July 28, 2000
JANE GEORGE
Nunatsiaq News
CARL RITTER BAY — Some people may take rocks for granted, but geologists with Canada’s Geological Survey are very serious about what’s under their feet.
This summer, they’re on northeastern Ellesmere Island to see what rocks lie in the towering mountains and steep valleys of this polar coastline.
For the past two years the GSC has operated this summer field camp at Carl Ritter Bay, 500 km. north of Grise Fiord. The camp is a stone’s throw away from the Nares Strait and the plateaus of Greenland — clearly visible across the water on sunny days.
After GSC’s Northern Ellesmere Island Regional Mapping Project winds up in August, it will start work on producing maps and other information on rocks from the Knud and Bache peninsulas up through the Judge Day Promontory.
The Geological Survey of Canada was established in 1842, and is one of the oldest scientific institutions in Canada. In its early days, the GSC was involved in the basic surveying and mapping of Canada, but it now focuses more on producing information about the energy-rich regions of Canada.
GSC rock scientists try to rebuild a picture of what happened to the earth over more than four billion years of history. The GSC names the rock formations it detects, and them shows on geological maps.
Key to resource development
As a record of rocks over time and space, these maps provide industry and government with signposts for resource development.
In the past, GSC mapping has pointed the way to oil and gas fields in central Arctic, and to other ore deposits in the High Arctic Islands. Exploration teams from mining and oil companies rely on the information within GSC maps when they’re in the field looking at rocks.
"You have to know about this," GSC geologist Ulrich Mayr said. "Whatever you can get out of the rock, depends on what kind of rock it is."
An American scientific team led by Adolphus Greeley made the first serious attempt to understand northern Ellesmere’s rocks in 1882, but the expedition’s rock collections were abandoned and lost when its desperate members abandoned their post at Fort Conger.
The High Arctic’s geology was first seriously — and successfully — mapped back in the late 50s.
"Up to then we were still using information from the 1800s in the Arctic islands," Mayr said. "Then in 1959 they had this big operation up here, and set up fly camps with dog sledges all through the Arctic islands. That was the first reasonably comprehensive idea of what rocks we had."
Mayr first mapped this region in the early 1970s when he was working as a consultant for an oil company. According to Mayr, geologists even then considered northern Ellesmere Island to be an unknown land — the sort of place medieval map makers in Europe used to show as unexplored territory, or "terra incognita," on their maps.
For years, Mayr wanted to bring the GSC back to do an updated, and more thorough, mapping of the region.
The southern areas that the GSC is now looking at also includes several parcels of Inuit-owned land. GSC geologists mapped these in 1998.
Its mapping of the northern section began last year, and will be wrapped up this season. The GSC will then compile the results, and publish a detailed report with geological maps of the region.
Hiking over mountains
To gather this information, GSC geologists still rely on labour-intensive methods. They walk over mountains for hours at a time, climb up and down slippery gravel slopes, hammer samples from rock outcrops, walk stream beds, and discuss what they do back in camp.
This physical and intellectual exercise produces maps that go much further than conventional land maps. They show a three-dimensional view of rock layers, telling where the rocks go, when they were formed, and what they’re made of. They also try to explain why the layers of rocks meander, split, and sometimes vanish entirely.
Northeastern Ellesmere is the one of last regions of the High Arctic with a high mineral potential to be comprehensively mapped in this fashion.
This is also the GSC’s only major, long-term Arctic project this season. That’s because the GSC, similar to other agencies such as the Polar Continental Shelf Project that rely on government support, has lost 40 per cent of its budget over the last five years.
Ottawa cutting GSC funding
Mayr isn’t happy about this "shredding" of GSC’s funding. In his opinion, government, not the private sector, has the resources and planning regional mapping needs.
"They just emasculated the GSC," Mayr said.
A field camp such as the GSC operation costs around $500,000 a year to mount, and these days, it’s only the Americans tearing up the fossil forest on Axel Heiberg Island or the NASA-Mars Society team that’s trying to recreate Mars at the Haughton Crater on Devon Island who have the money to do major projects in the High Arctic.
The GSC’s Northern Ellesmere project has been helped out financially by a collaboration with geologists from Germany. Their project, called "Circum-Arctic Structural Events," is looking at the forces that created a huge, circumpolar mountain chain.
The mountains start in the Svalbard Islands off Norway, run through Greenland, and poke out again in Ellesmere Island. The mountains’ uneven path reveals much about the rubbing, crushing, overlapping, and expansion of rock layers that pushed Greenland up, and Europe and Baffin away from each other some 50 million years ago.
These are the same pressures that are still moving land masses around today. Understanding them, says polar geologist Franz Tessensohn, is increasingly important.
The German Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources wants to collaborate with Canadians on another project that would look at the rocks under Nares Strait between Greenland and Ellesmere Island.
Germany is willing to put up $1 million for the study, but, so far, Canada has offered only a tiny amount.
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