Bid to monitor traffic in Arctic waters hits snag
The Northern Watch project falls short on its promises for year-round surveillance
An eight-year effort to develop yearround surveillance capability in Canada’s melting Arctic waters was only ever able to monitor marine traffic remotely twice for a few weeks during the hospitable northern summers.
As Canada prepares to spend more than $130 million on new proposals to keep watch over the Arctic, the quiet conclusion reached by military scientists involved in the previous technology demonstration project was that continuous tracking of the cruise ships, fishing vessels and hostile forces was a possibility — but a distant one.
“For the purposes of our tech demo, what we did was more in line with what we could afford to do,” Garry Heard, head of underwater surveillance and communications with Defence Research and Development Canada — the military’s science wing — told the Star in an interview.
The so-called Northern Watch project grew out of former prime minister Stephen Harper’s 2005 election pledge to create a “national sensor system” in the Arctic to monitor Canadian waters for submarines and other marine vessels.
Harper said it would allow Canada to assert sovereignty by forcing foreign ships to “ask our consent to traverse our waters.”
What scientists came up with were long strings of underwater sensors — known as arrays — that were laid along the seabed to collect acoustic readings. They were complemented by land-based cameras and sensors that pick up surface vessel movements, as well as satellite imagery, which provides only intermittent coverage.
The project was based at Gascoyne Inlet on Nunavut’s Devon Island, a place so barren the island is also used as a simulated Mars habitat.
The Barrow Strait, on the south shore of Devon Island, is an Arctic “chokepoint,” meaning that marine traffic cannot easily avoid passing through.
The need for Arctic surveillance was increasingly in evidence over the project’s lifespan. There were increases in fishing and commercial vessels, tour boats and even adventure sailors travelling in personal yachts. For one month in the summer of 2015, the surveillance system logged 21 different vessels transiting through the Barrow Strait.
“The Arctic really is quite beautiful and a big attraction for people to go see it,” Heard said. “It’s something very different from the normal populated parts of the world.”
The political rhetoric around the Northern Watch project was a success. Harper won the 2006 election and governed for nearly a decade. But the concrete pledge of a comprehensive surveillance network fell short.
“The last trial in the summer of 2015 fully demonstrated a remotely operated surveillance capability,” reads a concluding report that was submitted to the government last summer. “Unfortunately, the duration of the trial was a matter of weeks, not the continuous 365 days, 24-7 persistent local area surveillance that was desired.”
“You’re only vaguely in control of anything. You’re kind of lucky if you can pull off what you originally planned.” GARRY HEARD HEAD OF UNDERWATER SURVEILLANCE, DEFENCE RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT CANADA
A major hurdle was the dramatic costs of transporting the equipment and fuel 3,500 kilometres north of Toronto to Devon Island.
Heard also said that existing technology is not yet sophisticated enough to sift through and analyze the sensor data and determine without human analysis if a distant underwater sound is a submarine or a whale.
There were equipment failures in 2009, when sea water leached into and destroyed the sensors. And in 2012, a massive iceberg drifted through, taking with it an underwater acoustic recorder and dashing plans to collect a year’s worth of baseline sound readings to help researchers determine the normal everyday sounds in that little-known part of Canada.
“Our best goal was to try to come up with an array design that was reliable and robust and could last for years, but was still not so expensive that you couldn’t manage to lose it now and then,” Heard said, adding that underwater acoustic work in the field is rife with unexpected events.
“One of the first things you learn when you come from school . . . is that you’re only vaguely in control of anything. You’re kind of lucky if you can pull off what you originally planned.”
Michael Byers, a professor at the University of British Columbia who specializes in Arctic sovereignty and Canadian defence policy, questioned why the military agency needed underwater-sensing capabilities in the North, given the existing satellite capabilities and the aerial monitoring of foreign vessels in the summer months.
“What we’re really talking about is whether Canada needs the capacity to detect a Russian submarine if one were to enter Canada’s waters,” he said. “Quite frankly, the Russian submarines were a greater threat during the Cold War than they were in 2006 when this particular project started up.”
Byers added that Ocean Networks Canada, a federally funded research group, has already developed and deployed the same type of year-round surveillance tools and collects seasonal data in the Arctic that is made available to scientists and industry.
“Was there a redundancy in the Department of National Defence’s project given that the same federal government is putting money into systems that are operational, proven and are being multiplied in number, including with plans to put them in the Arctic?”
But Heard said his group demonstrated that remote surveillance of the Arctic is indeed possible and added to the understanding of conditions beneath the unknown waters.
It will be up to a future group of Arctic scientists to build upon their advances and to learn from their failures. The government is accepting proposals under a new $133-million research program to boost air and maritime surveillance, particularly in the North. The deadline for pitches is Feb. 1.
“What we built was an experimental prototype system,” Heard said. “It’s far from an operational device and so people would look at what we did and where our difficulties were and they would look toward a more integrated solution.”