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September/October 2000 issue

ON THE EASTERN COAST of Baffin Island, glaciers, fiords, mountains and ocean waters collide to form some of the country’s most dramatic landscapes. You’d think that once you’d seen it a dozen times, some of its beauty might fade. But not for veteran Arctic traveller Denis St-Onge. "All along here, it’s nothing but glaciers," he says, tracing his finger along a map of Nunavut. "It’s so spectacular." St-Onge will be sharing his passion for this glacier-carved terrain this fall, when he hits the road for The Royal Canadian Geographical Society’s lecture program. In New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, he’ll be presenting a virtual tour of Nunavut, in both French and English. "In the Arctic, more than anywhere else in Canada," says St-Onge, "the landscape defined where people could live and make a living." As a geomorphologist, St-Onge finds the most fascinating feature of the territory’s landscape is its glaciers.

Indeed, Nunavut’s eastern Arctic is home to three-quarters of the country’s glacial coverage and boasts the biggest and oldest glaciers in Canada. On Baffin Island alone, there are more than 10,000 of them, and those are just the ones that have been identified. But the glaciers in Nunavut, along with the rest of its geographical features, are experiencing dramatic change. Glaciers are retreating, permafrost is melting, and Arctic sea ice has shrunk up to 50 percent over the past 50 years.

"In the next few decades, not centuries, we will see the Northwest Passage open up as a route between Asia and Europe," St-Onge suggests. "There will be great pressure on the Canadian government to define where its sovereignty begins and ends." He adds that it’s now more important than ever to pay attention to the North. "It occupies such a huge percentage of Canada’s land mass, and its population is by far the most rapidly growing in Canada."

Lecture dates and times:

Mapping the passage of time

“Journey over all the universe in a map, without the expense and fatigue of traveling, without suffering the inconveniences of heat, cold, hunger and thirst.”
- Don Quixote

AT THE CANADIAN MUSEUM OF CIVILIZATION in Hull, Que., maps also let you travel through time. Later this fall, a series of Canadian Geographic maps will help guide visitors through Canadian history, from the Vikings a thousand years ago to 16th-century whaling grounds and the most recent century of change on the Pacific Coast. The 39 maps, produced by Canadian Geographic cartographer Steve Fick and cartographic contributor Signy Fridriksson, will be added to the Canada Hall’s virtual panorama of Canadian history, through which some 750,000 visitors trek every year.

Driving on sunshine
TRAVELLING ACROSS CANADA, doing repairs late into the night and driving a $1.2 million race car — for Erin Smith, it’s pretty much the perfect way to spend the summer. Smith is a member of the Queen’s University solar vehicle team, which, supported in part by a Society grant, drove its car Radiance 7,044 kilometres, from Halifax to Vancouver, in 29 days this July, stopping along the way to promote alternative energy. And, about an hour west of Thunder Bay, Ont., the team entered the record books for the longest distance ever travelled in a solar vehicle, breaking the previous world record of 4,058 kilometres.

Smith, an engineering student from Kingston, Ont., has always been a car fanatic. "My dad wanted me to be an engineer, to have some sort of university degree, but I’ve always wanted to be a mechanic. From a very young age, I was out with my father, watching oil changes, changing spark plugs."

Just like Jacques Villeneuve’s Formula One crew, Smith and the rest of the 15-member team logged many weeks working on Radiance, tinkering and replacing parts along the way, sometimes staying up until midnight before hitting the road again at 5 a.m.

Built from space-age materials such as carbon fibre and Kevlar, the car has the sleek design of a racing machine and of course, it generates no air pollution. Up to 4,600 solar cells convert the sun’s radiation into usable energy, which is stored in batteries that power an electric motor or is saved for driving on cloudy days. Radiance can reach 125 kilometres per hour, a big improvement on the team’s first car, built in 1988, which couldn’t top 30 kilometres per hour. "It’s meant to handle like a race car, which means when you go over bumps, it doesn’t absorb a lot of energy," says Smith, her arms and legs covered in bruises. Still, driving so far, just centimetres off the ground, has given her a whole new view of the country. "You get to see every inch changing as you cross the borders of each province."

Canadian snapshots
EXPLORING THE NOOKS AND CRANNIES of Canada is just a click away. At Canadian Snapshots on our website we zoom in on the familiar and little-known parts of the country that lie along the Trans Canada Trail. From Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula to British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley, we provide the lowdown on the geography, history, flora and fauna of these regions as well as web links and, of course, CG maps.

Teaching teachers
IT’S FALL — time to hit the books and head back to the classroom. But students might take comfort knowing their geography teachers spent some of their summer vacation in school. For the past seven years, the Society’s Canadian Council for Geographic Education has been teaching teachers across the country.

To date, more than 270 teachers have participated in the summer institutes. With pencils sharpened and notebooks open, these slightly more seasoned scholars have been learning the ABCs of geography in the classroom - from earth observation and remote sensing to using the Internet as a teaching tool and enticing kids to dive into maps - all to bring geography alive for their students.

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