Field Journal Entry 1: George River

Screaming above the jagged edges of rock and ice, our Twin Otter 10-seater prop plane pierced through the clouds, everyone enthralled by the changing landscape below. Marcel and I had done this route before, but never in winter. The tundra with all its ochre colours were replaced with a two-toned grayscale of the frozen world which had it’s own stories to tell. Brutally cold temperatures and the nonstop grinding of sea-ice explain whatever biology is remaining in the summer months and this simple flight seemed to provide this revelatory link between the dots of our first summer in Nunavik. Mind you, for an Indian and a Venezuelan, the frozen ocean is new territory for us! But as ecologists working in the north, it’s the elephant in the room - summer is easy and accessible but it’s the winter that sets the stage for the summer. This is where my research comes in.

Given how green (or melted?) I was with the world of the cold, my first winter had me engaged in a concerted effort to understand the cold world. I lived with my professor in a tiny room in a lighthouse with minimal heating and a questionable plumbing situation; I snowshoed across bays attempting to understand how the sea-ice on the surface plays with the rocks below; I even learned how to snowboard - making me appreciate snow and ice changes and feels through the progress of the winter. By no means had that left me a professional ice-man, but at least I gave myself a crash course in a true marine winter. This being said, the question echoed relentlessly - can lessons I’ve gleaned from Quebec winters be applied up north to Ungava Bay?

Ungava Bay is unique - the land where the tides are the greatest in the world (you shut your mouth Bay of Fundy). Tides so large that the Nunavimmiut, the Inuit of Ungava Bay, follow the descending tide out collecting mussels, clams and seaweed in the process. It’s with the Nunavimmiut that our group of scientists are partnering with to understand the role of Tininnimiutait (Inuktitut for those who live in the intertidal zone) in the local diet, culture and ecology. It’s carrying on in the trend of going back to the old ways (check the re-rising trends of yoga, eating millet and ayurvedic practices in India) because they were more organic, tied in to both our natural history and our physical and mental well-being. The history of colonization in the world, extends to beyond mass relocation and forcible employment. It’s still felt in the long-lasting effects of religion and diet in even the most remote parts of the world. Bread, for example, never existed up north until it was introduced under the premise that the Europeans know better (until they didn’t). ‘Valorizing’ (pitiful word) and better understanding older, more sustainable ways of eating with the full force of scientific technology is the goal for this project - and it gives us the opportunity to venture into some incredible landscapes in the process!

The uniqueness of Ungava Bay makes comparisons between the north and the south (or anywhere else…) difficult. The temperatures are far colder, daylight far more variable, winds much harsher, and tides far more monstrous. So any Humboldtian attempt of drawing wild similarities across different ecosystems naturally must be tempered. BUT a pattern is a pattern. One such pattern is how the ice interacts with the contours of the rocks (bathymetry) below. As the tide moves up and down, it moves the sheet of ice on its surface. It doesn’t cause too much of a difference in the open ocean but in the intertidal zone (zone between high and low tide), the ice cannot descend endlessly as the emergent rocks come in the way. So it cracks, leaving gaps and airpockets below. It’s in these air pockets that we’ve found that Tininnimiutait survive - sheltered from the sea-ice and the frigid temperatures above (it’s a balmy 0 degrees under the ice). In fact, the only place in the world where people interact with intertidal life under the ice is Ungava Bay! Check out this photo from the community of Kangiqsujuaq where the Inuit make wee holes in the ice at the tidal crack and descend below it for an surreal mussel-picking session. The reason it’s only in Ungava Bay is because the tides need to be below a certain height to leave behind those airpockets AND the ice needs to be strong enough to not crack above you making you fish food.

One curious interaction between the tides, rocks and sea-ice that I observed in Métis-sur-Mer (southern coast of the St. Lawrence in Québec) are these little Boulder volcanoes (check the picture below). Where there is a rock, the descending ice-sheet cracks all around it, leaving a beautiful intact mound of ice perched above the rock and a jagged halo around it. It’s bizzare and surreal and gorgeous and only appears in Quebec during the coldest winters when the ice is strong enough! The effect - the larger the boulder, the more intertidal life that lives around it! This is in fact is the system I’m studying for one of the chapters in my thesis! When I showed pictures of this in my présentation du projet, the first question I got was: does this even happen in the north? My logical response was that it does - the only difference being the thickness of the ice. And seeing is believing - the flight from Kuujjuaq to Kangiqsualuujjuaq revealed the perfectly pockmarked pattern, emblematic of the Quebec coastline on a cold winter, lining the coastline. What a rush.

Enough about science! The goal of this specific expedition is to both demonstrate what we’ve been working on and gauge whether there are other communities who would like to partner with us. In the process of consultations, which follows the fascinatingly obvious premise of asking permission and then learning from those who know the most about the lands you’re going to be researching on, we’re heading to four communities: Inukjuak (Hudson Bay), Kangiqsualluujjuaq, Kangirsuk and Kangiqsujuaq. Conversations, exchanging of ideas, learnings across various realms of what is contained within a culture ensues!

And it’s already been eventful! Landing in Kuujjuaq, we were greeted by the ever-effervescent Monica Nashak - the Nunavik research coordinator who we had the pleasure of hanging out with at the Marralik camp last year. She’d be perched up on the rocks as the tide was rising, munching her quanniq (Alaria seaweed) chanting liltfully at us, “The tide is rising, you better get out…”. So graciously, she took us home and cooked up an unbelievably tender caribou roast while her mum Phoebe baked a mean bannik! Also she’s getting married! So I got her some bangles from India to celebrate the occasion - two cultures that couldn’t be any more different coming together! Such excitement.

Airports too are such warm places - those that remind me of airports in Mumbai and Bangalore as a little kid where families showed up en masse to greet the recently landed. Every flight is punctuated by affectionate gasps of the previously estranged as hugs fly around and eyes hide behind beaming smiles unique to moments of togetherness. It’s in this limnal space where we also begin to see the connections in the Nunavik world - the lesson: everyone knows everyone! For a space this big, it’s a wonderfully small world.