by Sharon Oosthoek

Aboriginal rock paintings show that thylacines, or Tasmanian tigers, once lived all over Australia and on the islands of Tasmania and New Guinea. At the time, they were the largest meat-eating marsupials in the world. But then humans hunted them to extinction.

Benjamin, the last Tasmanian tiger, died in 1936 in Tasmania’s Hobart Zoo. That’s when zoo staff discovered the animal they thought was male, was in fact female. Their mistake was an easy one to make: both male and female Tasmanian tigers had pouches. Females raised their babies in the pouches, and males used them to protect their external reproductive organs. Tasmanian tigers’ scientific name, Thylacinus cynocephalus, actually means, “pouched dog with wolf head.”

Hunt and Be Hunted

While it was more related to kangaroos than wild dogs, the Tasmanian tiger had a dog’s body, a tiger’s stripes, and a muscular tail it used for balance. It could open its jaws a whopping 120 degrees. By comparison, a wolf can open its jaws about 90 degrees. Why such a big mouth? Thylacines were opportunistic hunters capable of taking down large creatures like kangaroos. They were strong hunters, but unfortunately that earned them a bad reputation.

“It was wrongly blamed in Australia for killing sheep,” says Andrew Pask, a molecular biologist at the University of Connecticut who studied the tigers. “People were really poor and were stealing each others’ sheep and blaming it on the Tasmanian tiger.” Because of these rumors, bounty hunters were given rewards to bring in dead thylacines. It didn’t take long before population levels dropped dangerously low.

Every few years since Benjamin’s death, people claim to have seen a Tasmanian tiger in the wild. In 2005, German tourists snapped photos of an odd creature that vaguely resembled a Tasmanian tiger. The blurry images inspired the imagination of those who want to believe the animals somehow survived extinction in Tasmania.

An Australian magazine, The Bulletin, offered $1.25 million to anyone who could capture a live, uninjured Tasmanian tiger. No one did, but the Tasmanian tiger was suddenly alive again in people’s imaginations…and so was its DNA.

A Mighty Mouse

In 2008, Dr. Pask led a team at the University of Melbourne in Australia that extracted a gene from a long-dead baby Tasmanian tiger. The baby had been preserved in alcohol for 140 years and kept in a museum. The gene they extracted was the thylacine’s blueprint for growing bone and cartilage, a tissue that acts like elastic to connect joints.

DNA is a bit like a set of instructions that tells a living organism how to grow. Each gene inside DNA contains instructions for specific characteristics, including the way bones, skin, and organs form.

Dr. Pask injected the thylacine gene into mouse embryos. As the embryos grew into adult mice, they developed bones and cartilage…without any apparent problems. That meant the Tasmanian tiger gene worked properly, long after the tiger had died.

“It’s important because we’d really like to understand how [the Tasmanian tiger] evolved its particular body plan,” says Dr. Pask. “We can look at the DNA and we can pick out the genes we think are important, but unless we put them into another living organism like a mouse, and see what they do, we don’t really know.”

Back in Order

In 2009, scientists from Penn State University studied some of the Tasmanian tiger’s genes using hair samples from two museum specimens. They successfully sequenced some of the animal’s DNA. That means they figured out the order, or sequence, of the instructions inside the genes.

Knowing the order of an animal’s genetic structure helps scientists understand how that animal is made — and it may even give some clues about why thylacines became extinct. “Tasmanian tigers were really interesting animals,” says researcher  Webb Miller. “It’s so sad they’re gone.”

Dr. Miller explains that by practicing on the Tasmanian tiger, he and his fellow scientists learned a lot about how to sequence the genes of other extinct species and species at risk of extinction.

The scientists have since found out that when a species is close to extinction, there is a noticeable lack of genetic diversity from animal to animal. When animals of the same species have slight differences in their genes, the species as a whole is able to fight off disease or adapt to dramatic environmental changes. But if their genetic code is the same, one disease can kill all of them. “Right now there are lots of cool animals teetering on the brink of extinction,” says Dr. Miller. He hopes that by breeding endangered animals with the widest possible range of genetic diversity, their babies might have a better chance of survival.

Tasmanian tigers may have disappeared 75 years ago, but they still have something to teach us today.

Mugshot:

Tasmanian Tiger

Size: About 60 centimeters at the shoulders

Weight: About 30 kilograms (65 pounds)
Color: Yellow-brown with dark brown stripes

Favorite food: Wallabies, wombats

Distribution: Tasmania, mainland Australia, and New Guinea
Last seen: Tasmania, 1936

Closest Relatives

Thylacines’ living cousins include numbats and small carnivorous marsupials called quolls, as well as the Tasmanian devil. Thylacines were not related to dogs or dog-like animals or tigers at all!

by Sharon Oosthoek

What plant is so menacing it’s an outlaw in the United Kingdom? If you move it across state borders in the United States without a permit, you’re in trouble? The answer is giant hogweed. The rock band Genesis even wrote a song about it threatening the human race in a plant-o-pocalypse scenario. (Yes, you can download the ringtone.)

“Everybody knows about yellow jacket wasp and bee stings,” says Jeff Muzzi, Manager of Forestry Services for Ontario’s Renfrew County, “but where things get a little more dangerous out there is with giant hogweed and [its relative] wild parsnip.”

The Burn That Lasts

Both plants can burn your skin, giving you blisters, and maybe leaving scars. Their sap contains chemicals called furocoumarins, which are phototoxic. That means the chemicals become active in the sun.

“After a day or two, your skin turns red and starts to blister. It’s ugly and can take up to a month to clear up,” says Muzzi. “But the photosensitivity (sensitivity to sunlight) will last for years. You won’t have any protection against the Sun — you’ll get instant sunburns every time you’re exposed.” If you’re unlucky enough get the sap in your eyes, you can go temporarily, or even permanently blind.

Settlers to North America brought wild parsnip with them from Europe over 100 years ago as a food source. Boil the roots and you have a nice starchy meal. Of course, the settlers knew enough to wear protective clothing at harvest time. Wild parsnip grows a bit taller than a mailbox and is topped with small clusters of yellow flowers.

Today, wild parsnips are everywhere, especially in roadside ditches and meadows. Giant hogweed, thankfully, has spread more slowly. Originally from the Caucasus region between Southwestern Asia and Europe, people brought them to North America because they thought they were pretty and liked to have them in their gardens. Giant hogweed stems reach up to five meters — that’s taller than a one-storey building — and are crowned with large umbrella-shaped cluster of small white flowers.

Painful Plants Aplenty

Plants can also cause you pain in more obvious ways — with sharp thorns and barbs for example. Botanists (scientists who study plants) call this a mechanical defense.

Roses and cacti have mechanical defenses. While their thorns can puncture your skin and make you bleed, you’ll easily recover unless your wound gets infected.

A more sneaky strategy is something botanists call a chemical defense. In this case, the liquid on a plant’s leaves or stems contains toxic chemicals that react with your skin, whether or not you expose it to the sun. Poison ivy, oak, and sumac all use a chemical defense by spreading an oily liquid called urushiol. (Well, it’s probably an accidental defense against humans since deer, goats, horses and birds eat parts of the plant.)

Urushiol is very sticky and doesn’t dry, so it clings to anything that touches it — skin, clothing, and pet fur. Even breathing in the smoke of a burning poison ivy, oak, or sumac can make your eyes and nasal passages red and tender. But if you touch poison ivy, you may not realize it until the next day, says environmental chemist, William Schlesinger, president of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in New York.

“You will wake up with a mild case of fluid filled blisters, which are extremely itchy and you can’t help but scratch,” he says. “That breaks the blisters and spreads the fluid across your body. If it’s bad, the blisters will coalesce (come together) and the entire surface of your skin will fall off and you’re left with one big, open, oozing sore.”  Eewww.

Unfortunately for the 80 percent of us who develop rashes from poison ivy, Dr. Schlesinger and other scientists have figured out the plant will get better at causing harm as we pump more carbon dioxide (CO₂) into the air. CO₂ is released by power stations that make electricity and comes out of the tailpipes of our cars, and it is causing the climate around the world to change.

Dr. Schlesinger and his team figured out the effect on poison ivy by buying CO₂ from a fertilizer factory and pumping it into a patch of forest in North Carolina until it reached levels scientists expect by 2050. They studied the forest from 1997 to 2004 and found the poison ivy grew faster and bigger, and its urushiol was more powerful. Ouch!

 Why urushiol?

Plants around the world contain the chemical urushiol. It’s purpose might have less to do with defense and more to do with protecting a plant’s wound.

 OW! Factor: OUTRAGEOUS plants

 • The manchineel tree’s sap, bark, and leaves are all highly toxic. It produces a sweet-smelling fruit that looks a lot like a crab apple, but don’t touch, and absolutely don’t eat. It contains a chemical that causes terrible pain and swelling.

Merely standing under the tree while it’s raining will cause your skin to swell and blister painfully. The tree grows in the Bahamas, the Caribbean, Central and South America, and in some parts of Florida.

• The giant stinging tree and the gimpie-gimpie are related trees that both grow in Australian rainforests and have large soft leaves covered in little hairs. The hairs contain a neurotoxin (a poison that affects nerve cells), and they can slide into your skin, delivering a sting that some people say is as painful as being scalded with boiling water and can last for months. You can even get sneezing fits just by standing next to a gimpie-gimpie.

By Sharon Oosthoek

July 13, 2011

If you looked at the plastic in your sneakers under a high-powered microscope, it would resemble cooked spaghetti, with each noodle tangled in the others.

Plastics are made of groups of many atoms — the smallest building block of any element — linked together into molecules. Molecules, in turn, are the smallest complete unit of any chemical. In plastics, the molecules are linked into long chains called polymers.

Polymers “become entangled with each other much like a single strand of cooked spaghetti gets tangled up with other spaghetti strands in a bowl of pasta,” explains Annette Jacobson, a chemical engineer at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

That entanglement makes it hard to break plastic, which is a good thing when it’s in your sneakers, toothbrush, bike helmet or hundreds of other products we use every day. But plastic’s strength is also its weakness — at least when it comes to the environment.

The reason: Plastic takes years, sometimes centuries, to completely disintegrate. So our garbage dumps fill up with discarded plastic — bags, food containers, tattered soccer balls and, yes, even old sneakers.

Full story

April 26, 2011

SHARON OOSTHOEK

Blame it on Augusta and the advent of colour television. Up till then, most golfers were content to play around the odd weed and didn’t get overly upset if skunks dug up turf.

But starting in the late 1960s, colour broadcasts of the Masters Tournament at the Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia showed the world a meticulously-maintained course shimmering like an ethereal Emerald City. Golfers turned green with envy.

“We call it the Augusta syndrome,” says Rob Witherspoon, director of the University of Guelph’s Turfgrass Institute and Environmental Research Centre. “The expectation of standards used to be lower. Golfers saw that and said ‘Why doesn’t our golf course look like that – blemish-free, no weeds?’”

But such standards come at a cost to the environment. Fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and astounding amounts of water are all necessary ingredients.

(more)

Area to become marine conservation area

By Sharon Oosthoek

Last summer was a stressful time to be the mayor of Grise Fiord, a tiny hamlet on Nunavut’s Ellesmere Island. Meeka Kiguktak was keeping tabs on a research vessel motoring to Lancaster Sound to conduct seismic testing. Kiguktak and others in Grise Fiord and nearby communities were worried that the federal government scientists aboard would discover oil and gas deposits, putting an end to a proposed marine conservation area for the sound, which is sandwiched between Baffin and Devon islands.

Full article

February 3, 2011

By Sharon Oosthoek

A water flea about the size of the equal sign on a keyboard has more genes than any other creature analyzed so far, say scientists, who suggest its sophisticated genome could one day double as a highly sensitive and inexpensive environmental monitoring tool.

Vaccinating prairie dogs may be the key to saving rare black-footed ferrets

by Sharon Oosthoek

Behind the brick walls of the National Wildlife Health Center, past security doors leading to an isolation room, black-tailed prairie dogs dine on peanut-butter-flavored pellets. These tan-colored rodents with black-tipped tails were captured near Wall, South Dakota, and now live in burrows of stainless steel boxes connected by plastic pipes. Normally, they would be eating alfalfa pellets, carrots and broccoli. But on this summer day in Madison, Wisconsin, the only thing on the menu is peanut butter snacks, served up by the center’s scientists.

The prairie dogs—13 in all—gobble up the new offering and that’s good news because the pellets contain a vaccine against plague. Three weeks from now they will be exposed to Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes the deadly disease. Remarkably, nine of them will live.

The vaccine-laden pellets are the handiwork of U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) epizootiologist Tonie Rocke, who believes they hold the key to saving an animal once thought extinct.

Full story

by Sharon Oosthoek

Over three thousand years ago, a cargo ship sunk off the coast of Turkey while carrying tin, copper, glass, and ivory hippopotamus teeth — likely gifts from one king to another.

The boat rested on the sea floor for 3300 years before a Turkish diver looking for sponges spotted some strange-looking objects. He told his captain they looked like “metal biscuits with ears.”

The captain knew some underwater archeologists and told them about the discovery. The archeologists thought the biscuits might be ancient copper ingots — slabs of copper with handles to make it easier to move them.

That’s exactly what the young diver had found. And when the archeologists dove down to the ingots, they also found the royal ship. “The wreck is probably the most important ancient wreck yet found,” says archeologist George Bass, who led the research into the ship’s history.

Nobody knows for sure how many shipwrecks there are, says Bass, who created the Institute of Nautical Archeology to study important shipwrecks. Bass and the institute’s president, James Delgado, believe only a tiny number have been found.

“It’s a big ocean and we haven’t searched it all,” says Delgado. “We’ve maybe looked at five percent of it and we’ve found thousands of shipwrecks.”

Shipwrecks are often found by accident by divers or fishermen. Sometimes they’re found by reading historical records. Archeologists who have a good idea of where ships might have sunk will go out in a boat to look. They tow video cameras underwater, or use metal detectors that can find shipwrecks that carried iron cannons or anchors.

Archeologists may also launch small unmanned submarines to look around. “They dive and work on their own. They go back and forth just like you might mow a lawn — straight lines back and forth all day long,” says Delgado.

The submarines have sonar scanners that bounce sound waves off objects on the ocean floor. The scanner turns those sound waves into a kind of graph that shows the shape of things below the water — including shipwrecks.

Some of the best places to look are close to coastlines because boats often sink after hitting rocks near shore. The coastlines of countries with a long history of sailing are an especially good bet — from the Mediterranean to the South China Sea.

Cold, fresh water is often wreck heaven. No, or little salt, spares wrecks an attack from shipworm, which can chomp through a wreck in 10 years. Until recently, the Baltic Sea was a great place to find shipwrecks in good condition because it was shipworm-free, says Bass. The beautifully preserved Vasa, a 17^th century Swedish warship was found in the Baltic.

“Alas, perhaps because of global warming, shipworms are now being reported in the Baltic for the first time,” Bass says. In fact, shipworms have already attacked about a hundred sunken ships in the Baltic waters around Sweden, Germany, and Denmark. Scientists think salt-loving shipworms can tolerate the warming Baltic waters. The shipworm’s lunch, however, is the marine archeologist’s loss.

Who Owns a Shipwreck?

It depends. If a boat belonging to a country sinks — say a navy ship — it still belongs to that country and its government gets to decide what to do with it.

If a ship belonging to a person sinks, it could end up the property of an insurance company. That’s because ship owners pay insurance companies a little bit every month, and if their boat sinks, the company pays them what it thinks the boat is worth. After that, the company owns the boat.

But what happens when a wreck is so old no one remembers to whom it belonged? If it’s close enough to shore, the closest coastal country gets to decide what to do with it. Some countries require you ask permission before salvaging.

“Each country has their own different law,” says underwater archaelogist James Delgado. “But when you get out into the deep ocean, it’s no man’s land.”

That’s when a judge working in a special court called an Admiralty Court uses the Law of Salvage to decide who owns it. If you find a ship that’s been abandoned far out in the ocean — either floating or sunken — and you bring it, or parts of it, back to land, you can go to an Admiralty Court judge and argue that you saved the boat and deserve a reward for your work.

If the owner can be found, and they want the boat back, the judge could order them to pay you a reward. If the owner can’t be found, as is the case with many ancient wrecks, you could end up owning it.

by Sharon Oosthoek

 If attacked, humans scream. So do chimps — ditto for lots of animals. And guess what? Tadpoles scream, too.

            The discovery surprised Argentinian frog expert Guillermo Natale, who thinks he may be the first to record tadpole screams. While biologists knew tadpoles have lungs and a throat, it was a surprise to learn that they make a racket during an attack.

            Dr. Natale, who works at Argentina’s Universidad National La Plata, made the discovery while recording the mating calls of a species in Argentina called the Pacman frog. Listening through his underwater microphone, he suddenly realized he was also hearing tadpole shrieks.

            Curious, the scientist brought some frogs back to his lab with the idea that they would have babies, and he could listen to them. The adult frogs did not cooperate. So Dr. Natale turned to University of Ottawa biologist Vance Trudeau, an expert in getting frogs to breed in captivity.

            Dr. Trudeau succeeded and together he and Dr. Natale discovered Pacman tadpoles as young as 72 hours make a series of quick, metallic-like screams. But they only did it when they were touched with a small stick or when another Pacman tadpole bumped into them.  

            “We were flabbergasted,” says Dr. Trudeau. “We still are. It’s incredible. It’s like fetuses talking to each other.”

            Drs. Natale and Trudeau found that Pacman tadpoles made no sound when they put a different species of tadpole into the aquarium with them. Instead, they silently ate the other tadpole.

            The scientists think the tadpoles scream because they know other tadpoles of the same species might eat them. Pacman frogs and tadpoles are very carnivorous — which means they have a huge appetite for other animals, including tadpoles. As adults, the frogs even eat mice.

            Drs. Natale and Trudeau believe the screams are the tadpoles’ way of saying to their brothers and sisters: “We’re from the same family, please don’t eat me.”

            Scientists actually call the frogs Argentinean horned frogs. But most people call them Pacman frogs because they have big mouths like in the Pac-Man video game, and they will try to eat just about anything they can get their mouths around. Believe it or not, a popular name like Pacman means the frog is becoming a popular pet.

            Scientists worry that it will be harder to find the frogs in the wild as people trap and then sell them. If only the frogs could scream to frighten away humans.

August 6, 2010

SHARON OOSTHOEK

When William Baffin sailed past the entrance to a broad channel north of the island that now bears his name, little did the intrepid English navigator realize that it was the gateway to the very thing he was looking for: the fabled northwest passage to the riches of the Far East.

Four hundred years later, another European ship is headed for Lancaster Sound. It, too, is on a voyage of discovery, one designed to advance not only scientific knowledge but the cause of Canadian sovereignty.

The German research vessel Polarstern (Polar Star) has been enlisted by Natural Resources Canada (NRC) to conduct seismic testing of the Arctic seabed. Over the next two months, it will crisscross 5,500 kilometres, nearly 400 kilometres of it in the sound, collecting data and gaining a better understanding of what lies beneath the ocean floor.

At the same time, hundreds of kilometres to the west, Canadian scientists are working with counterparts from the United States on a similar mapping project. Two coast guard icebreakers, one from each nation, are exploring 21,000 square kilometres of the Beaufort Sea in a bid to settle once and for all where Alaska ends and the Northwest Territories begin.

And last week the flagship of Russia’s polar fleet, the Academician Feodorov, left port in Archangel to spend 100 days conducting geological and seismological studies between Siberia and the North Pole as part of Moscow’s drive to expand its territorial waters.

With just three years before the deadline set out by the United Nations Law of the Sea, the race to claim what lies below the ocean is clearly approaching the finish line.

Long a subject of heated debate, northern sovereignty has been especially touchy since the polar ice began to melt, making the Northwest Passage a potential conduit for international shipping. Which is why it was no laughing matter three years ago when the Academician Feodorov reached the North Pole and sent down a submersible carrying the deputy speaker of Russia’s parliament to plant a flag on the bottom.

Yet the fight for national supremacy isn’t why people who live in the path of the Polarstern went to court this week.

SERENGETI OF THE ARCTIC

Lined with steep ice-covered mountains and deep fjords, Lancaster Sound lies between Baffin Island and Devon Island, covering 40,000 square kilometres, more than twice the area of Lake Ontario.

Seemingly desolate to the untrained eye, it is, in fact, home to an unusual abundance of wildlife. Extensive polynyas – stretches of open water surrounded by sea ice – make the area so creature-friendly that it has come to be known as the Arctic Serengeti, inhabited by most of the world’s narwhals and one-third of North America’s belugas, as well as massive bowhead whales, an array of seals (ringed, bearded and harp), walruses, thick-billed murres (cousins of the long-vanished great auk) and one of the highest densities of polar bears in Canada.

This natural bounty has long sustained the Inuit, who look at the $200 the Northern Store charges for a turkey no bigger than a soccer ball and worry about what impact the testing will have on their traditional source of food.

The Polarstern will drag air guns in its wake and measure what happens to the sound waves they blast out every 60 seconds. Hunters says all this noise is bound to drive off the animals, and this week, the Qikiqtani Inuit Association, which represents residents of Arctic Bay, Pond Inlet, Clyde River, Resolute Bay and Grise Fiord, petitioned the Nunavut Court of Justice to call the whole thing off.

The move has drawn support from a surprising source – environmentalists, who rarely see eye to eye with hunters, says Chris Debicki, who works in Iqaluit with Oceans North Canada, a branch of the U.S.-based Pew Environment Group. But they also oppose the testing, both in the short run and because of what it could lead to down the road: drilling for underwater petroleum and the prospect of a spill like the one that sent an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

If history is any indication, there is cause for concern. Four decades ago, a crew looking for gas on Melville Island, more than 400 kilometres west of Lancaster Sound, sparked a blowout that lasted 485 days – five times what it took to contain the gulf spill.

A year later, perhaps the largest blowout Canada has seen took place north of Melville on tiny King Christian Island. The gas ignited, fried the drilling rig and created an 85-metre-high column of flame that burned for three months and could be seen from the air hundreds of kilometres away.

Even so, in 1974, a company was given approval in principle to drill in Lancaster Sound, but the final go-ahead was delayed for three years and then the ruling rescinded due to environmental concerns.

NO THREAT AT ALL?

Now, the government insists that fears for the future of the sound are groundless, especially since last December, when Environment Minister Jim Prentice announced a $5-million study to determine whether it should become a national marine conservation area, which would effectively ban resource development.

If that is so, the hunters and environmentalists ask, why look for resources at all?

Mr. Prentice argues that by providing a better understanding of geology, the testing will “inform the creation” of a conservation area. Meanwhile, Leona Aglukkaq, who represents Nunavut in Parliament and is the federal minister responsible for the north, says that “the mapping of undersea geology is essential to making better decisions on land use and economic development.”

The territory’s chief geologist, Donald James confirms that testing is “part of the process” for a national park. “It’s called a mineral and energy resource assessment. It has to be done in the legislation.”

He says, “people don’t understand the process,” and “should a conservation area be formed, Lancaster Sound will be protected … regardless of the resource potential.”

Many Arctic residents don’t believe this. “When they find something, they will want to do the drilling or mining,” insists Meeka Kiguktak, mayor of Grise Fiord.

This week, although Inuit leaders had asked for a delay while the National Energy Board reviews the safety of offshore drilling, Indian and Northern Affairs auctioned off for $103-million exploration rights to 205,000 deep-water hectares in the Beaufort Sea.

The apparent haste worries people like Ms. Kiguktak: “I can’t imagine our whales and walruses floating on shore, coated with oil. Our elders always say money comes and goes, but if animals and birds go, they’re gone. For Inuit to survive up here, we’ve got to protect our environment.”

Experts in oil recovery say the cold and ice would make a cleanup far more difficult than in the Gulf of Mexico. News reports this week suggest companies facing a spill may need three years to drill a relief well.

And if the spill is significant, “there does not exist today technology that can recover oil from ice,” Ron Bowden of Vancouver-based Aqua-Guard Spill Response Inc. recently told a Senate committee. “You can’t lay boom on ice. You can’t recover oil from the surface because it’s hampered by the ice, or under the ice, so it’s quite a different scenario.”

Okalik Eegeesiak, president of the Qikiqtani Inuit Association, says that, given what is at stake, she is “bewildered” that Ottawa stuck with the seismic testing. “We were led to believe they would” cancel it or avoid Lancaster Sound.

So, it’s no surprise residents are joining forces with environmentalists, who she says are “starting to understand where we come from.” The feeling is mutual, adds Ron Elliott, the area’s member of Nunavut’s Legislature. “As someone … commented: ‘I think we’re starting to sound like Greenpeace.’ ”

TO DRILL OR NOT TO DRILL

Although exploration licences have been granted, no offshore drilling is being done in the Canadian Arctic, and Mr. James says no one knows whether there ever will be. The government and the NRC are “not in the oil and gas business,” he says. “But what we can do is say, … ‘Here are great areas that, in the future, we can direct exploration companies to test further.’ ”

In any event, he adds, “decisions are going be made with the very best geoscience tools and research data available. The work we’re doing right now is going to assist that.”

Residents can’t help but wonder how much say they will have. “A lot of times, it feels like David and Goliath here,” Mr. Elliott says. “And it seems Goliath is going to do what Goliath is going to do.”

In the Western Arctic, a verdict is much closer. Last week, Imperial Oil announced that it and its U.S. parent company, Exxon Mobil Corp., will take a 50-per-cent share in a venture to develop deep-water properties in the Beaufort Sea, where the stakes in the border dispute are high. The contested area may hold 1.7 billion cubic metres of gas and a billion cubic metres of oil.

The joint mapping mission should produce an agreement, but drilling is unlikely to begin until the NEB finishes the investigation it launched in the wake of the massive gulf spill – which is especially relevant, considering who has the other half of Imperial Oil’s big project: British Petroleum.