Picture by Paul Louwen
The Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory (PEARL), located near Eureka, Nunavut is Canada’s northernmost research laboratory and one of the closest to the North Pole in the world. The station provides a unique set of air quality and climate data used by scientists around the world, and was key in identifying a large hole in the ozone layer over the Arctic last year. But come April, thanks to a lack of funding, it will be forced to cease year-round observations, leaving the empty buildings to serve as an outpost for occasional short-term projects.
The station can no longer afford the required $1.5 million in operating expenses after the federal government axed the funding for its main contributor, the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, which had been providing about three-quarters of the cost. PEARL’s principal investigator Jim Drummond says that the station’s closure will mean a gap in global measurements, at a time when a lot of the world’s environmental changes are first observed in the Arctic. The government has plans to set up another station in the High Arctic but it isn’t scheduled to open until at least 2017, and will even then be located about 1,300 kilometres south of where PEARL currently sits.
