A mission of “science diplomacy” has taken a team of Canadian scientists to one of Earth’s most far-flung, extreme climates to explore the impacts of climate change: Antarctica. The CBC’s International Climate Correspondent Susan Ormiston and her crew are there with them.

“The overriding question for the expedition is how Antarctica and her surrounding waters are responding to the warming that they are experiencing,” Ormiston said in a recent Antarctica-to-Canada Zoom call with The Energy Mix. How the Antarctic is changing is critical to understand because the entire region plays a crucial role in regulating the Earth’s climate.

But it’s not only about research. “The diplomacy part of this is very important, for a number of reasons,” Ormiston stressed in the interview. “This ship cannot travel and work in the Antarctic unless… they are servicing the mission of science.”

A fundamental tenet of the Antarctic Treaty, signed in 1959, is that the continent would only ever be the site of peaceful pursuit of scientific knowledge, with militarism of any kind prohibited and all territorial claims frozen. The treaty is due to expire in 2048, but its renewal is possible.

Ormiston also has her own mission, to “bring the changes in climate directly to the people” by visiting a place where dramatic change is happening.

Her Antarctic adventure began Feb. 23, when Ormiston and her CBC crew, together with 15 Canadian polar science experts, departed Punta Arenas, a port city in southern Chile, on the HMCS Margaret Brooke.

Helmed by Commander Teri Share and crewed by 85 sailors, the Arctic and offshore patrol ship had left Halifax six weeks earlier.

A regular denizen of Canada’s Arctic waters, the Margaret Brooke is the first Royal Canadian Navy ship ever to visit Antarctica. Her purpose is entirely peaceful: to lend a hand to the all-Canadian research team of government scientists from Natural Resources Canada, Environment and Climate Change Canada, and Fisheries and Oceans Canada, as well as academic researchers from five Canadian universities.

“It’s all about the support to science,” Share told Ormiston March 1 as they steamed south on their 1,400-kilometre voyage to the Antarctica Peninsula on the northwest tip of the continent.

“We have basically the bare bones minimum of individuals on board here who are wearing a uniform like mine to help support the scientists doing everything they need to do down here,” she added.

For NRC scientist and mission lead Thomas James, it is all about trying to connect the dots between what Canadian researchers know about the oceanography and marine geology of the Arctic and what they have yet to learn about the Antarctic.  “If we only work in one pole, in one environment, we don’t understand the diversity of processes that are happening across the world,” James told Ormiston in the same March 1 interview.

Canadian Science in the Southern Ocean

Throughout the mission, the crew of the Margaret Brooke is helping the scientists with logistics, including the deployment of Zodiac boats from which the researchers will take “buckets of sea water” for sampling, Ormiston told the Mix during a Zoom call conducted below decks as the vessel shouldered her way through ice floes.

From “amazing blue icebergs” to “growlers” (small bergs so named because of the growling sound they emit when trapped air escapes as the ice melts), it has sometimes seemed that she and her shipmates are “entombed in ice,” the veteran reporter said.

Ormiston has been able to set foot on terra firma. See here for the moment when she and a colleague were chased by an aggrieved seal.

Some of the scientists are measuring the kinds and levels of microbial life in the Southern Ocean, while others are zeroing in on the presence of toxins like mercury and microplastics.

Other researchers are boring deep into the seabed to bring up sediment samples. “We call it mud. They call it treasure,” Ormiston noted.

This “treasure” will then be studied for clues about rates of glacial recession in the past. Still other scientists are spending time ashore, taking ice core, snow, and soil samples.

Back down on the seabed, another researcher has deployed a remote control vehicle—“about the size of a coffee table”—to map a section of ocean floor in a lagoon at the foot of a glacier.

Informing all the research is the drive to understand how anthropogenic global heating is changing Antarctica and its waters.

A climate modelling study just published in the journal Environmental Research Letters finds that the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC)—the world’s strongest current and pivotal to the uptake of both heat and CO2 in all of Earth’s oceans—could slow by roughly 20% by 2050 under a high-emissions scenario.

In simplest terms, the slowdown would be the result of meltwater from ice shelves around Antarctica disrupting the precise gradients of salt and temperature through the water column of the Southern Ocean that have kept the ACC turning over for millennia. Any slowing of the ACC would have knock-on effects on other vital ocean currents, including the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).

Longstanding Science Diplomacy, Rising Geopolitical Tensions

Shortly before the Margaret Brooke left Puntas Arenas for Antarctica, representatives from Polar Knowledge Canada—a key funder of the mission—signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Instituto Antártico Chileno for collaboration in polar science.

Just as Canada is a leader in Arctic research, Chile is similarly active in supporting and conducting Antarctic research. Thus, the memorandum establishes a framework for the two countries to cooperate on “polar scientific and technological research and logistical support over the next decade, leading up to the next International Polar Year 2032-33,” Polar Knowledge notes in a release.

There have been myriad examples of “science diplomacy” in Antarctica since the signing of its namesake treaty in 1959. Under the terms of the treaty, the continent is owned by no one and conserved by the collective in the interests of “science and peace.” Today, more than 40 countries are engaged in research, often collaboratively, on the continent. Militarism and resource exploitation are forbidden, and territorial claims by several countries are frozen during the treaty’s term.

Observers fear that rising geopolitical tensions may be endangering this peaceful collaboration, however.

Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and now Donald Trump’s “increased deference to Moscow,” means that “consensus among the treaty members is becoming harder to forge,” Ormiston wrote in a March 8 dispatch from Antarctica.

The United States and Russia—then, the USSR—were two of the 12 original signatories to the Antarctic Treaty. Both have a significant established research presence on the continent.

Russia’s formally reported discovery last May of a huge oil deposit (an estimated 511 billion barrels) in the Weddell Sea, east of the Antarctic Peninsula, is being viewed by some as evidence of slippage away from the fundamental tenets of the Antarctic Treaty.

“Until maybe just a few years ago, we talked about the Arctic as a place of relative stability, and the Antarctic Treaty as a framework for peace and stability. Now, both of those assumptions are being challenged,” David Hik, chief scientist at Polar Knowledge Canada, told Ormiston in an interview conducted shortly before the Margaret Brooke departed for Antarctica.

Getting (and Keeping) Climate in the News

“In March of 2022, there was a day when both the North Pole and South Pole regions were 40°C above normal,” Hik emphasized.

Such terrifying breaches of climate norms are continuing to happen, but just don’t “make the news anymore,” Hik said. “We should be very concerned that we’re normalizing these extreme changes in the coldest parts of the world.”

The problem of “how to bring the changes in climate directly to the people” and keep them engaged was top of mind for Ormiston and her producer Jill English, when they outlined the role of the CBC’s first international climate correspondent back in 2022, Ormiston told The Mix.

Realizing that climate change—no less than any other subject she had covered for the CBC in the past—was about “power, people, and politics” has helped Ormiston and her team deliver powerful stories about global heating and its impacts.

For example, see here, for her coverage of the devastating floods that ravaged both Brazil and Afghanistan in May 2024.

But it has been “very challenging” to keep audiences engaged on climate change—a subject they have now heard about for years with little apparent change in the script.

Ormiston believes her Antarctic reporting will have some traction because it communicates such an unusual adventure with a clear, compelling purpose.

“When you can take viewers to a place they will never themselves travel to, and try to illustrate what scientists are trying to discover about the climate in order to forecast what our children will face in the future, I think that’s where we can have some impact,” Ormiston said.

But such assignments are “hard” and “expensive” and therefore “not easily won.” A deliberate effort to integrate climate reporting into regular news is needed, she added.

The Way Ahead

“A job that looks to the future” was how Ormiston described her work in 2022, as she took up the mantle of CBC’s first international climate correspondent.

Asked if she would still describe the assignment the same way, three years on, Ormiston was reflective.

“Over my many years of reporting, I’ve always thought that we will report on something, we will make progress on it, and that we will continue to make progress—whether it’s women’s rights or climate,” she told The Mix. “Sadly, it’s not always that way.”

“We are trying to decode the future of the climate for our audience, but as we see in the United States and elsewhere, there have been pressures to roll back advances in the climate fight.”

“A lot of people care about what happens to the climate, but as we are seeing in the polls and voting, they care about other things more,” Ormiston says.

“So, it’s not a straight line into the future, and I think that that’s something we all have to think about.”

You can find Susan Ormiston’s stories from Antarctica at cbcnews.ca/climate.