The ICE-CAMPS (Ice Covered Ecosystem — Cambridge Bay Process Studies) 2016 field campaign will take place this spring, based on landfast first-year sea ice near Cambridge Bay, Nunavut. The oceanographic region in the vicinity of Cambridge Bay has a complex marine environment characterized by: (i) the narrowest and one of the shallowest points in the Northwest Passage (NWP), representing a major hazard to maritime shipping through the area; (ii) input from multiple relatively large rivers (e.g., Coppermine, Burnside, Hood, and Back rivers), which results in some of the lowest salinities found in the NWP; (iii) a consistent landfast sea ice cover from November to July, providing a stable platform for travel, fishing, hunting, wildlife migrations, and scientific investigations; and (iv) the communities of Cambridge Bay and Kugluktuk, whose residents depend on the local marine/ice environment for subsistence hunting, transportation, and an Arctic char fishery. Despite its importance, the regional marine environment of this complex system remains poorly characterized due to few existing oceanographic investigations. The overarching goal of ICE-CAMPS is to investigate physical and biogeochemical processes operating across the ocean-ice-atmosphere interface during the winter-spring-summer transition to improve our understanding of how our warming climate will affect the ice-covered marine ecosystem of the Canadian Arctic.
 
For further information, please contact: C.J. Mundy

ICE-CAMPS projects 2016:

Apr/May

• Install moorings
• Tidal shear on ice algal growth (Laura Dalman, CJ Mundy)
• Sea ice and ikaite (Heather Kyle, Søren Rysgaard)
• Carbon chemistry in sea ice (Yubin Hu, Fei Wang, Søren Rysgaard)
• Maintenance on Finlayson Island met station ans time series of water column DIC (Brent Else, Tim Papakyriakou)
• Distributed snow depth observations (snowmobile and helicopter) linked to SAR data calibration, scatterometer work (John Yackel)

June/July

• Phytoplankton development under-ice (Aurelie Delaforge)
• Maintenance on Finlayson Island met station ans time series of water column DIC (Brent Else, Tim Papakyriakou)
• Melt ponds, large scale observations - flight based (Randy + Masters, CJ Mundy)