This year, my team had the opportunity to take part in an expedition
to the Last Ice Area.
So in my research I have been doing modelling
and predicting how ice in the Arctic will melt.
So every year the sea ice is melting and thawing and freezing again.
But overall, the permanent ice is shrinking.
There is one area that has been estimated to be the area that will melt the last.
It's also the oldest ice.
And that area is along the Canadian High Arctic and Greenland.
And so that area is the Last Ice Area.
Our expedition is hoping to contribute to the international effort
to better understand what organisms are living there,
how they are living there,
how they might be affected by a changing climate
and what it means for the rest of the planet.
We went to an island called Ward Hunt Island.
It's the last land before the North Pole.
It's north of the magnetic pole
and actually it's less than 800 kilometres south of the geographic north pole.
And that island, Ward Hunt Island, is in a park called Quttinirpaaq National Park
and Quttinirpaaq means top of the world in Inuktitut.
In my research group, we're particularly interested
in microscopic life, so the invisible life.
Until recently, it was thought that all the High Arctic,
the ice and the frozen land are deserts with nothing living there.
But now we are seeing that it's actually full of life,
only that the life is different and so the life there is microscopic.
Now it's a really exciting time to study microscopic life
because we have DNA sequencing, and the advent of DNA sequencing
allowed us to make microscopic life visible.
So we can now study their DNA and see what they are, how many there are,
and how they're able to grow and survive in these environments.
So in order to study the microscopic life in the high Arctic
we had to collect different types of samples.
So we were very interested in what's living in the water.
And for that we collected some samples where we went to the shore
where there was a little bit of the ice that had melted
and we could collect water samples from the site.
To collect water samples from the middle of the lake
we had to go on the top of the ice and drill holes into the ice
and then lift and let a water sampler through the ice
to collect the water from the bottom of the lake.
We're also very interested in studying biofilms
that are made out of cyanobacteria that grow along the edges
of any of the lakes systems that you find in the Arctic.
These biofilms are complex microbial communities.
They are organised by different organisms and they're kind of like miniature cities
where phototrophic organisms like cyanobacteria
are like the trees that are growing and are primary producers
and other organisms living within their structures.
We think that phototrophic biofilms are key communities
in Arctic aquatic ecosystems.
In order to study them with DNA sequencing,
we collect them using sterile equipment
and then we freeze them
and take them back to the Natural History Museum for further analysis.
So our fieldwork being based in the Last Ice Area
we of course were very interested to study what's happening on the ice.
As part of the work,
we had the opportunity to venture out on the Ward Hunt ice shelf,
which is one of the remaining Ellesmere ice shelves.
And we ventured out there and collected sediments
and water from the meltwater ponds
to understand what organisms are living there and what the unique communities are.
So these environments are very extreme.
So most of the year everything is frozen.
And then only during a short time period during the summer
there are meltwater ponds forming on top of the ice shelf
and allowing microscopic life to grow and thrive.
And we think that there will be many new species
that can be discovered from the ice shelf
and potentially some of these species
might also be of importance for biotechnology
and might help us to find new medical drugs
and other compounds of importance for the wider public.
Another topic that we are also interested in
is that with a changing climate the conditions in the Arctic
are getting milder and so that allows for animals and plants
and potentially also their diseases to move more northwards.
As part of this, we were interested to see
if we can find microscopic diseases in the water, in the lakes
that are relevant for plants and animals.
So studying the microbial diversity will not only allow us to find out
what's living there in the environment and how they adapted,
but it might also help us to understand what diseases can be found
in the polar regions and what their distribution is
and how we can monitor them with climate change.
Climate change is affecting everybody, but it's particularly dramatic
in the Canadian Arctic where rapid warming has been observed,
and that has a big impact for the people living there.
And a lot of changes have been observed in the environment
that might mean that species have been lost and it will affect
how people are living up in the high Arctic.
So we have to gather the knowledge from the people living in these environments
that been living there for thousands of years
and putting together all our knowledge to understand what's there,
creating baseline data and understand how it might change
and how it will affect the way of life in the North
and how it also affects biodiversity.
This expedition was a really big success.
We were able to go there despite all the delays with the weather.
We got really interesting data
and we are really looking forward to studying the data,
working together with our international collaborators.
With our research, we will obtain new data
to understand how the environment
is affected by climate change and how quickly it might change.
And hopefully our findings will inform future research
and maybe help with the protection and management
of these unique environments in the Arctic.