Thank you all, I realise I separate you from lunch, going to try to give this talk expediently.
It’s a special lecture I’ve prepared for today and I’m doing so
because I felt the theme of this year’s meeting is particularly important.
Designing the ability to sustain into the future.
And what I’m going to show you is not a technical lecture, I often talk about the biology of water
and I’m going to bypass that today to share with you I think some images
of what we are losing as the current energy consumption patterns continue.
And this represents also a passion of mine outside of the laboratory and I suspect we all have interests
which sustain us in our careers.
So I’ve entitled this “Canoeing in the Arctic, a Scientists Perspective”.
So in truth when we think of North America often times the greatest attention is put upon the United States.
And if we could have the lights down, I’d be grateful because the show is the slide, not me.
So the attention of course is on the United States and the border of Canada
for more than 99% of the people in North America live in this region and in Mexico.
But north of this is a vast expanse which is often times ignored until some special resources become obvious.
And these discoveries in the Arctic and the Sub-Artic are threatening this right now.
Presently, we have not only the green house gasses emitted from this part of north America which are poisoning the environment
in the Arctic and Sub-Arctic, but the discovery of gem stones, precious minerals
leading to expansive mining efforts up in Canada, as well as the horrific environmental challenges
resulting from the harvesting of oil from the oil sands in northern Alberta.
Combine that with the drilling in the Arctic and northern Alaska, we have a large region of the world which is in peril.
Now the topic of my talk is not so much specifically the environmental insults but what is up there,
what natural organisms reside in the Arctic and Sub-Arctic, what people live there because while it’s sparsely populated,
there’s a beautiful indigenous population that lives there even today.
So I’m going to talk about 4 different expeditions I’ve participated in, in the Sub-Arctic and Arctic,
3 in Canada pedalling the great rivers of the north, the Seal River in northern Manitoba,
the Hayes River, the Hayes being the old fur trading route.
All of the felt hats prepared in Europe in the 18th and 19th century came from furs transported down this river.
The Seal River and the Thelon River in Nunavut.
And these trips were led by Chris Pankow a graduate student at the University of Minnesota
who in his summers leads expeditions into the North.
Our trip into Alaska was a voyage down the Noatak River from the gates of Arctic national park here to the Bearing Sea.
Now we hear a lot about Alaska, there was a presidential, a vice presidential candidate
and most of these people are people that lived down here round around Anchorage
and what I learned in Alaska is that people in the interior of Alaska refer to this as near Alaska, this being the real Alaska.
And we had a really remarkable adventure up there.
And our leader for that, Alexander Huhle, former graduate student in physical chemistry from the University of Dresden.
So how do you get up to the Sub-Arctic, there are no buses, there are no roads, there are no commercial flights,
you basically have to organise float plane transport to get in.
And so it’s an expensive proposition.
But a group of scientist friends and family members joined me on these trips.
And here we are packing off from the North West territories up to the Thelon River.
This is, I’m going to combine these trips so this is not in any chronological order,
all these different rivers shown concomitantly, so we’re going to jump from one field to another.
In Alaska there’s a barrier called the Brooks Range, almost as high as the Alps that one must cross
and these little planes actually are not designed to fly over the mountains.
We were actually flying through the mountain passes, which raise the hair on the back of my head I can tell you.
On the other side then you see the beginnings, the origins of the Noatak, a beautiful Arctic river,
it meanders probably 500 kilometres or so from the ice melt to the Bearing Sea so it’s a very cold river,
the water temperature being between 2 and 5 degrees Celsius.
Then we put down.
To the east now the water is flowing into Hudson Bay from Canada, travels a very flat expanse so eastern,
north eastern Canada is very flat and marshy.
And the waters have to travel a long distance, probably 1,500 kilometres or so before they reach the Hudson Bay
so the water is considerably warmer.
The rivers are really very beautiful from the air
and of course with the midnight sun you arrive in the late evening and it’s still daylight.
Put down and unload.
And by some miracle these pilots can put these planes down and take off again
and you’re on your own for 2 weeks, 3 weeks or longer.
So what is up there, what did we find.
Well first thing we had to put together the canoes and Alex’s precise and organised nature,
obviously a product of his graduate study, we had all the 5 canoes here put out,
laid out and assembled with great precision because they had to withstand significant stress in order to make this voyage.
The Noatak River of about 500 kilometres.
And of course we had consumed enormous amounts of food, you just do a little back of the envelop calculation,
basically human caloric consumption of about 3,000 kilocalories; we were 2 to 3 times that.
So in the end we had probably approaching 800 kilograms of food that we needed to bring to sustain ourselves.
We were able to catch some fish as well.
So we pushed off on the most beautiful trips imaginable.
Now the snow melt in the Arctic is considerable so there’s no summer season, winter season,
there’s a gradual decline during the summer season so these torrents in the early spring declined
and there was relatively small streams with huge expanse of beaches.
And when we climbed up to the top of this ridge to get a view, we saw that the river really extended as far as the eye could see.
Now the issue is anybody up there, has anybody been there, and the answer is yes to both of those questions.
This is an Inukshuk, a small statue of stones created by the native Inuit
who live in this part and lived up there for thousands of years.
With both religious and geological information.
But in fact it’s empty, we were there probably not more than a few hundred people go there in any summer season.
But the turf is guarded, sometimes jealously, here’s an Arctic Tern who thought Elizabeth’s hat looked like a good target,
she got out of the way of trouble.
And again you can get a view of it, in the summer torrent of course all of this is water rushing by
and in the later summer when we were there this declined to a rather small river and almost a desert like environment.
So the Arctic is actually composed of many different micro environments and some of them really quite fragile.
Camping there was a challenge because to gain enough fire wood to cook without trees in most of the areas,
we had to gather shrubs and cut it up.
Then other areas where the micro environment was protected, there’d be some small pockets of forest,
where people have in the past lived, here’s a trappers cabin, obviously had some long months in the winter,
he carved gargoyles on the ends of the logs.
One learns in the Arctic to look at the sky, first off it’s beautiful and secondly it provides information
because the weather is always changing.
Beautiful sun sets.
And the passage was really remarkable also for a sense of how miniscule we humans actually are
in the grand landscape of all of this.
We’re like dots on the horizon here, it’s hard to believe that our species is poisoning this part of the world.
So I’ll tell you about a few of my friends here just as we’re passing because they aren’t vagrant homeless people,
this is actually a distinguished biophysicist from the University of Calgary, Robert French and this is my son Clark, an artist.
Here’s the dean of Duke Medical School, Sandy Williams and a son, a student at Duke.
And we were in awe of the scenery as we pedalled along, it was ever changing.
And as a result of this extreme exercise we were pretty exhausted and took frequent breaks to get some rest.
So the weather changes fast and the winds can kick up in the far north as high as 80 to 100 kilometres per hour
in a matter of hours.
Bringing changes in temperature of 25 degrees or more Celsius.
So one has to be very careful, one has to be prepared, but there’s no alternative but to keep pedalling,
protecting ourselves as well as we could.
Hoping always that the storms would pass, bright sun shine would return and we could continue.
There are other barriers to being in this part of the world, water itself has enormous force
when there’s a disequilibrium and of course in the laboratory we’ve studied the aqua pourings
allowing water to cross cell membranes but on a global scale the energy in water is enormous.
So we had to face barriers such as rapids where even a drop of 1 or 2 metres lead to severe challenges to get through.
Here’s Professor Bennett, I’ll show you some more pictures of him, and Chris pedalling for their lives through the Seal River,
the deaf rapids, they made it, we all made it, but some didn’t.
Here’s a broken canoe discovered in one of the rapids, unfortunate couple, not well prepared,
were marooned there for 3 weeks until help could come.
Again a vast landscape, in some ways similar to the desert.
Tranquil beautiful river.
Now in the southern latitudes, and I say southern being at about the 58th down to the latitude and below
the residue left from the last ice age, called eskers,
these are large sand bars which represent the deposited debris of rivers flowing under glaziers.
And these turned out to be the highways by which the Caribou, the large, the principle large mammal of the north
would migrate from the tundra in the north where they will graze in the summer to the forests in the winter where they would live.
And so here are some of our campsites, always different, often times majestic.
But again strikingly small, miniscule, negligible in terms of the grand landscape of the Arctic.
Now the terrain in the southern latitude changes from a boreal forest to tundra by going through the taiga phase
and the native people, the Deni Indians in this region refer to this as the land of the little sticks,
and I think this illustrates how fragile the Arctic micro or environment is.
These small trees will grow up for just a few years and then a subtle change in weather patterns kills everything,
there’ll be dead trees to the horizon, they call this the land of the little sticks.
And of course horrific forest fires will emerge which is part of the natural process
and the pine cones which are dropped will then germinate, the seeds will grow and forests will grow again.
But again it’s a very fragile environment.
So there’s a lot of life up in the Arctic that you can’t see because it’s under water and here’s Professor Bennett,
my colleague doing his best to catch some of these species, here’s a northern pike,
here’s Chris our guide with a nice lake trout, here’s our son Clark with a chum salmon,
this is from the, now the Alaska trip, the previous 2 are from the Hudson bay trips.
And Doctor Bennett to amuse us, maybe disgust us decided he would demonstrate the true art of sushi preparation
by eating the roe right out of the fish, I tried it, I didn’t care for it too much myself.
So preparing fires to cook the food was often a challenge but these delicious fish steaks would sustain us.
And of course when you’re hungry, when you’re cold, when you’re tired, nothing is as good as a hot meal.
So here’s my Professor friends, here’s my brother Jim, Professor at the University of Minnesota
and here’s Dean Williams from Duke.
And here’s our guide Alex who has perfected the art of baking bread, I mean this guy deserves a Nobel Prize in baking,
to prepare something like this in the Arctic and I’ll explain it later but basically he had a hot fire with rocks in the bottom,
a little platform, he could bake bread which we just relished.
And there were other delicious food prepared for us.
Now this seems like a simple thing, another innovation by a graduate student leading,
this is Chris who developed something that I think Star Bucks ought to consider.
This is called cowboy coffee, you boil up a pot full of grounds and then you centrifuge it
with this round the clock motion, pouring out a brown substance which will put energy in your system you’ve never seen before.
And Alex has designed a very simple system, a shelter system for us to use which we use in sunny weather and foul weather
and in really foul weather this is our shelter against the Arctic winds, there’s nothing else up there.
And there’s also the place where we would carefully change clothes because our sleeping environments in the tents,
we had to have clothes that were never used while we were eating, so this is my brother putting on his sleeping gear,
very distinguished long underwear set as we head out to the sleeping tents.
Because of the hazards of bears in the region, one couldn’t eat in the same clothes and have them in the tent
because you might meet a big surprise in the middle of the night.
And in Canada it’s required that expeditions carry a shotgun.
We of course never used it but the team posed here for an interesting group picture.
So the tundra itself is amazing, anyone who has been to the Arctic will tell you
that it’s a vast expanse to the horizon with nothing that you can see, just permafrost.
And of course the permafrost reaches, is important in the eruption of sub permafrost heaving’s, these are called pingos.
This is clay from beneath the permafrost, permafrost under pressure would erupt in these small hills.
So at the end of a day when the weather is warm there is also a risk of mosquitoes, black flies and other insects.
I didn’t take this photo to catch the flies but you can see that they are pretty abundant.
And so we had to take some precautions to keep our hide.
This didn’t work, I’m going to ask Harry Kroto if he can help us with it,
as far as I can tell scare flies don’t scare the flies, but these are pretty nice, you can have a nice meal in an enclosed area.
Now behind the river banks, back through the muddy areas is often times an immensely lush glade
where the tropic greenery is incredibly intense and this is of course where the caribou graze,
it’s incredibly green and it provides the nutrients for that species.
And also beautiful Arctic flowers in all different colours and shapes.
These are cloud berries, these are delicious berries, you can pick them by the bucket.
And of course on the bare rocks the lichens would grow very slowly and there is considerable wild life.
Here are 2 Arctic swans.
And there’s often evidence of mammals but you don’t see the mammals too often, here’s the skull of a musk ox
and here are the tracks of the caribou which seem to be ubiquitous even though on most of the trips
the caribou were very evasive, hard to see.
Here’s our daughter Claire with 2 caribou antlers.
And I’d like to draw your attention to the shapes of these
because you should notice on the front of one of each of the antlers, this one is a scoop like area,
which is used by the caribou to scrape snow away from the tundra while grazing in the winter.
And Professor Bennett found some caribou fur which he thought would be useful in terms of maybe some underpants or a hat.
So where there are caribou there are wolves, we would hear them frequently, we would see them rarely.
But there was evidence that they were very carefully hiding from us, lodging themselves in the river sides,
waiting for the great migrations of the caribou because the caribou move in tens of thousands from the far north to the south.
And of course there’s evidence of a lot of caribou slaughter by the wolves.
And here if you look carefully is an Arctic wolf, I just caught it across the river at some distance.
So we finally at the end of our Thelon River trip saw a caribou.
This is the sentinel, there are actually hundreds of caribou hidden on the other side of the river.
So he was sent out to scout, sent out a few more, we got some glimpses of these.
And of course before the young caribou will cross the river the bulls will scout things out.
And here I have a picture of a remarkable caribou bull, this is Chris, our guide.
Now the caribou provide the nutrition for the people of the north, the average Inuit family needs 8 caribou to survive the winter.
And here’s a cabin, a wrecked cabin of a group of hunters who because of an alternation in the migration of the caribou
and this is where global climate change is wreaking havoc with their lives.
Because it’s no longer predictable when the caribou will move from the far north to the south and they missed timed it
and they starved to death.
So when the weather is nice and warm and there’s enough breeze to keep the flies off, like everybody everywhere,
we take our clothes off to enjoy the sun.
So the Americans seem to enjoy taking their shirts off.
Doctor Bennett showing us his wrestler’s physique.
The German’s, this is Heiko, they seem to prefer to take their pants off.
(laughter).
And the Canadians seem to want to take everything off and go fishing.
Usually head wear was pretty important because not only the sun which can be blistering, the rain, the wind,
so here’s Elizabeth Cousens, a business woman from Winnipeg who was on one of our trips and me with new hats,
we’re sort of dandified.
Here’s Chris and Van with their old hats, Van’s hat was so old and dilapidated it disintegrated at the end of this trip
so he now has a new hat.
Here’s John Holman, a friend of ours with male pattern baldness
who covered his head very compulsively to protect himself and he was very sensitive to mosquitoes.
Here’s the young people, they appear to prefer the ball caps, here’s our son Clark, here’s our friend Linden,
a software engineer from North Caroline and here’s Heiko, a German engineer from Ravensburg
who insisted to enjoy the full Arctic, he would not wear a hat, when reminded to wear a hat he would give us a grimace like that.
So there are a number of visitors we found in our campsites, here’s a porcupine that came along one night for a meal,
a beautiful little red fox.
And seals on the Seal River, here’s a bearded seal, handsome, I wish I could grow my moustache like that.
There are some predators, often times out of sight, here’s a young grizzly on the banks.
and of course these are the hazards we had to be very careful of.
But they’re timid, he trotted for the cover.
But near the coast, particularly the coast of Hudson bay are the polar bears and they’re enormous in size,
here’s a polar bear that entered our camping area one night.
This is my foot and that’s his foot.
They’re 500, 600 kilograms in the male species.
Here’s Bob French’s hand and a fore paw of a polar bear.
And the Muskox, amazing beautiful animals, looking at them from a safe distance,
you're looking back on a species whose lives have been unaltered since the last ice age,
wouldn’t that fur feel nice and warm on a cold winter day.
And then the bay itself, of course beluga whales.
And so Hudson bay is an interesting, very interesting, very shallow interior sea,
when the tides are out it’s an enormous expanse of mud and rocks.
When the tides are in it’s quite a beautiful coast line.
And we ended our journeys at the coast.
Here I am with our daughter and our son after a 2 ½ week paddle down the Seal River.
Here’s the end of another voyage on the Hayes River, the fur trading river, to a place called York Factory,
a large settlement in the 18th and 19th century, with perhaps a thousand or more individuals working in this area.
Now it’s a parks Canada location cared for by Floyd the Cree Indian keeper.
And surrounded by swampy area where the polar bears live in the summer,
in a state of semi starvation so he carries the rifle just as a precaution.
And here Clark and I are just as we left.
The village itself now is gone, nature reclaims its own, it’s just a graveyard and then the parks Canada site which is preserved.
And flying away in a small float plane you get a glimpse of how tiny this York Factory
really is in the great expanse of eastern Canada.
Other voyages ended in Inuit villages, this is the Seal River in Alaska, our last day after 3 weeks of pedalling,
a couple, this lady and her husband, an Eskimo couple, Inuit is the term used in eastern Canada,
Eskimo is the term used in Alaska.
And you’ll see in their boat are logs and the sad truth is they’re out cutting down trees
and the trees of course take decades if not centuries to grow that far north because the cost of heating oil is now out of reach.
The myth that areas and regions that generate a lot of oil will provide cheap revenue locally is not true.
In Alaska last summer the cost of heating oil, a barrel of heating oil,
I guess that would be about 200 litres of oil was more than $500,
unaffordable so they’re burning the trees in preparation for the winter.
And the villages themselves are very modest and there’s a sadness because there’s a conflict here
between the technology of modern life and their own technology.
They’re very religious people but the young have adopted these dune buggies,
all terrain vehicles even though the roads to no where, just to amuse themselves.
And of course like anything man made it has a finite life.
But the culture of the Inuit is preserved and this is I think one of the special joys of the trip,
this is a sign at the recreation centre in Baker Lake, an Inuit village on Hudson bay and the instructions,
if you can’t read them, to the young people, no fighting, no spitting,
no intoxicated person is allowed in the building or the Royal Canadian mounted police will be notified.
No drinking of alcohol, drugs or solvent abuse.
And of course solvent abuse, gasoline huffing is a huge problem in the young in the north.
No running around, no swearing, anyone damaging hamlet property will be asked to leave the building.
And helmets must be worn by every person playing ice hockey.
It’s a very family oriented culture and we were fortunate to arrive in this village the day of their annual fall feast.
And what you see here is a caribou feast.
And although we asked if we could pay to participate, they insisted on inviting us in and refused to accept any money.
It’s a very family oriented culture.
This gentle lady, Irene Amaruq, her name Irene a Christian name, Amaruq the Inuit for wolf, brought us a plate to eat.
And here we have a family, I think there were 4 generations, possibly 5 generations, all sitting together, very family oriented.
And there’s a young mother and her baby.
And babies are revered in their culture.
Her great grandmother now has the same baby on display.
And of course here’s a little child with a little pooh bear in her papoose.
And they’ve retained their culture as well as they can and here’s some of the native costumes at this wonderful festival.
And they performed singing and dancing, notice their leggings.
And we were asked to participate in the judging of the costumes and it’s very interesting, the Inuit in their culture,
they don’t have judges to provide a single prize, there were 12 contestants,
there were 12 judges and every contestant won a prize.
They have a different idea about competition.
And here are 2 beautiful old women who were singing the most beautiful songs.
I asked a young Inuit what they were singing and he listened carefully
and he said they’re singing about the past before the white people came.
And then he looked at me kind of sadly and he says now they’re singing
about what it will be like when the white people go again, because they expect us to disappear.
They realise that global climate change is real and they expect to survive because they can adapt to their environment,
but they worry about us.
So this is a picture I guess relevant to the topic of the Nobel Prize and here I am with my family.
And I’d just like to make 2 points to the young people here.
In his will Alfred Nobel asked the prizes to be awarded to individuals whose invention or discovery
was of the greatest benefit to mankind.
And I think this latter statement is very important to keep in mind.
The research we do in our laboratories is novel, it’s exciting
but in the end we should keep in mind how this can be applied to protect mankind and also the wilderness.
So the Nobel Prize every year creates a wave of publicity, every October,
the first story on every new station is the Nobel Prize in medicine, physics, chemistry
and then they go on to economics, literature and finally peace.
And so the prize itself is awarded to a recipient but I think many of us feel like it’s not exactly
given that we should get the prize, perhaps the larger message is that the prize is awarded
and all of science benefits from the recognition of what we do
because there’s so much great science ongoing in laboratories all around the world.
it’s a very important endeavour.
And there’s a second prize here and that’s the people standing around with me, my wife Mary who is here at the conference,
our children, our 4 kids, because each of us has a family and friends
and it’s important that we recognise their contributions into our careers
and we take some time to acknowledge that and thank them.
So I guess as we grow older, while the Nobel part of our careers is very important,
we’ll think back perhaps just as much on these times we spent with family and friends
and I hope some of you have a chance to go to the Arctic and enjoy the wilderness.
So that’s my presentation and I think now it’s time for lunch, thank you so much.
(applause).