BAFFIN ISLAND -- From the top deck of the ship, on the sixth day of a recent Arctic voyage, ecologist Jack Seigel stood peering shoreward through binoculars at a polar bear. This magnificent creature, an adult male weighing at least 1,000 pounds and standing nearly 10 feet tall, gazed back, interested but unconcerned. Then it swung off along the rocky coast.
"He's scavenging," Seigel said, handing the glasses to a passenger on the Adventure Canada cruise. "That's all he can do right now. But judging from the fat on him, this guy is in good shape to survive the next couple of months. Then the ice will return."
Later, speaking to a full house in the ship's theatre-style lecture hall, Seigel would explain that the polar bear, a "vulnerable species" nearing endangered status, lives mostly on ringed seals but will eat anything it can kill. It ranges, necessarily, over hundreds of square kilometres of sea ice - and every year, because of global warming, that sea ice is arriving later and melting earlier.
The change is affecting more than polar bears. Recent satellite images from the European Space Agency show that, for the first time in recorded history, the Northwest Passage is clear to maritime traffic. The receding ice is opening up a navigable sea route from Europe to Asia that is 7,000 kilometres shorter than the 23,000-kilometre voyage via the Panama Canal. Commercial interests are anticipating a navigable Northwest Passage - not to transport real gold from Cathay, as they did four centuries ago, but black gold from the Alaskan oil fields and possibly other minerals.
During the next couple of decades, maritime traffic will increase dramatically. And that is raising urgent questions. On the M/S Explorer, during a spirited discussion of sovereignty and the Northwest Passage, passengers articulated most of them. The Northwest Passage runs through an archipelago of islands that clearly belong to Canada. Are these, then, Canadian internal waters, as our governments have always argued? Or is this channel an international waterway, as Americans, Japanese and Europeans contend. Can anybody send tankers through here? Given the potential for environmental disasters, who will monitor and control traffic? And what about the Inuit, who have lived in this region by hunting and fishing for more than 5,000 years? Do they have no rights?
Nobody had any answers, but judging from the emotions expressed, this discussion resonated with the 96 passengers who had signed on for the 12-day Baffin Explorer cruise - one of several active-adventure excursions conducted each year by Adventure Canada, a Mississauga-based travel company. Mostly Canadian professionals in their 50s and 60s, though with a sprinkling of people both older and younger and also a smattering of Americans, they had travelled from as far away as California, Vancouver and Whitehorse to board a charter flight in Ottawa and fly north to Resolute Bay in Nunavut. There, they had boarded the Explorer, a purpose-built expeditionary vessel that can put 10 Zodiacs into the water, each carrying 10 people, so that everyone can go cruising at the same time.
Besides Seigel, a recently retired professor of environmental studies who has guided expeditions around the world, the ship carried more than a dozen resource people. They included Pakak Innukshuk, an Inuit drum dancer who took leading roles in the films Atanarjuat and The Journals of Knud Rasmussen; Bill Lishman, an ornithologist famous for flying with geese and whooping cranes (captured in Fly Away Home); and Mike Beedell, an award-winning photographer who once traversed the Northwest Passage in a catamaran. The resource staff also featured an archeologist, a sea-mammal expert and an exploration historian best-known as the author of Fatal Passage, Ancient Mariner and Lady Franklin's Revenge (yours truly).
Each staff member offered two or three presentations but still found time to go hiking, rock scrambling and Zodiac cruising among the icebergs. What with exploring archeological and historical sites, eating three gourmet meals a day, attending a daily "recap" in the lounge on the forward deck and juggling special events like the polar-bear swim, the whisky-label contest, the costume party and the variety show, nobody had a dull moment.
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