B  Introduction  A

The Context of Geographical Research
in Canada’s Arctic in the 1960s

This book is a narrative of field research and adventure in Baffin Island, Arctic Canada, a half century ago. The Distant Early Warning Line (DEW Line), a major Cold War–era collaboration between Canada and the United States, had just begun to function through a string of manned radar installations from Alaska across the Canadian Arctic to Greenland. It was essentially an early warning system for detection of a possible airborne atomic attack coming across the Arctic from the Soviet Union. Yet the existence of its physical facilities in some of the remotest areas of the North had an interesting side effect for some Canadian scientists. While still somewhat secret, the DEW Line was radically changing access to remote Arctic settlements and facilitating the reconnaissance-scale topographical and geological mapping of Canada’s vast and hitherto almost inaccessible northern lands.

The 1950s and 1960s have often been described, in retrospect, as the “golden age” of Canadian federal government research in the North. There were remarkable opportunities for what may be termed “curiosity” research, which was especially relevant to the discipline of geography despite its being widely regarded as the insignificant stepchild of several other disciplines. In the vast and little-known Arctic and Subarctic regions, the physical extent of which dominated the entire country, such research or reconnaissance was justified, in part, as a process of getting to know and understand Canada as a whole. The primary exploration of this country, the second largest in the world, had been completed shortly after the Second World War, but the secondary exploration of the North became a national duty. This sense of duty was highly relevant on a personal level for me—a “landed immigrant” from Britain and, since 1960, a Canadian citizen—for I had long nurtured an ambition to undertake research in the Arctic. I knew well that these huge “empty” expanses on the map of Canada were larger than France, the United Kingdom, or a combined Norway and Sweden. For me and many of my contemporaries, the exciting prospect of pioneer reconnaissance in the Arctic lands and seas was a palpable and highly motivating force.

In the autumn of 1960, I accepted a senior position in what was then called the Geographical Branch of the Department of Mines and Technical Surveys in the federal government. The position of assistant director, without any prevarication, should itself have been sufficient inducement for a twenty-eight-year-old immigrant to Canada with adventurous ambitions. However, I was especially attracted by a commitment from the branch director, Dr. Norman L. Nicholson, to support a series of field expeditions to north-central Baffin Island, and I was more than pleased to see that I had captured his imagination with my outline of proposed research in that region.

The broader set of my responsibilities included supervising applied research of a practical nature, ranging from analysis of the length of the shipping season for the St. Lawrence Seaway Authority to a study of the rationalization of the Prairie railroad branch line system and the further development of the National Atlas of Canada. But it was the Arctic field research opportunity that so strongly influenced my decision to join the federal civil service rather than to accept a university faculty position.

A first for Canada in the Arctic

This book is about Baffin Island research in the 1960s: specifically, the efforts to set up a continuing series of research expeditions in the North and, in so doing, to establish Canada’s first specific federal glaciological unit and a pattern of continuing multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research that was unique for its time. The Baffin Island expeditions also were a landmark in what we today call gender equality (and which perhaps we no longer consider as remarkable as it was at the time). In the face of strenuous official opposition, we included women as equal members of the field operations: as senior researchers and permanent staff, as well as undergraduate and graduate field assistants.

Another issue was very important. My experience as a doctoral student at McGill University (1954–1956) and as director of the McGill Sub-Arctic Research Laboratory in central Labrador-Ungava (1957–1960) had made me realize that, at the time, Canada had a serious shortage of young scholars committed to Northern research.1 The McGill Lab was heavily dependent on attracting young graduates from the UK and several western European countries to serve as year-round staff. It struck me that if a long-term research operation could be set up in Baffin Island through the work of the Geographical Branch, the recruitment of Canadian undergraduate and graduate students as summer field assistants would provide a useful training opportunity. Subsequently, the increasing number of university geography departments at that time (as part of the rapid creation of new universities across the country) would have a potential source for recruitment of young new faculty who would come with extensive Arctic field experience. The Baffin Island undertaking involved a wide range of research training that had a significant impact on later university activities in the Arctic. Many of the summer student field assistants went on to develop remarkable careers, and I have been fortunate to keep in touch with some of them over almost fifty years. Chapter 10 is devoted to exploring this outgrowth of the Baffin Island expeditions, probably the most important contribution of all.

This worthy aim of bringing bright young researchers into both academia and federal government research was not without its structural challenges. In 1967, the Geographical Branch was disbanded organizationally and its different units assigned to separate areas of the federal government. I served as its last director (1963–1967). A sense of desperate defeat pervaded my thoughts at the time, especially in view of the wide range of successes achieved by the Geographical Branch. But the Baffin Island adventure (it can be described as nothing less) did not fade away with the branch in 1967. Like the proverbial phoenix, it took on a new life centred on the University of Colorado’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR), which I directed and reformed between 1967 and 1980. Under the leadership of Professor John Andrews, who had been one of the first of the Baffin Island summer graduate student field assistants, research in Baffin Island and many other parts of the Arctic continued to flourish. After 1967, the INSTAAR progression into Arctic and alpine research expanded, developing an increasingly wider set of objectives and drawing in many individuals and institutions from Canada, the United States, the UK, and several European countries. Olav Løken moved as head of the Glaciology Section (to become the Glaciology Division) into the new Inland Waters Branch, thereby preserving its activities that have persisted until the present day.

Increasing relevance of the Baffin Island research

Today, the ongoing activities are by no means centralized as they were in the 1960s, in a small branch of a government department. With the growing awareness of climate change, those early field observations of a half century ago have taken on a heightened relevance. For instance, one especially intriguing discovery of the early 1960s was George Falconer’s collection of apparently dead vegetation that was being exposed by the retreating margins of small ice patches on the plateau north of the Barnes Ice Cap. Falconer (1966) even suggested that some of the plant material may have survived alive for several hundred years.

In the context of today’s warming climate, another facet of the research is worth recounting. Fifty years ago, we hypothesized a process of climate cooling. The late 1950s and the 1960s were characterized by falling annual air temperatures in many parts of the northern hemisphere; early results from our 1961 reconnaissance showed that, two to four centuries earlier, Baffin Island had reached a so-called “tipping point” of imminent expansion of snow and ice cover—an “instantaneous glacierization” (Ives, 1957). In other words, the climatic and topographic conditions had led to the rapid formation and extension of long-lying snow and ice cover, even with the relatively small amount of temperature lowering. Were we, therefore, about to experience in the 1960s a repeat of that earlier glacial encroachment (another Little Ice Age, if not a major ice age)?

A few years later, our findings suggested that about eight thousand years ago, the Laurentide Ice Sheet of the last great ice age had disintegrated catastrophically as the North Atlantic waters entered Hudson Bay. At that time, the inrushing waters from the Atlantic Ocean reached a height of up to three hundred metres above present sea level in the southeast section of the bay (Falconer, Ives, Løken, & Andrews, 1965). This hypothesis has since received substantial scientific support, based on the discovery that a leading mechanism was the outbreak of the immense Glacial Lake Agassiz to the southwest, itself provoked by the progressive and rapid thinning of the Laurentide Ice Sheet. The major remnant of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, centred over Foxe Basin and Baffin Island, thinned and receded over the next eight thousand years (excepting periodic reversals, especially during the period AD 1500–1900, the so-called Little Ice Age) until only a chunk of ice, about 145 kilometres long and more than six hundred metres thick, was left sitting on the north-central Baffin Island plateau: this was the Barnes Ice Cap, a last remnant of the ice ages. We further hypothesized that, if the ice cap could be melted away completely by artificial means, it would not reform under the existing climatic regime, even though somewhat cooler than that of today. This is because the underlying bedrock surface would not be high enough to reach the theoretical “permanent snowline” (glaciation level). Thus, each successive winter’s snowfall would melt and drain off the Baffin north-central plateau during most of the following summers, as it did from even the highest parts of the Barnes Ice Cap on several occasions in the 1960s; no permanent ice would accumulate.

Another facet of fieldwork emerged from research by Patrick J. (Pat) Webber, then a Queen’s University graduate student botanist/ecologist. He established almost one hundred precisely mapped and recorded vegetation quadrats around the northwestern margins of the Barnes Ice Cap. Subsequent visits to many of the field sites have demonstrated a significant increase in the number of plant species, their rate of growth, and total ground cover. This is attributed to a combination of a longer elapsed time following continued retreat of the ice cap (that is, the last fifty years) and the current climate warming. Pat, in collaboration with John T. Andrews, also applied the techniques of lichenometry developed by his mentor, Roland Beschel of Queen’s University, to expand his new method for dating rock surfaces that were exposed progressively by the retreating ice cover over the last thousand years or so.

A most significant overseas recruit for the glaciological work was Gunnar Østrem, a Norwegian. Gunnar not only induced us to dig out and fly to Ottawa more than one thousand kilograms of ice from the Barnes Ice Cap, he also introduced to the Canadian Arctic new methods in glacio-hydrology and laid the foundations for a glacier mass balance transect across the Canadian Rockies and Pacific Coast Ranges. This research led to a permanent mass balance record of the Peyto and Place glaciers in Alberta and British Columbia, respectively, maintained to this day as one of Canada’s long-term commitments to international glacier mass balance studies.

How this book is organized

The main focus of this book is the logistic, social, and personal aspects of mounting long-term Arctic research at a time when the northern interior of Baffin Island was almost unknown, or unvisited, territory. The chapters and related material constitute a record of the difficulties, the challenges, and the outstanding opportunities of carrying out such a venture from within a branch of the Canadian government in the 1960s. As I hope to attract a wide range of readership and interest to these pages, most of the scientific endeavours are described in general terms, with selected further references provided in the chapter end notes. The final chapter is reserved for a more intensive presentation of the scientific results and a discussion of their impact on subsequent research into the present century.

The first chapter provides a brief geographical introduction to Baffin Island, followed by a short synthesis of previous research. The remaining chapters are arranged in chronological order. Chapter 2 is an account of the pivotal and somewhat chaotic 1961 reconnaissance. It details the uncertainties and difficulties that had to be overcome. The summer of 1961 proved to be a learning experience that laid the foundation for the following field seasons. Chapters 3 through 8 are concerned with activities from 1962 to 1966. The number of personnel ranged from five in 1961 to thirty-eight in 1966, not counting pilots and support engineers. It included Canadian, British, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Swiss, and Australian participants. The research disciplines involved climatology, geomorphology, bedrock geology, glaciology, hydrology, plant ecology, animal ecology, geophysics, micro-palaeontology, and oceanography. Eventually, several federal government branches and more than a dozen universities were represented. Chapter 9 relates my transition from Ottawa, via Baffin Island, to the University of Colorado. Chapter 10, as mentioned above, is devoted to an outline of the subsequent career development and achievements of many of the expedition participants, both research staff and student assistants.

The final chapter is intended as a somewhat separate entity, to be passed over by readers who are not especially concerned with the give and take of progress in the natural sciences. As chapter 11 shows, a great amount of new information was acquired and a series of hypotheses developed. Many of the results, while relevant today, have been challenged by subsequent fieldwork, and significant adjustments to some of the original interpretations have been made. Nevertheless, the Baffin Island research of the 1960s provided the basis for the extensive amount of field and laboratory work that has since been undertaken and that continues today.

The large number of Hasselblad colour photos have been included because of their unique contribution as a record of the inspiring Baffin Island landscape as well as their value as documentation of the glaciers, ice caps, and associated landforms as they existed a half century ago, at a time when few were thinking about the potential impacts of climate warming.

My colleague and close friend Olav Løken provided the essential field leadership for the final years of the operation in Baffin, during which my direct involvement was limited by the responsibilities of branch director and the unremitting, yet vain, struggle to preserve the integrity of the Geographical Branch. After the disbanding of the branch in 1967, Olav served as head of the Glaciology Division in the newly formed Inland Waters Branch, Department of Energy, Mines, and Resources, thereby ensuring the survival of a formally designated glaciology unit within the Canadian federal government system.2

This account has been written with a strong personal perspective. Had it been prepared by any of the other principal participants, it would likely have a somewhat different flavour—inevitable in view of the great range of activities and the involvement of so many. Because of the inherent likelihood of bias, I have taken extra care to obtain comments, additions, and criticisms from many of those who shared the experience with me. My debt to them is detailed in the acknowledgements and in the relevant sections of the text.

note on place names

In most of this text, the place names given are those that were in use during the 1960s. For several of the more significant places, current official names are also indicated, as follows: Frobisher Bay (Iqaluit).