“Friends from the World is an intercultural exchange project conceived, within the project Map of Arctic People, aimed at promoting the reciprocal knowledge among children belonging to different cultures. The project was originally dreamt up as a bridge between the arctic world and the rest. Over the years, also thanks to the collaboration of the Italian nonprofit association Perigeo Onlus, engaged in the safeguard and valorisation of indigenous peoples cultural heritage, it succeeded in involving children belongin...

Gianluca Frinchillucci writes: Some years ago I was in eastern Greenland on an research. I was visiting a very particular village, Isertoq, probably housing the last branch of Inuit migratory movements, remained isolated for ages. As an researcher, I usually don't travel without a notepad, where I can take note of my impressions, the people I meet, the places I pass through and everything I want to fix in my mind. It was the time of Iraq war, when televisions from all over the world talked about the flight and the torment of thousands of men, women and children. An inuit child took my notepad and started drawing a sketch of how war was in his mind. ...

The Map of Arctic People (MAP) project has been set up to study the culture and the lifestyles of the peoples of the Arctic and subarctic regions and to establish lasting relations based on reciprocal cultural exchanges. The project is promoted within the IV International Polar Year, in collaboration with the Geographic Polar Institute of Fermo, CNR-Polarnet and under the patronage of CAI (Italian Mountain Sports Association) Executive Presidency. The purpose of the project is to draw up a map meant to be a work of reference for students and researchers, where the concept of Arctic is defined not only from the geographical viewpoint but especially in its essence as the cultural backbone of the peoples who live there. Many fundamental elements will serve to ma...

Hayley Hung writes: Amanda and I finished working at the rosette the night before at 4 a.m. At around 9:30 am, I heard my name announced on the P.A. system saying that I was expected at the flight deck?! Rushing out of bed, I’ve got a call from Gary saying that the captain and he would like to scout out Banks Island for a possible excursion for the scientists to hike the highest point in the Western Arctic, Durham Heights (724 m), before ending the leg. Nurse, Ève Bolduc, and I were honoured to be invited to join them on the helicopter ride. Setting out at 10 am, the helicopter headed towards the rugged southern cliffs of Banks Island. The landscape was very dramatic with high-rising cliffs bordering plateaus carved out by rivers and dotted with ponds. Several herds of mu...

I am traveling from Toronto to Ottawa and the train has just started moving. I'm passing a familiar skyline of the CN Tower, downtown, the Don Valley, and hopefully soon I'll see Lake Ontario on my right. I lived in Toronto for 5 years and though I haven't been back often, the scenery remains a home from home. Ottawa will be all new to me, and I'm glad to have grounded myself in the familiar for my first jet-lagged evening. I will be met by someone from Students On Ice at the train station, and presumably a handful of soon-to-be-friends also arriving on this route. (The heavens have opened, so much for my scenic train journey.) How do I feel? Excited, apprehensive, confident, intrigued, honoured, calm. I love th...

Hayley Hung writes: The work schedule came out around midnight last night but did not last very long. The wind changed direction and it became unsafe to deploy the rosette. The nutrient rosette originally scheduled for 6:15 was cancelled. This is frustrating as the nutrient data are essential in performing correlations with other scientific data collected at a specific location. Unfortunately, we had to leave the region of Tuktoyaktuk without this data. I had a very good night of sleep though. Tony and Patrick filmed me taking an air sample at the bow. Everyone has started planning packing up. As this is the last leg of CFL and the ship will be used by the Inuit Health Survey, most of the laboratories, fridges and freezers have to be cleared out. There was a party o...

Hayley Hung writes: We woke up to more “rock n’ rolling” this morning. I wonder why they use office chairs with wheels on the ship... I was literally sliding from one side of the room to the other while working on my computer. The wind finally subsided in the afternoon and the sun reappeared around dinner time (17:00)… the rapidly changing face of the Beaufort Sea! Now that the rosette is finally working, we are playing catch-up this evening. It is already 21:42 (Mountain time) and there is still no schedule as of what work is to be done tonight. I am waiting for the nutrient rosette to go down for Amanda’s water samples; hopefully, around midnight. If not, may be another night of endless waiting…At least, everyone is excited that finally some work can be d...

Hayley Hung writes: To everyone's surprise, it was and still is extremely stormy today. The weather forecast said 25 C and sunny!! It was in fact raining with ice pellets, cloudy and 30 knots of wind gusting to 40+ knots. The ship was rocking back and forth like a leaf! Many people felt dizzy. All the rosette work was cancelled. When lowering a mooring, one of the shackles broke, losing part of the mooring to the bottom of the ocean. Luckily, this part was replaceable. There is a strong low pressure over the Beaufort Sea area as INCATPA team member, meteorologist Jianmin Ma, indicated in his comments on the blog earlier. We may need to move further back into the gulf b...

Hayley Hung writes: The ship was close to Tuktoyaktuk today. Many scientists took the barge and helicopter to the river delta to collect samples. Very quiet day for me to concentrate on the Arctic air concentration data of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) that I did not manage to work on back in the office. Gary, the captain and Tony went to Inuvik to find Tony’s luggage which was lost on his way up to the Amundsen. Poor Tony has been borrowing clothes from people for the whole last week. Tony was so happy when he showed up at the bar tonight in his new found wardrobe! ...

Hayley Hung writes: Since the rosette has not been functioning properly for several days now, most people have been working in the laboratories on samples previously collected and preparing for upcoming sampling. During this time, several moorings were deployed and a few net tows were collected. My air sampling has been working very well though. I had an interview with Anthony (Tony) Christopher and Patrick Ellison (Anthony Christopher Productions) who are filmmakers producing a documentary on the Amundsen. Despite the lovely sun, it was extremely windy and cold on the front deck where we did the interview. We were literally yelling at each other. The topic was mainly on contaminants transport to the Arctic and how climate change may affect such movement. ...