Knowing more about the processes at work in the Arctic will provide a key to understanding, modelling and predicting global climate change, according to the scientific leaders of the expedition, Ed Carmack, an oceanographer with DFO's Institute of Ocean Sciences in Sidney, British Columbia, and his U.S. counterpart, Knut Aagaard of the University of Washington in Seattle. Because the Arctic must be studied as a system, the expedition will use a broad cross section of scientific disciplines working concurrently. Geologists who will collect sediment cores on the sea floor to complete a climatic history of the Arctic covering 2.6 million years, enabling scientists to distinguish between changes that are part of the Arctic's ongoing climate cycle and those caused by humans. Biologists who will measure the primary production by phytoplankton, marine plants which remove carbon dioxide from surface waters by photosynthesis. This will increase understanding of how much carbon dioxide is absorbed and released by the Arctic Ocean.
Contaminants are another focus of the study.
The great rivers of the Eurasian continent which flow north to the Arctic carry enormous amounts of agricultural and industrial wastes, including heavy metals, PCBs and other chlorinated organics. It is important to find out how much of the contaminated sediment sloughs off as the ice moves through the Arctic and how much is carried across the Arctic Ocean to the shores of North America and the Atlantic. The Canadian Basin is the only ocean basin in the world for which no ocean section has been completed.