Arctic research funding of $67M finally announced

The federal government formally announced $67.3 million for research on Arctic climate change Thursday, though the funding has already been flowing for months and an official website has long since divulged it.

Industry Minister Christian Paradis said the money would keep ArcticNet, a Canada-wide network of mostly university-based researchers, operating through 2018.

The 145 investigators run projects looking at topics as diverse as Inuit access to post-secondary education, to how global warming is affecting marine life on the floor of the Arctic Ocean.

ArcticNet's first round of funding came in 2003, and researchers have known it would be renewed since last fall, when the federal government quietly extended its financial commitment.

The exact amount of the second round of funding was later posted to the federal government's website for the Networks of Centres of Excellence, which supports national research collaborations.

But there was still no formal announcement from the government. The Prime Minister's Office said in August that Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver would make the official announcement in the fall, even as Industry Canada was already at work planning something for that month.

"It's a matter of opportunity," said Louis Fortier, a Laval University marine biologist and ArcticNet's scientific director. "We agreed with the Industry Department that we wanted to do the announcement in the North, and in the wintertime it's impossible, so the first favourable window was in August. We had something planned for the beginning of August in Resolute Bay, but things are always complicated in the North, and this is just one more example."

In the end, Paradis made the announcement Thursday alongside Fortier at Laval University in Quebec City, where he said the funding was the single largest amount Ottawa has doled out as part of the Networks of Centres of Excellence program.

All the machinations haven't been detrimental to ArcticNet's researchers, however, several of them said.

"The research community knew, when we had our last annual scientific meeting in December, that the decision had been made," said David Hik, a University of Alberta biologist and ArcticNet project leader.

"The fact the official announcement was delayed isn't a big deal. It hasn't delayed the flow of the funds, and none of the investigators would have been adversely affected at all. Probably with the election in May, a lot of these timelines got set back."

Fortier agreed there has been no adverse effect. "This is something the 145 of them were expecting. We were confident we would get funding," he said.

He added that the federal contribution is only a part of ArcticNet's budget. The government cash has a "leveraging effect" that allows the program to raise further funds from universities, granting agencies and elsewhere, for a total over the next seven years of between $400 million and $500 million, he said.

About $2.7 million a year of that goes toward operating the Canadian Coast Guard ship Amundsen, a 98-metre-long icebreaker that Arctic researchers use every May to December to travel to the remote North to study Inuit communities and the environment. Accessibility Links

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Arctic ice near all-time low, 2nd study confirms

Arctic sea ice on Sept. 9, seen by satellite, had retreated 35 per cent from its median 1979-to- 2000 low (indicated by the orange line), U.S. data says. National Snow and Ice Data Center

A second major scientific body has said Arctic sea ice is about as low as it's ever been since satellites began monitoring it.

And a researcher at the U.S.-based National Snow and Ice Data Center said that open water at the top of the globe may already be affecting weather in more southern reaches of North America.

The amount of ice in the North is almost at the all-time low of 2007 and could drop further in coming weeks, the centre said Thursday. That assessment came days after German researchers concluded ice cover is already less than it was four years ago, which was the lowest since satellite monitoring began in 1979.

There is now about one-third less ice in the Arctic than the 1979-2000 average.

Northern sea ice is considered a leading indicator of global warming.

Although the National Snow and Ice Data Center suggests the ice level could still drop below the all-time low, this year's result is more worrisome because it happened in a summer that didn't have the same kind of unusual weather as in 2007.

Walter Meier, a researcher at the centre, said that year was marked by remarkably sunny skies and winds that tended to bunch the ice together. This year had none of those special conditions.

'We haven't seen ice cover this low probably for the last several thousand years'—Researcher Walter Meier

This year "has more to do with the changing long-term climate of the Arctic rather than just a single one-year extreme event," said James Overland, an oceanographer with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Although satellite data only exists for the last 32 years, there's ample other evidence that the extent of modern sea ice is at historic lows, Meier said.

"We haven't seen ice cover this low probably for the last several thousand years."

Much has been made of the possibility of faster shipping routes and greater access to resources in an increasingly ice-free Arctic, but Overland said there are also implications for weather in the rest of North America that are starting to emerge.

"There is some evidence that warming in the Arctic will bring cooling to some of the weather further south," he said.

Air warms up more over dark open water than it does over white, reflective sea ice and some scientists believe that the warmer air is starting to disrupt wind patterns that normally keep Arctic air bottled up in the North. Overland theorizes that disruption may have helped create the cold, snowy winters of 2008 and 2009 in Eastern Canada, as well as the cold weather along the U.S. east coast in 2009 and 2010.

"We're not sure about this," said Overland. "It's very controversial."

It is expected that as early as 2030, the Arctic will be ice-free for part of the year.

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