Arctic oceanographer Eddy Carmack remembers his first trip to the North Pole in a surface vessel — it felt as though he was part of a great expedition into the unknown.
It was Aug. 22, 1994, when the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Louis St. Laurent and U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Polar Sea became the first North American vessels to reach the geographic top of the world. Carmack was along as Canada’s chief scientist.
“It was a big deal at the time,” said Carmack, 75, in an interview from his Saanichton home.
But it was only one moment in a life spent learning about the Arctic, a commitment that has earned him the inaugural Mohn Prize for Outstanding Research Related to the Arctic.
Carmack will be presented with the award, named after Norwegian astronomer/meteorologist Henrik Mohn (1835-1916), on Jan. 22 in a ceremony at the Arctic Museum of Norway in Tromso, Norway. His co-winners are the authors of the 2013 book The Meaning of Ice.
Carmack, who has been a senior research scientist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada and a research scientist at the University of Alaska, is being recognized as one of the world’s most productive Arctic scientists. He has more than 200 research papers to his name, 44 of them as first author, in the fields of high-latitude oceanography, limnology (the study of inland waters) and hydrology (study of water movement).
Carmack first fell in love with the Arctic in 1969 as a graduate student at the University of Washington in Seattle. He primarily specialized in fluid dynamics, the forces involved with the movement of liquids and gases. But then a colleague made him a unique offer.
The colleague said he was taking his PhD exam the following month, so he would not be able to make a scheduled Arctic research trip. Did Carmack want to go?
He soon found himself camping in a tent on sea ice on the border between Canada and Greenland. There was no going back.
“I felt like I was looking at a new frontier and I soaked up everything I could learn about the Arctic on that trip,” he said. “When I got back, my fluid-dynamic days were over.
“I was going to be a field oceanographer working in the high latitudes.”
Since then, he has made numerous trips to the Arctic and seen and documented changes as the climate warms.
One lesson he’s learned, he says, is that everything that happens in the Arctic is affected by fresh water, liquid or solid. “So, understanding how inflowing rivers and sea-ice melt affect the pan-Arctic system on everything from local ocean production to global ocean circulation to wobbly jet streams and nasty storms is of first importance.”
The other lesson relates to what he calls “fishboat science.”
He notes that his first trip to the North Pole was a monster of an undertaking, with the Louis St. Laurent, Canada’s most powerful icebreaker, smashing its way through the ice.
“It was like breaking through cement: bang, bang, bang and back up and bang again,” he said. “It was amazing we made it.”
Now the polar ice is thinner and softer, and the Louis St. Laurent has made the trip into the Central Arctic Ocean several times. Nations and shipping companies are now actively eyeing the Northwest Passage as a viable trade route linking Europe and Asia, and even tourists are making the trip.
Carmack is now convinced the best way to do research — and for Canada to assert its ownership of the Arctic territory — is with small boats, no bigger than a fishboat.
Small boats can carry researchers and scientists through the small channels and around the numerous islands, large and small, that make up the coastline of the Arctic Ocean. They can also link up the small Inuit communities that ring the Arctic coastline.
Small craft are perfectly suited to the unique oceanography of the Arctic Ocean, with its large proportion of shallow water covering a wide continental shelf.
In recent years, Carmack has made Arctic field trips on a converted 65-foot fishboat, the Martin Bergmann, conducting research and looking for the remains of the Franklin expedition. He was not in on the discoveries of the 19th-century wrecks of the Sir John Franklin ships HMS Terror and Erebus.
But Carmack said the research trips proved something important: the usefulness of small craft in studying the Arctic, whose real stories are to be found along the coasts. Big, powerful icebreakers are useful, but no longer essential.
“What was most important to me was the development of a tool and to show the usefulness of the approach of using small boats to better understand our Arctic waters,” said Carmack, who plans to head back to Bathurst Inlet in the Northwest Passage on his next expedition in August with an international team of scientists squeezed onto the Martin Bergmann. The goal is to study how tides and rivers affect the transfer of heat and nutrients from depth to surface, and thus regulate both sea-ice melt and marine production.
“To stay out in the middle of the ocean is to miss a big part of the story, which is along the edges and in all the narrow and shallow areas.”