberg’s protection.

“That’s as far as we’ll get in one or two years,” says Pollard. “I think if we sensitize people to the idea, hopefully it will get traction.”