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Cruising the Eastern Arctic – Pangnirtung

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Today was July 29th, and we awoke to our posted Adventure Canada itinerary for the day: destination Pangnirtung, aka “Pang”.

After the previous two days spent in Iqaluit, then cruising the waters around the southeast corner of Baffin Island, the MV Sea Adventurer was now sailing up Nunavut’s Cumberland Sound in an ice-spangled sea as smooth as silver satin.  It was magical.

I used my telephoto lens to see a little more detail in the cliffs of the two opposite peninsulas – Hall Peninsula and Cumberland Peninsula – flanking the sound.  Everything is so empty-seeming here and the colour palette is a thousand shades of sky-ocean blue and gneiss gray. But later we would discover that, botanically at least, this is a land of close-ups.

Headlands jutted out from the shore and we passed the occasional island, too. Cumberland Sound is 250 km (160 miles) long and approximately 80 km (40 miles) wide.

All morning, we watched Arctic fulmars (Fulmarus glacialis) flying around the ship, their bodies reflected in the still water…..

…. which accentuated the splashes as one took off.   We were lucky to have a seabird biologist on board, Dr. Mark Mallory who helped us with identifications throughout Nunavut and Greenland.

According to Wikipedia, there are two forms of the Arctic fulmar, a white form and this gray one. Though they look like gulls, they are members of the order Procellariiformes (the tubenoses), which also includes albatrosses.  Procellariiformes have nasal passages that attach to the upper bill called naricorns; however, nostrils on albatrosses are on the sides of the bill, as opposed to the rest of the order, including fulmars, which have nostrils on top of the upper bill. The bills of are also unique in that they are split into 7 to 9 horny plates. One of these plates makes up the hooked portion of the upper bill. Fulmars produce a stomach oil made up of wax esters and triglycerides that is used against predators as well as an energy rich food source for chicks and for the adults during their long flights. Being hit with the oil will mat the plumage of avian predators, and can lead to their death. Finally, they also have a salt gland that is situated above the nasal passage and helps desalinate their bodies, due to the high amount of ocean water that they imbibe. It excretes a high saline solution from their nose.   Fulmars are “pelagic”, meaning they feed exclusively in the open ocean, but they usually nest on uninhabited, predator-free islands.

As always, there were onboard activities, including a class teaching traditional Inuit sewing skills using animal skins.  Before metal needles and manufactured thread were introduced, seal sinew and bird-bone needles were the tools of the trade.

Aaju Peter helped teach that class, her hands and fingers (and also her chin and forehead) displaying traditional, symbolic Inuit kakiniit, or tattoos.

Then we turned into Pangnirtung Fjord. Off in the distance on the right, you can see a collection of buildings.

The prow of the MV Sea Adventurer was a great place to stand and watch the ocean ahead.

Soon we were nearing the little hamlet of Pangnirtung, aka “Pang”.  Imagine spending your entire life living between the sea and  massive flank of that mountain.

Speaking of mountains, Pangnirtung is the closest bit of civilization to the magnificent Auyuittuq National Park (Baffin Island National Park), measuring 21,470 square kilometres or 8,290 square miles, and starring the spectacular Mount Asgard.  If you’re a James Bond fan of a certain age, you might have seen this mountain with its monster twin rock towers in the dramatic opening scene of The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) with Roger Moore. Have a look, below!  (And here is California stunt skier/BASE jumper Rick Sylvester’s memory of the once-in-a-lifetime scene.)

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There are no high-rises in Pangirtung. The biggest structure is two storeys tall.  And most buildings sit above ground on metal stilts, in part to prevent their indoor heating from melting the permafrost below. With global warming, permafrost melting is a reality, leading to shifting and possible failure of house foundations. 

The zodiacs dropped us at the shore in ‘wet landing’ style.

I was so happy I’d bought the highest rubber boots I could find!

Our first stop was down to visit the ‘summer house’ of one of the Inuit elders of the community.

Along the way, we passed through a drift of alpine bistort (Bistorta vivipara).

Inside the little house, whose walls were papered with magazine pages, we took turns playing a few traditional Inuit games and were treated to a snack of bannock, i.e. palauga in the Inuktitut language.

Then we dropped into the Angmarlik Visitor Centre to learn about the area’s history, which included a long period of whaling (1824-1919) in Cumberland Sound and campaigns by colonial missionaries.   We listened to the guide explain how the Inuit utilize the animals they hunt – especially caribou and ringed seal – for clothing, shelter and food.  She showed us a game played with tiny animal bones and encouraged us to walk around and view the displays.

Then we headed to the wonderful Uqqurmiut Centre for Arts & Crafts for a tour, beginning with esteemed printmaker Jolly Atagooyuk, who demonstrated his work.

Here is a short video of Jolly that exploring his ethos and technique.

Then it was on to the studio where the famous  “Pang hats” are knit in a rainbow of….

….. colours of worsted wool.

Wool art was also on display.

And, of course, we had to purchase our own souvenir hats. I chose a baby hat for my brand-new granddaughter, my first grandchild, born that week the day after we left on our Arctic trip. And I made sure it displayed a sealskin rose, in support of the proud sealing tradition of these people in the far north.

Finally, we were invited to the community hall for a light meal of whale stew (delicious!)…..

…. and a presentation by the youth, which included spirited dancing. Pangnirtung has its share of problems, as do many northern communities beset by sky-high cost of living, isolation, addiction and many other social factors, especially for young people. But that day, we saw the very best of ‘Pang’.

Next up:  Botanizing at Sunshine Fjord

Cruising the Eastern Arctic – Waters East of Baffin Island

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Having sailed all night after our first day in Iqaluit down the 230-kilometre (140-mile) long Frobisher Bay, we were now cruising for a full day and night in the Arctic Ocean on the south east side of Baffin Island. The largest island in Canada and the fifth largest in the world, it ranks in size behind 1) Greenland, 2) New Guinea, 3) Borneo and 4) Madagascar. Its coastline is made up of many bays, inlets and sounds. Both Baffin Island and Frobisher Bay were named for English explorers; Martin Frobisher landed on what is now Baffin Island in 1576, while William Baffin made two expeditions to the waters off Greenland in 1612 and 1615. (And as a gardener I know that the ultra-hardy, Explorer roses bred by Felicitas Sjveda at the University of Ottawa also include ‘William Baffin’ and ‘Martin Frobisher’). The waters were quiet, the air so clear, and it was our chance to walk the decks to see if we could spot animals on the sea ice.

Then we heard the announcement… “Ladies and gentlemen: starboard, 2 o’clock, polar bear.”  Someone pointed excitedly and the binoculars were all trained on a distant patch of sea ice.

The captain angled the ship gently and slowed the engines, barely creeping forward, then stopped.  We gazed raptly, listening to the ship’s naturalists tell us how lucky we are to see this sight just one day into our journey; some expeditions never see a polar bear.

Out came my telephoto lens and I began clicking, watching as the female bear awakens, yawns, sniffs the air, rises, gazes at us, then walks around a little before slipping off the ice and swimming away.  We were jubilant!

Not much later, there was another announcement. Walruses this time! Another rush to the side of the ship with binoculars; again, the captain slowed so we could observe….

…. a pair of walruses resting on sea ice. According to the World Wildlife Fund, walruses (like polar bears) are threatened by climate change, which reduces the amount of sea ice they use for feeding and resting. Their long tusks are employed for keeping holes in the ice open and pulling themselves out of the water; they can dive up to 30 metres (100 feet) to feed on molluscs, but generally feed in shallower waters.

Sea ice is a major consideration for the captain of any expedition, and ours was no exception. Our trip’s original itinerary had been modified from a much more northerly route out of Resolute Bay to its new starting point in Iqaluit because of a large influx of sea ice through the Northwest Passage caused by a cyclone in the western Arctic.

We would learn much about “ice” on this trip. Sea ice is frozen ocean water that rises, owing to the lower density of ice compared to water. Its thickness and coverage varies each year based on both winter and summer temperatures.  About 12% of the earth’s oceans are covered with sea ice, translating to about 7% of the earth surface, most of it occurring in the Arctic and Antarctic.  Sea ice that is attached or fastened to shorelines or the ocean floor is called “fast ice”; if it moves around in currents or wind, as below, it’s called “drift ice”.  Every summer, warm temperatures cause some sea ice to melt, but never completely. Sea ice greatly affects global warming because the sun’s radiation is reflected back to space from white sea ice (this is called a “high albedo”), unlike dark sea water, which absorbs the sun’s rays and warms the ocean, thus causing more sea ice to melt. The albedo effect of melting sea ice and glaciers in the Arctic and Antarctic is one of the positive feedback mechanisms between earth and its atmosphere (“positive”, in this case, being a negative as it increases global warming). Unlike melting glaciers, melting sea ice does not cause sea levels to rise.

Sea ice is relatively flat, unlike icebergs. The National Snow & Ice Data Center keeps track of the percentage of sea ice in the Arctic. Sea ice has various classifications, depending on its age: frazil, slush and grease define sea ice as it forms; nilas is ice up to 10 cm (4 inches) thick; young ice is not yet a year old; then there’s first year ice, second year ice and multi-year ice.  As mentioned above, Arctic animals such as the polar bear, walrus, harp seal and caribou depend on sufficient levels of sea ice for hunting.

Icebergs are chunks of glaciers that have calved off and floated away on ocean currents. They are composed of frozen fresh water that might be thousands of years old.  Glacial melt does cause ocean levels to rise.

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During the day onboard an Adventure Canada expedition, there are various lectures and presentations representing natural history or local culture. On this first full day, we were introduced to two Inuit cultural representatives, Bernadette Dean, left, and Aaju Peter, right. Bernadette was demonstrating one way to use the traditional amautik (an integral part of an Inuit mother’s parka) for a newborn.

Aaju showed us how the kulliq, the traditional Inuit seal-oil lamp, is lit using dried moss and seal oil. Both these traditions are thousands of years old.

Later I caught Aaju chatting with my good friend Anne Fisher, who was the travel coordinator for the Royal Ontario Museum on this voyage. Aaju is a lawyer and a recipient of the Order of Canada, especially for her longstanding and public advocacy for the Inuit sealing industry. She even confronted the EU in 2009, where “she cut a striking figure at the European Union parliament in Strasbourg, France, where she had gone to speak as the EU prepared to vote on whether to ban the import of seal hides into Europe. Dressed in a traditional amauti (parka), she angrily denounced the ban. ‘We are one of the world’s last traditional hunting cultures,” she told reporters, “and seals have been essential to our survival for thousands of years. Should 600 people in [Europe] be allowed to define the terms of our existence?’ ” I will write more about Aaju and traditional sealing later in this blog series.

Then the ship put down anchor in Butterfly Bay off the southeast part of Baffin Island…..

….. and it was into our life vests and off in the zodiacs to get a closer look at the topography.

My only regret on the trip was that there was no geologist to pester. After doing some research on this part of Baffin Island conveniently written by one of Adventure Canada’s occasional resource people, Professor Marc St-Onge titled Geological Synthesis of Baffin Island Bulletin 608-Advance Copy-2020, I think I’m safe in saying the big outcrop behind the ship is gneissic rock (specifically Foxe/Meta Incognita/Hall Peninsula gneissic basement) anywhere from 1.96-2.8 billion years old.  This is Precambrian rock, or what geologists define as the Proterozoic Eon, literally “before animal life”, an era that stretched from 2.5 billion years ago (2.5 Ga, i.e. “giga-annum”) to 541 million years ago. (See Marc St-Onge, below). Beyond that in (Precambrian) deep time was the Archean Eon (2.5-4 Ga), to which some of the rocks in this part of Baffin Island have been dated. “Basement rock” refers to the thick foundation of the continent, in this case “orthogneiss”, a metamorphic rock derived from granite and formed in a tectonic mountain-building period. As my geologist friend Andy Fyon says, rocks like these were “caught up in the collision of two continents, where thick slabs of the rock from one continent was stacked on top of the other continent. The heat and stress on the rocks at the bottom of the stack(s) would have been enormous; hence, the cooking, squeezing, and bending of the plasticine rock.”

Subsequent to publishing this blog, I received a lovely email from Professor Marc St-Onge, referring to the rock above and below. He said, “Indeed that is a gneiss, which means a “layered rock”, probably derived from the mingling of two originally plutonic rocks.  Lighter coloured rock of “tonalitic” composition, and darker coloured rock of “dioritic” composition.  The location off eastern Hall Peninsula would suggest that the gneiss is possibly as old as 3.0 billion years and is part of what is known in the geological literature as the ‘Hall Peninsula tonalitic gneiss complex’. Old ‘Archean’ rocks then to core most of the current continents, with the oldest rock in the world being of course the Acasta Gneiss located 300 km NNW of Yellowknife and discovered by the GSC in 1983.”

The nearby pinkish, domed outcrop, below, is an intrusive plutonic rock*, likely from the Cumberland batholith, approximately 1.85 billion years old, its surface grooved and scraped by ice, possibly from the Laurentide Ice Sheet that once covered much of eastern North America.

Professor St-Onge also weighed in on the rock below: “Indeed that does look like a good plutonic rock.  From the photo I would venture to suggest that it is granitic in composition, probably ‘monzogranitic’, derived from melting of the lower continental crust and emplaced probably at a depth of 15 km or so in the middle continental crust.  What is also of interest are the large blocks (we would say ‘enclaves’ in geology) of darker rock, best seen right of centre, probably ‘dioritic’ in composition, which represent pieces rifted off or broken off the lower crust as the pluton was rising to its final depth of emplacement as a crystal mush and eventual solidification.  The location (not the photo) tells me that this plutonic rock is ‘Archean’ in age (aka older than 2.5 billion year old) and likely 2.7 billion years old from units dated in that area of SE Baffin Island.”

It was a short excursion in the zodiacs, all named for stars, with Capella being the sixth-brightest star in the night sky. Now it was time to head back to the ship for dinner. Next up: the tiny hamlet of Pangnirtung

Cruising the Eastern Arctic – Iqaluit

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Next week, we were to have flown to Stockholm to board a ship that would take us through the Baltic Sea. I had booked an extra few days in Sweden at the beginning in order to visit the Linnaeus Garden in Uppsala, long a destination on my botanical bucket list. The cruise included Helsinki, St. Petersburg, Talinn (Estonia), Gdansk (Poland), Berlin, Copenhagen and Alborg (Denmark) and three stops in Norway. I added a short flight from Bergen to Edinburgh en route home to visit the Royal Botanical Garden there, another botanical bucket list must-see. Like everyone’s travel plans in pandemic times, our trip was cancelled.

I know a lot of people who disdain cruises, but the few we have taken have been a wonderful way to nimbly visit a series of far-off places that we would not have seen otherwise. One cruise, on a small French ship, was to the Greek islands and the Turkish coast. Another was what I call a ‘tasting tour’ of Southeast Asia from Bali to Bangkok on a relatively small ship. But my favourite and the most unusual was our 2013 cruise through the Eastern Arctic with Adventure Canada and ROM Travel (Royal Ontario Museum), and I thought it would be fun to recall it here on my blog. It began with a charter flight on First Air from Ottawa…..

…… over the tundra and Hudson Bay….

…..  to land at the cheery, yellow terminal in Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut, one of Canada’s three northern territories, the others being Yukon and Northwest Territories. Originally called Frobisher Bay, the capital’s name was changed in 1987 to its original Inuktitut word Iqaluit, meaning “place of many fish”.

Shortly after we left the airport, I saw my first patch of dwarf fireweed (Chamerion latifolium), below. I was excited!

After a brief stop at the Legislative Assembly of Nunavut…..

….. built in 1999 when the region was officially declared a Territory of Canada with a consensus government (no political party)….

…. we departed for Sylvia Grinnell Territorial Park.  The park is named for the daughter of the New York man who helped to finance American explorer Charles Francis Hall’s expedition to the region c. 1860.  There were informal lectures here, but I was most interested in seeing the flora.

Nunavut has a very short summer window for plants to emerge, flower, fruit and set seed, so our visit on July 27th meant it was the perfect time to see a large selection of natives in bloom. Though it didn’t look promising for those used to seeing large perennials, shrubs and trees (of which there are none here), the ground was a tapestry of tiny treasures.

Best of all, Adventure Canada employed a naturalist named Carolyn Mallory…..

…. who had co-authored Common Plants of Nunavut (which I bought on this trip).  Carolyn would get used to me asking her about plants throughout Nunavut and Greenland.  I have used information in her excellent book to describe the plants I saw at Sylvia Grinnell Park.

That white flower Carolyn is pointing out above is northern Labrador tea, a prostrate member of the rhododendron genus, R. tomentosum subsp. decumbens.

The park was full of plants I had never seen ‘down south’. This is the dwarf shrub white heather (Cassiope tetragona).  Its Inuit name isutit means “fuel for the fire”.

This is Arctic harebell (Campanula uniflora).

Yellow mountain saxifrage (Saxifraga aizoides) is one of many saxifrages in the Arctic.

Lapland pincushion (Diapensia lapponica) is a tiny shrub, barely inches above the ground. Its Inuit name is piriqtut nunaralikuluit.

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This was a pretty combination: yellow alpine arnica (Arnica angustifolia) with purple mountain heather (Phyllodoce caerulea).

Mountain avens (Dryas integrifolia) is another dwarf shrub that rarely exceeds 15 cm (6 inches). In winter its leaves die off but gradually accumulate a thatch that helps conserve moisture in summer.

Yellow oxytrope (Oxytropis maydelliana) has a carrot-like taproot that was traditionally fried with whale blubber or seal fat and eaten as a vegetable (airaq) in spring.

Large-flowered wintergreen (Pyrola grandiflora) is a beautiful little perennial with fragrant flowers. Its leaves turn bright red in winter.

We would see tufted saxifrage (Saxifraga tricuspidata) in many locations on our expedition.

I loved the tiny vignettes that these small plants created with their neighbours. This is moss campion (Silene acaulis) wreathed with net-vein willow (Salix reticulata), one of Nunavut’s thirteen native willow species.

Arctic bladder campion (Silene involucrata) has fused sepals that create a striped bladder that you can see at left.

Arctic poppies (Papaver sp.) look very much alike but can belong to a number of different species, mostly distinguished by variations in leaf lobes and hairs on the leaf reverse or capsules.  On the Nunavut Coat of Arms, poppies represent the summer season.

This is flame lousewort (Pedicularis flammea) and though the sunlight was a little too harsh for photography at this point in the Iqaluit afternoon, you can see why the leaves cause the plant to sometimes be mistaken for a fern before flowers appear.

Look at the beautiful blossoms of mountain cranberry (Vaccinium vitis-idaea subsp. minor). Soon there will be shiny, red berries that are evidently sweeter once they’ve gone through a first frost. Inuit people call them kimminait.  Inupiaq people from Alaska often mixed them with meats or fish, storing them underground over winter in birchbark baskets.

I would have a very difficult time separating out the prostrate willows, but Carolyn listed Salix arctophila on her plant list from our day at Sylvia Grinnell, so I’m assuming that’s the identity of the plant below.

However, with Carolyn’s finger for scale, there was no mistaking the tiny leaves of Salix herbacaea, which is one of the world’s smallest shrubs.

Soon our visit to the park ended and we were bused to the shore to climb into one of several zodiacs to ferry us out to…..

….. our home for the next 10 days, a retrofitted 1975 Yugoslavian-built polar cruise ship called MV Sea Adventurer (now renamed the Ocean Adventurer). Though not technically an icebreaker, it has an ice-hardened hull and is listed as an A-1 Ice Class ship capable of negotiating smaller pieces of sea ice.   It was time to begin our adventure in the waters of Nunavut and Greenland…….

….. and watch our first sunset over the Arctic Ocean.  Stay tuned for more.