Places
A spotlight on the Canadian High Arctic Research Station — and what divers are discovering under the ocean’s surface
When Amanda Savoie shows people photos and videos from her dives in the Arctic Ocean off Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, they are invariably astonished by what they’re seeing. “The water in Cambridge Bay is crystal clear, like tropical Caribbean colours,” she says. “There are sandy beaches, clear water, but it’s actually freezing.”
And it’s not just the colour of the water that comes as a surprise — what’s beneath the surface is equally mind-boggling. When Savoie showed some underwater videos to Inuit Elders in Cambridge Bay, she says they were amazed; for much of the year, the surface of the land and sea come in various shades of white and grey, but dive into the ocean, and there are “anemones and seaweed and all this life. It’s all really colourful — red, yellow, blue.”
Other divers in these waters describe seeing soft corals living on the edge of the photic zone — the upper layer of water that receives sunlight. They glow red, yellow and purple when lit by a diver’s head-lamp. And then there is the rich sea life that swims about, including healthy populations of fish like cod, char and sculpin as well as mammals such as seals and whales.
Research and exploration of these decidedly icy waters is possible because of the existence of the Canadian High Arctic Research Station, a $250-million scientific hub that opened in Cambridge Bay in 2019. Run by Polar Knowledge Canada, the station is a gleaming, multi-storey steel-and-glass building on the edge of the 2,000-strong Inuit community here. Since 2022, Amanda Savoie has led the dive teams that use CHARS, which includes a fully operational dive centre, as a base from which to explore the waters around Victoria Island.
Savoie speaks in obvious delight about the place where she gets to carry out her summer field work studying marine macroalgae, better known as kelp and seaweed, for the Canadian Museum of Nature and for Polar Knowledge Canada. She is among the first to research the kelp forests in this part of the Arctic Ocean. In part, her work is aimed at developing a baseline survey of these forests to better understand the impacts of climate change on this important ecosystem.
Kelp forests act as both a key fish habitat and a carbon sink, absorbing and storing vast amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they grow. But researchers are only now doing comprehensive surveys to find out where the Arctic kelp forests are growing and how much kelp is out there. Having CHARS takes a lot of the logistics out of this research.
“It’s like there’s a dive shop in the Arctic,” says Savoie. And that’s a big deal because elsewhere in the Arctic, researchers have to ship scuba tanks and compressors by barge a full summer before they head north on a dive. Having a team at CHARS to take on the task of shipping and inspecting equipment removes a huge burden for visiting divers — after all, diving in subzero Arctic waters is hard enough work.
Chris Arko was a senior diver at the research station who helped run the dive centre from its opening in 2019 to late 2023. A longtime resident of Cambridge Bay, he also dives in the Arctic Ocean just for fun. He explains that, because of the salt content, the temperature of the water can actually fall just below zero degrees Celsius while still remaining a liquid. “Something really interesting happens when you get into the negative temperatures,” he says. “That water is no longer just trying to chill your body; it’s physically trying to change the state of your body from a liquid to a solid.”
That means you need much more than just a wetsuit to dive and survive. Divers layer up, often wearing a down jacket under their dry suit, which is sealed at the neck and wrists to keep the water out. “Then you wear a hood and gloves — so your hands and your head get wet, but your core is warm.” But in that kind of deep cold, even all that layering buys a diver only 45 minutes underwater to do what they set out to do. That part is definitely not like the Caribbean!
Most of those diving at CHARS are researchers coming in from the south. Because of the specialized gear, it’s an expensive pastime, which can exclude participation from members of the local community. Arko has previously worked with two Inuit divers at CHARS but says no community members are currently diving in Cambridge Bay, though he does know of Inuit divers in Pond Inlet and Pangnirtung.
Still, he hopes the research station will lead to a revival of, and a rich future for, local diving. “A number of community members have been diving in the past,” he says. The father of one of his co-workers, for example, was an avid diver for years. “They did fantastic things like junk cleanup (in the bay), where they’d be diving and hooking ropes onto garbage and having people haul it out.”
Though CHARS is an amazing facility, it’s the beauty of what lies beneath the waters of the Arctic Ocean that keeps divers like Savoie and Arko coming back to Cambridge Bay. “I’ve had the absolute privilege of diving with narwhal here,” Arko says “Being underwater with narwhal is as close as you can get to diving with unicorns.”
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