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| Fri, 21st Apr 2023 16:12:00 |
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How an Arctic snow school aims to respond to climate crisis with Inuit help |
Canadian project plans to strengthen understanding of Arctic environment by drawing on Indigenous knowledge
Alexandre Langlois was surprised to learn that snow that has stayed on the ground for a couple days in the Arctic can be heard even before it is felt.
Margaret Kanayok, an Inuk elder from Ulukhaktok, an Inuit community in the neighbouring Northwest Territories, had come to speak to a group of scientists who had gathered to attend the world’s first Arctic snow school, being held in Nunavut, Canada.
Kanayok was born and raised in an igloo for nearly 12 years of her childhood, and she clearly remembered what playing in snow was like more than five decades ago. Her own elders had often said the snow around them made different sounds, with “pukak” – or snow with bigger grains at the bottom – making a distinctive sound as you walk over it.
For Langlois, who researches extreme weather and has spent more than three decades in the snow sciences, this information was revelatory. “This is very important information because that type of grain size and snow layer really scatters our microwave signals and we always need to dig to try and find deeper snow ourselves,” he said in an interview.
“This will make our lives a lot easier for the next few years, trying to find those deeper snow layers to measure them.”
Langlois, a professor at the University of Sherbrooke, Canada, set up the snow school with Florent Domine, a professor at Laval University, to bring Indigenous knowledge and western science into conversation with each other.
The need to understand how snow reacts to weather inputs grows more urgent as the climate crisis gathers force, but, as Domine says, scientists simply know more about Alpine snow – right in the heart of Europe – than they do about Arctic snow.
As a result, much of the data gathered from the Arctic is “punctual in space and time”. In other words, it is collected from specific locations in the Arctic and only at specific times of each year. Langlois said this had created information gaps, because the data is not compiled year-round or across the region, which means that data models are not comprehensive.
Langlois added: “There are a lot of snow models in a community that [have not been based on] fieldwork and this is when you get into the field and you realise how complex Arctic snow is.
“To understand the complexity and depth, you need to develop snow models for which you need to have the ground-level measurement. To me, it’s critical to see and taste and feel the snow that you are trying to model and retrieve [information about] remotely.”
Working at the low Arctic temperatures was a whole new challenge for some of the young researchers who had come to the school. “When you look at the electronics and technology, they’re always saying that working temperatures should be 0-4C,” said Langlois. “But here, sometimes we’re at -40C.” At times, equipment stopped working altogether.
Read original full article
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