In the wilderness north of Great Slave Lake, in Canada’s Northwest Territories, mining companies are eyeing a potential treasure trove of critical minerals as demand for lithium, nickel, graphite and copper has risen sharply to meet the needs of the burgeoning electric vehicle and solar power industries.

The cost of mining in this and many other roadless parts of northern Canada used to be prohibitive. That changed last December, when the Canadian government announced its highly anticipated critical minerals strategy, which offers mining companies generous tax breaks, $3 billion in additional funding incentives, and a promise to fast-track the federal environmental impact review process.

While the strategy is being touted as a way of helping the world transition to a post-carbon economy, some environmentalists fear that it will result in drained wetlands, diverted streams and the disturbance of carbon-rich peatlands. Over the past three decades, the mining industry has walked away from these and many other environmental liabilities, leaving Canadian taxpayers with cleanup bills amounting to more than $10 billion.

Will benefits of mining outweigh costs to biodiversity and Indigenous people who live there?

“In this transition to renewables, two clear storylines have emerged,” says Teresa Kramarz, a professor and co-director of the Environmental Governance Lab at the University of Toronto and co-chair of the United Nations Development Programme’s Advisory Group on Energy Governance. The first, she says, is the political urgency to rapidly decarbonize, while the second is the enormous business opportunity presented by mining for critical minerals needed for a clean energy revolution.

The blending of these storylines concerns Kramarz, as well as many other scientists and environmentalists, because the overall benefits of mining might not outweigh its costs to biodiversity and to Indigenous people who live in mineral-rich regions.

Nor is there any guarantee that reserves of minerals like lithium are large and accessible enough for Canada to compete with reserves in South America and China, which are much larger and are subject to less environmental oversight.

A caribou walks near the former Lupin gold mine in Nunavut. The mine — now in care and maintenance — sits along the migration path of the Bathurst herd, whose population has crashed due to a number of factors including mining disturbance. Fortune Minerals is now exploring along the Bathurst herd’s migratory route north of Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories. Photo: Pat Kane / The Narwhal

“The critical minerals strategy is one important step and welcomed, given the need for Canada to strengthen supply chains to support the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources,” says Justina Ray, senior scientist and president of the Wildlife Conservation Society Canada. “But the strategy doesn’t fully appreciate the global [ecological] significance of mining regions such as the Hudson Bay Lowlands, the second largest peatlands in the world.” While peatlands account for only three per cent of the Earth’s land, they store approximately 30 per cent of the planet’s soil carbon. A quarter of the world’s peatlands are found in Canada. What’s needed, says Ray, “is a regional assessment led by federal, provincial and Indigenous leaders to determine whether the trade-offs are worth the cost to biodiversity.”

Most of the critical minerals reserves are located in remote regions of the Northwest Territories, Nunavut and northern Quebec, and in the Hudson Bay Lowlands of northern Manitoba, Ontario and western Quebec.

The mine that Fortune Minerals is exploring in the 3,700-square-mile mineral region north of Great Slave Lake lies within the migratory path of the Bathurst caribou herd, whose numbers have crashed from a high of nearly 470,000 in the 1980s to 6,240 today, due to a number of factors including mining disturbance, overhunting and climate change.

History of mining in northern Canada contains harsh lessons

In the so-called Ring of Fire region, in the 124,000-square-mile Hudson Bay and James Bay Lowlands, mining activity could accelerate the thawing of permafrost that stores nearly 35 gigatons of carbon and degrade the habitat of caribou and the nesting grounds of millions of birds. The Lowlands, according to Jeff Wells, vice-president of boreal conservation for the National Audubon Society, are “astonishingly important.” No other place on the planet has as many red knots, semipalmated sandpipers, dunlins and other nesting shorebird species. The Lowlands also are possibly the most important refuge for woodland caribou, which are now functionally extinct in the United States and disappearing quickly across Canada.

Politically, the critical minerals strategy is a win-win for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government. It speaks to the Conservative Party’s demand for more mining jobs and regional economic development while addressing the left-wing New Democratic Party’s demand for climate action.

If the past history of mining in northern Canada says anything about the future, there are plenty of reasons to be concerned, especially with the Ontario, Manitoba and Northwest Territories governments signalling their desire to speed up mining for critical minerals.

At the former Giant mine site, core samples are left in place as a matter of record. Remediating the site is expected to cost $4.38 billion, take until 2038 and even then, hundreds of thousands of tons of arsenic trioxide left at the site will likely have to be frozen and stored underground in perpetuity. Photo: Matt Jacques / The Narwhal

Just a few dozen miles from Fortune’s play in the Northwest Territories, the Colomac gold mine’s tailings ponds once overflowed with cyanide and ammonia, triggering a mining inspector to complain of burning eyes and a sore throat just minutes after arriving at the site. After low gold prices finally shut the mine in 1997, Colomac’s $1.5-million security deposit, posted to cover environmental liabilities, didn’t come close to covering the $135-million cleanup that was performed at taxpayer expense.

The final cost of the remediation at Colomac, whose initial phase included construction of a five-mile fence to keep caribou out of contaminated areas, is dwarfed by the resources that continue to be poured into two ongoing remediations.

The Faro zinc mine, which operated in the central Yukon between 1969 and 1998, was once the largest open-pit lead-zinc mine in the world. Today, it is one of the most complex abandoned-mine remediation projects in the country, if not the world. Its 77 million tons of tailings and 353 million tons of waste rock contain high levels of heavy metals, which authorities fear could potentially leach into the mountainous headwaters of many fish-bearing streams. The remediation, which began in the early 2000s, is expected to take between 10 and 15 years at an estimated cost of $500 million or more.

The remediation of the Giant gold mine, on the shores of Great Slave Lake in Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories, will cost an estimated $4.38 billion and won’t be completed until 2038. Even then, storing the gold mine’s 261,000 tons of highly toxic, virtually indestructible arsenic trioxide — in frozen underground mine chambers — is anticipated to require perpetual maintenance because groundwater that flows into the mine and rapidly thawing permafrost are undermining its stability. The mine may have to be refrigerated permanently, according to engineers working on remediation options. Since 2016, all 20,000 Yellowknife residents have been warned by the government to avoid drinking water, swimming, fishing and harvesting plants and berries in and around several lakes due to their high arsenic levels.

Since 2002, when the Auditor General of Canada issued a scathing report on 30 abandoned mines in the north, federal, territorial and provincial governments have become more diligent in reviewing mining plans and demanding security deposits to cover the cost of cleanups. But the liabilities continue.

Plans for battery plants in Ontario bolster Canada’s critical minerals strategy

This past May, for example, the Yukon government took over the Minto copper and gold mine on Selkirk First Nation territory after mining inspectors repeatedly warned of the potential for contaminated water to flow into the salmon-bearing Yukon River system. The action was taken less than a year after the owners of the Wolverine Mine, which contains reserves of gold, silver, zinc and copper in the southeast corner of the territory, reneged on paying $19 million in security costs. By then, the Yukon government had already poured millions of dollars into environmental mitigation efforts after an underground portion of the mine flooded in 2017.

Tom Hoefer, executive director of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut Chamber of Mines, says that abandoned mines in the Canadian North “should be a thing of the past” thanks to legislative changes that have addressed the issue of security deposits and created oversight boards that oversee land-use planning, wildlife management, environmental assessment and review, and land and water regulations.

“The driver, of course, was that Indigenous groups also didn’t want to see repeats of environmental messes on their traditional lands,” he said, noting that the law requires that half of the review board members in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut come from an Indigenous community.

The Faro mine in Yukon Territory is one of the most complex abandoned mine remediation programs in Canada, perhaps the world. It will cost the federal government an estimated $500 million and take more than a decade. Photo: Matt Jacques / The Narwhal

Canada’s critical minerals strategy has already attracted a lot of interest and is bound to attract more now that several battery plants, including one proposed by Volkswagen, are in the planning stages in Ontario. The Volkswagen plant will receive a package of subsidies amounting to as much as $10 billion over the next decade.

In addition to fast-tracking the regulatory review process, the federal strategy will give mining companies a generous tax credit, equal to 30 per cent of the capital costs associated with establishing a mine. Priority will be given to mines that produce lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, copper and other critical metals. To entice companies to invest and explore, the government has earmarked $60 million for geoscience and exploration aimed at discovering potential new deposits.

The Canadian government has funded this kind of geo-mapping before, in the hopes of encouraging oil and gas companies to develop energy and mineral reserves in the northern regions of the country. Between 2008 and 2017, more than $75 million was spent helping private companies find new sources of fossil fuels and minerals, but not a barrel of oil or a gigajoule of gas found its way to market. What northerners got instead was tens of thousands of miles of seismic lines — narrow corridors cleared of vegetation — running through formerly frozen peatland that are now releasing untold volumes of greenhouse gases as they thaw.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford pledges to mine in the Ring of Fire, even if he has to “hop on a bulldozer myself”

Provincial leaders tend to be supportive of the new mining projects. Ontario Premier Doug Ford said, “If I have to hop on a bulldozer myself, we’re going to start building roads in the Ring of Fire.” Based on the increased value of critical minerals already established to be in the ground, George Pirie, Ontario’s minister of mines, estimates the mining value of this area at a trillion dollars.

But according to Jamie Kneen, the national program co-lead of Mining Watch Canada, there is little data to back up such claims. He fears that Canada will be left with a lot of holes in the ground and many more environmental liabilities if technological developments come into play and make the critical minerals strategy obsolete.

The federal government was forced to step in and pay for the cleanup of the Faro mine when its owners declared bankruptcy in 1998, leaving behind 77 million tons of tailings and 353 million tons of waste rock contain high levels of heavy metals. Photo: Matt Jacques / The Narwhal

Charles Kazaz, a Montreal-based lawyer for a firm that advises clients in the mining sector, concedes that demand could drop, but he considers the critical minerals strategy unique for addressing both economic development and climate-change targets. “Canada needs to be aggressive and act fast in order to catch up with the rest of the world,” he says.

Without the strategy, he says, Canada might miss an opportunity because of foreign investment restrictions that prevent countries like China from partnering in critical-mineral development in Canada, and by the constitutional requirement that the government and industry consult with and accommodate Indigenous communities before mines or access roads can proceed.

Indigenous communities are divided over whether to support development of resources within their territories. The recent federal decision to greenlight Nemaska Lithium’s project in northern Quebec is a case in point. The Nemaska Cree band council embraced the mine on the basis that it would provide the community with jobs and royalties. But some Cree, including Thomas Jolly, a former Nemaska chief, don’t think it is worth the risk of contaminating the Rupert River watershed. Neither does Jolly accept the argument that the Cree should agree to the mine to help the world deal with climate change.

“Who is responsible for the climate crisis?” he asked. “Is it up to us to pay and suffer for what they [southerners] have done?”

In 2018, 360 shipping containers near the shore of Great Slave Lake hold a mine’s deconstructed roaster, where gold was separated from rock. That process produced arsenic trioxide, leaving the building so contaminated that it was deconstructed inside of a “shrink wrap” tent. The containers will be buried underground during the remediation process. Photo: Matt Jacques / The Narwhal

The Cree communities that live in and around the Ring of Fire, where several mines are already in operation and where at least 15 other companies have more than 26,000 mining claims, are working with conservation groups like the Wildlife Conservation Society Canada, the Wildlands League and MiningWatch Canada to make sure that no environmental shortcuts are taken, as federal Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson has promised.

Kramarz, at the University of Toronto, remains skeptical. Like other scientists, she isn’t downplaying the need to aggressively deal with climate change. But she believes that enthusiasm for exploiting critical minerals to speed a transition to carbon neutrality ignores significant costs.

“If that’s the narrative,” she says, referring to industry exuberance, “then it would be good to not forget that there are environmental concerns that need to be thoroughly understood and mitigated.”

Updated on Oct. 10, 2023, at 1:32 p.m. PT: This story has been updated to correct the cost of cleaning up the Colomac mine in the Northwest Territories from $53 million to $135 million. The starting operational date of the Faro mine has also been revised from 1968 to 1969.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

In October, more than two years after the last caribou in the Maligne Valley of Jasper National Park died or disappeared, Parks Canada announced a tentative plan for a caribou captive breeding program. Subject to an expert review that will likely take place in January, females from other herds will be rounded up and penned in a facility near the town of Jasper.

Stan Boutin, a biologist from the University of Alberta, sees these desperate measures as necessary — and these are desperate times for caribou herds.

There are now only three herds in Jasper National Park. None of them are faring well. The 45 animals in the Tonquin herd are down by a third since 2010, the Brazeau herd is left with just 15 animals, and neither has enough females to grow the population. The last stronghold is the À la Pêche herd, with 150 caribou that move precariously in and out of the north end of the park.

Decades of planning

Parks Canada has been looking for ways to save the caribou in its mountain parks for decades. In 2002, it floated a plan to close the Maligne Road that takes vehicles up to the base of the caribou’s alpine winter range, so that it would be harder for wolves to access the dwindling herd.

But officials dropped the idea four days after the plan was made public and the business community complained. The caribou recovery plan never made it to the public consultation phase. The business community high-fived. Park biologists licked their wounds.

Scientists were hugely concerned that a large animal like caribou could disappear from a national park in Canada as the herd in Banff did in 2009. Writing in Conservation Biology, several noted that Banff National Park’s last southern mountain woodland caribou died the same day a coalition of conservation groups announced the Banff Spring’s snail was the “only species out of 449 listed under the Canadian Species at Risk Acts to benefit form the fully legally mandated conservation process.”

Federal legislation compels the government to protect species at risk, and in 2011, it launched a captive breeding program for southern mountain caribou with Parks Canada, the B.C. government and the Calgary Zoo. It was supposed to be a new beginning and the cornerstone of the caribou conservation strategy, but the agreement fell apart in 2015.

Science-based conservation programs in the mountain parks have long been pitted against tourism. Jasper’s resource conservation manager was fired in 2015 without cause, though many suspect that it was because he had pushed for the release of an overdue report on how a Jasper ski hill expansion would affect the threatened Tonquin caribou herd. His departure coincided with a plan to build overnight tourist accommodations in the Maligne Valley.

The Tonquin and Brazeau caribou herds in Jasper National Park are now so small that they cannot recover on their own. Photo: Parks Canada

Decades of decline

It’s not just caribou in Jasper, Banff and other mountain national parks that have suffered. In the 1970s, Parks Canada dithered on stopping the serious decline of the woodland caribou in Pukaskwa National Park on the shores of Lake Superior.

There were only about 24 caribou then, and the population collapsed to just five individuals in 2009 and then disappeared entirely. Caribou might never have had a strong foothold in Pukaskwa, but the approach of doing nothing while watching the population’s extirpation wasn’t a plan either.

It’s not that Parks Canada is doing nothing about endangered species and wildlife recovery. Bison were reintroduced successfully into Banff recently, but bison can adapt to almost any ecosystem. To its credit, Parks Canada also proceeded with the difficult challenge of removing exotic trout from many of the mountain park lakes by poisoning them, which could have been a public relations nightmare.

Caribou are different. Like polar bears, they are climate-challenged animals. They need alpine space, buggy bogs and forested fens in order to escape predators, flee from wildfire and find the food they need to survive.

They’re having hard time doing that outside of national parks, where the peatlands in oil and gas developments, logging and coal mining sites are being carved up and eaten by roads, seismic lines and oilsands operations.

In 1992, naturalist Ben Gadd predicted caribou would disappear from Jasper if Parks Canada didn’t set aside two large exclusion zones to protect them. He and other members of the Jasper Environmental Association had the ear of park biologists back then, but not the support of Ottawa.

Senior officials have consistently bent to the will of those in the business community to expand ski hills and build roads and monuments, including the monstrous Mother Canada Monument in Cape Breton National Park, even when it violated the spirit of the National Parks Act.

Ministers rarely come to the rescue because few stay in the job for long. Since 1971, there have been 30 ministers in charge of Parks Canada. Just five lasted more than three years, and 16 held the job for less than or little more than a year.

Not enough caribou

In 2018, Catherine McKenna, the second-longest serving environment minister, realized Parks Canada had lost its way when she said it was time to send the agency back on a conservation course. With McKenna now serving as infrastructure minister, judges and environmental groups are trying to hold Parks Canada and the federal government accountable.

The caribou recovery program in Jasper is sorely needed, but it is likely too little, too late. There are just not enough caribou around to grow the herds.

It also suggests that it’s easier for the Canadian government to pen and rear caribou in captivity than it is to deal with the issues threatening them in the wild. And that’s a sad commentary on an agency whose “first priority” is to protect the “natural and cultural heritage of our special places and ensure that they remain healthy and whole.”

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had nothing to say about ecological integrity in national parks when he handed Jonathan Wilkinson his mandate in overseeing Environment Canada and the Parks Canada agency. What’s needed is a national board of advisers with a compelling legal mandate that can hold Parks Canada’s feet to the fire and shield it from political interference. Business as usual will not be successful in this era of climate change.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

In the summer of 2003, I had a first-hand look at a fire season that was unlike any that had occurred before.

Thousands of acres were burning in Western Canada, prompting officials to call in more people to help suppress the fires. They piled into crowded tent camps and other makeshift facilities. Approximately 45,000 people were evacuated to nearby towns, hotels and community centres for days and sometimes weeks. Hundreds of emergency relief responders came in close contact.

If the coronavirus pandemic persists this summer, Canadian agencies will be hard-pressed to deal with a fire situation like that one, according to several provincial and federal officials, who spoke on the condition their names would not be used because they were not authorized to publicly discuss their work. Canada is unprepared for an intense wildfire season.

Unstable funding, the need for social distancing and the likelihood that neither the United States nor any other country will offer a helping hand when our resources are tapped all raise the potential for a nightmarish scenario.

The ‘Holy Shit Fire’ of 2003

The 2003 fire season wasn’t notable for the area burned, but for the fact that so many towns, national parks, industries and historic sites were in harm’s way.

More than 2,000 people evacuated the Crowsnest Pass region in southern Alberta. Waterton Lakes National Park was on standby for an evacuation as 13 per cent of neighbouring Glacier National Park in Montana burned.

A prescribed fire in Jasper, Alta., got out of control and might have torched a 20 kilometre-long path to Hinton had it not been for the heroic efforts of Parks Canada wildfire managers, who dropped fuel on the forest to force the fire to turn on itself.

The Okanagan Mountain wildfire in 2003 burned over 25,900 hectares and forced over 33,000 people to evacuate. Photo: Province of B.C. / Flickr

Banff was threatened on two fronts. The first came from an out-of-control prescribed burn that ignited east of the town, near Canmore; the second from an enormous fire that was chugging east along the mountain highway that runs through Kootenay National Park into Banff. It was called the “Holy Shit Fire” because that’s how everyone reacted when they saw it from a helicopter.

Wood Buffalo, Mt. Revelstoke and Prince Albert national parks also burned in the weeks before the interior of British Columbia lit up around towns and cities, including Kamloops and Kelowna. The military was brought in and triaging became the order of the day.

Dens destroyed

Mark Heathcott also remembers the 2003 wildfire season well because he was Parks Canada’s fire management coordinator for Western Canada. At one point, he was asked to send resources he didn’t have into polar bear country to prevent a fire from burning the Prince of Wales historic site near the west coast of Hudson Bay. The building survived, but several polar bear dens in Wapusk National Park were destroyed.

Typically, Heathcott would have been able get support from the provinces or U.S. firefighters, but the competition for resources was fierce that summer. He and his colleagues were lucky because Nik Lopoukhine, the director general of Parks Canada, understood fire. He signed off on an emergency response plan in the spring when Heathcott warned him that an intense fire season was likely. Lopoukhine’s directive compelled superintendents from across Canada to send employees to help suppress fires that might get out of control.

Minimal travel, no help

Like many wildfire managers in North America, Heathcott wonders how various agencies are going to respond if the coronavirus persists into what is forecast to be an extreme fire season.

The Forecast Severity Anomaly shows which regions are predicted to be above or below the regional climate average. Maps: Canadian Wildland Fire Information System

Last fall, Alberta ordered budget cuts of $23 million that included closing 30 wildfire lookout towers and shutting down a helitack program of firefighters trained to rappel into a wildfire. The government has since found $5 million to hire 200 more firefighters.

In early April, Victoria Christiansen, who heads the U.S. Forest Service, laid out some broad guidelines, including a recommendation that firefighters be deployed in ways that minimize travel to other geographic areas. This is bound to result in our American friends denying or limiting our requests for help.

Christiansen is also recommending social distancing, which is almost impossible to do in the tent camps typically used by firefighters in Canada. She’s calling for more seasonal employees to be hired, without admitting that this may not be possible without additional financial support, and with a workforce that might be reluctant to take on an already dangerous job in which they could be quarantined for up to month before and after a fire.

Heathcott voiced the concern of others I talked to when he noted that it will difficult to mount the usual attack. “Perhaps the crews will be dispersed, ‘coyote camping’ in small units, spotted out along the fireline, walking in on the fires,” he said.

“This may occur anyway, as the Canadian fleet of helicopters may already be decimated with the loss of revenue from the early end to heli-skiing and the lack of winter seismic work.”

Even if contract helicopters remain available, he wonders, how does one social distance in the compact cabins and tents? “We will see increased competition for the resource, and more fires may be lost at initial attack. With a reduction of air support, crews may be exposed to increased danger on the fireline and we may see increased work refusals, gun-shy fire managers and more let-burn situations. Forget about inter-agency deployments, everyone will be hunkering down on their own turf.”

A member of the Utah Army National Guard drops water on the Tunnel Hallow fire near Morgan, Utah July 23, 2014. Photo: Sgt.Tim Chacon / National Guard

The high cost of not being prepared

One of the many things the coronavirus pandemic has taught us is that being unprepared for emergencies comes at a high price. Dealing with the pandemic is a challenge because there is not enough robust data available to inform us how we can get back to some semblance of normalcy.

That’s not the case with wildfire.

Since 2003, wildfires have been burning bigger, more often and in increasingly unpredictable ways. Projected increases in area burned suggest the current state of wildfire management in Canada will be unable to cope with increasing wildfire activity. Restricting people from going into the backcountry, as some provinces are now doing, will help but not solve the problem.

There is a vaccine of sorts that could minimize the risks wildfires pose to human health and safety. The latest blueprint for that comes courtesy of the Canadian Forest Service.

Instead of investing more, however, we have been spending less. Unless that changes, our response to a wildfire season like the one in 2003 may end up being as chaotic and scary as the ongoing response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Edward Struzik is the author of “Firestorm, How Wildfire Will Shape Our Future.”

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

By Ed Struzik. This article was originally published on Yale Environment 360.

Canadian scientist Philip Marsh and I were flying along the coast of the Beaufort Sea, where the frozen tundra had recently opened up into a crater the size of a football stadium.

Located along the shoreline of an unnamed lake, the so-called thaw slump was gray, muddy, and barren, in sharp contrast to the brilliant russet and gold of the surrounding autumn tundra. These retrogressive thaw slumps, or landslides — formed as warming temperatures rapidly thaw permafrost — are increasing across the Arctic, including the kilometere-long, 100-meter-deep Batagaika Crater in the Yana River Basin of Siberia.

The tundra of the western Canadian Arctic has long been carpeted in cranberries, blueberries, cloudberries, shrubs, sedges, and lichen that have provided abundant food for grizzly bears, caribou, and other animals.

Now, however, as permafrost thaws and slumping expands, parts of that landscape are being transformed into nothing but mud, silt, and peat, blowing off massive amounts of climate-warming carbon that have been stored in the permafrost for millennia.

A permafrost slump, the size of a football stadium, on the shore of an unnamed lake in the Canadian Arctic. Photo: Ed Struzik / Yale Environment 360

If this had happened in an urban area, it would have resulted in dozens of buildings being swallowed up.

If it had happened along a pipeline right-of-way, it might have resulted in an environmental disaster.

Arctic fastest-warming region on Earth

As the Arctic warms faster than any region on Earth, public attention has largely been focused on the rapid disappearance of Arctic sea ice. But major changes are also taking place on land, and one of the most striking is the thawing of vast swaths of permafrost that have underlain these polar regions for millennia.

That thaw is taking a toll in complex ways that are not clearly understood, and scientists such as Marsh are now intensifying efforts to grasp how these changes will play out this century and beyond.

The landscape slumps into the water. Photo: Roger MacLeod / Natural Resources Canada

Exposed permafrost. Photo: Roger MacLeod / Natural Resources Canada

What we do know is that if the Arctic continues to warm as quickly as climatologists are predicting, an estimated 2.5 million square miles of permafrost — 40 per cent of the world’s total — could disappear by the end of the century, with enormous consequences. The most alarming is expected to be the release of huge stores of greenhouse gases, including methane, carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide that have remained locked in the permafrost for ages. Pathogens will also be released.

But less well appreciated are the sweeping landscape changes that will alter tundra ecosystems, making it increasingly difficult for subsistence Indigenous people, such as the Inuit, and Arctic animals to find food.

‘Beyond what our instruments can tell us’: merging Indigenous knowledge and Western science at the edge of the world

‘The frozen ground literally falls apart’

The disintegration of subterranean ice that glues together the peat, clay, rocks, sand, and other inorganic minerals is now triggering landslides and slumping at alarming rates, resulting in stream flows changing, lakes suddenly draining, seashores collapsing, and water chemistry being altered in ways that could be deleterious to both humans and wildlife.

“We’re seeing slumping along shorelines that can drain most of the water in a lake in just days and even hours,” says Marsh, a former Canadian government scientist who is now a professor of hydrology at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario.

“It’s not surprising when you consider that as much as 80 per cent of the ground here consists of frozen water. When that ice melts, the frozen ground literally falls apart.”

Coastal erosion reveals the extent of ice-rich permafrost underlying the active layer on the Arctic Coastal Plain in the Teshekpuk Lake Special Area of the National Petroleum Reserve, Alaska. Photo: Brandt Meixell / USGS

As a result, says Marsh, Indigenous communities, the resource industry, and the government need to better understand how a warming climate is impacting water resources and permafrost ecosystems.”

As the helicopter pilot circled Marsh’s research site searching for a dry spot to land, I could see the Husky Lakes in the distance. This is a unique treeline/tundra transitional zone where grizzly bears have been known to kill or mate with polar bears and where sea-going belugas swim into brackish inland lakes.

From the helicopter, the research camp below looked like a stick man.

Aerial view of the Trail Valley Creek research station in the western Canadian Arctic, situated along the Mackenzie Delta. Photo: Ed Struzik / Yale Environment 360

Narrow wooden boardwalks connect weather stations, snow, and rain gauges, and instruments that determine how much carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane are being absorbed by tundra plants and how much of these gases is being emitted into the atmosphere. The boardwalks were laid down so that the scientists’ boots won’t disturb the thawing peat and permafrost or skew the recordings.

Solar panels and a back-up generator kept everything powered, including an electrified fence designed to keep out both grizzly and polar bears.

Marsh, who has conducted field work in the Arctic for more than four decades, established this research station in Trail Valley Creek in 1991. Not only is it situated in the most rapidly warming region on Earth, but it is also the site of a new Arctic highway, hundreds of now-dormant exploratory oil and gas drilling sites, and some of the most important bird nesting territory in the Arctic.

Like all permafrost scientists, he and his colleagues have worked in arduous conditions, fighting off hordes of biting flies and mosquitoes in the summer, and measuring snowpack and ground temperatures in bitter winter cold.

Branden Walker, a researcher from Wilfrid Laurier University, gathers data from a weather station on the tundra in the Northwest Territories. Photo: Ed Struzik / Yale Environment 360

One of the largest carbon sinks in the world

Marsh’s research in the Canadian Arctic has already led him to conclude that climate warming will result in hydrological changes this century that will dry up 15,000 of the 45,000 lakes in the Mackenzie River Delta, one of the largest deltas in the world.

He also expects to see more of what Antoni Lewkowicz, a geographer and permafrost expert at the University of Ottawa, is seeing father north on Banks Island in the High Arctic of Canada. Lewkowicz recently reported a 60-fold increase in slumping along 288 lakes that he has monitored with satellite imagery from 1984 to 2015.

Slumping can occur with sudden catastrophic force.

In one notable case that was captured on time-lapse photography in 2015 by Steve Kokelj, a permafrost expert with the Northwest Territories Geological Survey, a rapidly thawing cliff bordering the shores of a tundra lake collapsed into the Peel River watershed in the Northwest Territories. The waterfall that was created drained approximately 800,000 gallons of water from that upland lake in just two hours.

Heavy metals in the permafrost, such as mercury, were flushed downstream along with silt and peat, tainting the river system for miles downstream.

Permafrost occurs in areas where the temperature of the ground remains below the freezing mark for two years or more. About a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere’s landscape fits this definition.

Most of the world’s permafrost is found in northern Russia, Canada, Alaska, Iceland, and Scandinavia. Much of it underlies peat ecosystems. But like peat, permafrost is also found in the Rocky Mountains of Canada and Alaska, the Alps, the Himalayas, the high-altitude Patagonia region of South America, and the high country of New Zealand.

The rapid thawing of permafrost has enormous implications for climate change. There are an estimated 1,400 gigatons of carbon frozen in permafrost, making the Arctic one of the largest carbon sinks in the world. That’s about four times more than humans have emitted since the Industrial Revolution, and nearly twice as much as is currently contained in the atmosphere.

According to a recent report, a 3.6-degrees Fahrenheit ( 2 degrees Celsius) increase in temperature — expected by the end of the century — will result in a loss of about 40 per cent of the world’s permafrost by 2100.

Greenhouse gases on the tundra are released in two ways. As permafrost thaws, once-dormant microorganisms break down organic matter, allowing methane and carbon to be released in the atmosphere. Thawing can also open pathways for methane to rise up from reservoirs deep in the earth.

The Mackenzie River system is Canada’s largest watershed, and the tenth largest water basin in the world. Parts of the watershed sit atop permafrost, which makes the area vulnerable to climate change. Photo: Joshua Stevens / NASA Earth Observatory

Once-dormant pathogens coming back to life?

The permafrost thawing that is leading to the release of greenhouse gases is intensifying across the Arctic.

Much of the permafrost degradation that has occurred on Canada’s Banks Island took place after some of the warmest years on record, according to Lewkowicz.

In 1984, the island had 60 active slumps. By 2013, there were 4,000. Lewkowicz expects that the island may see as many as 30,000 new active slumps in the coming years.

This thawing will have a profound impact on the flow and chemistry of lakes and streams, as well as those parts of the Arctic Ocean into which rivers drain. Lewkowicz’s satellite data, for example, shows that the colour of many of the lakes on Banks Island has changed from blue to turquoise, indicating that the once-clear water has become filled with sediments.

Scientists suspect that some of the slumping may be giving new life to pathogens capable of killing muskoxen, caribou, and nesting birds as warmer temperatures nudge the pathogens out of their dormant state. Massive die-offs of muskoxen on Banks and Victoria islands in Canada, as well as reindeer in Siberia, appear to be related to once-dormant pathogens that are coming back to life.

Scientists are also finding that hundreds of sumps excavated by the oil and gas industry in the 1970s and 1980s are now thawing. Toxic petroleum waste that was supposed to be permanently contained in 200 frozen pits in the Mackenzie Delta, for example, is migrating into nearby freshwater ecosystems.

At Trail Valley Creek, Carolina Voigt, a post-doctoral geography researcher, and Oliver Sonnentag, a hydrologist at the University of Montreal, are using manual and automated sensors to measure how climate change affects greenhouse gas activity on the tundra.

Evan Wilcox, a geography PhD candidate at Wilfrid Laurier University, has made important discoveries about the role that the rapid expansion of shrubs in the Arctic — the result of rising temperatures — is playing in the thawing of permafrost. All across the warming Arctic, shrubs are expanding into tundra where grasses, sedges, and lichens once prevailed. Not only are the taller shrubs shading out the smaller plants below, they are also changing the hydrology of the ecosystem.

“We’re finding that the date when snow melts is the key to determining the rate at which the active-layer permafrost thaws,” says Wilcox. “The snow in tundra areas where you have shrubs such as dwarf birch tends to melt a week earlier than it does in areas where there are no shrubs. This results in more permafrost thawing. As the shrubs expand into the tundra, we’re likely to see an acceleration of thawing.”

Researchers Evan Wilcox (left) and Niels Weiss extract ice-rich permafrost cores from the tundra. Photo: Ed Struzik / Yale Environment 360

Evan Wilcox holds a permafrost core sample. Photo: Ed Struzik / Yale Environment 360

Wilcox bores steel probes — as many as 3,000 one recent summer — into the ground to determine the depths of ground thaw.

Arduous as that is, Niels Weiss, a postdoctoral fellow working with Marsh, has a much tougher time hammering into the solid ice to get the sample he needs to determine how much and what kind of organic material is contained in the permafrost.

Weiss has conducted permafrost research in Siberia, Scandinavia, and Canada, and he and others have found that carbon storage and the ways gas is released from these ecosystems depend on a variety of factors such as soil composition, groundwater flow, and whether trees, shrubs, or grasses are predominant.

What’s clear, he says, is that even in the coldest places in the Arctic, permafrost is thawing at accelerating rates.

Although much remains to be discovered about the impacts of thawing permafrost in the region, Marsh says one thing is becoming increasingly clear: In the coming decades, the tundra landscape will look much different than it does now.

That change was evident as we bushwhacked through 8-foot-high willows en route to retrieve a water gauge swept away during the spring flood. Thirty years ago, lichen and sedges dominated this landscape. Today, willows and shrubs are proliferating across the tundra. Abundant caribou once fed on the lichen, their numbers on the Tuktoyaktuk Peninsula hitting 3,000 in 2006. Now, only half that number remain.

The world’s longest border is moving

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

This article originally appeared on Yale Environment 360.

Early in the evening of August 12, 2017, heat and smoke from an intense wildfire burning in the forests of British Columbia began mushrooming skyward, sucking up ash, blazing wood and vegetation, and water vapour from lakes and streams below.

Rick McRae, a researcher with Australia’s Capital Territory Emergency Services Agency, was on site helping with fire management. Sensing that this conflagration was going to erupt into something extraordinary, he texted a group of scientists from around the world who since 2013 have been collaboratively studying fire-triggered thunderstorms — technically known as pyrocumulonimbus clouds, or “pyroCbs.”

“This is a very bad day all around in western Canada,” he wrote. “Fires went ‘pop’ progressively on the leading edge.” A pyroCb was forming in the southeast corner of British Columbia, near Kamloops, McRae added, noting,“Things could get worse if certain things ‘align.’ ”

And align they did.

As fires that would eventually consume 4,700 square miles in British Columbia burned out of control, five fire-driven thunderstorms rose over the conflagration, shooting black smoke and carbon high into the lower stratosphere, spewing noxious gases that were eventually detected almost as far north as the North Pole, and touching off more fires.

At the same time, fires in neighbouring Washington State spawned yet another pyroCb.

“By later that night we were agape about the cluster of pyroCbs and the extremely impressive smoky anvil-shaped clouds,” recalled Mike Fromm, a meteorologist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.

A pyrocumulonimbus cloud, capping at 25,000 feet over the Mazatzal Wilderness during the Willow Fire near Payson, Arizona in 2014. Photo: Eric Neitzel / Wikimedia Commons

Later, Fromm and David Peterson, a colleague at the Naval Research Laboratory, labeled that day’s cluster of pyrocumulonimbus clouds “the mother of all pyroCbs,” surpassing even the events of Black Saturday in Australia in 2009 when monstrous bushfires killed 173 people, injured 414 others, and burned 1,700 square miles. On that night in February, three clearly distinct pyrocumulonimbus storms erupted across the state of Victoria in southeastern Australia.

Yet another major pyroCb event occurred in May 2016 during a massive wildfire in Alberta that forced the evacuation of 88,000 people in the tar sands community of Fort McMurray. A pyroCb formed over the fire that day, and lightning from the firestorm ignited several new fires in the forest 22 miles northeast of the fire’s front, astonishing wildfire experts.

“I have never heard of lightning causing new fires so far in advance of the main fire,” said Cordy Tymstra, the wildfire science coordinator for the Alberta government.

As a warming world causes larger, more frequent, and more intense wildfires, fire-driven thunderstorm events are on the rise in places — including Texas, Portugal, South Africa, and Argentina — where they have never occurred before.

Mike Flannigan, director of the Canadian Partnership for Wildland Fire Science at the University of Alberta, says that pyroCbs seem to be on the rise because warmer temperatures are likely producing more intense fires with more vigorous plumes of smoke, black carbon, and water vapour, all of which increase the likelihood of pyroCbs.

Whatever the reason, these episodes can wreak havoc on fire-suppression strategies. Flannigan says that pyroCbs fires are extremely hot and chaotic, especially when the plume collapses.

A fire-induced pyro cloud rises over Fort McMurray, Alta. during the May 2016 wildfires. Photo: Tamarackaspenbirch / Instagram

Winds can reach the speed of a tornado. Embers shoot in all directions — in some cases up to three miles. That means sending firefighters in to fight them on the ground is impossible, according to Flannigan.

“PyroCbs like the one that was associated with the Carr fire in California in 2018 can be catastrophic because they can generate tornado-strength vortexes,” says Flannigan.

Pyro clouds continue to puzzle scientists

The physics behind pyroCbs are complex and continue to puzzle meteorologists and atmospheric scientists. What we know is that when super-heated updrafts from an intense fire suck smoke, ash, burning materials, and water vapour high into the sky, these elements cool and form “fire clouds” that look and act like those associated with classic thunderstorms.

The heat and the particulates in the smoke almost always trigger a dynamic reaction that arrests the ability of the cloud to produce precipitation. What’s then left is a lightning storm that moves across the surrounding landscape, triggering more fires, as happened near Fort McMurray.

Interest in pyroCbs is increasing among wildfire scientists.

Last month, an entire session at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in Washington, D.C. was devoted to the subject of pyroCbs and how they can potentially impact weather and climate in the same way volcanic eruptions have in the past.

Fromm of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory has been instrumental in proving that pyroCbs — a long-known, but relatively rare meteorological phenomenon — have as much energy and impact as moderate-sized volcanic eruptions.

Fromm and others have shown that smoke and aerosols from wildfires can rise high into the stratosphere, where they can linger for months, scattering the rays of the sun. The impact is similar, though on a much smaller scale, to volcanic eruptions like Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines, which occurred in 1991. That eruption spewed massive quantities of sulphate aerosol emissions that blocked some of the sun’s rays and cooled the climate globally by about 1 degree Fahrenheit for 15 months.

Penfei Yu, a scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences in Boulder, Colorado reported at the AGU meeting that simulations he and his colleagues conducted show that smoke and black carbon from the August 2017 pyrocumulonimbus clouds in British Columbia and Washington may have lingered for eight months because there is no rain that high in the stratosphere to wash the clouds away.

What goes up must eventually come down, which explains what happened when Canadian scientists at a High Arctic air monitoring station on Ellesmere Island, 700 miles from the North Pole, detected extraordinarily high levels of ammonia, carbon monoxide, hydrogen cyanide, and ethane — chemical compounds that are consistent with what the 2017 pyroCb event injected into the stratosphere.

“This was a very unusual event,” says Kimberly Strong, chairwoman of the physics department at the University of Toronto.

“We saw something like this following the massive 2010 fires in Russia, but not anywhere near the concentrations we saw in 2017. Our colleagues in Greenland recorded the same thing happening there.”

To the troposphere and beyond

Fromm’s interest in pyroCbs began in 1998 when the satellite instruments he was using were homing in on strange-looking clouds in the stratosphere in the summer. Strange, because clouds like these usually only form in winter.

This wasn’t the first time that scientists had seen summer clouds like these in the stratosphere. Puzzling images of aerosol clouds appeared periodically over the boreal regions of North America in the summers from 1989 to 1991.

But the scientists who identified them then concluded that they must have come from volcanic eruptions because the researchers, like everyone else in the scientific community, believed that pyroCbs didn’t have the energy to get past the troposphere, which contains most of the Earth’s atmosphere and where weather is generated.

There was, however, just one problem, according to Fromm. There was no documentation of a volcanic eruption anywhere in the world during that time.

That’s when Fromm began doing some detective work to determine whether pyroCbs might be responsible.

Among the first people he called was René Servranckx of the Canadian Meteorological Center. Servranckx, according to Fromm, was crucial to making the case for the pyroCb explanation because he demonstrated that they had enough energy to send smoke into the stratosphere.

Using satellite image data and laser-based LIDAR imaging, Fromm eventually linked clouds in the stratosphere detected in the summer of 2001 to extreme pulses of smoke from the Chisolm fire in Alberta, which burned 287,000 acres and was one of the hottest fires on record.

The smoke from a pyroCb generated by that fire drifted completely around the world more than once.

Then, in July 2008, Fromm and an international group of more than 100 scientists descended on a NASA-led research base site at Cold Lake, Alberta to track smoke from wildfires that were burning in western Canada. In a research plane, a small group of them made the first-ever flight into an active pyrocumulonimbus cloud to get measurements in the updraft core.

Pilots with the Oregon Air National Guard fly near pyro clouds over the Gulch fire in 2014. Photo: Oregon Air National Guard

Unlike conditions found in the core of any other cloud, this one produced total darkness, courtesy of the abundance of smoke and small cloud droplets.

Flying into a suspected pyroCb that day, Fromm could smell forest fire smoke at 34,000 feet inside the NASA aircraft.

It underscored the fact that wildfires could send smoke from the troposphere, where the pollution it generates is a regional problem, into the stratosphere, where it becomes a global phenomenon.

More fire-induced storms in our future

PyroCb events appear to be increasing dramatically, producing more energy, and erupting in places where they have never been seen before. No one knows what the rate of increase is for pyroCbs. But there is little doubt they will occur more frequently in parallel with the larger and hotter wildfires we are already witnessing as the world warms.

Since the turn of the century, an average of 73,200 wildfires have burned roughly 6.9 million acres in the U.S. each year. This is nearly double the 3.3 million acres burned annually in the 1990s.

“Figuratively, we have a map pinpointing the location of pyroCbs events,” says Fromm. “It’s been filling up fast. Maybe we’re better at detecting them, but I think they’re increasing.”

Researchers say they are now documenting an average of 25 single-pyroCb events a year in western North America.

The thing to watch out for in the future, says Fromm, is what will happen if we see more of the multiple pyroCbs events, like the ones that occurred in 2017, which were an order of magnitude larger than previous benchmarks for extreme pyroCb activity. One pyroCb may not have the weather and climate-altering capacity of a significant volcanic eruption, but several clusters occurring in a year might.

“PyroCbs are not in the Pinatubo category,” says Fromm. “But the thing to consider is that volcanos occur sporadically. PyroCbs occur every year.”

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.