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Home On the uppermost nib of Ellesmere Island, 800 km from the North Pole, the
military post and weather station at Alert is the most northerly permanent
Sci-Tech settlement on Earth. Every winter, its 200 occupants - including a few
meteorologists - endure -50 degC temperatures and five months of total
Medical
darkness.
Features
by Douglas Page,© 2000
Profiles
Marriage Peril The only way into Alert, Nunavut Territory, is by air on an austere
Hercules C-130 aircraft, a 10-hour flight flown once a week from Trenton,
Bio Ontario.
Usually, the only people aboard the rattling transport are Canadian Forces
personnel, dispatched to the hemisphere’s bleached, boreal rafters to
electronically snoop on Russia, its rogue neighbor. A relic of the Cold War
situated at 82.27 N and 62.31 W, Alert is actually closer to Moscow than
Ottawa.
"My interest in Arctic research was sparked during the early 1990s by
Leonard Barrie, a former colleague," Schroeder says. "At that time,
atmospheric monitoring of toxic and persistent organic pollutants - so-
called POPs - had been initiated at several locations in the Canadian
Arctic under the NCP. However, there existed little, if any, data on
atmospheric concentrations of mercury or other heavy metals north of the
Arctic Circle in any of the circumpolar nations, including Canada."
"This then state-of-the-art approach yielded the first annual time series
of weekly-integrated total gaseous mercury concentrations anywhere in the
Arctic," Schroeder says. "With this manual methodology, however, we could
not observe any fluctuations in mercury concentrations occurring on a time-
scale shorter than a week."
It’s not always easy going. Though the permafrost releases its chisel-cold
grip on the Alert terrain during the quick, brisk summer, allowing a sparse
carpet of ephemeral polar vegetation, for 10 months of the year Alert is
snowbound.
Approaching the observatory from the main camp, this barren steppe on the
northern fringe of the Hazen Plateau rises abruptly to an elevation of
approximately 200 m with local folds pushing up 500 m. Beyond the
observatory in the pristine distance, the Plateau itself continues to rise
to the south, forming the frozen bosom of Ellesmere Island, reaching a
typical elevation of 1,000 m, defined by a Canadian national park the size
of West Virginia and the 7,500 km2 Agassiz Ice Cap - a permanent feature
with a central elevation greater than 2,000 m. Southwest of Alert lie the
rugged United States range, its bleak, sterile crags exceeding 2,500 m.
"It has happened that scientists left the base camp in the morning under
good weather and visibility to go out to the Observatory (a 45 minute drive
in special track-truck snow vehicles) for their weekly inspection and
calibration visit and then, following completion of their tasks, found the
visibility and weather conditions had deteriorated to such an extent that
they couldn’t see to return to base camp and were forced to stay at the
Observatory until the blizzard blew over," Schroeder says. After serving as
an emergency shelter a few times, the scientists stocked the Observatory
with emergency rations and a bunk bed for just such incidents.
STARTLING FINDINGS
When not braced against the gellid Arctic winds, Schroeder is working on
several other projects dealing with mercury in the Canadian environment.
Regardless of the hardship and risk, Schroeder, Steffen and others have
"Our scientific studies at Alert have revealed that, each spring the
elemental mercury vapor in surface-level Arctic air is transformed (through
an, as yet unknown, oxidation process) into one or more compound(s) which
is/are much more readily removed from the troposphere than the original
form," he says.
POLAR SUNRISE
Alert is the site of another important field project. The Polar Sunrise
Experiment 2000 took place last winter and spring, the goal of which was to
study ozone depletion at the ground in the Arctic Atmosphere upon polar
sunrise, and the potential role being played by chemical reactions in the
snow pack and the ice surface.
Some unexpected, and quite dramatic, phenomena have come to light in the
last year, Bottenheim says. During Polar Sunrise Experiment 1998 strong
evidence was obtained for the emission of formaldehyde (HCHO) from the snow
pack at Alert after polar sunrise. Concurrently, a diel pattern was
observed in NOx that could only be explained from an unknown source most
likely in the snow pack as well. During the summer 1998 campaign at Summit,
Greenland, direct evidence was obtained for a snow source of NOx and
possibly HONO at that location.
They also raise new questions, foremost among those is the chemical
mechanism of these reactions in the snow/ice. To a large extent this will
also indicate whether this new chemistry can play a role in other snow
covered regions of the globe than just the Arctic.
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