![Maribeth Murray received an Insight grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for her research project, Northern Seas: An Interdisciplinary Study of Human/Marine and Climate System Interactions in Arctic North America over the Last Millennium.](/news/sites/default/files/styles/ucws_image_desktop/public/2019-07/151125_edit_maribeth-murray_arctic-0007.jpg?itok=H86BVD6q)
Maribeth Murray received an Insight grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
Riley Brandt, University of Calgary
Nov. 26, 2015
Maribeth Murray received an Insight grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
Riley Brandt, University of Calgary
When Maribeth Murray, director of the Arctic Institute of North America, began recruiting her team to investigate historic climate and sea ice variability in the Arctic, she was looking for archeologists, ecologists and geographers. Old world handwriting expert wasn’t listed as a requirement, but is a skill that’s already coming in handy.
“We’re pulling together data from the logs of historic explorations ships, whaling ships, seal hunting vessels, as well as coastal trading posts,” says Murray. “We want to see what the Arctic marine ecosystem looked like before extensive anthropogenic impacts caused by human activity, and use that information to help address contemporary environmental problems linked to climate change.”
Murray received an Insight grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) earlier this year to fund her four-year project, which will ultimately produce research to help build better Arctic climate models and develop marine ecosystem impact scenarios that can inform management and conservation.
Wealth of observations found in old ship records
Postdoctorate fellow Patricia Wells, an archaeologist and documentary researcher, arrived from the University of Western Ontario last month. She’s begun scouring journals from Hudson Bay Company posts along the Arctic coast between the Beaufort Sea in the west and the Labrador Sea in the east. These handwritten texts go back over 300 years.
“It takes a few days for your eyes to adjust to the language used and the style of handwriting,” says Wells.
“I’ve started with journals from the Hudson’s Bay Company housed in Government of Manitoba archives. I was happy to discover there are 92 coastal posts in my study area, all with preserved journal information.”
Contained in these records, and those written by crew members on a wide range of ships, is a wealth of observations on climate conditions, sea ice and even wildlife. The Hudson Bay Company, for instance, mandated that climate conditions be reported as matter of routine.
Overlap with work by international experts
“It’s a huge undertaking, no one has pulled all this together before,” says Murray. “People are definitely interested, I only had to make a couple phone calls and had interest from museums and archives in the United States, England and Denmark all wanting to collaborate.”
Some pieces of the work have already been completed by groups such as the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which has captured most American whaling ship data, and Old Weather, an international citizen science initiative that has been digitizing ship records and using crowdsourcing to transcribe them.
“We’re looking to see how much overlap these organizations have with our work,” says Murray.
The Whaling Grounds, by Abraham Storck, shows a scene of Dutch whaling in the Arctic Ocean.
Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons
Combing through 400 years of colourful data
Her team also includes postdoctoral fellow and co-investigator Gabriela Ibarguchi, an evolutionary ecologist with expertise in biodiversity in polar environments, as well as a third postdoc fellow supported through the Eyes High program with expertise in climatology and geospatial analysis who will arrive in the new year, and likely a PhD student a little later on. They will be looking for museums and archives in Canada, the U.S., U.K., Norway and Denmark that might have records from ships that travelled through the Arctic over the past 400 years.
“The problem, and I guess it’s a good problem to have, is we have an embarrassment of riches,” says Murray. “There’s so much available, it’s just a matter of going through it all.”
And then there’s the task of building a baseline from all the observations they collect. Many logs collected information such as wind speeds, the thickness and texture of ice and the health of wildlife. But, for instance, wind speed might be reported in terms such as “a hearty gale.” Quantifying that in scientific terms with other observations that also use descriptions unique to the observer is another challenge. But the result should be some interesting snapshots from history.
Toward an understanding of how Arctic responds to climate change
“We’re not going to get consistent spatial and temporal coverage for the entire period in which we are interested, but rather a combination of data that is very rich temporally but spatially restricted (such as that from HBC post records), or information that is point data — from one place at one point in time. However, together these data sets can provide a lot of detail on short-term climate, weather and ecological conditions,” says Wells. “We can see how the Little Ice Age (approximately 1300-1850) impacted one specific area versus another specific area and then perhaps gain insight into why there may have been differences from one area to another.
“Climate and ecosystem modelling are complex activities and currently we lack both climatological and ecological baseline data that can contribute to a more robust model. Any time we can extend key time series like barometric pressure or species biogeography, it adds to our understanding of how the Arctic might respond to climate change in the future.”
Other collaborators on this project include:
The pressures of our growing global population are changing how we interact with each other, our systems and our limited natural resources. The University of Calgary’s Human Dynamics in a Changing World research strategy brings together multidisciplinary teams to understand these changes — to ensure our security, quality of life and the health of our ecosystems.
Dutch Whalers near Spitsbergen, a painting by Abraham Stork.
Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons
2015 Insight Grants to University of Calgary researchers
The SSHRC Insight program supports research excellence in the social sciences and humanities. The funding is geared to both long-term research like Murray’s, as well as for early stage research.
The 2015 round of Insight grants marks the highest number received by University of Calgary researchers since the program was launched in 2011. The maximum value of an Insight grant is $500,000 over three to five years.
Faculty of Arts:
Faculty of Social Work:
Haskayne School of Business:
Werklund School of Education:
Faculty of Environmental Design:
Cumming School of Medicine:
2015 Insight Development Grants to University of Calgary researchers
Faculty of Arts:
Werklund School of Education
Haskayne School of Business
Cumming School of Medicine:
The federal government’s Research Support Fund assists Canadian postsecondary institutions and their affiliated research hospitals and institutes with the expenses associated with managing the research funded by Tri-Council agencies (CIHR, NSERC, and SSHRC). The Research Support Fund helps the university create an environment where researchers can focus on their research, collaborate with colleagues, and translate their discoveries and innovations. Read more about how UCalgary uses the Research Support Fund