Cutting-edge science on the edge of Kluane
Just over 75 years ago, an American geographer named Walter Abbott Wood arrived in the Yukon from New York. His goal was to carry out a scientific exploration of the St. Elias Mountains region on behalf of the American Geographical Society.
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Kluane Lake Research Station on the shore of Kluane Lake.
(photo: Kluane Lake Research Station)
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Wood's 1935 expedition used packhorses supplied by the Jacquot brothers of Burwash Landing and relied on traditional local knowledge of the area. Wood and his team also used what was then the new scientific technique of photogrammetry, taking photographs, especially aerial ones, to make surveys and maps.
Wood couldn't have known it then, but that first foray laid the foundations for much of the future scientific research in the region.
In 1961, again spearheaded by Wood, the Kluane Lake Research Station (KLRS) was established on the south shore of Kluane Lake, 220 km northwest of Whitehorse. KLRS grew out of the need for a base of operations for the Arctic Institute of North America, a nonprofit research organization created by an Act of Parliament in 1945.
This year KLRS is celebrating a remarkable 50 years of research over a wide range of disciplines, from glaciology to geology, botany, climatology, and many others. It is also carrying on the innovative work of the man who might be described as its founding elder, bringing together the latest scientific discoveries with traditional aboriginal knowledge of the region and its history.
The research station was built where it was thanks to a joint Canadian-US military effort in the early fifties called Project Eager Beaver. The airstrip built for that project near Silver City seemed like a natural fit for a research base, explains Ryan Danby, an ecologist from Queen's University who's spending his 10th summer doing research at KLRS.
"The ability to land a plane and its proximity to the icefields – we're right at the base of Kluane Lake and the main flight path is up the Slims River Valley to the Kaskawulsh Glacier and then into the icefields," says Danby.
The station itself has no research agenda of its own. Instead, funded by the Arctic Institute as well as through user fees, it's a facility for researchers from across North America who carry out their own field studies and sometimes hold field school courses as well.
When KLRS first opened, "it was focused on glacial geophysical research based around this massive icefield, the largest outside of the polar regions in the world," says Danby.
That first project, known as the Icefield Ranges Research Project or IRRP, used new technology like radar sounding, then in its infancy, to measure the depth of the ice.
"Techniques and technologies that are commonplace in geophysics today were all tested and developed at that time as part of IRRP."
At first glance, KLRS looks like many other Yukon camps rather than a world-class scientific research station. "But it's all about the people and the minds that come here and the work that they're doing."
KLRS is a very busy place in Yukon's short summer. It can accommodate up to about 40 researchers, who can be there from a few days to a few weeks.
"My crew – two grads and three undergrads – is up for seven weeks this year," says Danby, who studies vegetation change in southwest Yukon. "There's also two other researchers and their teams stationed on a glacier in Kluane Park, and there's a couple of crews from UBC doing work on small mammal ecology and boreal forest ecology.
"Then there's David Hik's crew from the University of Alberta working on alpine ecology out of a satellite camp in the Ruby Range."
KLRS attracts international researchers, too, including Americans and occasionally Europeans. A joint Canadian-Norwegian field school is coming in a few weeks to do an onsite course on the cryosphere, or ice-related environments, such as permafrost and glaciers. The station can also be used in the winter, though it hasn't been used year-round since UBC ecologist Charley Krebs' boreal forest research project from the mid-eighties through the late nineties. That project was aimed at understanding the ecology of the boreal forest, using the cycling of the snowshoe hare as a keystone species.
"Charley is still here every year doing research work with grad students," says Danby, pointing out that his own PhD supervisor, David Hik, completed his PhD on the boreal forest project with Krebs. "So there's almost a lineage of researchers that's come through the station. One researcher trains another, and he or she stays on and trains other researchers, so right now there's probably three or four generations of scientists here."
Dinner is the time when all the researchers sit down together and conversation can range from "the current events of the day to scientific hypotheses to local history to whatever."
"There's this cross-pollination or information exchange that happens," says Danby. "If there's a climatologist who says, well, we're reconstructing climate and we see a certain warm period in this particular era, then that leaves me thinking, what am I seeing around that time and is that a mechanism of change that is potentially responsible for the changes that I'm seeing in my particular research?"
According to Danby, many researchers at KLRS – himself included – find they're much more scientifically productive there than at their respective institutions.
"You can really focus, you're in the environment that you're studying, and you're around other scientists who're studying the same region, so besides topical questions there are regional geographic questions that emerge as well."
KLRS, in fact, sounds like the ideal university. Danby laughs and agrees. "And the students who come up here are really interested. They're a mix of grads and undergrads, and they're eager to get up and work and learn."
Danby's own two youngsters, aged nine and five, are spending the summer at KLRS and loving it. "They're learning something as well," says Danby. "They're learning the process of discovery."
- For more information, visit the Arctic Institute of North America website at www.arctic.ucalgary.ca.
