On May 25, the research icebreaker CCGS Amundsen left its home port of Quebec City for its 13th expedition to the Canadian Arctic.  The first leg of the 2017 expedition was to be devoted to the Hudson Bay System (BaySys) Study, co-led by the University of Manitoba and Manitoba Hydro. Funded at a level of $17 million, this four-year program aims to develop an understanding of how to separate the impacts of climate change from those of hydroelectric development on freshwater-marine coupling in Hudson Bay. The BaySys program was to also support research on the GENICE project, funded by Genome Canada, to investigate the potential for microbial genomics to remediate oil spills in sea ice.

Unfortunately, due to unprecedented ice conditions along the east coast of Newfoundland and lack of an available alternate icebreaker, the CCGS Amundsen was re-directed to ice-breaking duties and Search and Rescue operations, and the BaySys Summer expedition was cancelled and re-scheduled for next summer.  While onboard, the team of sea ice scientists was deployed onto the ice to collect samples and study the conditions more closely.   

To learn more about the cancellation and the conditions:

Climate Feedback: How sea ice can still be thick in places in a warming Arctic 

CBC: Climate change researchers cancel expedition because of climate change

The Guardian: Climate change study in Canada's Hudson Bay thwarted by climate change