Researchers heading north to study glaciers in N.W.T., Nunavut

Nestled between jagged mountain peaks in Nahanni National Park Reserve, N.W.T., the Bologna Glacier stores water and serves as a smooth transportation corridor for animals like caribou, porcupines and wolverines.

But, like ice all over the world, it's melting and shrinking in the warming climate, leaving the future uncertain for creatures that travel across it and ecosystems that exist below it — including the South Nahanni River, to which its melt water flows. 

Mark Ednie, a scientist with Natural Resources Canada (NRCan)'s Geological Survey of Canada (GSC), says it'll take more than just his research to understand how the quickly changing glacier will affect the traditional territory of the Dehcho First Nations. 

"We need to have bigger teams and different researchers come in to try and understand the implications," he said. He is, however, part of an effort to understand how the glacier is changing.

Ednie and two other GSC scientists are preparing for a weeks-long trip, starting in April, to study a handful of Canada's most significant glaciers.

Ednie will visit the Bologna Glacier — a trip he makes twice a year — as well as the Peyto Glacier in Alberta and the Helm Glacier in British Columbia. 

His colleagues, David Burgess and Bradley Danielson, are heading to the High Arctic. They'll be gathering data from Nunavut's Agassiz, Meighen and Devon ice caps and Grise Fiord Glacier and the N.W.T.'s Melville Ice Cap as part of a trip they do once a year.

NRCan defines a glacier as a large body of snow that accumulates on land and turns into ice over many years. They flow and "deform" under their own weight. Ice caps, meanwhile, are a type of glacier. Burgess said ice caps are typically shaped like a pancake, and it is sometimes difficult to determine where an ice cap ends and where a glacier begins.

Unprecedented melt, and why it matters

Burgess said observations they've made on the Devon Ice Cap, in particular, have been "really striking." By comparing data gathered there to ice cores that date back 10,000 years, he was able to determine that the melt of the ice cap, since the mid-2000s, has been "unprecedented in several thousands of years." 

The glacier at Grise Ford, meanwhile, has lost more than 55 per cent of its area between 1960 and 2016, he said. 

Burgess said glaciers in the High Arctic are among the biggest contributors to sea level rise which has implications locally and around the world. Minute levels of sea water rise, paired with extreme weather, have "severe" effects on coastal communities, he said.

Danielson said glacier water contains nutrients and sediments that change marine ecosystems — affecting microscopic forms of life like plankton and krill, and working its way up to fish, seals and whales. 

"It could shift the patterns of where wildlife are concentrating now versus where they were, making it harder to find them, making the local people change their patterns to adapt," he said.

Burgess said "limited research" in Grise Fiord shows, so far, that melt water has given a "boost" to the bottom level of the marine food chain that people living in the community rely on.

"We really don't know what's going to happen as the temperatures warm and the glaciers start to pump out more [water]. This could go either way. It could get worse or get better," he said. 

Burgess said the eight spots that both NRCan teams are studying this spring are "regional representatives" of glaciers throughout Canada — which will help them better understand data being collected in other parts of the country.