Soils are the safeguard of the western Canada economy.  Every time you pass by an inland terminal, you should see the soil scientists who make sure that there is enough water and fertilizer to grow the wheat, canola, flax and lentils that fill those terminals.  As you eat you steak, chicken or pork tonight you should see the soil scientists who make sure that manure doesn’t get into our food or water.  As you drive home tonight, soil scientists will have made sure that the Canadian oil sands have a safe place to store their excess sulfur and that these oil sand operators can rebuild the forest are demolished to get to the oil sands.  Your house will have been built out of trees that soil scientists made sure could grow. Your home tonight will be heated thanks to soil scientists who figure out how to clean up soil that has been polluted by pipeline spills or test wells.  And finally, as you put your kids to bed tonight, you should know that soil scientists are working feverishly to prevent our world from reach the tipping point of climate change which would see the prairies dry to a dustbowl and the Lake of the Woods become a pond.

Soil scientists secure the foundation of our western Canadian economic juggernaut; we help renewable resource companies renew their resource, reduce environmental impact of our non-renewable resource companies and uncover key starting blocks for technology companies.  To do this, soil scientists go to the field and dig a hole.

In fact, you could say that our western economy is based on soil holes.  A soil scientist might dig over a thousand holes in one year.  At each hole, he or she will take some soil, throw it on the back of a truck, or a helicopter, or an ice breaker, or even a simple back pack.  Soil scientists have been doing this for a hundred years or more and the hard part has always been… what to do with the soil/plant/insect when you get back to the lab.

These days we have fancy machines in our labs that can tell us just about anything you want to know about the soil.  For example, some machines take 1 millionth of a liter of soil water, pressurize it to 4000 pounds per square inch, run it through a nano-engineered piece of tubing and then subject it to laser bombardment.  From this, I can tell you if your well water is going to be poisoned.

So the machines are useful but they are also… delicate.  So delicate, that we don’t like to bring our mud, boots and shovels into the same room as the fancy machine.  That is why we need a field building.  This is the building that from which we launch our Antarctic and Arctic expeditions, it’s also the same building we organize things to take to Tisdale for the week.  It is to this very building that we will bring our samples, dry them out, organize and store them, and clean ourselves up in.  Until our samples have been processed, our fancy machines can’t be used and we can’t tell you how much fertilizer needs to be applied this year.

Soil scientists are there when the rubber hits the road in Western Canada.  We are the field scientists who make sure that the western economy keeps on rolling. We need a bridge, a bridge between our university ivory tower and the real world.  The new field facility is that bridge. If you help build it, I promise you, we will be there.  For you. Your neighbour. Your kids.  Soil science secures the future.

We’ve been working with the citizens of Iqaluit to assess how many and what sort of contaminants are present in their soil.  In a neighbourhood called Lower Base, some of the soil has been contaminated as a result of historical activities.  We’ve been analyzing the soil for hydrocarbons and metals.  Our initial results indicate that while the Lower Base region is contaminated, the levels of pollutants are too low to be much of a cause of concern.  This is great news as it indicates that there is likely no significant risk to human health in this heavily populated region of Nunavut.

Over the course of this winter and next summer, we will be monitoring the amount of soil that is suspended in the air and adhering to the hands of Iqaluit residents.  Using this data we can update our models of how humans are exposed to contaminated soil.

Soils are our history and our foundation. A soil profile tells us what has happened over the last 100 years and what will happen over the next 100 years. It is the legacy we leave our grandchildren. So, we must manage it. Manage it well and we can’t make any mistakes because if the soil goes wrong, no plants can grow, not animals can scamper and no birds can sing. If you don’t believe me, go to Haiti, go to the Sahara, go the middle east which used to be the World’s breadbasket but is now a desert. Why, because their soils were wrecked. So if you want to save the world, you need to save the soils first.

What will a soil’s education give you? Just this, a chance to immediately get a job. This job will be either helping protect our ecosystems from industrial damage or helping produce food. If you don’t believe me, in the 100 years since settlers came to the prairies, 50% of the organic matter and hence, the ability of soils to support human use, was lost. But beginning in the 70’s, soil scientists figured out better ways to manage the soil. As a consequence, for the last 20 years, we are no longer losing organic matter but are in fact increasing it. Thanks to soil science, our lives on the prairies is more sustainable than ever before.

As a new soil scientist, your challenge is to figure out how to make our mining, oil and gas and forestry industries sustainable. It’s not easy but nothing worthwhile is. Why should you work with me. Arctic soils are the tipping point. Can we stop run away greenhouse warming which will flood Halifax, Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto and all of Bangledash? There is so much carbon and nitrogen stored in Arctic soils that determining what they do will determine, are we going to tip?

Why else should you work with me? Simple really, soils form the basis of life. Our lab group tries to heal sick soils and make sure that sick soils don’t poison people.

As another integrated plan begins, it is important to ask ourselves, as an institution, why don’t we consider ourselves a northern University?  As an institution, we often spout fine rhetoric but rarely follow it with action.    I think that there are two reasons for this, our diversity as an institution and our unwillingness to identify ourselves as a northern location.

Despite our northern self-denial, our University has tremendous strength in northern affairs.  For example, the most prestigious national award for northern scholarship is called the ‘Garfield-Weston Award’ and only seven are awarded annually.  Our University graduate students received three of these awards, to Ms. Schafer, Mr. Laird, Ms. Guang.  In addition, another major award for Northern Studies was won by Ms. Brown.  Thus, in one year, our University won the greatest number of scholarships for northern studies across Canada.  Further, the University of Saskatchewan is training the only Nunavut resident in veterinary science in Canada.  These efforts in student education parallel our research strengths. Research programs across campus in fields as diverse as: political science, history, biology, Centre for Hydrology, geography, geology, toxicology, soil science, plant science and agricultural economics all speak to our northern expertise.  We have nationally recognized leaders in the fields of snow melt, northern wildlife, northern toxicology, Arctic ocean-floor ecosystems, Arctic governance, northern anthropology, soil science and climate change.  These leaders are involved in a range of projects, and in one case, are a major component of the largest International Polar Year terrestrial project Canada has ever undertaken.

Yet, as a University we don’t promote our northern students or research teams and they never occupy our homepage.  Why don’t we promote our northern success?  The first culprit that comes to mind is that upper administrators are oblivious to our northern success.  Yet, two of these administrators are prominent northern scientists in their own right (Basinger and Franklin).  So, ignorance of our success at the upper administrative levels is not the reason.  Rather the root causes likely lie elsewhere.  The first reason is that the University has a lot of strength in many areas, northern issues, being one among many.  If you look around, you see research programs across campus with important national implications.  So, despite the northern group on campus being one of the best groups in Canada, we can get lost in the crowd of national caliber groups that exist on campus.

The second reason is that the people of the University don’t identify themselves as northerners.  To me this is bizarre.  For example, where else would windchill be a routine topic of conversation, or frost bite, except in a northern location.  Yet, if you ask people from Saskatchewan if they are northerners, they will likely answer ‘No.’   This self-denial of our geographical, linguistic and culture heritage only hurts us as an institution.  Other Universities such as Laval and Alberta have managed to convince everyone that they are the northern powerhouses.  Because of this, we are shut out of the process of discussing how northern research and policies should evolve.  Currently there is a national discussion of how we should arrange the new Arctic research stations, how we should strengthen our Arctic sovereignty, how we should insure that resource use in the north is sustainable?  Yet despite our national expertise in Arctic governance, toxicology, hydrology and climate change, the University of Saskatchewan is not a major part of the debate.  We need to be.  We should be.

The Arctic is our heritage.  It can help this University more than this University can help the Arctic.  But only if we open the door to the possibility that we too, are northerners.

Arctic buildings, highways and services all are specially designed to cope with extremely cold weather as well as permafrost affected ground.  One of the key things is to prevent permafrost degradation and frost heave.  Frost heave happens in frozen soil because as water freezes in soil, it draws more unfrozen water towards it which then freezes.  This ‘ice lense’ expands and causes the soil to ‘heave’.  For many Canadians, we experience this when our house shifts during the winter. The key to preventing frost heave is that the soil needs to be porous and there should be little liquid water present.

The term ‘liquid water‘ sounds strange but it refers to water that is still in liquid phase below zero degrees centrigrade.  The majority of water will be present as ice but a small fraction, <20% is present as liquid and can still move through the soil. We term this water as liquid water to differentiate this water from the ice present in the soil or from water vapour.

Recently, our group has found that diesel spills in Antarctic soils increases the amount of liquid water present in frozen soils.  We think that the diesel is increasing the liquid water content because it is decreasing the free energy of the liquid water present in the soil.  I know that this sounds even stranger.  But when you are thinking about phase changes, you need to think about the relative energy of the two phases.  So in this case, we have the environment at a specific energy and then the liquid water at another energy.  As the environment cools, at some point it will be more energically favourable for the liquid water to be in the solid phase.  Thus, if diesel decreases the free energy of liquid water, then the environment will have to be colder to before the water undergoes phase transition to solid state (i.e. ice).

This increase in liquid water by diesel is a good news/bad news story.  The bad news is that it is possible that the presence of diesel will make certain soils more susceptible to frost heave because more water will be available to move and form ice lenses.  These ice lenses could cause frost heaving and topple existing infrastructure.  The good news is that degradation of diesel is more dependent on liquid water than temperature in Arctic soils.  Thus, diesel contamination may make it easier for microbes to eat the diesel because there is more liquid water around that microbes need to eat.

If you find this interesting, you can find the detailed technical publication of these results in an upcoming issue of Environmental Science and Technology.

We’ve just returned from Alexandra Fjiord, easily one of Canada’s nicest High Arctic research station.  Alex is home to Canada’s and the world’s longest running climate change experiment in seven different ecosystems.  Since 1992, Professor Greg Henry, UBC, has been monitoring ecosystem change in response to experimental passive warming.  He has managed to collect a truly impressive data set on plant community changes.

While we were there, we met an amazing field crew of James, Sarah, Adrian, Will, Carolyn and Tammy who were busy monitoring birds, caterpillars, flowerss, marine arthropods, net ecosystem respiration and soils.  They also were fantastic hosts as we tried out the brand new IPY FTIR instruments.  if you ever get a chance, go to Alex, it will re-define High Arctic for you.