Underwater adventures

MIRIAM HILL

Dr. Kathy Conlan has experienced parts of the territory that most Nunavummiut have never even dreamed of seeing.

A marine biologist with the Canadian Museum on Nature in Ottawa, Conlan studies, among other things, the effects of icebergs and pack ice on the Arctic seabed. To see what’s going on under the waves, Conlan often dons diving gear and slips into the frigid water.

After seeing some of Conlan’s underwater photographs, a colleague at the museum suggested she write a children’s book about her experiences. Under the Ice, published by Kids Can Press and geared to children aged 8 to 10 years old, chronicles Conlan’s 10 years of underwater research in the polar regions.

“I wanted to make sure the Arctic was in there as well as the Antarctic,” Conlan says, although the Arctic portion of the book is much thinner than the Antarctic portion.

“Part of the problem is I didn’t have as many good photos because we have to do so much work diving in the Arctic and we’re working with open water. You know how the drift ice can just close you in and you can’t get out? Well, that happened to us. We would go up for six weeks and maybe get three weeks of working time. The rest of the time you’re just stranded on the shore. So when we could get out in the boats we just blitzed, so we didn’t have time for fun dives.”

Conlan began doing field research in the waters off Resolute Bay back in 1990. Her work focused on ice scours, the result of icebergs or pack ice moving and scraping furrows in the ocean floor. Although the project ended in 1999, she has been back to the North every year since.

“I just loved Resolute,” she says. “Particularly when Buster Welch had his aquarium [the Resolute Aquarium] there. Lots of people would come down to the camp because that’s where we were based. After the aquarium closed down it wasn’t as easy to meet people.”

There is a photo in the book showing students at Resolute’s Qarmartalik school examining the dive equipment. Conlan says the kids thought it was hilarious to dress up in the gear.

Not surprisingly, she adds, they didn’t know much about what lies under the ice.

“They would know the things that get washed in after a storm and things they can get close enough to at a low tide,” she says. “In Resolute the tides don’t get as low as they do in Iqaluit, so in Iqaluit they might know more things. They certainly know the clams and sea urchins and kelp. They might know about the shrimp and certainly about the Arctic cod.”

Conlan herself was surprised by what she saw during her first dive off of Resolute. “I really thought that cold water meant there wouldn’t be much, but it didn’t mean that at all,” she says. “I was amazed. I was really taken with the lush, lush gardens of kelp. I didn’t expect that.”

The plants, she says, are very well adapted to the long periods of darkness in the High Arctic. The kelp do their growing in the winter and in the summer capture all the sun’s energy and hold on to it by converting it into sugars. In the dark winter months they use the sugars to build new tissue.

The results of Conlan’s ice-scouring research produced some interesting results. While the scours are devastating for organisms — they are all destroyed as pieces of ice drag across the seabed — the long-term effect is a positive one.

“It actually fertilizes,” she says. “It brings out fresh sediment that’s never been revealed before to the water so it’s got lots of nutrients in it.”

Diatoms, a type of small plant, immediately start to grow and within a year a thick coat of them has formed, providing the base for more sea life to grow.

The colour palette under the ice is not as drab as one might expect. She says reds, pinks, beiges, creams and yellows stand out well against the browns of the kelp.

“Then there are all those neat little Arcturus [Arcturus baffini, a relative of the lobster], with the great long antennae and the babies hang off the antennae. That’s so cool because they look like big bushes,” she says, her voiced becoming more animated. “And the little pink corals, they are very dainty looking and there’s lots of sea anemones. Those look like big pink flowers and there are lots of different kinds of starfish, and sea urchins are over the place.”

Conlan will be returning to the North this summer to do research in the Beaufort Sea, but alas, she says, the visibility is too poor for diving.