The web series reveals what research is happening in Canada’s Arctic right now.

“There’s a lack of knowledge about the Arctic in general,” says Katriina O’Kane, a multimedia documentary maker who worked extensively on the series. “It’s a very romanticized place in a lot of people’s minds and they don’t necessarily understand what the current conditions are like. It’s not on people’s radar.”

O’Kane flew up to Resolute Bay, Nunavut last summer and spent two-and-a-half weeks interviewing and filming the scientists at The Polar Continental Shelf Program’s Arctic Logistics Support Centre.

“This series shows what it is really like to be a scientist up in the Arctic,” O’Kane says. “This really goes into the specifics of what it is that scientists do, what kind of lives they live and why they’re doing what they’re doing.”

O’Kane is hoping the series will help Canadians better appreciate the Arctic and the research taking place there.

“Right now is really a crucial moment,” she says, noting that the Arctic is warming and there’s interest in developing resources and shipping in the area. “To be able to know how to develop the Arctic in a sustainable way, we need to know how the environment reacts to certain things. At the moment, that knowledge isn’t there, but it can be developed with the help of research.”<

Listen to an audio clip on how noise affects whales, taken from an interview with Caitlin O’Neill, who is studying mammal migrations.