Canada has agreed to spend $24.5 million to turn an icebreaker into the country's first Arctic research vessel. It's one of nine infrastructure awards, totaling $130 million, announced last week by the Canada Foundation for Innovation to help the nation's scientists participate in international projects.
The retrofit of the 42-berth ship will add current meters, biological sonars, sediment traps, and a multibeam system to scan the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, allowing climate change researchers from around the world to conduct studies. One planned mission will be to assess the ecological impact of a reduction in the McKenzie Ice Shelf. Scientists would also like to rechristen the ship, now named for the famously unlucky Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin, who in 1847 led two ships and a crew of 134 on a search for a Northwest passage but disappeared. "That's why we want to change the name," laughs principal investigator Louis Fortier, an oceanographer at the University of Laval in Quebec.
Other projects include one to transform the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Ontario into an international lab for underground science and a beamline at the Spallation Neutron Source being built at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
