On the Lip of a Crater

Resolute is a remote Canadian town, and one of the coldest inhabited places on Earth. In Inuktitut, the town is called Qausuittuq (pronounced cow-sweet-tuk), meaning ‘place with no dawn,’ referring to the hundred days of 24-hour sunlight in summer, and eighty days of darkness during winter. The barren arctic landscape lends any object, from bucket to truck, a monumental quality. Given these extremes, it’s appropriate that in both English and Inuit, the name of the place has a sense of the unequivocal.

I was in Resolute in 2008 on my way to the Haughton Mars Project (HMP), a scientific research base located on the edge of the Haughton meteorite crater on Devon Island, where I was hoping to rendezvous with my father, who was sailing through the Northwest Passage. Before researching Resolute, I’d assumed it was established by the Inuit. In fact, the town was set up as an army base, and only became a permanent community in the 1950s when the Canadian Government forcibly moved Inuit families from Quebec to the arctic islands—much further north than they chose to live—to strengthen sovereignty over the Arctic during the Cold War. The families were left to fend for themselves, and had to seek help from Inuit groups to the south in order to survive. Today, the town’s population is about 200. As the ice melts, opening the Northwest Passage and increasing access to resources, army presence is again rapidly increasing.

For three days the wind blew so hard that you took your life in your hands if you stepped outside. It’s eerie to look through a window and, due to the lack of vegetation, hear but not see the wind. Holed up, I talked with hotel staff and locals who ate at the hotel canteen. When I said I was Australian, on three separate occasions the immediate response was, ‘Aaaah, Crocodile Dundee!’ Before I left for the Arctic, polar bears were the first thing Australians brought up, closely followed by moose and the television series Northern Exposure. It would seem that (certain) animals hold a strong position in our imagination of place, and even in the West they retain a powerful role as totem.

At the Resolute airport, you’re greeted by a smiling polar bear in a glass case, its paw raised as if offering a handshake. Polar bears affect daily life in the far north, and the airport bear wasn’t the only reminder of this. Walking in the late evening light, I turned a corner to find a large, furry skin hanging over a plank to cure. The teeth had been removed but not the claws; they were the size of my little finger. Polar bears hunt along shorelines and locals have implemented an alarm system around Resolute Bay called ‘dog town’, a line of about forty chained huskies. Bears don’t like loud noises, and the barking dogs are usually enough to scare them off—the smell of the dogs was enough to scare me off! Bears contribute to the local economy as Inuit sell their hunting licences to non-Inuit, usually American, hunters. In May 2008, the United States listed the polar bear as threatened under its Endangered Species Act,[1] preventing the importation of bear parts and products, resulting in a loss of income for the town.

Whales are the other feted animals of the Arctic. With summer and breaking up of sea ice, warmer currents bring belugas into Resolute Bay. A pair of binoculars sat on the windowsill of the hotel canteen, used by staff to check if the beluga had arrived. After breakfast one morning, filled with the same sort of anticipation I get when buying a raffle ticket, I picked them up hoping I’d be the winner of the ‘first beluga spotted’ prize. After twenty minutes and a couple of false sightings, I conceded it was not to be. This far north, most edible life is found in the ocean. Skeletons of whales and seals litter the beach and decorate roof tops; the meat and skin hangs off railings and fence tops to preserve. It’s a good anatomy lesson and reinforcement of the life cycle, so often obscured by city living and mass production.

To get from Resolute to HMP I caught a Twin Otter plane for a fifty-minute flight, including crossing the Wellington Channel which, in midsummer, is an expanse of thin, beautifully patterned sea ice. Devon Island is the largest uninhabited island on Earth and is a polar desert with little precipitation. HMP uses the environment as an analogue for Martian and lunar landscapes; it is funded through grants from NASA and the Canadian Space Agency. While research by the international team is broad, the focus is ‘traverse planning’, or ground travel on Mars and the moon.

Science has always increased the magic in my world. From a young age I have been drawn to its mythical qualities, and have regularly dipped into popular science books looking for concepts that both unravelled and enhanced the mysteries of life. Quantum physics, for example, enabled materiality to be malleable in ways that could, I reasoned with undoubtedly skewed logic, account for the vagaries of my own perception. I’ve never been called by God, despite the persistent prayers of one family member, and whilst science has not been a replacement for spirituality, its stories have certainly provided welcome moments of transcendence.

My love of concepts involving the very large and the very small came in part from a desire to escape the messy domestic realities of pain, fear, mortality, the tedious and mundane, and even joy and love. The more a concept dwarfed humans and placed them into perspective in the wider universe, the better. My low-level misanthropy was, thankfully, offset by an appreciation for human consciousness and capacity. Visiting HMP and the high Arctic gave me the opportunity to indulge both concerns.

From the air, HMP is a dot on the forbidding landscape and would be convincing on the cover of a science fiction novel about off-world colonisation. At ground level it is a collection of large Nissan-hut-shaped tents, with plenty of power points, internet access, gas heaters, and geek-cool equipment such as a gravity accelerator. The camp is packed down for winter and all waste removed. Research activities are structured to minimise impact on the environment. It sleeps up to forty people in ‘tent city’. A short walk from the research area, the brightly coloured tents look like a collection of psychedelic barnacles on the rust-coloured earth, buffeted by the wind instead of the tide. Along with the revolving door of researchers are an array of nonscientists who, in the five days I was there, included the science writer Mary Roach, a French documentary team, and a writer and photographer from the men’s fashion magazine Details.

The landscape surrounding the camp spoke to me of deep time: both backwards and forwards. Overlooking tent city are three inuksuit that honour the seven astronauts who lost their lives in the 2003 Columbia mission. The monuments sit on a reef 350 million years old from the Paleozoic era that saw one of the Earth’s major extinction events. The reef is full of fossils and decomposing carbon life forms. It smells strongly of oil. For me, the monuments and the reef were a reminder of our moment in time; of the interplay between what we can control and what we can’t; of that which we strive for; of the seemingly random nature of the universe—of that which is beyond us, a liberating and sometimes terrifying thing.

I prepared for my visit to the north by reading about the south. Tom Griffiths in his wonderful book Slicing the Silence describes the effects of being in Antarctica: ‘the extremes of climate and geography, and the distortions of high latitudes and compressed longitudes, made a weird nonsense of the passage of a day’.[2] Despite this description, it was only when I was in situ that I fully appreciated what Griffiths meant. Twenty-four-hour sunlight was disorienting enough, but distance and sound perception were also distorted and I had to continually reconsider what are usually unconscious judgements. On a still day, sound travelled extraordinarily effectively. Distances didn’t seem hard to estimate, the estimations were just wrong. For instance, when looking at a ridge I guessed it to be about a kilometre away (a distance I know well as it’s the length of the straight dirt driveway that connected my grandmother’s house in Deniliquin to her front gate where the mail was delivered), only to find that the ridge was more than five kilometres away. I gained a new appreciation for the physics associated with living on a globe.

Accurate distance perception is an issue that astronauts come up against in outer space. If they are unable to judge the distance to a destination, they are unable to determine how much energy and air they require to get there. Researchers at HMP are studying these issues in order to create assistive tools. My own confused sensory perception as well as the work by HMP brought to mind a quote from Hannah Arendt: ‘It was not reason but a manmade instrument, the telescope, which actually changed the physical world view …’[3] Tools enhance the capability and often the reliability of our bodies. They are an extension of our body, and the more tools we have, the more body we have. The recent proliferation of tools has come hand in hand with consumption on a scale never seen before. As a result, the United States, Russia, Japan and China have all been investigating the potential to mine the moon.

The main form of transport at HMP is quad bikes, or ‘all-terrain vehicles’. These machines are fantastic tools, handling the treacherous rocky terrain with ease even for the novice rider. It took an hour (longer than usual given my riding skills) to get to the Haughton meteorite crater, which is twenty kilometres in diameter and estimated to be thirty-nine million years old. It is a shallow bowl filled with white-grey breccia, which, when hit by sunlight, could be mistaken for snowdrifts. The perimeter is marked by a ring of chimneys, formed by water funnelling out from the impact basin. These extinct hydrothermal vents are yolk-coloured, and a non-active form of yellowcake. They’re slightly taller than a human, and generally capped with fluorescent orange lichen. It took the HMP team a while to work out why the lichen only occurred at the top of the vents—not because of impact minerals, but because arctic terns rest on them and their droppings provide the nutrients for the lichen to grow.

Part of the reason for the journey to the crater was to check on work being done by researchers based in a tent located between two of the vents. One side of the cramped workspace was taken up by a robotic drill and a laser tracking the drill’s progress, the other by four desks and an array of chords and computers. The researchers were testing the setup, software and function of the drill—an unenviable job where hours of observation of the live data feed is required. It’s no wonder that large containers of mixed lollies sat within reach. If there is life on Mars, it’s likely to be microbial extremophiles that live in hydrothermal vents and feed off the chemicals concentrated there. By locating the HMP tent between two Haughton crater vents, the researchers gain a degree of similarity to conditions on Mars. The next voyage to Mars may well have one of these drills on board; it will certainly be robots such as this that make the journey before humans do.

Also working out of the crater, but not associated with HMP, was a team of palaeontologists who visited HMP a few nights later to share an exciting find. The impact exposed a lakebed from the early Miocene period where the team found a ‘missing link’ fossil of an ancient carnivore, the forebear of seals and walruses. At the time the creature lived, the Arctic was forested and much warmer so there was enough food for the animal to hunt on land and in water.[4] The researchers hope that their find will contribute to our understanding of polar ecosystems and how they have responded to climate change in the past.

An example of human life in a warmer Arctic is the Thule (pronounced too-lee) archaeological site just out of Resolute. The Thule lived there between five hundred and a thousand years ago, during the Medieval Warm Period when the northern Atlantic region had anomalously warm, and then cool, phases. During the warm period, large whales visited arctic waters and the Thule settled to hunt them. They built houses out of whalebone and the massive sculptural remains still stand on end where they once buttressed the walls and ceilings. Thule huts were so well designed, with paved floors and crawl-through entry/exit corridors that acted as cold sinks as they were set deeper than the living area, that even today it is easy to imagine them as cosy if—complete with whale oil lamps—uncomfortably akin to Jonah’s temporary residence. When the climate cooled the Thule abandoned their houses, moved south and, according to DNA testing, interbred with the Inuit they met there. The current phase of warming comes at a time of much larger populations, causing concern about climate refugees. Even in Australia the effects of long-term drought are starting to show, with many towns (such as Deniliquin) experiencing significant drops in population.

As well as popular science, and probably the result of a childhood diet of David Attenborough, I’ve always loved nature documentaries. But the more I watch them, the more I experience them as eulogies—as a tribute to something irretrievable. Humans are one of many marvels of the universe and what we do can only be natural, even if that means being the cause of a mass extinction event. Cultural inheritors of the Christian faith know what it is to live in thrall of an apocalypse story. In the world of fast media there is no shortage of such stories. It is still a mystery as to whether the results of this round of global warming will be catastrophic and our ‘happily ever after’, or just another chapter. What is clear, however, is that scientists have had to turn from being communicators of wonder to communicators of doom. I feel the loss.

Notes

1. For more information on the listing of polar bears see the US Fisheries and Wildlife Service website fact sheet: http://www.fws.gov/home/feature/2008/polarbear012308/pdf/037257PolarBearQAFINAL.pdf Back to article

2. Tom Griffiths, Slicing the Silence, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2007, p. 250. Back to article

3. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd edn, University of Chicago Press, 1998, p. 274. Back to article

4. Nature, vol. 458, no. 7241 (23 April 2009), p. 944. Back to article