Revealing an Oasis at the Top of the World

Winter in Gjoa Haven, a Canadian Inuit community of fewer than 1,500 located north of the Arctic Circle, gets so cold that the residents leave their trucks running all day, says University of Manitoba oceanographer and National Geographic Explorer Kristina Brown, “because otherwise the engine will get too cold and you can’t turn it on again.” Gjoa Haven is one of five villages in the barren and forbidding Kitikmeot region—a place known mostly for legendary shipwrecks like the H.M.S. Erebus and H.M.S. Terror. Ecologically speaking, Brown says, “it’s kind of a desert.”

And yet Brown, who grew up in comparatively sunny southern Ontario, loves it here—especially in the winter, when the sun shines for just a few hours each day. “You have these really long extended pink periods of sunset and sunrise,” she says. “It’s really beautiful. There’s a reason the Inuit have been here for a very long time.”  

Another reason can be found less than 100 miles away: Sherman Basin, a sanctuary of coastal lushness and teeming natural abundance that supports bearded seals and arctic char in the water and caribou and musk oxen in the surrounding tundra. The Inuit community has fished and hunted there for millennia. “Every time we talked to [the elders], they just kept repeating how special this place is to them,” Brown says. For the past several years, her work has focused on connecting modern oceanographic research with centuries-old local wisdom to answer a question central to the community’s survival. What makes the Sherman Basin so special? Why is it so miraculously resource rich when the surrounding waters are so inhospitable to life?

Solving the mystery entailed a series of expeditions to the basin with a handful
of Gjoa Haven youth and elders. And those expeditions have become a kind of model for how scientists can collaborate with local communities to pool knowledge and share in the breakthroughs.

But in order to collect the necessary marine data, Brown’s team needed to travel by boat—an enormous challenge, because this area “has no marine charts,” she says. “We really didn’t know if we’d even get the ship in.” In fact, the Coast Guard, which effectively acts as the Uber of oceanographers in the Arctic, is limited to deep water, so Brown needed something that could handle unknown shallow depths. But she was able to secure a retrofitted trawler and an intrepid captain who works as a commercial fisherman when he’s not ferrying scientists.

The key to the Sherman Basin’s plenitude, it seems, is deceptively simple: its shape.

Think of the Kitikmeot region as “this big bathtub,” Brown says, with two “very shallow sills at either end” that significantly limit the amount of nutrient-rich salt water pouring in from the ocean. Meanwhile, fresh water from surrounding terrain flows in on top, forming a stratified layer above the salt water and trapping those valuable nutrients at the bottom.

Now picture a big ladle floating in the bathtub. The spoon is the Sherman Basin, and the long thin handle connecting it to the wider Kitikmeot (the bathtub) is known as Sherman Inlet. Tides rush back and forth through the narrow, shallow inlet, generating vertical mixing between the salt- and freshwater layers, which helps dredge up the buried nutrients and bring them within reach of sunlight.

Like much of the Arctic, though, the Kitikmeot is warming rapidly, which Brown says risks “pushing these very well adapted organisms to the limits of their comfortable thresholds.” Warming conditions would bring in Pacific salmon to compete for sustenance with the arctic char, and the Inuit, Brown says, “do not like to eat Pacific salmon. They feed it to their dogs.” What if climate change forces a change to a traditional cornerstone of their diet? How might thawing permafrost impact the ocean’s chemistry? Brown’s work is helping the people of Gjoa Haven discover those answers for themselves so that they can thrive for another millennium to come.