In the Field: on board the Amundsen
Nature reporter Quirin Schiermeier is spending June 5-12 aboard the Canadian research icebreaker CCGS Amundsen, as part of a project to study climate change in the high Canadian Arctic. His dispatches can be read at In The Field . At the start of his voyage, Quirin writes:
After an epic journey, on four planes and one helicopter, I have at last arrived on board the CCGS Amundsen. The final leg of my trip, the short transfer from Inuvik to Cape Parry at the northern tip of Canada’s Northwest Territories, was easily the most spectacular flight of my whole life. The tiny aircraft flew at very low altitude, so that every barren hill and every glittering lake in the tundra below seemed almost seizable. Then we were out on the frozen Franklin Bay, an inlet of the Amundsen Gulf, and headed towards the edge of the fast ice. We went down on a gravel airstrip next to an abandoned cold-war early warning station. From there a helicopter took us on board the icebreaker which is currently staying put in the fast ice at only a few ship lengths distance to the ice edge.
Please read on at In The Field for the remarkable and beautiful story of this journey, where there is "no night, no darkness, not even a dawn. With bright daylight lasting for 24 hours, time seems to stand still. Meals and other little rituals that structure a day gain a new significance when the sun never sets."
