What is the Northwest Passage Project?
NPP 2019An expedition through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago (CAA) that involved the collaboration between 5 minority serving institutions including UIC, the University of Rhode Island, and the Inner Space Center and indigenous communities and their youth science program. This project aimed to capture the biological, chemical, and physical response of the Arctic to climatic change.
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Broadcast and OutreachThe Inner Space Center and their explorative technologies and telepresence capabilities gave all the student participants and scientist the chance to share the live Arctic Expedition with the public to share the most recent findings and observations. Check out the link below to watch a recorded Facebook live!
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Frozen ObsessionOne of the most exciting additions to the entire expedition was the filming of the documentary Frozen Obession by David Clark and his team. They captured not only the pristine looking environment, but also the discovery of micro-plastics in the ice and the ever changing ocean chemistry and physics.
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CTD SamplingCTD stands for conductivity, temperature, and depth. This term refers to the electronic equipment that measures conductivity and temperature in relation to depth. In the bottom middle image above, you can see what a CTD looks like. It is an essential tool that we used abroad the Swedish Oden Icebreaker Research vessel, to understand not only connectivity and temperature, but also collect data on nutrients and methane concentration.
In the image to the left, you can see the foil bag in which the water from the CTD was transferred into and the injection of hydro-carbon free air to create a headspace and eventually record the rate of methane oxidation. For more details about CTDs you can check out NOAA website linked below! |
Seawater SamplingSurface water sampling was performed using the equipment you can see in the image to the left, a bucket and a rope. This allowed us to collect surface water efficiently four times a day, everyday for the duration of the expedition across the Northwest Passage. Once the water was brought back up to the ship, we collected subsamples for salinity, temperature, and oxygen stable isotopes.
The reason oxygen is very important to sample within the surface water is because in the Arctic there is high variability of O18 in the surface waters due to high seasonality in ice melting/formation, river run off, Eastern-Pacific intensification and rapidly changing summer ice minimum. Additionally, the relationship between ocean salinity and oxygen is still relativity uncertain because of the lack of sampling. |
Funding and Acknowledgements
The expedition was funded by the National Science Foundation’s Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program and by the Heising-Simons Foundation’s Science program
Acknowledgments to the fellow shipmates including other undergraduate students, graduate students, research scientist, and ship crew and engineers. We all worked very well together to accomplish an exciting and innovative expedition!
Acknowledgments to the fellow shipmates including other undergraduate students, graduate students, research scientist, and ship crew and engineers. We all worked very well together to accomplish an exciting and innovative expedition!