In January and again in March we were visited by Dr. Pascal Lee, Chairman of the Mars Institute, NASA scientist and polar explorer. He spoke to us on the challenges and opportunities of Mars exploration and his project on Devon Island in the Canadian arctic. Dr Lee has visited our school over six times in recent years, and has helped us with our Mars Project.

In April Dr. Lee will drive on the sea ice the length of the Northwest Passage from Kugluktuk to Devon Island on his new vehicle, the Moon-1 Humvee Rover. The Northwest Passage is a legendary sea route from the Atlantic to the Pacific via the Arctic Ocean.

The purpose of this event is to deliver the rover to Devon Island and to do some scientific investigations along the way. It will be a historic event! Nobody has ever driven the Northwest Passage before.

The arctic is interesting to us on many levels: as a Mars analog, as a place for danger, tragedy and heroism, as a last frontier for development, as an environmental canary in the coal mine, as a cultural landscape linked to our hunter-gatherer past, and of course as the region affected first and most by global warming.

We are following Dr. Lee's progress by satellite phone and the internet. Groups of students have researched an arctic topic from the list below, built a web page devoted to that topic, linked the group's page to other relevant pages, and advocated for change around an issue that's important to the topic. Read and enjoy!:

1. Why was the NWP important hundreds of years ago? 2. Martin Frobisher 3. Sir Francis Drake 4. James Cook 5. Sir John Franklin 6. Robert McClure 7. Amundsen on the Gjoa 8. Polar Bears and global warming 9. Seals and Walruses of the NWP 10. The Arctic Fox 11. Caribou and Musk Ox 12. Tundra plants 13. The Whales of the NWP 14. Plankton in the Arctic Sea 15. Icebreakers and Arctic sea ice thickness 16. Icebergs 17. PCBs in the Arctic 18. Ozone hole in Arctic 19. Tourism in the Arctic 20. Oil and natural gas in the Arctic 21. Global warming’s effect on the Arctic 22. The vehicle 23. The towns along the route 24. Inuit traditions 25. Haughton Crater/Antarctic dry valleys as Mars & Moon analogs 26. Who owns the NWP? - Law of the Sea Treaty 27. Why has the NWP become important again? 28. Nunavut & modern Inuit society

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