E-mail A Friend Tell a friend about the information found on this page by sending them an e-mail.   Your Name: Your E-mail:   Type an e-mail address, then click add: Add a Personal Message: (Optional)

January/February 2010 issue	In this issue Table of Contents IPY: What is IPY? IPY: Kluane research station IPY: Inuit health IPY: Arctic mercury mystery IPY: Arctic scientist IPY: Future Arctic research IPY: Multimedia The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Reverberations À la carte Mosaic Book Reviews

Way and other participants in the CryoEX international student exchange head out for a day of fieldwork in Jotunheimen National Park.
Photo: Robert van Waarden

• PHOTO ESSAY
• VIDEO
• INTERACTIVE

Cryosphere kid: Young Canadian scientist Robert Way travels to Norway to learn more about his home

Turbulent tundra: Global warming’s impact on Arctic tundra

Crossing the line: Observe changes in the tree line and examine its affect on Canada’s Arctic tundra

As a whole, the contingent of 17 students and professors in Norway bears an apolitical quality. Individually, however, opinions on how the world should react to climate change fall along a well-defined continuum. On the left are Lars Elmkoer Hansen and Anna-Marie Chwastek, a pair of young Danes who work near Way in the rain, measuring lichen diameter. They hope for progress at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen in December. On the right is Humlum, a physical geography professor and a renowned polar researcher who says data shows that CO₂ has less of an impact on global warming than many people believe. Walking down the mountain after his last measurements at a moraine deposited around 1960, Storbreen sparkling turquoise behind him, Way says he doesn’t think Humlum is right but he’s willing to listen.

“I’m open to a good debate,” says Way before coming to a tumbling meltwater stream and hopscotching across on a few large stones. Still, he adds, accepting anthropogenic CO₂ as the cause of Storbreen’s recent rapid shrinkage can’t cause any problems. “What’s the worst that can happen? We stop polluting so much?”

Bernd Etzelmüller, a professor in the University of Oslo’s department of geosciences, didn’t co-create CryoEX to attain game-changing conclusions. In part, it was to fulfill the IPY call for collaborative polar science. The best way to do that, he says, is to generate researchers with international experience.

Gathering 15 students from Canada, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Holland and the United States would have been much more difficult in the past, says Etzelmüller. When he arrived a decade ago from his native Germany to begin work on Norwegian permafrost, he was a pioneer in his field. Now, he says, “people understand you have to know what is happening with the permafrost, with the glaciers, to know what is happening with climate change.” So government funding has finally begun to flow.

CryoEX bridges the University of Oslo and the University of Ottawa — home base for the program’s other founder, geography professor and faculty of arts dean Antoni Lewkowicz — but funding comes only from the Norwegian Centre for International Cooperation in Higher Education. The case made in 2008 for securing 1.5 million Norwegian krone (roughly $280,000) over three years from the centre was strengthened, says Lewkowicz, by his co-operation with Etzelmüller to map Yukon permafrost in 2006. They had forged a link between institutions that do strong permafrost and glacier research, says Lewkowicz, noting that while there are similarities between Canada and Norway, there are also geographic differences that allow researchers from the two countries to learn from each other.

“IPY encouraged us to organize into formal and informal groups,” says Lewkowicz, to overcome “the limitations of individual researchers.” There was also the fact that Etzelmüller, who’d come to Canada on sabbatical, had research equipment that would have cost Lewkowicz $4,000 per week to rent for their map-making project, which was partially funded by IPY and will ultimately help predict how thawing will affect residents and industry in the Yukon. The Norwegian Centre recognized the spirit of collaboration and the value it could have if applied to students. “What they learn during this week, they don’t learn the whole semester reading books,” says Etzelmüller. “This may be the most important thing: to get the students into the field.”