B  Career Development of  A
Members of the Field Team

It was claimed in the opening pages of this account that the subsequent career development of so many of the field team is probably the most important contribution of those seven years of wide-ranging operations and ardent struggle for scientific results. Consequently, this chapter is devoted to brief overviews of the careers of as many former student field assistants and staff as are available to me, given the long lapse of nearly a half century.

A total of seventeen “mini-biographies” are included. Many of those individuals have remained in close, or intermittent, personal contact with me over the years. Others I was able to contact via the Internet, their remarkable success rendering the effort easy.

Not all of the more than fifty team members followed scientific or academic careers. Indeed, one of them contacted me out of the blue a couple of years ago (the first communication since 1967); he wanted to let me know, now he had retired, that while the Baffin experience did not directly shape his career path, it had made a profound and highly beneficial impact on his life. This would indicate that this chapter is somewhat incomplete, as there are others whom I failed to contact.

Another, related aspect is beyond my remit: the impact that these individuals have had on their own students and/or staff under their administrative guidance. As Professor Emeritus John England, now in very active “retirement,” remarked in a recent email, we are witnessing the development of a third generation of academics and scientists as well as their influence, which is already extending to yet a fourth generation.

Many have written their own mini-biographies. Few modifications have been made, and the factual information and the spirit of the communication carefully preserved. Most have been checked and approved by their originators. And to preserve all sense of spontaneity, no uniformity of presentation has been attempted.

In thinking back over the last half century, it must be borne in mind that the entire approach to field research, even in regions still considered extremely remote, has changed. The extensive development of technology, instrumentation, and Internet contact, as well as communication in the field, has driven this change. Much of the Baffin Island experience, despite the early acquisition of helicopter support, depended on hiking boots. Chapter 11 expands on this aspect.

Student Field Assistants

Michael Church

Mike was born in Preston, Lancashire, in 1942 and emigrated to Canada with his family at the age of five. He first joined the Geographical Branch Baffin Island project in the summer of 1962 as field assistant to George Falconer in a reconnaissance of the Pilik River basin in northern Baffin Island. Travel was done partly by kayak and, as Mike was subsequently told, he attained the position because he was the smallest, lightest applicant—well suited to kayak travel. He subsequently spent three summers at Lewis River, on the northern margin of the Barnes Ice Cap, monitoring glacial runoff. The equipment provided in the first summer proved inadequate for accurate gauging, so—armed with a copy of Åke Sundborg’s classic paper on the River Klarälven in Sweden—Mike decided to study the hydraulics and sedimentology of the outwash plain channels at the glacier front. This experience inspired Mike’s subsequent career as a fluvial geomorphologist. Following the Lewis work, he embarked with branch support on three seasons at Ekalugad Fiord, in Home Bay, where his study of the outwash plain became the topic of his PhD thesis, “Baffin Island Sandar.”

After these experiences Mike looked forward to a career with the Geological Survey of Canada (which had absorbed much of the Geographical Branch) but was told that his style of process-oriented work was not a priority for the organization. So he remained at his graduate university (the University of British Columbia) initially as a computer programmer, then as a lecturer and ultimately professor. His teaching career, in hydrology, geomorphology, field training, and environment and resource studies, spanned thirty-eight years. His Baffin experience was put to good use in consultancy on prospective routes via the Mackenzie Valley for an Alaskan oil pipeline (1971–1972), further work on Baffin in 1972 and 1976, and work on the western Arctic coast and Mackenzie River during the 1970s. However, the increasing difficulty of gaining permission for independent work in the Arctic, and the costs, led him to switch regional focus to the western mountains; there, he worked on steep forest streams, contributing to the evolution of forest practice rules for forest land use around streams and to major projects on Peace River and Fraser River. Inspired by Sundborg’s example, he is one of the relatively few geomorphologists (until very recently) to tackle research on “big” rivers.

Peace River provided the opportunity to document the response of the river to damming in 1967 for hydropower production, while Fraser River presents the problem of aggradation of gravel in a reach that is adjacent to Lower Mainland settlements but, at the same time, supports one of the richest river fisheries in the world. Mike’s focus has been on basic research, most of which has been initiated in response to practical problems and all of it feeding directly into river management issues.

Mike was presented with the Kirk Bryan Award by the Geological Society of America in 1977. In recognition of his river work, he was made a fellow in the Royal Society of Canada. Subsequently, he was elected RSC director of its Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences (EOAS) Division of Academy III. He was also elected to fellowship in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Geological Society of America, and the British Geomorphological Society (BGS). The BGS awarded him its highest honour, the Linton Award, in 1996. In addition, Mike has been awarded the Massey Medal of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and the G. K. Warren Award of the (U.S.) National Academy of Sciences. In 2008, Durham University (U.K.) conferred on him an Honorary Doctorate of Science. During the ceremony in Durham Cathedral, he was acknowledged as one of the world’s foremost geomorphologists.

[Author’s note: As Mike couldn’t resist saying when I had to press him for his statement, “Not so bad for the smallest, lightest applicant to go north with the Geographical Branch.”]

W. Richard (Dick) Cowan

Dick was born in 1942 and grew up on a drumlin south of Ottawa whose shoreline features can be attributed to the postglacial Champlain Sea; it was here he learned some of the realities of boulder till and Leda clay. While attending Carleton University he met John Andrews, who recruited him in 1963 to work on geomorphological studies around the Barnes Ice Cap and in the Bruce Mountains of Baffin Island; he also assisted Olav Løken with the spring accumulation survey on the Barnes Ice Cap in 1966. Dick graduated from Carleton in 1964 (geography) and then accepted an appointment to the McGill Subarctic Research Laboratory in Schefferville (1964–1965), where his research on ribbed moraines led to an MSc from McGill in 1967. He later followed his Baffin/McGill colleagues to the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research in Boulder, Colorado, headed by Jack Ives, where he completed his PhD in 1975 under the supervision of John Andrews.

Dick’s early professional career included ten years of Pleistocene stratigraphy and mapping for the Ontario Geological Survey, where he became supervisor of Quaternary Geology. He then migrated to environmental management and took on technical and management positions with the Northern Pipeline Agency, created to regulate the Alaska Highway Gas Pipeline. After six years of consulting work in Calgary on energy and mining development projects, Dick returned to Ontario, where he took on progressively more responsible management positions with the Ontario government in mineral titles, mineral development, and mine reclamation, eventually retiring in 2005 as director of mines for Ontario. He has published more than fifty papers, reports, and maps on Quaternary geology as well as numerous papers and presentations on mine development, rehabilitation, and regulation. He attributes much of his professional success to the Baffin Island experience, which introduced him to the importance of “good science, sound project planning, and good data.”

John England

John’s first Baffin Island summer experience was in 1965 when he celebrated his nineteenth birthday on arrival at the Inugsuin Fiord base camp. He also participated in 1966 and 1967, followed by completion of his master’s and doctoral degrees with INSTAAR, University of Colorado (in 1969 and 1974, respectively). He returned to Canada as an assistant professor at the University of Alberta, which became his long-term base for both teaching and Arctic research. This simple statement disguises an enormous lifetime contribution of forty-eight years of groundbreaking fieldwork across the length and breadth of the Canadian Arctic.

Following completion of his postgraduate degrees, based on fieldwork in the vicinity of Broughton Island, John transferred his attention from Baffin to Ellesmere Island. From this point, his contributions can be divided into three phases: Ellesmere and the High Arctic; the northwestern section of the hitherto presumed outer limits of the Laurentide Ice Sheet; and the vast region of the also presumed non-glacierized region of the Beaufort Sea, in northern Alaska, and the farthest reaches of Canada’s northwestern islands. Much of this work was undertaken in conjunction with several eminent Arctic colleagues and more than forty students, many of whom have themselves become leading contributors in unravelling the complexities of the geography and history of our northern landscape. Specific results of the highest importance include the mapping of, history of fluctuations of, and sea level relationships of the Innutian Ice Sheet—an unravelling of the 10,000 to 5,500–year record of penetration of driftwood into far northern fiords and bays from Siberia and its sudden blockage over five thousand years ago. This established the age of formation of the Ellesmere northern shelf ice, also vital to current evaluation of the impacts of climate change in the Arctic. A third contribution is John’s total redrawing of Laurentide Ice Sheet extent in the far northwest and recognition of the catastrophic collapse of a former ice shelf that was over 100,000 square kilometres in extent, by far the largest ever known and an invaluable proxy for present-day ice sheet collapse in the Antarctic.

John’s work has been recognized in numerous quarters. He was awarded an NSERC Northern Research Chair, renewed to cover the period from 2002 to 2012. He has been invited to lecture in the United Kingdom, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Belgium, the United States, and across Canada. He was the main protagonist in the creation of Canada’s northernmost national park—Quttinirpaaq, northern Ellesmere Island—and has devoted much time to both classroom and field teaching of Inuit and Gwitch’in students from Inuvik and Iqaluit. John continues a long commitment to lobbying for the establishment of an effective Canadian polar policy. He was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada in 2012. Currently he is a professor emeritus in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Alberta.

Barry Goodison

Barry Goodison joined the Baffin Island project in May 1965 as a first-year undergrad from the University of Waterloo. His first task was to measure snow accumulation over the northwest part of the Barnes Ice Cap and then to work with Mike Church on fluvial geomorphology at Lewis River. Little did he realize at the time that this early encounter with the North, snow, and ice would set his career path in hydrometeorology and climate and cryosphere studies for almost fifty years. He joined Mike for two more summers in Baffin before conducting studies on Peyto Glacier in Alberta.

Barry completed his MA and PhD in geography at the University of Toronto under the guidance of Dr. Ken Hare and Dr. Vit Klemes respectively. He joined Environment Canada as a research scientist in 1973, which led to an exciting career in research and management of national and international cold region science and technology for over forty years. His research included the development of new knowledge and technology for the measurement of snowfall and snow cover using advanced satellite and ground-based methods. For World Meteorological Organization (WMO)’s first major international experiment determining the accuracy of solid-precipitation measurements throughout the world, Barry was lead scientist. He also conducted and managed national and international field research studies for the development and validation of satellite algorithms and land surface process and climate models, including Boreal Ecosystem-Atmospheric Study (BOREAS) and Boreal Ecosystem Research and Monitoring Sites (BERMS) in Western Canada. For fifteen years he served as lead scientist for the Cryosphere System in Canada (CRYSYS) project, a Canadian contribution to NASA’s Earth Observing System (EOS) program. The project brought together the cryospheric community distributed across Canada and, through the efforts of the participants, provided a training opportunity similar to that provided by the Baffin Island project.

Barry was active in the development and management of several national and international polar observation and research activities, many related to the International Polar Year (IPY) 2007–2008. He was the IPY coordinator for Environment Canada, was a member of the Canadian National IPY Steering Committee, and served on the World Meteorological Organization’s Intercommission Task Force for IPY. Over the last five years, he led development of the concept and implementation strategy for the IPY legacy initiative, Global Cryosphere Watch (GCW), which is a new WMO involvement to provide authoritative, clear, and useable data, information, and analyses on the past, current, and future state of the cryosphere. With the Arctic Council’s Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP), he has been involved in the development and completion of several collaborative polar research and planning initiatives, including, most recently, the Snow, Water, Ice, and Permafrost in the Arctic (SWIPA) assessment. Barry chaired the World Climate Research Programme’s Climate and Cryosphere Project (WCRP/CliC) from 2002 to 2008 and is currently a member of the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) steering committee.

Barry has authored or co-authored over one hundred papers and contributed to or edited numerous books, chapters, and agency reports, made countless presentations, and been a member of or chaired numerous Canadian and international committees and working groups. He continues to serve as an expert in the review of research proposals and projects. He has received national and international awards for his contributions. He was one of fifty recipients of the University of Waterloo’s Fiftieth Anniversary Alumni Award (2007) and was recently awarded the Patterson Distinguished Service Medal (2012) for outstanding service to meteorology in Canada.

These achievements would not have occurred if it were not for the opportunity to be part of the Baffin Island project and to have the chance to work with and learn from the team of outstanding scholars who contributed to this early northern adventure.

William (Bill) Rannie

When I was selected for the Baffin Island project in 1963, as a first-year geography student at Queen’s University, I was pleased, excited, and a little apprehensive. I expected it would be an adventure, but I had no idea then how my life’s path would be altered and how lucky I was to have been chosen. The civil service application required that field assistants be able to “carry heavy packs over rough terrain” but instead of being a beast of burden, I had the much better fortune to be Mike Church’s assistant, measuring the water and sediment discharge of the Lewis River on the northwest corner of the Barnes Ice Cap. The two summers I spent with Mike, learning the basics of field hydrology (and a great many other things besides), were the best educational experience I could have had. Most importantly, we learned to use the salt dilution technique introduced by Gunnar Østrem to measure extremely turbulent discharge (for the first time in North America). This was a process made all the more challenging by flow conditions that were decidedly more difficult than had been anticipated. After two summers on the Lewis River, luck smiled again when I was given responsibility for stream gauging as part of the Decade Glacier project, for two more summers in beautiful Inugsuin Fiord.

The immediate result of this research in the North was a complete switch in my undergraduate focus from a vague notion about urban planning to physical geography, with a particular interest in hydrology and sediment transport. These interests carried through two graduate degrees and a forty-year career at the University of Winnipeg. While circumstances and opportunities changed the specifics of my research interests, a focus on hydrology remained.

All of this was the direct result of the opportunity provided by the Geographical Branch’s Baffin Island project. Whatever path I might otherwise have taken, it would have been completely different without the Baffin experience and it’s hard to imagine that it would have been more fulfilling. In the four summers on Baffin, I was privileged to meet so many superb scientists, to experience an astonishingly beautiful part of the country that would otherwise have been completely inaccessible, to receive an outstanding education almost without realizing it, and to have countless adventures all the while. In retrospect, I have often thought that the most amazing aspect of the project was the extraordinary amount of responsibility the Geographical Branch was willing to invest in such a junior person—and not just me, of course, but many others as well. This truly was a golden time to be a student, one that will probably never be repeated. Field research projects were being undertaken by government agencies and universities all over northern Canada. These projects provided opportunities for countless undergraduates, giving them skills and experience, changing many of their career paths, and generating an unintended but real added value beyond the scientific outcome. Such opportunities are rare now, as government withdraws from field research and pure science year by year and funds from other sources diminish. I was truly fortunate to have been part of the Baffin project.

June (Ryder) Church

June Ryder worked on Baffin Island for the Geographical Branch in the summers of 1966 and 1967, investigating alluvial fans and talus slopes. Interest in alluvial fans carried over into her PhD thesis—on paraglacial fans in the valleys of south-central British Columbia—completed at UBC in 1970. Her article in the Geological Society of America Bulletin (1972) on “paraglaciation,” influenced by her Baffin Island experience, has spawned an entire subfield of geomorphological study. She subsequently worked for the Geological Survey of Canada for several summers under the direction of Dr. R. J. Fulton, carrying out terrain mapping, while teaching part time in the geography department at UBC during the remainder of the year. This in turn led to an appointment with the B.C. Ministry of Environment as head of the surficial geology unit from 1976 to 1981. Here she made major contributions to the development of the original British Columbia terrain classification scheme (1976); later she was responsible for revising and upgrading this system. Between 1982 and 2003 June worked as a geological (terrain) consultant specializing in terrain mapping and analysis for forestry (primarily slope stability). Provincial responsibilities included positions as member of the Clayoquot Scientific Panel (responsible for slope stability) and as provincial reviewer, responsible for quality control of terrain stability mapping (funded by Forest Renewal B.C.); June also prepared the latest edition of the “Terrain Classification System for B.C.” and compiled AUser’s Guide to Terrain Stability Mapping. She also conducted numerous workshops on this topic at locations around the province for government and private logging companies. In addition, between 1990 and 2003 she employed more than twenty of her former students, providing on-the-job training in air photo interpretation, terrain mapping and interpretations, slope stability assessments, and bio-terrain mapping. Though retired since 2003, June now works almost full time: as a volunteer bird surveyor for Bird Studies Canada and as editor of the British Columbia Field Ornithologists newsmagazine.

Patrick John (Pat) Webber

Being born in England in 1938, I was a pre-war baby. My formative years were spent roaming the Chiltern Hills in winter and spring and Exmoor every summer. My father was a Bedfordshire schoolmaster who knew every wildflower, and my grandfather farmed on the Devon side of Exmoor. My family never worried that I was gone from morning to evening with my dog—and my haversack containing oat cakes and collecting gear for birds’ eggs and Lepidoptera. Later, I learned sociability and teamwork on the Baffin Island expeditions of the 1960s; in fact, teamwork became my lifelong mantra.

Following my bachelor’s degrees in honours chemistry and botany from the University of Reading, I applied to Queen’s University in Kingston to pursue my interest in the natural history of swamps and bogs. To my surprise, Roland Beschel offered me a teaching and research scholarship. I arrived in Canada in the summer of 1960 to find that Beschel was on Axel Heiberg Island; he had left me instructions to learn the local flora and to identify a topic for a master’s dissertation. Beschel soon discovered that I had been bitten by the polar bug through the romance of Robert Falcon Scott’s trek to the South Pole and my undergraduate professor’s (T. M. Harris) work on the Jurassic flora of Scoresbysund (Ittoqqortoormiit), East Greenland. Beschel made it clear that if I could demonstrate research skill working in southern Ontario bogs and swamps he would help me find a way farther north. Through the foregoing serendipity and the Geographical Branch’s discoveries of fossiliferous deposits and rock lichen patterns, Beschel made good on his promise when he negotiated with Jack Ives a place for me on the Baffin expeditions.

So, in May 1963 I found myself helping Gunnar Østrem dig ice from a moraine, and for the rest of the summer I learned the basics of periglacial geomorphology from John Andrews and Mike Church in exchange for tips on vascular plant identification and lichenometry. My everlasting gratitude is to Jack Ives and his team for the world-class field support and complete freedom to pursue my own science.

My doctoral dissertation theme was exploration of the nature and structure of High Arctic plant communities. At that time there was much debate, even rancour, about the level of organization of species in vegetation in general; the common wisdom was that, in the Arctic, competition among species was so minimal that repetitive assemblages suitable for mapping or replicable experimentation did not exist. So I set out to test and compare for R. H. Whittaker’s alternate hypotheses: the individualistic hypothesis and the association unit hypothesis. I pioneered the application of ordination and dendrogram classification methods to Arctic vegetation. Most of the 1963 field season was spent collecting plants and establishing—with John Andrews and every member of the expedition—a network of lichen-measuring stations throughout the Flitaway Lake and Lewis Valley areas. In 1964 I sampled eighty-nine plots to serve as the basis for testing the Whittaker hypotheses. Over the years they have been resampled several times. During the Fourth International Polar Year, these plots and several of the Baffin Island lichen stations were resampled under the banner of “Back to the Future.”

In 1966 I joined the faculty at York University and developed a field program on the southern shore of Hudson Bay, and in 1967 I rejoined the Geographical Branch team for a summer at Kangirlugag Fiord, which is adjacent to Ekalugad Fiord. In 1969 I joined the University of Colorado’s INSTAAR and participated in many large ecological projects, such as the International Biological Program, Tundra Biome, the San Juan Ecology Project, and the Alpine Long-Term Ecology Project. Over the years I spent considerable field time on the North Slope of Alaska and, in particular, developed mapping methods that have been used to monitor long-term cumulative changes in Alaska’s largest oil field, at Prudhoe Bay. Throughout my career I mentored a fair number of graduate students and thoroughly enjoyed teaching large general ecology and introductory botany classes. I was director of INSTAAR from 1980 to 1986. I served on a number of national and international committees, for example, the U.S. National Polar Research Board, Man and the Biosphere Program, and the International Arctic Science Committee, where I was president from 2001 to 2006. I also served in Washington, D.C., at the U.S. National Science Foundation as director of the Ecology Program (1986–1989), director of the Arctic Systems Science Program, and head of the Arctic Section of Polar Programs (1993–1995). In 1990 I joined Michigan State University where, for a while, I directed an experimental dairy farm and the W. K. Kellogg Biological Station; I was later able to return to my own Arctic research, work with another generation of graduate students, and in particular, establish the Alaskan group of the International Tundra experiment. In 2005 I retired to take up farming and woodworking in New Mexico. I was in 2010 the first recipient of the International Arctic Science medal, awarded in Oslo, for lifetime contribution, leadership, and mentoring in Arctic science.

Geographical Branch Staff

John T. Andrews

John was born in 1937 in Millom, England. He completed his bachelor’s degree in geography at the University of Nottingham in 1960. Following graduation, he emigrated to Canada, spending his first Canadian winter at the McGill Sub-Arctic Research Laboratory. There he prepared for his master’s degree fieldwork on the Labrador coast north of Nain while at the same time beginning a study of lake ice growth rates in central Labrador-Ungava. John completed his MA in geography at McGill in 1961, after which he served as a graduate assistant in north-central Baffin Island for the federal Geographical Branch. Becoming a permanent member of the branch staff in 1962, he concentrated his efforts from 1962 until 1967 on glacial geomorphological research and sea level fluctuation. During this period, he took a year’s sabbatical leave that enabled him to complete his doctoral degree at the University of Nottingham, in 1965, under the supervision of Dr. Cuchlaine King.

In 1968, John was appointed associate professor in geological sciences and assistant director of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR), University of Colorado, Boulder. He devoted the remainder of his long career to Arctic research from his base in Boulder. In 1975, John received the Kirk Bryan Award of the Geological Society of America for his monograph A Geomorphological Study of Post-Glacial Uplift with Particular Reference to Arctic Canada and, in 1978. was awarded a DSc degree by the University of Nottingham. The University of Colorado recognized him as Distinguished Research Professor.

John advised and supported numerous graduate students and published several hundred papers in a wide range of scientific journals. His mature research is best described as a study of terrestrial and marine glacial systems. This work recognizes the progressive expansion of his fieldwork from the eastern Canadian Arctic to the fiords and continental shelves of Greenland, Baffin Island, Labrador, and Iceland. Since 1970, John has been the dominant figure in the highly effective annual series of Arctic Workshops that originated at INSTAAR in Boulder and has extended to alternate-year locales in Canada, the eastern United States, Norway, and Iceland. He has developed longstanding research collaboration with the Atlantic GeoScience Centre (Canada), the universities of Tromso and Iceland, and GeoMar (Germany). In 2002, the American Geological Society recognized John’s extensive contribution by arranging for a special session in his honour during its annual meeting in Denver. He is probably the single most prolific scientist in his field.

Lyn (Drapier) Arsenault

When I was in my final undergraduate year at Southampton University (hons. botany and geography, 1966), Dr. John Andrews visited Dr. Roger Barry (my academic supervisor) and gave an inspiring lecture on the Arctic field research ongoing at the Geographical Branch in Canada. As a fervent devotee of hands-on mapping, fieldwork, and camping, I promptly applied to Ottawa! With job prospects bleak in the U.K. and it being almost impossible for a woman to be considered in several other countries, it was a relief to be offered a position as research assistant, starting in September 1966. Roger Barry joined the Geographical Branch the following year for his sabbatical leave. I worked from 1966 to 1968 in the branch’s Division of Physical Geography and spent a memorable two months on Henry Kater Peninsula, Baffin Island, in summer 1967 with Dr. Cuchlaine King and Mary Strome. Following the breakup of the branch, I consulted for the Geological Survey from 1968 to 1970, and from 1971 to 1973 I worked for the Glaciology Division of Environment Canada.

My career to this date had involved air photo interpretation of northern land features, but then came the challenge facing Canada as economic interests necessitated locating and identifying sea ice and icebergs year round. Thus, I founded a consulting business, Cold Regions Remote Sensing, in 1973 and for thirty years provided information on sea ice and iceberg regimes, and on a wide range of remote sensing imagery for their detection and discrimination. This included research for aircraft and shipping companies, the petroleum industry, and government departments (Environment, Fisheries and Oceans, Natural Resources, Transport). I also worked as a scientific editor.

I began analyzing sea ice extent with some of the earliest optical Landsat data in 1973, in cloud-free daylight conditions, and ended with superb imagery from Canada’s Radarsat, the first civilian, spaceborne synthetic aperture radar, which can distinguish sea ice types and detect icebergs under all weather conditions, both day and night. The imagery analysis involved extensive fieldwork in the Canadian Arctic and southern Greenland: on the sea ice surface, aboard ships, and on Canadian, American, and Danish research aircraft.

I served on several committees and boards over the years: Canadian Advisory Committee on Remote Sensing/Working Group on Ice (secretary); Canadian Ice Working Group (co-chair); Alliance for Marine Remote Sensing; Ottawa Glaciological Group (vice-chair) of the International Glaciological Society; and The Arctic Circle (president).

Since retiring, my continued enthusiasm for the Arctic has prompted extensive camping trips throughout the North with my husband, Jim.

Roger G. Barry

Professor (geography) since 1971; distinguished professor since 2004, University of Colorado. Director since 1976, National Snow and Ice Data Center/World Data Center for Glaciology, now employing one hundred staff, archiving and distributing snow and ice data products (http://nsidc.org).

Teaching/researching climate change, Arctic and mountain climates, snow and ice processes; field research in the Canadian Arctic, New Guinea. Published over twenty textbooks, over two hundred articles; supervised fifty-five graduate degrees. Awards totalling $78 million as Principal Investigator (PI) or co-PI since 1996. Service to national committees (NAS), international programs (WCRP, GTOS, IPCC).

Guggenheim Fellow (1982–1983); Fulbright Teaching Fellow, Moscow (2001); Fellow, American Geophysical Union (1999); Foreign Member, Russian Academy of Natural Sciences (2001). Awarded the Goldthwait Polar Medal (2006), and the Royal Geographical Society Founder’s Medal (2008). Visiting professor in Australia, France, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, Russia, Switzerland, and United Kingdom.

Since high school, I have had a keen interest in other cultures and languages. Born in England, I went on three student exchanges to France as a teenager. My master’s degree in climatology from McGill University included a year at a the McGill Sub-Arctic Research Laboratory. After seven years at the University of Southampton, including two seasons of meteorological fieldwork in Arctic Canada, I moved to the University of Colorado in 1968. I have trained over fifty graduates in climatology, snow and ice, and mountain and polar environments.

I became director of the World Data Center for Glaciology in 1976 and the National Snow and Ice Data Center in 1982. They grew from a two-person grant to a scientific and technical staff of one hundred with funding of $8.5 million/year; the combined activities span snow cover, floating ice, glaciers, ice sheets, and frozen ground/permafrost. The center has responsibility for snow and ice remote sensing and in situ data products under NASA’s Earth Observing System and it archives polar data for NSF and NOAA.

Sabbatical leaves/visits have allowed me to lecture at institutes in Europe and Russia (I am fluent in French, German, and Russian) and in China, Japan, and Venezuela. I am a member of international research and data committees with the World Climate Research Programme, Global Digital Sea Ice Data Bank, Global Terrestrial Observing System, and International Permafrost Association and review editor for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Graduate education: I trained some of the leading climatologists of the present generation: Ray Bradley (former chair of geosciences, UMass), Jill (Jaeger) Williams (former director, IHDP), Wally Brinkmann (former chair of geography, University of Wisconsin–Madison), Gerry Meehl (NCAR scientist), Ells LeDrew (former dean of environmental sciences, University of Waterloo), Henry Diaz (NOAA-CDC scientist), George Kiladis (NOAA-PSD scientist), Roger Pulwarty (scientist, NOAA, Boulder), Mark Serreze (NSIDC scientist), Jeff Key (scientist, NOAA-CIMMS, Madison), Andrew Carleton (Penn State University), Jeff Rogers (Ohio State University), Mark Anderson (University of Nebraska), Shari Fox-Gearheard (CIRES visiting fellow, Clyde River, Nunavut).

Supervision of Jill Williams’s PhD entailed the first use of the NCAR general circulation model to simulate global climate with Glacial Maximum ice margins and changed sea surface temperatures. Mark Serreze and Jeff Key worked on Arctic climate and sea ice. Jeff Rogers (with Harry van Loon) documented the North Atlantic Oscillation.

Research on the climate of Arctic and Subarctic Canada; mountain climates in Colorado, New Guinea, and Venezuela; paleoclimate of the Last Glacial Maximum and ice sheet inception, changes in snow cover, sea ice, mountain glaciers, and frozen ground.

Group leadership of projects on landfast sea ice in Baffin Bay and the Beaufort-Chukchi seas, Arctic climate–sea ice interactions, passive microwave remote sensing of Arctic sea ice. Data rescue programs with the Institute of Geography, RAS, Moscow; the Institute of Fundamental Biology and Soil Science, RAS, Pushchino; the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute, Saint Petersburg; and the WDC for Glaciology, Lanzhou.

Published books include: eight editions and four translated editions of Atmosphere, Weather and Climate (with the late R. J. Chorley, 1968–2003); two editions and two translated editions of Mountain Weather and Climate; Synoptic Climatology (with A. H. Perry, 1973); Synoptic and Dynamic Climatology (with A. M. Carleton, 2001); Arctic and Alpine Environments (co-edited with J. D. Ives, 1974); The Arctic Climate System (with M. C. Serreze, 2005); The Global Cryosphere: Past, Present and Future (with Thian Yew Gan, 2011); Essentials of the Earth’s Climate System (with E. A. Hall-McKim, 2014).

Jane (Philpot) Buckley

Raised by Oxbridge scientists in Oxford, I studied at Cambridge, graduating in 1962 with a degree in geography. I was scientific leader for the first British Girls Exploring Society expedition (Lofoten Islands, Norway) before coming to Canada. After a year teaching geography in Ottawa, I was fortunate to be recruited by Dr. Jack Ives as an air photo interpreter in the Geographical Branch. In 1964, I shortened a world trip to return to Ottawa, tempted by the possibility of going to the Arctic.

So in 1965, after rifle practice with the RCMP (who suggested that I take up shooting), I served as field assistant to Dr. Cuchlaine King working on raised beaches and glacial features on Baffin Island. Practical plane-tabling sessions in Cambridge had failed to teach that squishing mosquitoes messes up maps and that hands that hold survey poles should not be covered in repellent—the numbers on the poles were soon illegible!

In 1966, assisted by Penny Crompton, I worked on the coast near Sam Ford Fiord. After our radio failed, I learned always to check my own equipment. Despite going on half rations until we were rescued by the “Ives Air Force,” I put on weight that summer. On my return to Ottawa to marry Michael Buckley, my wedding dress had to be altered—I blamed rum-soaked fruitcake!

After several co-authored publications based on the Baffin fieldwork, I completed a paper on glacier gradients, comparing those in Baffin with those in Greenland and Antarctica. This work ceased in 1967 and I was transferred to the Geological Survey.

After the birth of a daughter, I learned scientific editing and became sole editor for the Forest Management Institute for four years. In the mid-1970s, I helped establish the Freelance Editors’ Association of Canada (now the Editors’ Association of Canada). Government departments provided work on things environmental, icy, oily, and fishy. I learned how powerful the legal pen is when applied to documents: my job was to stitch up the remains and make them read like science. Editing books and conference proceedings gave me great pleasure. Annual conferences of the Council for Biology Editors took me across North America.

In 1988 I joined Agriculture and AgriFood Canada, editing award-winning research books for its Research Program Service (RPS). When offered early retirement in 1995, I revived Gilpen Editing Service, which I operated until 2003. While fascinating topics had ranged from flies to fescues and from statistics to soils, the RPS team had not the same rapport as I had experienced at the Geographical Branch. Thanks for the memories, Jack.

Currently, I copyedit the local community newspaper; prepare the annual Conservation List for, and offer sage advice to, Rare Breeds Canada (RBC); learn about handling agility dogs; count birds for the local Project FeederWatch; and garden passionately whenever my garden is not under snow. I will be a member of the Arctic Circle committee for the next three years, where cherished memories of the Baffin Island adventure are rekindled.

George Falconer

Born in U.K., 1929. Served in British Army of the Rhine (1947–1949), then read geography at Cambridge University. Participated in the geography department’s glaciological work in the Jotunheim Mountains, Norway, and later, privately, in the Swiss Alps. Emigrated to Canada in 1953. Worked on terrain analysis and air photo interpretation keys in Coppermine, N.W.T., coastal areas for Geographical Branch (1954). Special assistant to Professor J. Tuzo Wilson, Geophysics Laboratory, University of Toronto (1955–1958). Managed and participated in extensive air photo terrain analysis of much of Arctic and Northern Canada, culminating in the publication of the first Glacial Map of Canada (co-author, designer, and production manager). Organized and participated in University of Toronto geophysical and glaciological expeditions to the Salmon Glacier, B.C. (1956–1957).

After a brief experience in town planning in Toronto, joined the Geographical Branch in 1958. Worked on area economic surveys on the east coast of Hudson Bay (1959–1961). Participated in the Baffin Island research project (1962–1965). In a change of focus, transferred to the Geographical Branch’s National Atlas program in 1967. Initially in charge of the physical geography component of the atlas. Later served as special assistant to director-general of Surveys and Mapping Branch and secretary of Interdepartmental Committee on Remote Sensing.

Appointed chief of Geography Division, Surveys and Mapping Branch, and editor-in-chief, National Atlas of Canada (1974). Directed and edited the final publication of the fourth and fifth editions of the national atlas and numerous other publications including the Canada Gazetteer Atlas. Served as secretary of the National Advisory Committee for the National Atlas and as senior advisor, National Geographical Information. In 1990 left government service to pursue interests in visual arts and art history.

Cuchlaine A. M. King

Cuchlaine was born in 1922 and grew up amidst academics in Cambridge, England (her father, Professor W. B. R. King, FRS, was professor of geology). She obtained her BA in geography in 1942 and entered the Women’s Royal Naval Service. After the war she returned to Cambridge for her doctoral degree, awarded in 1949. In this she specialized in shoreline and beach processes, an element of physical geography that she pursued throughout her career. Her 1959 book Beaches and Coasts won the admiration of Professor William Balchin, who described her work as a “unique approach with a mathematical and quantitative treatment”; this was at an early stage in what became known as the “quantitative revolution.”

Apart from a year at Durham University, her university career centred on the University of Nottingham, which—with her undergraduate students Jack Ives, John Andrews, and Roger Tomlinson—came to have a remarkable impact on Canadian Arctic research. She accompanied Jack Ives to Iceland in 1953 and 1954, thereby initiating a long-term involvement in glaciology, after which she worked for several years with Vaughn Lewis and Cambridge colleagues on an intensive study of the Austerdalsbreen in the Norwegian Jotunheimen. She joined the Baffin Island project for two summers (1965 and 1967) and provided the psychological assist that was vital in pressuring the Canadian government to accept the notion of gender equality in fieldwork in the Canadian Arctic. She was promoted to reader in geography in 1962 and full professor in 1969. She joined Jack and Pauline Ives for the 1968 INSTAAR summer research and teaching program in the Colorado Front Range. Thereafter, she travelled and published extensively and is credited with a library shelf of major textbooks, including Glacial and Periglacial Geomorphology, which she authored jointly with Chris Embleton.

Cuchlaine was one of very few women to hold a lifelong academic career beginning shortly after the Second World War. She and Dr. Moira Dunbar (Canadian Defence Research Board) produced all but one of the articles by women published in the Journal of Glaciology during its first two decades.

Olav Løken

Olav was born on February 23, 1931, in the Norwegian town of Alesund. After completing his early degrees at the University of Oslo he worked as a glaciologist at the Wilkes Station in Antarctica as a member of the U.S. Antarctic Program during the International Geophysical Year (1957–1958). From there he spent a year at the McGill Sub-Arctic Research Lab. This was followed by fieldwork in the Torngat Mountains of northern Labrador that formed the basis of his McGill doctorate. His first postdoc appointment was as assistant professor in the department of geography at Queen’s University.

1964: Joined the Geographical Branch as chief of the Division of Physical Geography and, in addition to directing the development of the division, devoted a large part of his energies to the Baffin Island expeditions, 1964 to 1967.

1967 to 1976: Became head of the Glaciology Subdivision in the Inland Waters Branch, Department of Energy, Mines, and Resources. Much of his work focused on projects launched in the context of the International Hydrological Decade (1965–1974). He also continued his earlier work along the Canadian eastern seaboard, particularly on submarine geomorphology and the reconnaissance survey of the Baffin Island fiords.

At the end of this period he was seconded to the Environmental and Social Program, Indian and Northern Affairs, to investigate the environmental and social impacts of the Polar Gas pipeline.

1976 to 1984: Became director of the Northern Environmental Protection Branch, Indian and Northern Affairs, where he directed, planned, and coordinated environmental assessments of major development projects according to the federal Environmental Assessment and Review Process. This included environmental assessments of the Norman Wells Oil Field Expansion and Pipeline Project, Mackenzie Delta gas projects, the Arctic Pilot Project, and the Beaufort Sea Hydrocarbon Production Proposal.

Oil and gas exploration in the Eastern Arctic was about to begin. The government, in cooperation with industry, established the Eastern Arctic Marine Environmental Studies (EAMES) program to collect and interpret environmental data in order to improve understanding of the ecosystem in anticipation of expanding oil and gas activities. Studies were conducted in Baffin Bay and Lancaster Sound.

The branch was also involved in the Arctic Land Use Research Program, investigating the rehabilitation of sumps at earlier drilling sites and the effect of vehicle traffic on the tundra surface.

1981: Headed the Task Force on Beaufort Sea Developments. He planned and directed the work of an interdepartmental and intergovernmental task force established to examine the state of government preparedness in the Beaufort/Delta area. The task force report recommended policy and program initiatives, and a formal government program was established.

1984 to 1989: Was director of the Environmental Studies Research Funds (ESRF), Indian and Northern Affairs/Energy, Mines, and Resources, where he was accountable to the Environmental Studies Management Board for the scientific, administrative, and financial planning of the ESRF’s operation. This targeted research program facilitates decision-making regarding oil and gas activities in Canada’s frontier regions. Funded by industry, the program involved extensive contacts with private sector companies and First Nation and Inuit groups.

1989 to 1990: Served as scientific advisor to the Polar Continental Shelf Project, Department of Energy, Mines, and Resources.

1991 to 2005: After retiring from the Government of Canada, Olav worked with the newly created Canadian Polar Commission to promote Canadian involvement in Antarctic-related research. Among his many activities, he was secretary of the Canadian Committee for Antarctic Research from its inception in 1998 to 2005. He was instrumental in Canada’s application to join the Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research (SCAR) and represented Canada there. He was also active in efforts leading to the passage of the Antarctic Environmental Protection Act in 2003.

Miscellaneous: In 2001 Olav served as an observer for the International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators (IAATO) on an Antarctic cruise ship. He has been a member of a number of job-related and professional committees at the national and international level. He served as president of the Canadian Nordic Society and as president of the Arctic Circle, both in Ottawa.

Gunnar Østrem

Gunnar was born in Oslo in 1922. He obtained his Cand. mag. degree at the University of Oslo in mathematics, chemistry, and geography; this was followed by the Cand. real. degree in 1954 (geography with specialization in glaciology). He was awarded the Filosofie Licentiat in 1961 and the Filosofie Doctor in 1965, both at the University of Stockholm with specialization in glaciology. His early career involved teaching at high schools and university in Norway and Sweden, and he served as assistant professor of physical geography at the University of Stockholm from 1958 to 1962.

Gunnar joined the Geographical Branch and began research on the Baffin Island project in 1962, serving as head of the Glaciology Section until 1966 and returning to Stockholm later in 1966 as associate professor and then, from 1981 to 1983, as full professor. He was head of the Glaciology Section at the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Board (NVE), Oslo, from 1962 to 1981, with interruptions in Stockholm and Ottawa and a sabbatical at Carleton University (1971–1972). After 1981 he continued part time with NVE until his retirement in 1992.

The Hans Egede Medal (the highest award of the Danish Geographical Society) was awarded to Gunnar in 1982 for “extensive research in Arctic areas”; he was also honoured with the King of Norway Gold Medal in 1992 (for scientific achievements in Norway and abroad) and the Swedish J. A. Wahlenbergs Silver Medal in 1993 (for seventeen years of editorship of the scientific journal Geografiska Annaler).

Gunnar made extensive contributions in training and research, and developed and taught specialized courses in glaciology, for various United Nations agencies (e.g., UNESCO, WMO, FAO) and especially in the Indian Himalaya; he was invited to give summer courses and field training in Canada, Nepal, Pakistan, Austria, Argentina, and Greenland. He published more than eighty scientific and technical articles and books and many specialized maps related to water resources, hydropower, and glacier meltwater and runoff.

Brian Sagar

Brian was born in 1927 in Colne, Lancashire, England, and earned a BSc in geography at Hull University. After spending three years in Africa in an administrative capacity with the United Africa Company, and following a brief return to England, he emigrated to Canada in 1958 to join the Defence Research Board IGY summer expedition to northern Ellesmere Island. So began his scientific passion for the world of snow and ice. His glacier mass balance studies, central to his McGill University MSc (1959), involved further Arctic research with the Defence Research Board and AINA, and he eventually joined the Geographical Branch in December 1961. This led to his “command” of the Barnes Ice Cap as a key member of the branch Baffin Island expeditions, from which he took several short leaves of absence to teach physical geography at Carleton University. His many friendships, cemented by the camaraderie of Arctic adventure and scientific endeavour, remained profoundly important for the remainder of his life. It was also in the Geographical Branch that he met Norma, leading to twenty-five years of marriage before his untimely death from cancer on January 12, 1990.

Brian left Ottawa in 1966 to take up a faculty position in the department of geography at Simon Fraser University (SFU), where he served as acting head of the department from 1969 to 1971. He taught physical geography, climatology, and the geography of natural hazards, together with a regional course on Africa, to thousands of undergraduates and graduates during his twenty-three years at SFU, together with field courses that included supervision of graduate students at both SFU and UBC. He also served as vice-chairman of the Vancouver branch of the Canadian Meteorological Society and as organizing secretary of the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society from 1976 to 1979. These interests were reinforced by numerous environmental and associated political activities. Brian was crucial to the evolution of the formal establishment of glaciology within the Canadian federal government.

[Author’s note: Brian’s brief biography was summarized from an obituary generously supplied by his surviving spouse, Norma.]