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November/December 2002 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Editor’s Notebook Feature: Bighorn sheep The Inside Story Reverberations À la carte Mosaic

Seeking a Low profile
Near the end of a five-week canoe expedition to retrace some of Albert Peter Low’s journeys, James Stone can barely contain his admiration for the geologist who mapped large tracts of Labrador and northern Quebec from 1884 to 1895. "He was one tough dude!" exclaims Stone over the crackle of his satellite phone from his campsite on a southern tributary of the Rupert River near James Bay. Indeed, Low covered some 12,800 kilometres on foot and by canoe in the harsh terrain of the Labrador Peninsula. His surveys of the sparsely populated region laid the foundation for the Quebec-Labrador border.

Low also led the first official government expedition to entrench Canadian sovereignty over much of the eastern Arctic in 1903-04 and became the deputy minister of mines in 1907. Despite his many accomplishments, Low remains an obscure figure in the annals of Canada’s exploration history. Last summer, in an attempt to get a better sense of Low’s personality and drive, Stone and expedition partner Max Finkelstein undertook his treks of 1885, 1892, 1893 and 1895, through the marshes and bone-chilling mist between Lac Naococane, near the Quebec-Labrador border, and Oatmeal Falls, about 100 kilometres inland from James Bay. Their voyage was supported by a $5,000 expedition grant from The Royal Canadian Geographical Society.

Though Stone says he and Finkelstein didn’t find "notes on trees or A. P. Low’s name carved into rock," their trip — including some 75 back-breaking portages — has given them insight into Low’s character and working conditions. It will be an invaluable source of inspiration as they sit down to write a biography and produce a video about the unsung geologist.

Monique Roy-Sole

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Class acts
Autumn means back to the class- room for the Canadian Council for Geographic Education (CCGE) and the Society, both of which are sponsoring activities to put the "gee!" back in geography. The CCGE has put together a teaching kit brimming with ideas to celebrate Geography Awareness Week (November 17-23). The package, which will be sent to 3,200 member teachers, includes a book of lesson plans on biodiversity in Canada’s forests, produced by the Canadian Forestry Association, as well as Canadian Geographic’s new poster-map of the Northwest Territories. Teachers who wish to join the CCGE may register online at www.ccge.org.

On November 12, the Society is teaming up with the Canadian Space Agency and the Canadian Museum of Nature to present astronaut Steve MacLean, who will give schoolchildren in Ottawa a preview of his next space mission, scheduled for May 2003. During that mission, he will contribute to the assembly of the International Space Station.

While students were enjoying their summer holidays this year, keen teachers hit the books at the CCGE’s Teacher Institute at the University of Lethbridge. The first Phyllis Arnold Award, established to help teachers attend conferences or professional-development courses in geography, was presented to Elizabeth Fargey of Red Deer, Alta.

Arctic awakening
From plunging into Arctic waters in their bathing suits to being awestruck by the deafening sound of seabirds lining the cliffs of Coburg Island, experiencing the Arctic for the first time was an eye-opener for the two winners of Canadian Geographic’s Polar Bound Contest.

High school students Becky Dayboll, 16, of Port Colborne, Ont., and Andrew Dargie, 15, of Calgary set out last August on a two-week voyage to the High Arctic on the Russian icebreaker Kapitan Khlebnikov. Fifteen other students from Canada and the United States were also on board.

Daily lectures and excursions shed light on the vulnerable ecology of the North, while friendships formed between students from such different worlds as Long Island, N.Y., and Cambridge Bay, Nunavut.

"It’s a place I’ll long to go back to for the rest of my life," says Dayboll, who hopes one day to return to the North as a geophysicist.

"The Arctic changes you," adds Dargie. "It shows you the beauty of the world and gives you a new perspective."

Students on Ice expedition leader Geoff Green says visiting the polar regions allows students to appreciate that nature is in control. He has seen that the Arctic and Antarctic have "profound, intense effects" on adults. "We thought, ‘Imagine if we could give students that experience at the beginning of their lives.’"

Jodi Di Menna

Climate clues
The watery lake-bottom graves of generations of hard-shelled, kidney-shaped organisms called ostracods provide a natural archive of climate change in southwestern Yukon.

University of Ottawa master’s student Joan Bunbury is trying to decipher what these microscopic critters can tell us about past and future climate trends, with the help of The Royal Canadian Geographical Society’s $5,000 James W. Bourque Studentship in Northern Geography.

"Ostracods are sensitive to changes in their environment," says Bunbury, "so as soon as the environment changes, the species’ composition does as well." Last June, Bunbury collected sediment from 40 lakes in the Kluane region. She will spend the winter identifying the species in the samples to see how their distribution in the sediment layers has evolved over time.

Bunbury says she hopes her ostracod research will add to the understanding of the region’s ecology and to the growing body of work on the North’s susceptibility to the shifting climate.

J.D.

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