Setting sun on Cape Bounty (it will be back)

Around this time of year, the sun disappears at 75 degrees north and won't appear again until early February.  In theory, it gets completely dark, but that is really not the case.  When the moon is out and it is clear, it can be quite bright, and the snow tends to make it less than pitch black anyway.  Regardless, for all the years we have worked at Cape Bounty, we have not seen a sunset.

We set up time lapse cameras in 2012 to photograph both lakes hourly to determine when the ice cover formed.  These images are the last for both cameras, suitably showing a sunset (West Lake) and a sunrise (East Lake), but snow covered the cameras that night and then the November darkness came, so we don't know what happened after that.  The cameras worked well in the cold temperatures, but stored thousands of black or blurred images.  We relocated the cameras for 2013-14, so hopefully we'll be able to get that last light around now...

The old camp 2003-2010

The original camp at Cape Bounty was on a low ridge overlooking the West Lake.  We chose the site in May 2003 because it was free of snow in the spring, and the rock surface was very durable and relatively flat.   It was a good site with a great view, and it was close to most sampling locations, which is important when you are doing it every day for 6-8 weeks.  Even after seven years of foot traffic, the site looks untouched.

The problems though, started to mount as our research group grew.  Drinking water became scarce in some years in late July as the land dried up, and moving equipment to the airstrip down at the lake (on the far left of this picture) required an ATV or a lot of heavy hauling. Finally, the wind was much worse at this location than elsewhere. It all came to a head in August 2010 when the main tent was blown down the hill in a severe wind storm.  The tent, salvaged from an old mining exploration camp, was destroyed, and we decided it was time to move the camp.

This photograph was taken in June 2007 in the late evening (around midnight) from "latrine hill".  No one will miss having to slog up the hill for privacy, or to suffer in the wind when the weather was poor. Still, it was quite a view when the weather cooperated!

Camp- our home away from home

In 2011 we moved the camp from the hill north of the West Lake to a site at the air strip closer to the lake.  It is much better location that makes moving equipment in the summer possible without vehicles, and it is much smoother for sleeping on the ground.  Another important benefit is the close proximity of the lake and river for drinking water later in the season.  It is definitely less windy!

The camp is composed of a main Weather haven tent for cooking and meeting, and a smaller Weather haven tent for the latrine.  Moving to this location close to water meant that we had to install a propane-fired incinerating toilet.  It is not nearly as awful as it sounds!

We also set up temporary sleeping tents for each person about 200 m from camp.  You can see the "field' of the yellow tents on the left.

 Flights into CBAWO are either with ski- or wheel-equipped Twin Otters.  The lake ice provides a good landing site for the ski planes until early June.  The summer strip is marked on the tundra with white bags filled with rocks and is aligned with the prevailing northwest winds.  It looks quite soft, but it is actually river gravel with a soft moss cover, so the wheels of the plane compress it but do not sink in.  You can see in the foreground where we have had to fill in a frost wedge with gravel.  Each year, the wedges are settling more and this needs to be dealt with.

We leave the Weather haven tents up over winter and remove all food and cooking equipment from the site to avoid attracting animals.  Of course, the tracks and scat suggest we get frequent winter visitors.

It does not snow much in the High Arctic.  There is usually 20-40 cm of snow on the land, but it gets blown around and drifts extensively.  In the spring, our tents have caused massive snow drifts.  Thankfully, digging out was not too much of an issue, as long as we remember where everything is.  For this reason, we photograph the site before leaving in the summer, and we keep important things like tools, shovels and some fuel inside the main tent so it is easy to find.

Research infrastructure

Autumn is a time when we are hard at work analysing the data from the past field season.  We also have to start to plan for the next season with many applications for funding due in November and permits to renew. Plans for 2014 are coming along nicely and we expect to be at CBAWO for almost three months.

A big part of operating a long term research program is to carry out basic, systematic measurements that are needed for all kinds of work.  These include weather, river, soil and lake measurements and they are the cornerstone of our efforts at CBAWO.  In this region of the Arctic, there are no systematic river or lake measurements taken by government agencies, and the nearest weather station is 300 km away at Mould Bay, so we really need to have good quality data for our research.  

This map shows the current primary measurement network.  There are a number of weather, river and lake stations that have been in operation from the beginning in 2003, and some like the small streams and soil stations that have been added since that time.  There are many other locations not shown here that are sampled regularly but this network is the core of CBAWO.

In the last two years, we have added time lapse cameras to this basic network.  We have two located on a plateau edge to provide images of the ice cover on each lake.  This is very important for us as we are not usually there when the ice forms in autumn, and in some years (like 2013), the ice comes off the lakes after we leave as well.  The cameras perform well but can be buried by snow, so we miss much of the winter.

We installed a time lapse camera on the West River station in 2013 as well, looking down stream at the river and lake.  The goal of this is to provide some visual indication of what happens at the river in our absence.

Retrospect on 2013 Lake Ice

In many respects, 2013 seemed cold and rainy at Cape Bounty.  After the past five years where we have routinely had warm, sunny conditions and little summer rainfall, 2013 seemed like a throwback to the past, almost like the Little Ice Age of the 19th century.   The ice on the West and East Lakes seemed to support this notion, and were frustratingly uncooperative with our plans to carry out detailed side-scan sonar and sediment acoustic surveys in late July and early August.  We were reasonably successful with the East Lake, where the ice broke up substantially during the period we were working, but the West Lake skunked us completely.  In most respects, 2013 was still an above average summer in terms of mean temperatures and rainfall.  It is just that compared to recent years, it did not feel as warm.

One of the nice things about working with a diverse research group is that you get to see your own work through a different lens.  This image, from Canada's Radarsat 2 was taken on August 9, 2013, a week after we left the camp at Cape Bounty.  It clearly shows the residual ice on both lakes, and indicates that we would have still been waiting for the ice to clear on the West Lake.

Interestingly, you can still see ice pans on the ocean as well, although the ice cover usually reaches a minimum in mid-September.

Thanks to Ashley Rudy for the image (courtesy of the Canadian Space Agency).

Location map

Location map of Cape Bounty in the Canadian High Arctic

Welcome to Cape Bounty!

In the past, we had a website with links to our research at Cape Bounty Arctic Watershed Observatory.  This blog will present the same content and hopefully you will find it interesting to follow along with us as we investigate arctic environmental processes and change.

The West River draining into the West Lake at 11 PM, August 2, 2013.  Note the ice cover on the lake and low flow in the river.

The 2013 field season has ended and we are now working to run samples on laboratory instruments and to analyse the results.