Elders teach history and traditional skills in college classroom
20 year old aims to get more youth involved in bridging traditional and scientific knowledge
Beth Brown
Northern News Services
Thursday, November 10, 2016
IKALUKTUTIAK/CAMBRIDGE BAY
Mia Otokiak braces herself against the wind, focusing on her 30-centimetre ruler.
Mia Otokiak takes daily measurements at a snow monitoring station in Cambridge Bay. Data goes toward Ocean Network Canada's Safe Passage Project for predicting changes to freeze and thaw patterns of sea ice. - photos courtesy of Brydon Beattie
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She is measuring daily pile-up on a community "snowboard" in Cambridge Bay.
"On one board we do three different measurements. Then we add them up and divide them by three to get the average measurement of the snow."
The 20-year-old Inuk woman is an Arctic youth science ambassador for Oceans Network Canada (ONC).
The B.C. based science education organization has three new sets of snow monitoring stations in the hamlet.
Each snow station is made of two boards, or metre by metre pieces of wood.
"With the board on the right, every time I'm done getting my measurements I wipe it off," said Otokiak. "And the one that's on the left, I leave that there to accumulate snow, to see how much is going to fall throughout the whole winter."
Once the bay freezes over three more snowboards will be put out on the ice.
Data collected from the stations is being used in a recent partnership project with ONC and Polar Knowledge Canada, called the Safe Passage Project.
The purpose of the project is to develop a more concrete understanding of sea-ice freeze-up and break-up in the western Arctic, around Cambridge Bay and in Dease Strait, as well as in the eastern Arctic around Deception Bay and Hudson Strait.
Scientists on the project will create computerized models that can predict how snow and ice patterns in the regions develop.
"We are not at the predictions stage," said Maia Hoeberechts of the University of Victoria, who oversees community initiatives for Ocean Networks Canada in Cambridge Bay.
"We are still gathering data and refining the models but the eventual outcome is to be able to inform predictions that Environment Canada does around ice forecast."
Info for the models will come in part from large scale science measurements, such as satellite imagery, but also by way of traditional knowledge from hunters and elders and manual measurements from communities taken by people such as Otokiak.
"When you create a model you need to check that your model is accurate. One way of checking that is simply measuring whatever the model is meant to be predicting," said Hoeberechts.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays Otokiak brings two high school students to monitor the stations with her.
This semester she is working with a Grade 10 science class. The students plan to use the data for their entry in a regional science fair.
Cambridge Bay is one of the few communities in Nunavut that offers a full set of academic biology, chemistry and physics classes, said Otokiak.
"Not a lot of students want to take these classes. They think they can't do it, they think they're not smart enough."
She said having students involved in "hands-on research " that contributes to the work of actual scientists trying to make things better for the hamlet creates incredible buy-in.
And, Otokiak is in a place to foster that interest.
"I graduated from Kiilinik High School where I am working," she said.
"When I first started with Ocean Networks I gave a presentation to high school students and I got to bring it to their level and make them realize that they can graduate and they can get through science. It might be a lot of work but it's definitely worth it in the end."
Ocean Networks Canada has a K-to-12 program called Ocean Sense that Otokiak has been trained to start up in the hamlet. She will be building a lesson plan on an ice profiler that sits at the bottom of the bay. The instrument is part of a community observatory installed by Oceans Network Canada in Cambridge Bay in 2012.
The underwater platform sits about 50 metres away from the shoreline, said Ryan Flagg, support engineer for the observatory. It looks a bit like a tripod, and sits about seven or eight metres deep.
A 200 metre cable runs off the main dock and along the sea floor to power the platform. On the dock is
a shore station with a weather monitor and camera to create a daily time lapse.
Flagg said the combination of real-time ice thickness data, water temperature and air temperature measurements gathered from the observatory greatly increases the scope of the models being developed for the Safe Passage Project.
"We have started to create and refine a mathematical model for understanding when things freeze up or thaw and how that is changing each year," he said.
Otokiak and her supervisor Mercedes McLean will be presenting the Safe Passage Project at ArcticNet's annual scientific meeting in Winnipeg, from Dec 5 to 9.
