Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, as a research scientist with Environment Canada, I was involved in the 1970s series of studies called the “Beaufort Sea project”, which included extensive research on the potential impacts of oil pollution in the Arctic and on the climate. It appears that, as oil exploration and production are again being planned, there is a growing probability of a major oil spill or even a blowout occurring, which would release oil into the Arctic ice and water regime.
I would also like to make the point that recently Bill C-3 extended Canadian jurisdiction to 200 nautical miles offshore, thus greatly increasing the area requiring monitoring, and has increased the cost and difficulty of remedial activities in the case of oil spills that are now a Canadian responsibility.
I am the immediate past chair of the Defence Science Advisory Board, which is working on studies sponsored by DND on infrastructure requirements for increased activities by the Canadian Forces in the Canadian arctic. We are also looking at an all-of-government approach in trying to assess the potential for collaborative infrastructure initiatives with northern communities. I mention that just for some background on myself.
The results of my early studies, part of the 1970s Beaufort Sea project, were on the physical and biological impacts of the largest--to date--controlled experimental crude oil spill on sea ice. I want to help the committee to gain an appreciation of the risks and to see what regulations and timing may be appropriate with regard to granting permission for offshore drilling to be undertaken safely in ice-covered waters. There is some background on the Beaufort Sea project provided in the text of my brief, which unfortunately didn't get translated in time. This is the sort of thing that you should gain access to. These are the summary reports. There are five of them and they are available from Fisheries and Oceans. There are 42 technical reports, which this summarizes, and I'm talking about the summaries now.
We studied the impact of oil on the melting of sea ice in the spring, as well as the impacts on the organisms living in, under, and on the ice. Another major area of study was the impact of oil on the reflectivity of ice, in other words the albedo of the oil-contaminated sea ice. This measures how much the sun's radiation is absorbed compared to how much is reflected back from the surface. The concern was whether oil-polluted sea ice from a major blowout could impact the climate by influencing the degree of ice cover in the Arctic Ocean from year to year.
The field experiments were conducted by releasing eight individual spills of hot crude oil in the winter, 36 barrels each, under two-metre-thick landfast ice. We then followed the fate of the crude into the spring breakup period and on into the following year when landfast ice melts, of course, each year. The spills were into 800-foot diameter containment booms frozen into the ice such that the average depth of the crude was one centimetre in the contaminated areas.
I have a few images here that will give you an idea of what we did. The first shows where the experiments took place on the Beaufort Sea at a place called Balaena Bay near Cape Parry, which is to the east of Inuvik and Tuk. You can see here that the bay was an enclosed bay with a very small mouth into the open Beaufort Sea. This was chosen for safety: if we had to seal it off, we could. The actual spills took place in this little corner of the bay and consisted of these eight boomed areas under which the crude was pumped.
This is what it looked like in the spring. You can see the eight boomed areas and you can see crude oil beginning to emerge.
This was in June, so the melt had begun. Partial disposal of oil by burning is possible, and in June we did begin to try burning. Oil can be burned when it first arises in the spring, but soon after being exposed to the air and the sun, the lighter fractions disperse and you can't burn it. Large areas of the surface can also be contaminated by black soot from the burning.
Oil rises up through brine channels. Sea ice is a very complex material and it has channels through which the oil rises.
This is what it looks like on a burned area where you can see soot. There's a lot of soot and that extends over hundreds and hundreds of metres from the site, even when it's not very windy.
This shows one of the organisms that's at the heart of the food chain in the marine environment; this is a marine diatom. We studied these, and there were various changes. We found them to be more numerous and more diverse in the presence of oil. We also found much algal growth in the melt ponds in the oil area compared with the control area. Here is an image that gives you an idea what it looks like from a human perspective out on the ice.
And here is an indication of where the landfast ice is. You can see that there's an active shear zone between the landfast ice, which is the ice that melts every year and remains stable throughout the winter, and a transition zone, which is multi-year ice and some first-year ice, and then the main polar pack, which has a sort of gyre that goes in the direction I am pointing, past Banks Island and the Canadian shores.
Just to give you, from a cartoon perspective, a sense of what the ice looks like, you can see in this next image that you have the first-year ice, you have an active zone that contains multi-year ice, often with ridges and the possibility of scoring the seabed, and then you are out into the polar, multi-year ice. Multi-year ice can grow up to ten feet thick, and every ten years it's basically regenerated by refreezing from the bottom and melting from the surface. It's a very dynamic system.
That gives you a short course on the ice in the Arctic.
The tests we conducted, the largest so far ever conducted with real crude oil, were conducted without natural gas. There would normally be gas accompanying the crude in a blowout, and the large gas bubble that would form under the ice therefore couldn't have been observed in this. It would have major effects on what would actually happen.
The major conclusion we came to was that oil-contaminated landfast sea ice melts faster in the spring and stimulates biological processes that differ from those in normal sea ice. Secondly, any physical modelling, without including the surprising biological responses to the oil itself and to the burn products that have seen from these experiments, would not predict the impact of an oil blowout on the dynamics of the sea ice regime in the Arctic. That is, biological systems may be a determining process in looking at the impacts of oil on the environment and climate.