INFOGRAPHIC
A warming climate is changing the way Canada builds ice roads
The new tech that could help preserve Canada’s remaining ice roads
WWhen the 190-kilometre Inuvik to Tuktoyaktuk ice road in the Northwest Territories was replaced by a $300-million permanent highway on Nov. 15, 2017, it signalled the end of an era. Unpredictable ice and weather patterns in a warming climate had shortened the seasonal lifespan of the Arctic’s most famous ice road and made its surface unpredictable.
These issues threaten the ice roads that continue to operate across Canada’s North, remnants of a crucial mode of transportation in the Arctic since the 1930s. At that time, the region had just started to open up to development and engineers saw a need for goods and people to be efficiently transported by motor vehicle across the frozen terrain safely and more cost-effectively than maintaining year-round roads on the tundra. They enlisted the help of local guides to determine road locations and identify the times of year when ice would be thick enough to support multiple vehicles. For nearly a century, these ice-road guidelines adopted by northern governments didn’t change, but now in the face of a warming climate, they have to.
These changes have forced ice-road builders to use new technology to preserve the last of Canada’s ice roads. Here are some of the innovations they use to keep these roads active and safe.
Flood pumps
Big Ice, a flood pump company in Saskatchewan, has developed auger, pump and spray technologies to efficiently thicken ice roads in remote areas. A portable pump releasing a volume of 300,000 litres of water per hour can increase the thickness of an approximately one-kilometre by
20-metre section of ice road by up to
15 centimetres per day.
Ice thickness
When the ice reaches approximately 60 centimetres thick (usually in late January to early February), trucks can drive on the ice road, carrying no more than 50 per cent of their maximum capacity. Once the ice reaches 100 centimetres and thicker, trucks are able to travel on it with their maximum loads (up to 63,500 kilograms for the largest truck class).