Today@Dal

From Wednesday's Globe and Mail:

Seen from the air, in the soft glow of Arctic twilight, Canada’s premier platform for climate science in the North looks like a wayward shoebox perched high on a snowy ridge.

The place is called PEARL – the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory – and its choice position overlooking Eureka on Ellesmere Island offers a window on the mechanics of climate change in the part of the planet where its effects are most immediate and acute.

“There are just so few stations in the high Arctic,” says Jim Drummond, a professor of atmospheric science at Dalhousie University and PEARL’s principal investigator. “We could put one further south and it would be useful, but not as useful.”

For all the frigid challenges that come with doing science near the top of the world, the biggest chill PEARL faces involves financing. In 2012, the Harper government, while touting its commitment to the Arctic, canned the lab’s funding source, the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Science, provoking an outcry from scientists both within Canada and internationally. Although a measure of funding was restored in the latest federal budget – $1-million a year for the next five years, or about two-thirds of what PEARL used to receive – the interruption came as a damaging blow to the lab.

“We lost pretty well a whole summer of observation of atmospheric composition,” Prof. Drummond says. “Anything that couldn’t be run automatically was run very intermittently.”

Read the rest of this story at the Globe and Mail's website.