Lab Diaries 1: Frozen Khashiff meets Frozen Ocean

Man I love the winter. Just something wild-west-cowboy-jacques-cousteau-the-adeventurists about the whole professor-lets-you-know-midday-he’s-heading-to-the-field-so-you-jump-in-your-windshield-wiper-less-bazou-and-drive-five-hours-to-shovel-and-snowshoe-your-way-to-your-field-site that really gets my blood pumping. My field site out in Métis-sur-mer is absolutely unreal - a lighthouse overlooking the St. Laurent, replete with an intertidal teeming with mussels and snails. Curiously enough, not much else. Terrible if you’re a traveller expecting to chance upon some wonders; spectacular if you’re a scientist keen on seeing how A results in B with no millions of fancinful creatures distracting you in the process (how do coral reef scientists do it…). I was particularly keen on this trip because now we’re kind of approaching the dead of winter in Quebec. Coldest air temperatures usually mean a lot of ice - something that happens to be what I’m looking to study for the duration of my PhD. I was here a couple months ago around mid-December which was brilliant: the wind on the first day made standing up a workout and the cold on the second day just froze the entire intertidal. Usually we plan our trips around the spring tides where the moon, the earth and the sun are perfectly aligned to create the strongest tides in the two week cycle. This means the low tides are really really low allowing us scientists to venture out really far into where the water would otherwise be - revealing all the weird (lazy) and wonderful creatures left behind. But when it’s cold (-15 C) cold, the water doesn’t leave, it just freezes in place. The lazy sessile cretins living on these rocks transform into Han Solo popsicles and the very physics of the ocean morphs into that of an alien celestial body.

Round 2 in the absolute dead of winter stepped the foot on the throttle. We ventured out previously in probably the first few days of cold. Now, we’ve got almost 2 months of sub- -10 C weather (freezing temp of sea water is -1.9 C) so I was buzzing to see what these temperatures did to my ocean! To even make it out to our field site, we had to sledge our way out which is effectively packing all our belongings onto a sled and using our truthful hips to drag it across the 3ft of snow that had gathered in our absence. We reached at dark so we couldn’t gawk at how stunning it was but my first time sledging had me grinning wildly the entire time. Woke up the next morning to just white. It was snowing like crazy and through the diagonal white curtain you could notice that the river for at least half a kilometer ahead of you was nowhere close to fluid. Time to snag my camera and make it out to finally see what I’ve been reading about so extensively through the last five months.

But first, let’s talk drip. Never leaving the house without my classic three layered pants and five layered top. We talking MEC, Decathlon, North Face, Decathlon, Eddie Bauer. No fucking around at these temps. Slap on a gaiter and a beanie (hoodie up of course) and you’ve got an Indian Michelin Man cosplaying as a warm bumblebee. On to feet whips. Got those 3M insulated hiking boots that spell sweaty murder in the summers latched into snowshoes with metal teeth to float over ice and sting into the snow (Ali). This was the most bizarre feeling, roaming around the intertidal with my Xtra-Tuffs in the warm confines of the house. Xtra-Tuffs have been my go to intertidal shoe partner for years now, boasting supreme grip and high up on your ankles that give you the confidence you need to get the data you deserve (sponsor me.). But even Xtra-Tuffs don’t have the bite of pointy steel or the surface area of a raquette. Raquettes it is. Last touch, a handful of pepper! An old buddy of mine told me that when we was growing up in Quebec, his mum would put pepper into their socks whenever they went ice skating because the capscecin in the pepper convinced the body that the feet were hot and to increase circulation down there! Works like a gem - I tried it only on my left, leaving the right pepperless foot as a control. Scientific method in action baby!

It was time. Strapped on my camera and ventured out onto Europa. The wind stirred up the snow to a slight fog in the air, swirling around the contours of ice. First few steps were precarious because, like most people, I had no desire to fall through ice into a cozy death cavern that would slowly fill with freezing water. But then I got too excited and went where my heart so desired. First thing that caught my eye were these incredible frozen explosions. Dormant ice volcanoes formed by the 3 ft-thick ice sheet descending with the tides onto a magnificently stubborn rock only to find that rock beats ice. You see the first one, then the second, then they’re all around you and you’re snowshoeing across a hypothermic adolescent’s pimpled face. Taking a closer look, you see all that the ice has trapped in it’s relentless grasp: cantina lights of Ascophyllum, weeks worth of sediment uplifted by expansion of water, confused clams clearly preparing for a dark winter. So bizarre. The sounds were equally strange and hypnotic. The crunch of a snowshoe followed by the jangle of loose snow twinkling across exposed ice. My buddy Kyra sent me the audio of hear squeezing snow in Montana, USA, and I remember thinking to myself, ‘what a strange foreign world…’ Incredible that that’s my world now.

Shooting at those temperatures is also so much fun. For one, fidgeting with your buttons with ski gloves takes a wee bit longer than expected. Sometimes, your autofocus jams when making the tiniest adjustments so you’ve got to do a quick ab crunch to reset the focus to the ground and then back up to your original subject. I usually slap it on AV mode so I don’t have to mess around with shutter speed AND aperture while every ounce of my body is freezing. But these ice volcanic sculptures made the coolest subjects. All I had to worry about was the frame! I remember heading out last winter during a winter storm with the epic John Luo on a photography jaunt along Lake Michigan. I got some cool pictures but I found it so difficult to capture the emotion of trudging through this frigid tundra. Only now I’ve realised working with perspective around a central subject really helps convey distance and contrast in an otherwise blank canvas. It’s also freeing in a certain way because n o t h i n g is recogniseable so you can really mess with size and force imagination! A tiny mound of snow could be a giant estranged dune freezing alongside me. A massive uplifted shard of ice could be a broken wineglass after a night out (I’m a clumsy drunk). Really pushing that fractal dimension. And then you have the pieces of ice that don’t even need to force the right-brain into gear. One section I walked past had a pizza slice with dripping mozarella large enough to feed an adolescent whale while across from it lay, probably the same whale’s, heart etched by Tilikum’s heavenly ice pick. Winter’s a black box in ecology. Sucks for them, good for me.

Ecologically, some interesting points. A strong ice sheet that moves vertically up and down with the tide doesn’t scrape the bottom as much as a few ice fragments that can move in the horizontal direction and can be thrown by waves. The latter is observed a lot more in the beginning and end of winter when the ice is just forming and breaking up respectively. In terms of time, this would make the start and end of winter the most destructive to marine life while the middle might actually be protective! I say protective because ice actually shields these organisms from the frigid winds and air temperatures at low tides. Take a population of 100 mussels. At -13C, 50 of them will die. But if ice forms a protective cavern over them, their temperatures don’t stray that far from the that of the surrounding waters, keeping the population alive in the process. A little idea I’ve had that’s been really cool to see in practice.

So the pepper worked, my jaw has been returned to its natural un-dropped state and I’m warm again. Took the drone out for a spin but everything and everyone was so cold that it didn’t really do it for me. An 8 minute video vanished from my SD card that I’m mildly upset about - but no pepper off my socks. A few more days out here to gaze at the frozen sea/river (St. Laurent is an ‘estuary’ which has 0 poetic merit). Hopefully I’ll have some gorgeous GoPro timelapses coming out showing how the ice sheets are moving with the tide, what northern gifts the Côte-Nord winds are sending my way, which cracks the waters are seeping into. I’m also curious to see how much of the intertidal rocky structure changes through the winter (but that’s another story).

A cold goodnight from the St. Laurent.

P.S. A last note, I guess, about these photos. They’re edited of course to bring out what I felt in my mind’s eye the moment I saw it! But I will say that I felt this inexplicable tendency to push the image to a more blueish hue, in keeping with the visual vocabulary of most arctic photographers. Perhaps blue conveys the despondency and lonliness of the cold arctic better. Perhaps it’s so related to the vast expanses of the ocean and the sky that it forces the subject to look small. Or perhaps a more yellow hue just makes the ice look gross and all peed on. Either ways, I’ll be messing with the editing process a bit as well but message me if you have any thoughts/want to try your hand at editing the same image! Could be cool to see what you think!