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Scientists say the Mackenzie River and its tributaries play a crucial role in cooling a warming climate, acting as a ‘climate stabilizer.’
VANCOUVER—Alexander Mackenzie kept a careful record of his troubles 224 summers ago, scribbling about torments like cold, driving rain and clouds of ravenous mosquitoes as he paddled a bark canoe north to the Arctic.
For days on end in early June 1789, he journeyed along the shores of Great Slave Lake, blocked at each turn by ice, searching with native guides for a route to the river that would eventually take his name.
Some 600 kilometres south of the Arctic Circle, lake ice was a constantly shifting barricade, frustrating Mackenzie’s breakout on an epic voyage that would carry him 4,241 kilometres north to what he called the Frozen Ocean.
Today the country’s longest river is a vague memory from social studies class for most Canadians, a remote place out of sight, out of mind. But international scientists say the Mackenzie River and its tributaries, stretched across a sprawling basin that occupies nearly 20 per cent of Canada, plays a crucial role in cooling a warming climate.
“It tends to act as a climate stabilizer,” Henry Vaux, a resource economist at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a telephone interview.
If growing threats to the Mackenzie watershed aren’t better controlled, “loss of the refrigeration capacities of the basin is simply going to feed further warming,” he added.
Covered in ice
As Mackenzie navigated in and out of Great Slave’s bays, hunting for the river’s headwaters, a dream of riches lured him on: he wanted a route to expand the lucrative fur trade for his bosses at the North West Company.
Ice kept getting in the way of progress.
“Towards noon,” Mackenzie wrote on June 12, 1789, “our old Companions (the Muskettoes) visit us in greater Numbers than we would wish as they are very troublesome Guests.
“The Ice moved again in the same direction. I ascended a Hill close by, but could not perceive that the Ice had been broke in the Middle of the Lake.”
More than two centuries later, Great Slave Lake wouldn’t have gone any easier on Mackenzie, even though overwhelming scientific evidence shows the Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else on Earth.
About 80 per cent of the lake is covered in ice, and the figure has been that high for five of the last 11 years, reports Gaetan Langlois, superintendent for ice and marine satellite analysis at the Meteorological Service of Canada.
The early June ice cover dropped to a low of 10 per cent in 2006, but experts caution that climate is variable, so short-term variations say little about the broader problem of climate change.
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