Island stories

Nunavut’s High Arctic islands have a story to tell, one that John England has been chasing for nearly 40 years.

The story of the giant ice sheet that covered the region from 18,000 to 8,000 years ago is told on the beaches of the High Arctic islands and by driftwood and whale bones.

“Think of an island as a carving — you can see what the carver did. We can see what the ice sheet did on an island, and you’re suddenly seeing the world telling its story,” says England, a geographer from the University of Alberta in Edmonton, whose passion is reconstructing the tale of past environments through studying the land.

The High Arctic’s ice sheet probably built up about 18,000 years ago, and England is still learning more about what this ice sheet looked like, when it disappeared and why. Beaches tell the story because, when this ice sheet melted, the land slowly came out of the sea, creating beaches that now rise 200 meters above sea level.

“All the beaches come down [to sea level] like stairways right down to the present,” England says.

As he walks those beaches, England picks up shells, wood and bones, which provide material for radiocarbon dating.

By collecting whale bones, he can also map when bowheads came into the High Arctic, how far they got and how they were gradually forced out of the islands.

When there was less sea ice, the bowheads moved much further north.

Recent sightings of bowhead whales near Somerset and Ellesmere islands tells England that the ice cover over the High Arctic is less now than ever before.

“I can tell you that whales have never been in this area in 8,000 years, so we’re looking at something that is not a repeat of what has happened before. Using the past to look into the future, we can say ‘whales tell us this about sea ice in the past,’ so this is a whole new ball game, and this is serious,” England says.

Driftwood also has its story. Most driftwood found in the Canadian High Arctic comes from Russia in a voyage that takes three years, piggy-backed on ice. England has observed when there’s a lot of driftwood, there is a lot of sea ice and the whales are gone.

“Driftwood tells us where the big currents are through time. When the wood is here in abundance, we know the big current was running through the Arctic islands,” England notes.

When the ocean currents switch, the wood and ice ends up in Europe.

“We don’t know how frequently these switches occur, but when they occur they really affect the weather of Europe and North America. The driftwood story in the Arctic Islands is a big part of the answer. It can tell us how frequently these big currents change.”

England started tracking this change after he first came first came to Baffin Island as an 18 year-old in 1965 as a field assistant at the Foxe 2 DEW line station.

Over the years, England has walked coastlines in Nunavut that few people, including Inuit, past or present, have ever walked, spotting cairns left by adventurers Robert Peary and Capt. Joseph-Elzéar Bernier in the beginning of the 1900s and finding traces of even earlier explorers, such as brass cylinders with notes deposited by Capt. Mark Stevens of the HMS Discovery in 1876 and by Adolphus Greely in 1881.

“Finding these notes was magical. Something that was left 100 years before by somebody else.”

In Iqaluit recently to work with students at Nunavut Arctic College and the Canada-Nunavut Geoscience office, England has seen many changes during the years he’s been coming North.

“Society evolves and changes. I came through here in 1965. Apex Hill would have been way south of the airstrip and I would have been put up on the American base. That would have been just about as foreign to me as the new experience of being in the village, which I much would have preferred,” he says.

Wandering through the remote High Arctic islands, England missed out on interaction with people — but now he’s making up for these lost opportunities, collaborating with Nunavut Arctic College’s environmental technology program as a way to encourage its students to embrace scientific investigation.

“There’s a growing desire from within the northern communities to be involved and participate in science, and what you have now is an enormous amount of good will on the part of the scientific community,” England says.

The question now is how to the bridge the gap between the two, “so Inuit also understand that scientists tell stories, with a different language.”