“TUSSOCKS!”

exclaims Martin Raillard, surveying the ankle-breakingly uneven carpet of tundra stretched out ahead of us. “The field biologist’s worst nightmare.” It’s mock exasperation; Raillard, clad in an overstuffed red utility vest, gaiters and a camouflage baseball cap, is clearly in his element. The chief scientist of the planned Canadian High Arctic Research Station has been off-grid for more than two weeks, hiking across an uninhabited swath of tundra south of Elu Inlet, in Nunavut, to collect data for a high-resolution map of Arctic vegetation zones. He’s hauling a backpack full of gear and a tripod-mounted Swarovski spotting scope, and he stops periodically to point out a tundra swan in the distance, pluck a few leaves of mountain sorrel to munch on — “it tastes like rhubarb,” he explains — or scoop a sample of muskox poop into a plastic bag, which he then drops into one of the vest’s myriad pockets. Alongside him trot a pair of huskies fitted with saddle bags — not so much because they’re needed today, he says, but because “they love to work.” Raillard is overseeing the launch of a project whose scale, in the sparsely populated context of the Far North, is hard to fathom. The CHARS building alone, which is slated to open next summer in the remote community of Cambridge Bay on Nunavut’s Victoria Island, will cost $142 million; another $46 million is earmarked to get the science program up and running; the annual operating budget, starting in 2018, will be $26 million. And it’s not just the money. The initiative involves a wholesale — and not uncontroversial — reimagining of the goals and norms of Arctic science. As construction crews race to finish the building on time, polar researchers across the country are preparing for a new regime, and the Inuit who make up the overwhelming majority of the region’s population are grappling with what, exactly, the mega-project means for them and their rapidly changing way of life. All of this seems impossibly distant as we pick our way through the tussocks and then scramble up a rocky ridge to the tabletop summit of Mount Elu, where Raillard unpacks the dogs for a field lunch: bannock, slabs of Klik canned meat, tea fortified with the vim-restoring sweetness of condensed milk. When we finish eating, he sets up the scope and pans slowly across the landscape below — green tundra laced with bands of weathered grey rock, the iceblue sky reflected in nameless and uncountable ponds — and shakes his head. An unexplained muskox die-off across the region has left the landscape seemingly devoid of life, the mosquitoes buzzing around our heads notwithstanding. It’s eerily quiet, and the sense of isolation is profound — until Raillard looks at his watch: 12:05 p.m. “Oh my goodness,” he says, scrambling to unpack his satellite phone, “I missed my call to Ottawa.”

in the southern imagination, still has a heroic ring to it. Almost two centuries after Sir John Franklin and his peers, the prevailing narrative still sees intrepid knowledge-seekers embarking on gruelling expeditions into the inhospitable blank spaces at the top of the map. The drawbacks of this approach have long been obvious — Franklin’s men, after all, starved to death in a landscape where the Inuit had lived for centuries — so it was significant that when the new research station was announced in 2007, responsibility for planning it went to Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (now Indigenous and Northern Affairs) rather than to the department responsible for scientific research. The message was clear: CHARS would be different. “The old model was scientists go north, take measurements, then go back south