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NUNAVUT
Swimsuit models and hot rods have no place near the poles, so it makes sense that a new calendar raising funds for polar scientists would feature something that gets them more excited: a decent place to answer the call of nature.

The Association of Polar Early Career Scientists Polar Potties calendar features Marc Edwards’ scene from Alexandra Fiord on Ellesmere Island as its July 2012 photo. The Sphinx and Skraeling Islands are in the background.o - photo courtesy of Marc Edwards

“One of the fun things that bonds polar scientists together is the outdoor toilet experience,” said Dr. Jenny Baeseman, director of the Association of Polar Early Career Scientists (APECS). The Tromso, Norway-based non-profit group plans to use the funds raised from the Polar Potties calendar to train young scientists how to share their findings with the general public, who – through government funding – typically pay for their research.

The calendar features 12 different toilets photographed on location in the Arctic or Antarctic. Weaned from about 55 entries, three of the 12 photos are from Nunavut.

“Some have great views. Marc Edwards put in a nice photo of an old outhouse that overlooks the sea, and you can see icebergs in the sea off Ellesmere Island and it's just really beautiful,” Baeseman said. “Others are very creative holes in the ground. One of my favourites is simply a bucket on the ice sheet in Antarctica. It's just an amazing expanse of nothing but snow and sky, and there's your toilet in the middle of nowhere.”

APECS made a prototype calendar last year that made German environmental scientist Torsten Sachs “laugh every time I looked at it,” he said by email, noting he hadn’t seen the finished 2012 version. Sachs, who leads a young researcher group studying the exchange of greenhouse gases between the Earth and the atmosphere primarily in Arctic tundra ecosystems, submitted the September 2012 photo of a toilet on Bathurst Island.

“It's part of everyday life in the field and one of the first things to think about and construct when setting up camp somewhere in the Arctic,” Sachs said.

There are several things to consider when planning a toilet, he said.

“You need to find a good spot – with a view; you need building material, which is sometimes hard to find; and you need to figure out how to dig a hole in the frozen ground,” he said. “It's the first team-building exercise upon arrival in the field and then one of the most basic and important pieces of camp infrastructure.”

When it comes to doing numbers one and two, setting up a place to do these things is actually the number two priority.

“Bathrooms are the second most important part of field camps, after the kitchen,” Michelle Trommelen stated by email. A Quaternary geology PhD student working for the Manitoba government, Trommelen’s photo of a rainbow pointing to a toilet at the CNGO-GSC Southwest Baffin Island geological field camp is the image for May 2012.

“This year’s construction (of the toilet) took five people and a whole afternoon,” she stated.

Kristen Peck, a biology undergraduate studying alpine ecology at the University of Alberta, submitted the August 2012 photo from the Pika Camp in the Yukon.

“It was a riot to look through the diversity of solutions to the same polar problem,” she stated by email. “Trying to place human waste in an area with frozen soil and no plumbing is an important part of field life and something that not everyone immediately thinks about.”

These types of field lessons are critical for young researchers, and APECS helps by linking them with senior mentors who share knowledge that cannot be learned from a textbook or in a lab. The group has members around the world working in any field – including biology, glaciology, economic development, polar law – related to the Arctic, Antarctic, Himalayas, and the general cryosphere, Baeseman said.

“We're hoping this will send a message that researchers do have a fun side,” Baeseman said, “and are out in nature participating in the environment and are not just sitting in a lab being book nerds.”

APECS is accepting submissions for 2013, and is considering publishing two calendars: one of “polar potties” and another of “polar hotties,” she said.

“When we solicited for pictures of potties, we also asked for polar hotties, if you will,” she said. “We got some, but we didn't get enough that were tasteful enough to put in a calendar. There were some extremely amusing ones, but we want it to be tasteful. We'll see what kind of pictures we get.”

Anyone can submit by visiting the group’s website, where the calendar is also for sale.

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