2011 News

Antarctic mission emboldens McGill students’ passion

Published: March 25, 2011
Peggy Curran

MONTREAL - Lick the seasickness, Eric Galbraith says, and there’s no place on Earth to beat Antarctica.

Maybe that’s because Antarctica doesn’t actually feel like Earth at all.

“Antarctica is as close as you can get to being on another planet,” says Galbraith, an oceanographer and professor of marine biochemistry at McGill University.

“You leave Argentina, and it takes two days to get there through the Drake Passage. You travel through this grey, windy cloud. Then the sun comes out, and there’s this crazy, beautiful, amazing world.”

The southern ocean can be choppy and very rough, and even the strongest sailors have been known to lose their sea legs.

“The thing about seasickness is that, once the water is calm, it’s gone. It’s like magic, like waking the dead.”

Galbraith has just returned from his seventh trip to the polar ends of the Earth, where he and a group of McGill students took part in Students on Ice. Now in it’s 10th year, the two-week field study course enables researchers and students from campuses across Canada to conduct research, admire the scenery and check out the wildlife – in this case, penguins and seals that were curious and not the least bit afraid of the strange beings wandering across their beach.

“In one of our Zodiac rides to shore, a whale and her baby came to the surface just beside us, as if they came to say hi,” says Audrey Yank, who is studying bioresource engineering at McGill. “I realized how important it was to take advantage of my experience, to bring awareness to this fragile environment.”

Galbraith’s team studied water temperatures and salinity levels, “a keyhole” into the complex, incremental study of questions relating to climate change, global ocean currents, oxygen and nutrient supply, and the natural production of carbon dioxide, the kind that existed long before the Industrial Revolution began and we began spewing vast quantities of greenhouse gases into the air.

Galbraith is fascinated by the role the southern oceans play in regulating the world’s climate, dating back to a time more than 15,000 years ago when prehistoric Montreal was covered by a thick ice sheet, in part because carbon dioxide levels were low in those waters several thousand kilometres away.

“The Antarctic Circumpolar Current is 120 times stronger than that of all the rivers on the planet combined, so it’s a very powerful influence on the atmosphere,” Galbraith said.

“If waters in the southern ocean warm quickly, the Antarctic ice sheet will melt, causing water levels worldwide to rise by 70 metres.”

Galbraith, who made his first visits to Antarctica as a guide on tourist ships before he went to graduate school, believes Canada, so focused on the Arctic in its own backyard, would do well to pay more heed to what’s happening on the continent at its polar opposite.