Measurements in a unique environment

Greetings from the ice, just off the southern tip of Banks Island! A spectacular place – Banks Island isn’t nearly as flat as I thought it would be; majestic 500m cliffs jut vertically out of the water about 20 km from us.
My name is Ralf Staebler and I’m a research scientist at Environment Canada, with the Air Quality Research Branch. Most of my work deals with forests down south, but I’ve also been doing lots of research in the Arctic. It’s one of those places that are very addictive – I was hooked the first time I came up to Alert, on Ellesmere Island, back in 1992. The wide open spaces, the harsh but beautiful landscapes, the clear skies… they really put everything into perspective.
I’m up here with the OASIS team (Ocean Atmosphere Sea Ice Snowpack), part of a big international program, studying processes that go on right at the boundary between the ocean surface and the lower atmosphere. We are specifically interested in getting a better understanding of the chemistry and physics responsible for an interesting phenomenon that happens nowhere else on the planet, only in the polar regions in the spring. When the sun comes up after the dark winter, both ozone and mercury in the bottom 1000m of the atmosphere experience these drastic depletions, sometimes several days long, and then they come back up to normal concentrations. This was first discovered in the mid-80’s by some of our colleagues at Environment Canada. We now know that bromine from the sea water plays the major role in the ozone destruction and the conversion of mercury into more reactive forms, but we don’t understand many of the details yet – and that’s why we’re here! We need to understand these details in order to be able to be able to predict how atmospheric chemistry may change as the ice cover up here decreases and eventually becomes seasonal, since this may have implications not only on climate but also on the whole food chain all the way up to the polar bear and the people living in the north.
Some of our measurements have already been explained in other dispatches (by Vlad, Paul, Phil and Patrick). We’ve added a few more gizmos since then, and possibly the coolest is this fully automated sled (see photo) that we park out on the ice a few km from the ship, where it can measure ozone, mercury, carbon dioxide and bromine in the air right over some interesting surfaces such as young ice or frost flowers, and away from the smoke stack of the ship. We’ve had some adventures with this already – last Wednesday a wide crack opened up in the ice between the ship and the sled and we had to use the helicopter to airlift the sled back to the ship!
Doing research on this ship has been excellent – we can go places that are really difficult to get to any other way. And the infrastructure and assistance from the Coast Guard have been amazing – this ship is basically a big mobile lab building with outstanding technical support. We certainly hope to be back for future projects!