Arctic science summer camp
UBC student Kristina Brown travels north each year to help unlock the secrets of Arctic ice

For some people, going "up north" means a boring two-hour drive out of the city. For Kristina Brown, "up north" is the real deal—all the way to the Arctic Ocean.

Kristina is a PhD student studying oceanography at the University of British Columbia. In 2006, she was invited to spend a few weeks on the icebreaker CCGS Louis S. St-Laurent, a research ship operated by the Canadian Coast Guard. She never really thought of the Arctic as a place to go and do research, but from her first moments aboard the ship she was hooked—and has gone back every summer since.

Arctic ice and the carbon cycle

Kristina's research looks at how changing sea ice affects what's called the 'carbon cycle'—the movement of the element carbon between the air, water and land. This is very important, because not only is carbon needed by all life on Earth, but when it's in the form of carbon dioxide gas, it can also contribute to the warming of the planet.

In the Arctic, sea ice can act like a 'cap' over the water beneath it, limiting the movement of carbon dioxide between the atmosphere and the ocean. As the summers get warmer and the sea ice gets thinner, the total area covered by the ice will shrink. As a result, there will be more interaction between the ocean and the atmosphere—which could have a big impact on the Arctic carbon cycle. Kristina's research will help scientists better predict how changing sea ice conditions will affect distributions of carbon dioxide in oceans all over the world.

Aboard the Amundsen

While she's made a few trips aboard the Louis S. St-Laurent, in the summer of 2009 Kristina took her first voyage on another icebreaker, the Amundsen. That two-week journey took her from the Mackenzie River in the Northwest Territories to Banks Island in the Beaufort Sea and back again.

During her time on the Amundsen, Kristina collected seawater from all different depths using Niskin bottles, which are attached to a metal frame called a 'rosette'. (When the rosette reaches a depth where a sample is to be collected, an electronic trigger closes the Niskin bottle and traps the water inside.) Once the rosette was back onboard, Kristina analyzed the samples in the ship's lab to see what nutrients and chemical tracers (such as carbon) were inside.

Kristina also worked on the ice to collect core samples—taken by drilling out long cylinders of ice—to measure thickness and temperature. Some of the samples were cut into smaller pieces and taken back to the ship, where they were melted and studied like the seawater. Others were stored on the ship and taken to laboratories across Canada, where they were analyzed in the months following the expedition.

Kristina's trip aboard the Amundsen was part of the International Polar Year's GEOTRACES program, which included not only researchers from all over Canada, but several from Europe as well.

"There was a lot of collaboration and working together," she says. "It was really interesting to see how my work fits in with other research being done around the world."

Return to the Arctic

Three days after her Amundsen trip ended, Kristina was back on the Louis S. St-Laurent. Why does she keep going back to the Arctic? Besides being such a beautiful and interesting place to work, she always looks forward to reuniting with her fellow researchers. She says it's a bit like going to summer camp—except for the fact that everybody actually wants to be there! (Speaking of camps, Kristina hopes one day to move her research from the "warm and comfortable" ship and to a base camp on the ice itself. It'll be a tough transition, she says, but she's up for the challenge.)

Kristina says students should know that if they're interested in studying the Arctic or simply passionate about science there are a lot of opportunities to get involved.

"There's still so much that we don't know," she says. "And there are so many possibilities for people of all backgrounds to get involved and add to our understanding of the region."