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January/February 2010 issue	In this issue Table of Contents IPY: What is IPY? IPY: Kluane research station IPY: Inuit health IPY: Arctic mercury mystery IPY: Arctic scientist IPY: Future Arctic research IPY: Multimedia The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Reverberations À la carte Mosaic Book Reviews

Robert Way wants to probe the permafrost and glaciers of his native Labrador, but already, at age 20, he’s thinking globally.
Photo: Robert van Waarden

• PHOTO ESSAY
• VIDEO
• INTERACTIVE

Cryosphere kid: Young Canadian scientist Robert Way travels to Norway to learn more about his home

Turbulent tundra: Global warming’s impact on Arctic tundra

Crossing the line: Observe changes in the tree line and examine its affect on Canada’s Arctic tundra

Click map to enlarge

This sort of fieldwork, on a cold August day, isn’t exactly what Way had envisioned when he signed up for an international student exchange program called Cryosphere Exchange back at the University of Ottawa, where he’s finishing an undergraduate degree in geography, with a minor in geomatics and spatial analysis. He’d rather be up on the surface of Storbreen, where Jon Ove Hagen, another University of Oslo prof involved in this week-long field component of CryoEX, has led a group of students to determine the net change in the glacier’s size. But Way’s shoes, a cheap pair picked up before leaving Ottawa a week ago, are so soft-soled, they threatened to ruin the crampons needed for the ice walk. So he crouches, hammers, records and doesn’t complain. “I like the cold,” says Way. “Where I come from, it’s all about the snow and ice.”

From Happy Valley-Goose Bay, N.L., the son of a father of Inuit descent and a mother from the Avalon Peninsula’s Irish Loop, Way represents the next generation of researchers focused on the snow, permafrost, glaciers, ice caps and river and lake ice of the polar regions. Taken together, these features form the terrestrial cryosphere, and despite the role that the cryosphere plays in the water and carbon cycles that influence climate change, it has been pushed out of the headlines by sea ice and warming polar waters.

In a sense, CryoEX exists to balance attention between land and ocean. The newly minted program was established by the Universities of Ottawa and Oslo, with Carleton University and Norway’s University Centre in Svalbard serving as satellite institutions. The curriculum is exclusively concerned with the coldest parts of the Earth’s crust. While Way’s home in Labrador offers plenty of research opportunities in this field, he came to Norway because he knows that polar science thrives through the cross-pollination of theories and research methods between nations. To succeed locally, you have to collaborate globally, which means starting with data collection in the wind and rain of unfamiliar territory.

But Way is also here to satisfy a desire to go where others have not. Before he leaves Norway at Christmas, he’ll travel to Svalbard, the country’s Arctic region. In February 2009, his studies took him to Antarctica. “It’s one of those places you can leave your mark on,” he says, noting that few people have been to both Antarctica and the Arctic in the same year. This remark may demonstrate the inflated sense of self-importance typical of a 20-year-old convinced that a promising career awaits, but it’s also evidence of the expeditionary spirit without which science cannot thrive. And if programs such as CryoEX can foster either attitude, they will put more of the world’s young and curious on paths toward enriching our understanding of the North, at home and abroad.