Focus turns to finding Terror
Parks Canada search team actively underway with summer field work
Michele LeTourneau
Northern News Services
Monday, July 25, 2016
KITIKMEOT
Tightening the noose around the lost HMS Terror tops the agenda for the Parks Canada search team this year, eight years after the first expedition to find Sir John Franklin's lost ships.
The Erebus was found in September 2014 thanks to Inuit oral history collected by Gjoa Haven's Louie Kamookak and state-of-the-art technology. Above, a first look at the Franklin shipwreck obtained from side-scan sonar data. - photo courtesy of Parks Canada - |
"We'll see a similar team to the last few years, but the greater focus of energy will (be) on the search for the Terror," said Ryan Harris, senior underwater archaeologist with Parks Canada's underwater archaeology team and the lead archaeologist for the Franklin wrecks.
The Erebus was found in September 2014 thanks to Inuit oral history collected by Gjoa Haven's Louie Kamookak and state-of-the-art technology.
In early June, when Harris spoke with Nunavut News/North, the team was "feverishly gearing up for the summer field work."
"We're going to try to divide our time between the two sites, which is challenging," Harris said, who calls this season a transitional year. "We'll spend more of our time looking for the Terror farther north on Victoria Strait."
The team has been looking in Victoria Strait since 2011, beginning at the mouth where the straight bottlenecks and funnels into Alexandra Strait. So far they've covered in excess of 800,000 to 900,000 square kilometres.
"The thought is that the Erebus made it through that strait and somehow the Terror did not, based on Inuit accounts."
There are two possible scenarios regarding the Terror, according to Harris. Either the wreck is destroyed or the wreck is pristine, waiting to be found. As he explains it, in 2011 the team began scanning the edge of the bottleneck.
"Where all the ice builds up under tremendous pressure, it catches itself in the bottleneck as it tries to force itself into the narrow of Alexandra Strait. One of our thoughts is that perhaps the ship got caught in this highly dynamic ice, between the immobile land-fast ice near shore and the sluggishly mobile ice."
The team has slowly made its way north and east towards Victory Point where the two ships were abandoned in 1848 by the crews and towards Erebus Bay, where a couple of the boats were discovered in 1859. That's also where a few of the first casualties of the expedition were found.
"It's possible we're getting close. We'd like to think so," said Harris.
"But as we progress the water gets deeper and deeper."
The team encountered, in 2011 and after, deep furrows etched into the Victoria Strait sea floor by ice keels, ice dragging down and scouring the bottom, said Harris.
"In excess of 50 metres below the present-day surface. We don't know how old these drags are. But suffice to say, if the Terror had been caught in the tracks of one of these ice drags it would have been obliterated."
The good news is there are fewer and fewer of the furrows as they progress farther north.
 | "You don't get a do-over" | 
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"The sea floor is increasingly absolutely featureless, unblemished. If we can capture a wreck site there it stands to be absolutely immaculate in terms of being well-preserved."
Harris gives the example of the Breadalbane, a transport ship bringing supplies to a Franklin search party in 1853, which sank about a half-mile south of Beechey Island.
"It was 90 metres below the present-day surface. It has the reputation of being the best-preserved ship in the world. We hope that we might be similarly lucky with the Terror, if we're to find it."
As for the Erebus, the hard, painstaking work of careful excavation will soon begin in earnest. The work must be done safely and ethically.
"You don't get a do-over. It's a slow, scientific discipline," said Harris.
"One thing we're hoping to accomplish this summer within a limited amount of time is to, for the first time, insert a small remotely operated vehicle - a guided robot, essentially - into the (Erebus) wreck to try to manoeuvre it down into the lower recesses of the ship."
The idea is to "visualize" parts of the ship that haven't yet been seen, such as the hold and the aft hold where the steam engines should be located.
"The bowels of the ship, the stores. We never know what we might come across," said Harris, who hopes the team will be in full operation around Aug. 10 to 15, depending on wind and ice.
As per previous years, the main platform is the Canadian Coast Guard Ship Sir Wilfrid Laurier, with the Arctic Research Vessel Martin Bergman also on site. But fewer weeks will be spent in the field. Harris said they plan for a week or two of actual surveying.
"The work we need to do on the Erebus site is very intensive and requires more infrastructure on site. We can't really operate with small Zodiacs on the site so we're really looking at 2017 as the year where we're going to start more in the way of in-depth investigation and excavation to learn what we hope to learn."
While searching, investigating and excavating, the team also collects data for the Canadian Hydrographic Service to be incorporated into new, updated navigational charts for the area for safer passage.
"If you actually look at the currently published paper charts for Victoria Strait, Alexandra Strait, Wilmot and Crampton Bay - the areas where we've been surveying - they're largely white. No depths indicated, or very few of them. Hydrographics has a great saying.
"They call it slaying dragons when they're surveying these areas. It refers to 16th century charts where you see the new world inaccurately rendered and big sea serpents in the corner of the map."
