IQALUIT: There are more than 60 words to describe sea ice in Inuktitut.
For Nunavut hunters, words are key when traveling on an ocean road frozen by snowmobiles or dog equipment.
At Pond Inlet, north of Baffin Island, Andrew Arreak spends much of his time collecting these words and their definitions. He says he plans to share his list with the community and local schools to help people stay safe.
“I’m trying to get all these words right so they can know what to expect when they come out on the ice.”
Arreak runs the Nunavut operations of SmartICE, an organization based in Nunatsiavut territory and region in Newfoundland and Labrador. It combines local knowledge of sea ice with modern technology, using sensors to determine the thickness of ice and collect data on ice conditions, which communities can use when going out on ice.
Although SmartICE has continued its research throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, thanks to its Nunavut-based staff, this year other scientists and researchers from the south were left out of the territory.
“SmartICE didn’t lose pace during COVID,” says Trevor Bell, a professor at Memorial University in St. Louis. John’s, New Zealand, and founder of SmartICE.
He says research was always created to be done locally.
“We put our control tools in the hands of community members from the beginning. They can operate and generate information about sea ice … without any intervention from us.
“It’s operated by communities for northern communities. The benefit of that is seen in a year like this.”
Nunavut is a year-round research center, but especially during the summer months. In 2017, for example, the Nunavut Research Institute licensed 136 research projects with 662 people.
In March, the Nunavut head of public health restricted travel to the territory to residents only. Trips between communities were mostly unrestricted, apart from blockades in the spring and November.
Milla Rautio, a researcher at the Universite du Quebec, has been traveling to Nunavut every summer since 2014 to study changes in the Arctic lakes of Cambridge Bay and Victoria Island.
This year, in light of travel restrictions, Rautio turned to community members to conduct his research. He sent sampling equipment to Cambridge Bay and remotely supervised a small research team.
“I was able to get everything I needed and even more.”
Rautio says that having Nunavummiut collect samples meant he could also continue his research year-round.
“Instead of me and my students going to Cambridge Bay once a year, usually in August, doing this sampling snapshot, we now have this opportunity to understand what’s going on north all year. he says.
“I didn’t have to go there myself.”
Rautio worked for years to establish connections with students and other community members in Cambridge Bay. She says these connections have been instrumental in her research continuing in the midst of the pandemic.
Thanks to local knowledge, Rautio’s research team also discovered something he probably didn’t find. A once crystalline lake that was used for fishing near the community has suddenly become murky.
“I’m not sure I would have known without them”
Heidi Swanson, a professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, usually spends the summer in all three territories studying summer fish. This year he also conducted his research with the help of residents.
“In Kugluktuk, Nunavut, we made our northern research partner do a better job than ever in the past,” Swanson said at the Arctic Net annual conference on Dec. 9.
Like Rautio, Swanson has established connections in several northern communities.
“Where relationships are stronger, we had more adaptive capacity.”
This report from The Canadian Press was first published on December 26, 2020.