This summer, students and staff from the University of Rhode Island, the David Clark film company and five other institutions traveled on a Swedish icebreaker through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, or Northwest Passage, on a journey to learn as much as they could about the arctic ecosystem.
The trip took place from July 18 to Aug. 4. The five other institutions that joined URI were the University of Illinois at Chicago, City College of New York, Virginia Commonwealth University, Florida International University and the California State University. The crew travelled on a vessel called the Oden.
“We were finding critical, hands-on oceanographic research, because the Northwest passage has not been studied as much as other areas in the arctic,” said Holly Morin, the marine mammal lead and expedition coordinator. “We were looking at plankton and the arctic food web, and how that’s changing, also looking at the dynamics of water mass and oceanography.”
The expedition team had multiple staff members that had worked with Josh Jones, a researcher from Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. Jones’s team had launched a buoy with a hydrophone, or underwater microphone, to listen to the unseen world under the ice.
At one point, the buoy became lodged in ice, and the data was temporarily lost. Tracking the location of the buoy, Jones noticed the Oden’s proximity and contacted the team for help.
After a long day of trial and error, the expedition team was able to recover the important parts of the buoy that held the recorded data and audio.
This passive acoustic monitoring is really important in understanding marine mammal distribution, their activity patterns, and their habitat association,” Morin said. “Just because you don’t see them, doesn’t mean they’re not there, because these animals do live a large portion of their lives and spend a lot of time under the water. Especially when they come to the surface, all they’re going to do is take a breath. You’re not going to see a whole bunch of animals when they come to the surface, that’s why listening to them is so very important.”
This entire event was captured through the David Clark film company, which joined the expedition. They plan to create a documentary “Frozen Obsession” that depicts the entire voyage, including the research of all staff and students on the trip.
Morin also was in charge of many live interactions with the team, where an audience could tune in to a live-feed video of many of the observations, collections, and analyses while the team was performing them.
“If you’re doing really great things, that’s awesome,” Morin said. “If you’re doing great science, that’s awesome. But if you don’t tell anybody about it, nobody knows or can appreciate it.”
The expedition team was a collection of professors with backgrounds in arctic research. Those professors then invited both undergraduate and graduate students to apply for a position as well.
“[The students] were split into four research groups,” Morin said. “There was one that was studying seabirds and marine mammals, there was one that was looking at microscopic communities, one was looking at physical oceanography, and one ocean chemistry and atmospheric chemistry.”
The groups of students rotated daily, taking on new jobs in the four different focuses of the expedition. This allowed them to see the connections between all the organisms and environmental factors, including how one small change could affect the whole system. A day on the ship could vary heavily for a student.
“It really depended where we were, in some cases, we were traveling long distances and maybe we couldn’t sample that day,” said Jacob Strock, an oceanography graduate student at the URI Graduate School of Oceanography. “We were always processing samples and always ready to take those samples, because if you can imagine, it’s not easy to get yourself out to the arctic and get on one of these fantastic expeditions. So while you’re there, you try to take advantage of every moment. So, if you come to a station at two in the morning, that is when you’re going to get up and start your work. There were very long days, but also very exciting times to take a look at these habitats and carry out these studies.”
Strock hopes that their research can help reach a large audience.
“Hopefully this can reach many people about why the arctic is important,” Strock said. “There’s a lot we can still learn and I hope this trip can add to our scientific knowledge.”
Based on the data collected from the expedition and buoy, the team believes that much more information can be gathered about how the Northwest Passage functions and may be affected by climate change. The team hopes the public will be motivated by the documentary and live-feed interactions from the voyage.