Work stories: 1985

 Arctic Islands [Previous ¦ Next]

I spent a short summer in the High Arctic with the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC): do you know why the central airport in the Canadian high Arctic is at Resolute Bay on Cornwallis Island? Not only is it very near the magnetic pole (little one can do about that), but it's amidst a well-know perennial fog-bank in the summer (something could've been done about it, read on).

A coincidence in geology and geography made Siberia and northern Alberta very similar. Both had two petroleum provinces mid-continent in the foothills of orogenic belts, with shallow clastic and deep reef oil and gas deposits in significant amounts. And both were plains of rather higher elevation against mountain ranges with short summers and long days, and long dry winters. As Canada was not involved in the Cold War (indeed Kennedy suspected Trudeau sympathised with Krushtchev), there was a natural affinity and petroleum technology was freely exchanged across the N Pole. Then every two weeks a charter flights flew over the pole from Calgary to Novosibirsk. [For a weird twist of Cold War era geopolitics, see this here].

On the other side of the ideological divide, there used to be a friendly cat&mouse game going on between US and CDN [1], of lesser importance in the post-Cold War era [0] Canada claims sovereignty over the entire pie from the Yukon/Alaska border [2] up to the pole and down between Baffin Isl. and Greenland through Nares Straight. US claims the intervening international waters beyond the so-called 200 nautical mile Economic Exclusion Zone. To test that sovereignty, the US Navy used to ship a barge yearly through the Northwest Passage - from New York, south of Baffin Island, past Cornwallis Island and Mackenzie Delta, on to Prudhoe Bay. To further test this in the mid-fifties, the US decided to build an airbase to help with surveillance missions in the former Soviet Union. On the appointed summer, bureaucratic tie-ups and the extra organisation to ship an airport in spare parts delayed the departure of the convoy until September. Wouldn't you know that by end of month when they reached Cornwallis Island, the ice-bank had already closed across the straight as it does every year by October [3]. So the convoy turned around, but only after off-loading said airport materials to pick up next year, and make the round-trip faster and cheaper - the Arctic is very dry and sparsely inhabited, so leaving gear up there is no big deal (I found many caches from forty years ago, with pristine cans of peanut butter, dried bananas... and spam).

So the US Navy went back next year and earlier in August, but that one was one cold summer where the ice never left the ground (same as ‘85 when I went up, which is why I was told this story). Having gone all that way and looking for something to show for their travails, they decided then&there to build the airport right where the gear was dumped on Cornwallis Island. Voilà! Instant airport with no rationale as to its location, other than traveling mishaps and ice - which, in their defence, is the rule in the Arctic anyway... It has been used ever since. Resolute Bay is a thriving community, used by CDN government field-parties that spend summers there as part of the claim to sovereignty (a whole program called Polar Continental Shelf Project went for almost 50 years though it's staggering nowadays amidst government cutbacks and new Arctic geopolitics). The only problem however is that Resolute Bay sits right in the middle of a perennial fog-bank, which any Inuit (Eskimo) could have informed anyone who cared to ask! So it's a ritual up there to build in ten days slack on each end of a short summer field season, just in case fog fails to lift at appointed flight times (and Murphy has a field-day on that one).

0: 2009 update: but of renewed importance in the 1985 Arctic geopolitics

1: Q - do you know what the acronym C-D-N for Canada stands for?
A - Commonwealth Dominion of North-america back

2: itself under dispute with pending ANWR drilling, does it go perpendicular to shoreline (US claim as it give it more of Mackenzie delta) or straight up to the pole (CDN claim)? This happens on every shore, and is a classic GIS problem. back

3: in the field can be found nests made of stone, which were set up by Vikings to encourage eider geese to nest in - Vikings used to make October runs from Greenland to mid-Arctic and back on their sleek vessels to collect the eider down, after the geese had flown south and before the snow set in. Legend has it that they were once blown/forced off course and ended up over-wintering in Newfoundland 500 or so years before Christopher Columbus landed on Caribbean beaches (he had the better deal both in terms of climatic conditions and of what history recorded).