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November/December 2000 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Editor’s Notebook The Inside Story Feature: Alert, Nunavut À la carte Curious by nature Reverberations

There is only one way into Alert, which lies at the tip of our topmost Arctic island, Ellesmere, and is the world’s most northern permanently inhabited settlement. You can’t get there by sea, although it overlooks the great icy sweep of the Arctic Ocean. In the 50 years since its founding, it has been reached by ship only four times, and all of those vessels were steel-hulled icebreakers. And you certainly can’t get there by road - not even Inuit live that far north. It may lie within Nunavut, but the closest Canadian Inuit community — Grise Fiord — is 800 kilometres south.

So the only route into Alert (pop. about 70) is by air, and the only air carrier that runs regular fiights into the settlement is the Canadian Forces. You climb aboard a Hercules transport loaded down with extreme-weather survival gear, as I did in August, at Canadian Forces Base Trenton, just east of Toronto. After an eight-hour fiight in the cargo hold with wooden crates, spools of cable, boxes and spare tires — all expertly lashed down by the loadmaster — you step, blinking, into the Arctic desert, with 24-hour sunlight, a bitter wind blowing, snowfiakes in the air and a foreboding of winter.

The settlement’s proper name, as Dane Lanken tells us in his feature story in this issue, is Canadian Forces Station Alert. Its principal mission is to "maintain signals intelligence collection and geolocation facilities in support of the Canadian cryptologic program." In plain English, it is used by the military to spy, electronically, on others, including our Arctic neighbours just across the North Pole - the Russians.

The windswept station itself consists of a gravel airstrip, a central complex with room for up to 250 people, a gym and curling rink, a power plant and warehouse and a couple of Environment Canada buildings, including "the most northerly permanent environmental research laboratory in the world." All of it is set on a fiat-topped hill surrounded by the starkest landscape I have ever seen: a sea of fractured shale devoid of vegetation, other than the hardiest lichen.

Last spring, photographer Janice Lang spent a month in Alert with a group of National Defence scientists observing their testing of devices that will allow remote monitoring of ship and submarine traffic in the Arctic seas. The current warming trend in the North may well mean, within a decade, regular ship traffic through the Northwest Passage. Being able to monitor that traffic is vital for protection of the North.

As for my visit, Canadian Geographic had asked a year ago for permission to travel to the base. Our request was granted in August, and so, on a steamy summer morning, I left for a place where the pack ice comes in on the morning tide.

The men and women in the Armed Forces who are based in Alert for six months at a stretch were cheerful and welcoming. By now, they are enveloped in total darkness, a blackout so complete that the moment you are out of sight of the station’s lights, you literally cannot see your hand in front of your face. They will endure this absence of sun until March.

Although their quarters offer all the amenities of home — private rooms, television, plenty of good food, recreational facilities, a chapel — they live in utter isolation. While I was there, one man confided that in a phone call home, his teenage son told him he now had a death’s-head tattoo and a pet rat.

“Nothing I can do about it from here,” he said, with weary resignation.

“Probably nothing you could have done about it at home either,” was the best I could offer by way of sympathy.

Despite its forbidding location — indeed because of it — Alert is an ideal site for many scientists, who study everything from ocean currents to air quality, ice thickness and Arctic plants and wildlife. Its very isolation, far from civilization’s grit and growl, makes it a controlled lab setting. Yet fewer and fewer researchers have been allowed in recent years to make use of its facilities. Cutbacks to the Canadian Forces and automation have reduced the number of personnel based in Alert from 215 in the early 1990s to about 70 today. Although there is room to host researchers, those cutbacks mean that the base does not have the resources — food, fuel and transport — to support them.

The federal government insists that it is vigilant in its defence of our claim to sovereignty over the Arctic islands, but the fact remains that it has allocated little more than windy rhetoric to monitoring the region’s ecological health. Canadian Geographic has reported on cutbacks in federal funding for Arctic science (CG Nov/Dec 1999). And in September, at the 51st Arctic Science Conference in Whitehorse, members of the Task Force on Northern Research urged the federal government to invest in research in order to help Northerners cope with the unprecedented social, physical and environmental challenges currently facing the region.

“We no longer have the effective research presence in the North that we need to help safeguard this unique and sensitive environment,” said task force chair Tom Hutchinson of Trent University.

Alert is a vital intelligence-gathering outpost on our northern frontier. What intelligence could possibly be more vital to our national interests than understanding how the pack ice is thinning or how industrial pollutants carried on the winds are affecting Arctic marine life? Ensuring that Alert has the resources to host scientists would be a concrete demonstration of the federal government’s commitment to the care of our Great White North.

Professional mountain guide Karl Nagy was one of the members of The Royal Canadian Geographical Society team that summited Yukon’s Mount Logan in 1992. The team established, for the first time, its exact height (5,959 metres) and confirmed its status as Canada’s highest peak. On August 29, Nagy was killed in a freak rockfall while working with mountain guide candidates near Lake Louise, Alta. After 1992, he returned to Mount Logan several times and also climbed in the U.S., Europe, South America and Asia. Climbers are often accused of having a death wish, but Nagy’s reply to this was straightforward: "I have a life wish." He was 36 when he died. To his wife, Inka, and to his family, our most profound condolences.

Included with this issue is our newest supplement, Canada Online. It’s a handy guide to the best Canadian websites that we think will be of interest to you, our readers. The subjects range from geography to astronomy, wildlife, the environment, human history, health and travel. There’s also a primer on Internet navigation. We think it will be a useful desktop reference for anyone interested in Canada and a good resource for school projects.

Loyal readers will notice a bold new change to our “GeoWatch” department and a more subtle tweaking of our “GeoMap” section at the front of the magazine. “GeoWatch” is now named “Discovery,” and has been expanded both in terms of the topics it covers and in the number of pages we devote to it. We invite your comments on it and your story ideas.

“GeoMap,” the department that allows staff cartographer Steve Fick to tell a story with a map, is now named “À la carte.” It will feature both Fick’s creations as well as satellite images and the work of other mapmakers. In this issue, we pay tribute to Remembrance Day by devoting “À la carte” to the First World War battle that touched almost every city, town and outport in Newfoundland.

Rick Boychuk

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