SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
A presentation on a possible oil seep in Baffin Bay was attended by just four people, including news media, at the Nunavut Research Institute last week.
Karen Foster, a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Earth Observation Science at the University of Manitoba, points to the area of Baffin Bay where scientists believe they may have found an undocumented underwater oil seep. - Peter Worden/NNSL photo |
Despite the presence in Iqaluit of the Nunavut mining symposium running concurrently, Dr. Karen Foster's presentation on hydrocarbon sediments in Baffin Bay was given to a room only one-fifth full.
Foster's research, which involved a team of scientists working aboard the research vessel Amundsen collecting sediment cores from the sea floor in Baffin Bay and Davis Strait, revealed what she describes as a site of a natural oil seep.
"People put a lot of time and money into finding out where seeps are," said Foster, a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Earth Observation Science at the University of Manitoba.
Oil seeps occur naturally all over the world. Currently, there are six documented oil seeps in the Arctic—four in the Beaufort Sea, one in Scott Inlet and one in Barrow Strait.
"With the Nunavut mining symposium underway in Iqaluit, the research data that (Foster) is working on points to entire industrial sector areas of future interest," said Bert Rose, who was one of four people in attendance at Foster's discussion. Rose called the tie-in of her team's research to modern industrial uses "obvious."
Scientists estimate somewhere between 90 and 400 billion barrels of oil exist in Arctic reserves. With polar ice extent at a historic low this winter, Foster said accessibility will become more feasible as will shipping traffic.
To date, no such data has been collected for Baffin Bay.
Foster said the sedimentary columns her team collects provide a "natural archive" of current and preindustry-era activity, much like fingerprints, and can tell if the source of hydrocarbons was natural or caused by combustion or spills.
She said the chemical profiling of sediment cores is "tricky" since hydrocarbons accumulate through spills, runoff and combustion as well as through natural sources such as plants, algae and forest fires.
To complicate matters, Baffin Bay's North Water Polynya - slow moving water that never freezes - is a nexus of many currents.
Foster will conduct further research aboard the Amundsen this summer, chemical profiling the sea floor's hydrocarbons and hopefully getting to the bottom, so to speak, of a newly discovered oil seep.
