Canada 150’s Remote Research Success: From the Stars to the Sea

The Canada 150 Research Chair (C150) Program supported new insights into sea ice and deep space, thanks to two United States scientists who came to Canada to pursue their research as part of the Government of Canada’s $117.6 million program.

In 2018, Julienne Stroeve joined the University of Manitoba as the C150 in Climate Sea Ice Coupling and Jonathan Sievers joined McGill University as the C150 in Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. While the positions are based in Winnipeg and Montréal respectively, their research interests take them further afield to other parts of Canada.

From Stroeve’s field work on Hudson Bay and the Arctic Ocean to Sievers’s analysis of data from northern Quebec and the Arctic, the two researchers have made significant research contributions as C150s over the last seven years.

Julienne Stroeve

A renowned polar researcher, Stroeve has worked for more than 20 years to deepen our understanding of rapid Arctic sea ice change and what it will mean for the rest of the planet. She has appeared in TV documentaries, briefed high-level US government officials, and spoken on panels at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

“I believe it’s important to talk to others outside of the science community to help them understand the importance of what is happening in the Arctic,” she says.

The US-born Stroeve spent much of her career at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, but was in the United Kingdom, leading the University College London’s Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling, when the University of Manitoba reached out about the C150 opportunity.

“Over the last seven years, the C150 program has been instrumental in helping me develop new instrumentation for field campaigns, and it has allowed me to further research in the Canadian Arctic,” she says.

The first thing Stroeve did as a C150 was build a radar system that can accurately measure sea ice thickness and snow depth from satellite data. She put it to the test in 2019 when she joined the MOSAiC expedition, which brought 300 climate scientists from around the world aboard a German icebreaker in the frozen Arctic Ocean. For four and a half months that winter, Stroeve worked in almost complete darkness, collecting measurements with the groundbreaking new instrument.

“It provided a lot of new insights into how radar waves interact with the snow and ice cover, with the potential to lead to new satellite missions. It is also going to improve the way we process current radar altimeter data to derive sea ice thickness, because we now understand that the current methods are not quite accurate enough,” she says. “That's all thanks to the data we collected because of the C150 grant.”

Stroeve contributed to a key study in 2020 showing the Arctic Ocean will very likely be ice free in the summer, starting before 2050. How often it is ice free depends on future CO2 emissions: if emissions are reduced rapidly, ice-free years will be occasional; but with higher emissions, it is predicted the Arctic Ocean will have ice-free summers most years.

In this context, the new instrument that Stroeve developed is more important than ever. For example, Northern communities will need to be able to monitor ice thickness on lakes and ice roads with a high level of accuracy to ensure their safety. The instrument is already in high demand, with it travelling as far as Antarctica to measure ice there.

Stroeve is looking to build a drone-based version of her ice-measuring instrument that could become more widely available.

“If you start building these prototypes, and it becomes more affordable, then communities could use it as well and do their own monitoring with drones,” she says. “That’s the next step.”

As the C150 program draws to a close, Stroeve is upbeat about the new relationships and collaborations she has formed with Canadian scientists, including in a research area new to her: polar bears. She notes that at the Churchill Barber Symposium, an annual knowledge exchange forum open to the public, Indigenous groups reported seeing more bears than they used to on the Hudson Bay coast. Stroeve’s research connects the increase in human-bear encounters specifically to sea ice loss. She co-authored her first paper on polar bears in 2024, published in Nature, and a second article is in the works.

“I definitely want to continue the polar bear work,” she says. “I like it when my research involves working with other people and looking at some of the implications of continued ice loss, which helps people better understand why this work matters.”

Jonathan Sievers

A groundbreaking cosmologist, Sievers is seeking answers about the origins of the universe by analyzing data from telescopes.

“We don’t really understand what space is, and I’d really like to,” he says. “At the end of the day, we're trying to answer very fundamental questions.”

Over the course of his career, Sievers, who was also born in the US, has sought out remote, radio-quiet places to set up equipment and conduct his research without interference from the modern world. In a previous role with the University of KwaZulu-Natal, he set up the first radio telescope on Marion Island, located halfway between South Africa and Antarctica. He also led the creation of a massive telescope array, known as HIRAX, under construction in the Karoo, a vast semidesert in South Africa’s interior.

In 2018, Sievers was persuaded to move his research to Canada. He became the C150 in Theoretical and Observational Cosmology at McGill University, holding positions with the Department of Physics and the Trottier Space Institute.

“The C150 program is really the thing that made the difference in deciding to come here,” Sievers says. “The resources are really amazing.”

When he reflects on the last seven years, he is most proud of his successful efforts to bring “serious astronomy efforts” up to the McGill Arctic Research Station (MARS).

“We've been able to turn the Arctic into a thriving place for radio astronomy research, and that would not at all have happened without C150,” Sievers says.

The seasonal research base, located on the uninhabited Axel Heiberg Island in the Arctic Ocean, was previously visited mostly by biologists and geologists.

“Just keeping the power on is an enormous, enormous struggle,” Sievers says. “Watching it really develop and come together has been very satisfying.”

Together with other MARS researchers, Sievers is looking for ways to improve the infrastructure, and potentially build a landing strip, to make even better use of the station. 

In addition to MARS, Sievers collects and interprets data from a northern Quebec research station on the edge of the Manicouagan Crater Lake, 12 hours northeast by car from Montréal.

"Station Uapishka is majority Innu-owned,” Sievers says. “We work with them quite closely, and they've been incredibly supportive of our work. Without them, it's safe to say doing tests in Quebec would have been virtually impossible.”

Both MARS and Station Uapishka are quiet enough to hear radio signals from the past, supporting one of Sievers’s major projects as a C150: searching for the signal from the birth of the first stars.

“It comes up in radio, but the place where it comes up is right where FM stations broadcast, we think,” he explained. “So, if you're within 1,000 kilometres of the nearest FM station, you don't get science, you get Selena Gomez.”

Sievers imagines a future where the Arctic is home to even more research bases, like in Antarctica, and scientists can conduct cross-disciplinary research.

The more cross-disciplinary research that happens, the more unexpected the discoveries, Sievers says. Recently, a telescope one of his team members helped build to search for the first stars caught the attention of another researcher, who said it could help communities monitor their ice road safety.

“That never would have crossed my mind,” says Sievers. “But technology often becomes useful in wildly unexpected areas.”

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Keywords

• Climate Sea Ice Coupling
• Cross-disciplinary research
• Northern communities
• Arctic Ocean
• Polar bears
• Radio astronomy
• Radar system
• Theoretical and Observational Cosmology
• Satellite data
• CO2 emissions