You never forget the fi rst time your ship strikes a slab of ice 6 ft. thick: The jolt rips me out of a dead sleep at 1 am and sends me scrambling from my bunk.

As the vessel shudders and the ice scrapes and moans along the hull, I grab my clothes with one hand and a glass of water shim-mying toward the edge of my desk with the other. I quickly dress

N O R T H b y N O R T H W E S T

TO REACH THE HIGH ARCTIC, A CANADIAN COAST GUARD ICEBREAKER NEEDS 17,000 HORSEPOWER, SIX DIESEL/ELECTRIC ENGINES AND ONE SLIPPERY COAT OF PAINT.

t e x t a n d p h o t o g r a p h s b y M a r g o P f e i f f

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The icebreaker Des Groseilliers plows through pans of summer sea ice on its way to resupply the Canadian weather station on Ellesmere Island.

TANQUARY FJORD

SLIDRE FJORD

JONES SOUND

GREELY FJORD

EUREKA SOUND

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In the engine control room, a console displays a schematic of the ship’s six diesel/electric engines. The throttle indicators match those on the navigation bridge, but the levers remain upright unless control of the ship’s propulsion is handed over to the engine room. Right: Two crewmen perform maintenance on one of the 16-cylinder Bombardier engines.

north to refuel Tanquary Camp, headquarters for Quttinirpaaq National Park. Quttinirpaaq, which means “the land at the top of the world” in the Inuit language, is the apex of the Canadian coast guard’s northern-most route. Choked by sea ice often too thick for conven-tional vessels, even during the height of Arctic summer, this is one of the few regions that receives most of its food, fuel and other provisions via icebreakers.

When I join Des Groseilliers in late August, the ship is in the deep-water port of Nanisivik—2000 miles north of Montreal at the tip of Baffi n Island. Over the course of two days, the crew loads the 322-ft. icebreaker with more than 1000 tons of cargo—everything from new

and hurry to the bridge of the Canadian coast guard ice-breaker Des Groseilliers (“day-GROW-see-ay”).

The atmosphere there is tense. We are in the High Arctic, maneuvering through Eureka Sound, roughly 200 miles west of Greenland. The reddish glow of dusk illu-minates Capt. Denis Coulombe, whose hand rests on the throttle. Stretching before us, a solid fl oe of multiyear ice sits high in the water. It is stippled with Caribbean-blue ponds, the product of years of freezing and thawing. Coulombe thrusts the throttle forward, shifting six 16-cylinder diesel/electric engines from full astern to full ahead. Like a battering ram, we take another run at the ice. It has roughly the tensile strength of concrete.

The vessel rides up onto the fl oe, vibrating angrily. More than 8000 tons then bear down on the “knife,” or sharp edge of the bow. It slices through the ice, sending school bus-size chunks rolling in all directions. “This ship is like a big Tonka toy,” says navigation offi cer Vincent Gougeon, excite-ment in his eyes. An extremely big, stable Tonka toy, I reassure myself, as we press north into more treacherous waters.

S U M M E R J O BCANADA’S 125,566 miles

of coastline—the longest of any nation’s—encompass at least 50 major Arctic islands and more than 36,000 minor ones. The ice in this region, impassably thick in winter, thins enough during the brief, six-week Arctic summer to open the fabled Northwest Passage. Vessels carrying cargo from Europe to Asia thread the devious route between Greenland and the Beaufort Sea, as do, increasingly, cruise ships with tourists.

The Canadian coast guard’s six icebreakers, which spend the winter maintaining navigation channels in the St. Lawrence River and waters of the Atlantic provinces, head north in late June to activate navigation beacons for the Arctic shipping season. The ships remain there until freeze-up in late October, carrying out search-and-rescue operations, escorting icebound vessels, cleaning up oil and diesel spills and participating in scientifi c research.

Des Groseilliers’s mission this summer is to deliver supplies to the Eureka weather station, midway up the western coast of Ellesmere Island, before heading farther

ARCTIC ROUTEIt takes Des Groseillierssix days to travel 742 miles from Nanisivik, through Norwegian Bay, Eureka Sound, Slidre Fjord and, fi nally, Tanquary Fjord, where it resupplies the world’s northernmost national park.

Q U T T I N I R P A A Q N AT I O N A L P A R K

N A N I S I V I K

B A F F I N B A Y

B A F F I N I S L A N D

D E V O N I S L A N D

A X E L H E I B E R G I S L A N D

E L L E S M E R E I S L A N D

E U R E K A

G R E E N L A N D

NORWEGIANBAY

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vehicles and canned corn to light bulbs and plumbing fi xtures. The decks piled high with crates, we push off for Eureka, 645 miles to the north.

From Nanisivik, we cruise around the east coast of Devon Island, where the ice cap fl ows like heavy cream into streams of glaciers reaching the water’s edge. The temperature hovers around 38 F as we ply the open waters in brilliant sunshine.

So far it’s smooth sailing—conditions that don’t sur-prise Coulombe. “There has been noticeably less ice over the past 10 to 15 years,” he says. According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado, warm-ing air temperatures have limited the growth of sea ice

during winter, initiating a steep decline in ice during the summer melt season. In 2005, sea ice covered the smallest expanse of ocean in more than a century, just 2.2 million square miles at its low point in September. If that rate of shrinkage—23,328 square miles a year—continues to increase exponentially, as it has, there will be no summer sea ice at all in 2060.

A Northwest Passage free of summer sea ice would no doubt appeal to shipping companies, bringing an infl ux of vessels to the Arctic archipelago. But the task of responding to an increased number of fuel spills, emergencies and illegal discharges of waste would pose a daunting challenge for Canada’s aging, civilian coast

guard f leet, which is already stretched thin. Less perilous summer waters wouldn’t elimi-nate the need for icebreakers. Ships would still require their support in spring, before winter sea ice melts, and as ice is form-ing in the fall.

I C Y P A S S A G EWE THREAD the dramatic,

cliff-lined narrows of Hell Gate, pass a lone polar bear in Norwe-gian Bay and enter Eureka Sound. Here, between Axel Heiberg and Ellesmere islands, we encounter the multiyear ice pack, as predict-ed by Rene Boisvert—the on-board ice specialist, or “ice pick.” Several times a day, Boisvert downloads images from two or more satellites, including Cana-da’s RADARSAT-1 and NASA’s MODIS. This data along with observations from the govern-ment’s Ice Patrol—a single de Havilland Dash 7 plane based in Iqaluit on Baffi n Island—provide the foundation for Boisvert’s color-ful charts of the waters ahead.

Still, sometimes nothing beats a fi rsthand look. Coulombe sends Boisvert to the fl ight deck, where Mireille Samson—the only female helicopter pilot in the Canadian coast guard—slips a rifle under the seat of a German-built Euro-copter, “in case we have to land where there are bears.” Samson

also increases fuel effi ciency by up to 10 percent.The icebreaker can maintain a bone-rattling

3 knots through 3-ft.-thick ice. To stand up to that pun-ishment, every component, from the propeller shafts to the steering mechanism, is supersize. And, because Des Groseilliers travels in extremely remote areas, redundan-cy is built into everything. The ship has dual gyroscopic GPS, radar and navigation systems, and two evaporators and a reverse-osmosis system for desalinating water. Three additional Bombardier V8 diesel engines supply the ship’s electricity.

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calls her machine “the pickup truck of choppers.” It is modifi ed for carrying bulky rescue gear, and is equipped with inflatable fl oats in the event of a brush with the Arctic Ocean. Once airborne, Boisvert scans the 8-mile radius of jigsaw-puzzle ice, updating the ice charts in his Toshiba pen com-puter. These will be uploaded via satellite for use by other vessels that pass through the area.

I C E C R U S H E RCOULOMBE HAS HIS eye

on a small red area of the chart—a gnarly 25- to 30-ft.-thick ice cap about a day’s sail from here. “It’s the kind of ice we don’t like to play with,” he says. So far, sheer momentum has allowed the vessel to easily plow through pans of thin ice. But soon, Des Groseilliers will need all of its 17,000 hp to muscle through fl oes up to 7 ft. thick.

Each of the ship’s six diesel engines drives an electric generator. These provide power to two electric motors that turn the ship’s two massive propellers. This diesel/electric confi guration (similar to that used by railroad locomotives) makes for a powertrain that is both respon-sive and durable. According to senior engineer Karim Diop: “When ice strikes the propellers—as it often does—the shock isn’t transmitted back to the engines.” In addition, the props are shielded from major ice dam-age by their deep, inboard location and by the ship’s wide beam.

The vessel’s icebreaking arsenal includes a 2-in.-thick steel hull reinforced with a web of steel port-to-starboard stiffeners. A heeling system can shift 143 tons of water from a tank on one side of the ship to the other in 13 seconds, enabling the vessel to rock free from thick ice.

Some icebreakers have a bubbler system, in which compressed air is forced through rows of holes across the bow to form a cushion between ship and ice. Des Groseil-liers relies instead on Inerta 160—an abrasion-resistant, low-friction coating that is only 1⁄5 in. thick and feels like Tupperware to the touch. “Before Inerta we would drag 20 ft. of ice on each side of the ship for miles after we left a fl oe, and the hull would be scraped down to bare metal after a few weeks in ice,” chief engineer Stephane Dufour says. With the coating, only about 40 percent of the hull needs to be touched up every two years; Inerta

PEARL is a single red building perched on a desolate, windy ridge 2000 ft. above sea level. Outfi tted with lidars (lasers), radars, photometers and spectrometers, it is one of the most advanced atmospheric research facilities in the world. Data from PEARL can be used in conjunction with the Canadian science satellite, SCISAT (which meas-ures temperature and aerosol contaminants), and with NASA’s CloudSat (which measures wind, clouds and pre-cipitation) to create a comprehensive picture of atmo-spheric conditions in the Arctic from the ground up.

As part of the International Polar Year, a worldwide research blitz that began on March 1, PEARL will be a critical source of data for scientists trying to understand how the Arctic interacts with the global climate system. “We expect that the initial signs of climate change, which we are probably already seeing, will be visible in the Arctic and Antarctic because they are pristine en-vironments,” Fogal says. In 2005, Ellesmere Island expe-rienced its warmest summer since 1960; numerous landslides rippled across the thawing permafrost. As we return to the ship, Fogal points out several places where the permafrost has melted beneath steep tundra slopes, causing it to slide down in muddy waves.

J O U R N E Y ’ S E N DOUR FINAL LEG is the 100-mile jaunt north up

Greely Fjord to the head of Tanquary Fjord, where a clus-ter of brown Quonset huts compose the headquarters of Quttinirpaaq National Park. Near them sits a collection of vintage snow machines, graders and sleds from half a century of polar exploration. We are at 81 degrees 26.4 minutes north latitude, less than 650 miles from the North Pole. We pushed off from Nanisivik six days ago.

Quttinirpaaq is the world’s northernmost park, a spec-tacular reserve protecting a rich, freshwater oasis in the midst of a polar desert, mountains towering over immense ice fields, and wildlife that includes Arctic wolves, char and hip-high Peary’s caribou. It is so silent and pristine it seems as though nothing has changed here in millennia—and as though nothing could change.

At the moment, the temperature is dropping; in just a few weeks Quttinirpaaq once again will be icebound. It’s time to head home. It takes 9 hours for Samson and her fl ying pickup truck to shuttle 400 drums of Jet-B fuel ashore two barrels at a time. By evening she has fi nished, and a barbecue is held on the aft deck. When the captain turns the ship south, the bow shatters a skin of newly formed sea ice into tiny shards. They tinkle like ice cubes in a whiskey glass. PM

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N O R T H E R N E X P O S U R E“MAGNETIC COMPASS USELESS” is something

you don’t usually want to see on an oceanographic chart, but there it is—in red lettering—hovering on a page that’s otherwise white for lack of features. When the GPS reads 79 degrees 59 minutes north latitude, we swing into Slidre Fjord and see signs of civilization: Eureka weather station, population 8. Musk oxen graze near the 60-year-old outpost, staffed year-round by a federal department called Environment Canada. Temperatures here can drop to minus 58 F, so it seems appropriate that building doors are insulated like walk-in freezers.

After unloading cargo, the crew unfurls 1200 ft. of fl oating hose so that fuel can be pumped to the weather station’s tanks. I hop in the brand-new Ford F350 pickup truck just delivered to University of Toronto physicist Pierre Fogal. He manages the neighboring Polar Environ-ment Atmospheric Research Laboratory (PEARL), run by researchers in the Canadian Network for the Detec-tion of Atmospheric Change. To reach the lab, we follow what is perhaps the world’s longest extension cord 9 miles up a dirt road. “To keep the air as clean as possi-ble we get our power from Eureka so we don’t have to run a generator up here,” Fogal says.

Clockwise, from top left: Ice specialist Rene Boisvert scouts trouble spots in Eureka Sound. Every two years, the Canadian coast guard refuels the Tanquary Fjord airstrip with 400 drums of fuel. One of Des Groseilliers’s four cranes loads crates in Nanisivik; the icebreaker can carry about 1600 tons of cargo.

ON THE WEB /// To learn more about icebreaker technology, see popularmechanics.com/icebreakers.