The Inside Story: News from The Royal Canadian Geographical Society Grants: The ring cycle Fellows: Friends in high places Contests: To the ends of the Earth Research: Sedimental journey

It was on a field trip for a biogeography class that Carolyn Reardon became enchanted by the mysteries of the bog. Reardon, a geography and environmental studies student at New Brunswick's Mount Allison University, was struck by the devastation of the wetlands she saw in rural New Brunswick that had been mined of their peat. "It became important for me," she says, "to find a method for restoring them."

Peat harvesting for the horticulture industry is big business in the province. The process removes all surface vegetation, turning once-thriving peatlands into fields of clay. But some companies have discovered dense layers of stumps and logs beneath the peat, indicating areas occupied by forests up to 3,000 years ago.

With a grant from The Royal Canadian Geographical Society Reardon sampled larch and black spruce in ancient and modern bogs in the Shippagan-Lamèque region of northern New Brunswick last summer. She aims to provide insight that could one day help extraction companies return their bogs to forestland.

Her research is an example of the pioneering work being carried out in the Mount Allison Dendrochronology Laboratory (MAD Lab), formed in 2003 by biologist Colin Laroque to study treering data. Research has ranged from analyzing dead trees in a Newfoundland old-growth forest in an attempt to save the threatened pine marten ("The inside story," Jan/Feb 2005) to studying the rings of wood turtle shells to determine how climate change affects growth patterns ("The inside story," May/June 2006).

Many of Laroque's students have received RCGS grants, continuing a relationship that began in 1991 when Laroque himself got a grant from the Society to measure the ice depth on Alberta's Rae Glacier.

"Fieldwork is an endangered activity in geography today," said Christopher Burn, chair of the research and grants committee, at the Society's Annual General Meeting in November. The value of an RCGS grant, echoes Laroque, is that, aside from furthering the work of the MAD Lab, it recognizes the importance of working in the field.

"There's such a chasm between book learning and going out and experiencing the environment," he says. "Getting chewed by bugs and seeing a deer in the early morning can be life-changing events."

Fieldwork made all the difference for Mount Allison student Ben Phillips, whose RCGS-funded research uncovered the world's oldest red spruce ("The inside story," Jan/Feb 2006).

"I struggled my first year at Mount Allison," said Phillips during a presentation to Society fellows at the AGM. "But the RCGS recognized that I could take my skills and go out in the field."

Patricia D'Souza

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Call it a fateful journey. Vincent Lam, an emergency physician at Toronto East General Hospital, was working as the ship's doctor on an Arctic cruise in 2002 when he found himself in the company of acclaimed Canadian author Margaret Atwood, who was aboard as a speaker. Lam, who was in the midst of writing a collection of short stories, summoned up the courage to ask Atwood to read them.

Last November, that collection, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, received the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the most prestigious literary award in Canada.

The same month, Lam was elected to The Royal Canadian Geographical Society's College of Fellows, nominated by John Geiger of Toronto, whom Lam met on the same Arctic cruise.

“The Arctic is one of those places that makes you feel so small but so close to something amazing,” says Lam, who for the past year has served as a member of the expeditions committee, of which Geiger is chair. “It's a great setting to meet just about anyone.”

Lam's election is part of a larger initiative to make the College of Fellows, the 200-member voting body of the RCGS, more representative of the Society's membership as a whole. He joins five others, including Donat Savoie, the chief federal negotiator for Nunavik self-government who retired from Indian and Northern Affairs Canada last April and continues to work on contract on the creation of a public government for the Inuit of northern Quebec, and Norman Vorano, the curator of contemporary Inuit art at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Que.

Patricia D'Souza

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Rosie Simms, guide Abraham Innuarak and Gillian Mucklow. (Photo: Geoff Green/Students on Ice)

Simms and Gillian Mucklow, 18, of Thunder Bay, Ont., were the winners of Canadian Geographic's 2006 Polar Bound Contest, which sends high school students to the Arctic or Antarctica with the international polar-education program Students on Ice. The pair joined 15 other students on the 10-day expedition last June, travelling by ship with a team of scientists and guides to the floe edge, where the frozen Arctic Ocean meets open water.

"Three weeks ago, I thought a narwhal was a mythical beast," wrote Mucklow in a Students on Ice online journal, "and now I am seeing [one] swim right in front of me." She got a thrill each time she realized "this isn't just camping. I'm in the Arctic!" Now in her first year of biology at the University of Ottawa, Mucklow plans to work in the North, something she hadn't considered before her trip.

"Listening to [guide] Panuili Okango talk about climate change," wrote Simms, who is now working in a Bolivian orphanage as part of an exchange program, "was the first time I had seen the personal side of global warming."

For information on the 2007 contest, see the Polar Bound website.

Andréa Ventimiglia

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Can you imagine having a view of the North Pole from your campsite? Jessica Tomkins doesn't have to imagine it. She lived it last May when she spent two weeks on Nunavut's Ellesmere Island drilling through two metres of ice to collect lake-sediment samples.

Tomkins, the recipient of The Royal Canadian Geographical Society's 2006 James W. Bourque Studentship in Northern Geography, is trying to decipher ancient climate and water conditions in the area to better understand recent environmental changes.

"Lake sediments can work like a history book," says Tomkins, a Ph.D. student at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont. A year's worth of information is encapsulated in just a few millimetres of silt and clay, providing "a window into the past."

Annapurni Narayanan

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