‘Seeing is believing’: VR project immerses viewers in climate change on Yukon Island
HERSCHEL ISLAND, YUKON – Surrounded by chirping birds, buzzing mosquitoes and waves gently lapping on the shore, the viewer travels through time, witnessing a permafrost slump, rising floods and bushes taking over Qikiqtaruk or Herschel Island.
The virtual reality project Qikiqtaruk: Arctic at Risk takes people to the northernmost point of Yukon without ever having to leave home. Using real sights and sounds, including the cracking and popping of permafrost thaw, the National Geography Society-funded project provides an immersive experience of the effects of climate change on the Canadian Arctic island.
“There are a lot of changes I’ve seen in my 20 years working on Herschel,” said Richard Gordon, senior park ranger for Qikiqtaruk Territorial Park at Yukon Parks.
Gordon said the coast is eroding rapidly, the ice is disappearing sooner and it’s getting harder for the elderly to read the weather while traveling. He said black guillemots, with the island home to the largest colony of seabirds in the western Arctic, are also declining because there are fewer fish to feed on.
Gordon said the VR project aims to help young people, tourists and others understand firsthand what is happening on Qikiqtaruk, and the importance of working with researchers in management decisions.
“It really gives you a good reality of what’s happening with climate change as it happens,” he said.
“If you could see it happening on a small island in your homeland, it’s happening all along the North Slope coast.”
Qikiqtaruk, which is approximately 116 square kilometers in size and is located five kilometers off the north coast of Yukon in the Beaufort Sea, is an important cultural heritage site with Inuvialuit having used the island for thousands of years. It is home to a variety of animals and plants, including Porcupine caribou, Arctic terns and Arctic lupins.
In the late 1800s, the island became the region’s main base for commercial whalers and a Euro-American settlement was established at Pauline Cove. The RCMP also established one of their first Arctic detachments on the island in 1903 and hired their first special agent there in 1909.
Gordon, who is Inuvialuit, said when he was a child his family subsisted on musk oxen, caribou, arctic char and island herring, and indigenous people continue to harvest in the area today. Qikiqtaruk was established in 1987 as a natural environmental park under the Inuvialuit Final Agreement, allowing traditional indigenous use to continue.
Isla Myers-Smith, a scientist at the University of Edinburgh and the University of British Columbia, has been researching tundra and plants on Qikiqtaruk since 2008. permafrost thaw and erosion.
Myers-Smith said the idea to develop the VR project came during the pandemic when researchers couldn’t travel to the island.
“I think a lot of people around the planet hear about climate change, but they don’t necessarily understand what that means and what it could mean in an Arctic context,” she said.
“For those of us who spend time on the island, it’s amazing how you can make it lifelike,” she said of the VR project. “When I have the headset on…I feel like I’m in those places.”
Jeff Kerby, a researcher and science photographer at Aarhus University in Denmark, said “seeing is believing” when it comes to changes on the island, of which he said the formation of massive permafrost thaw slumps is the most obvious . He said the VR project brought together Gordon, researchers and immersive content creators.
He said the project helps address accessibility issues, as traveling to Qikiqtaruk requires chartering a plane, which is expensive, or taking a long boat ride. It also helps bridge an empathy gap, he said, connecting people from far away to the island in Canada’s Arctic.
“If we can use this to at least start some conversations or connect people more to the connection they have with the island, that’s great, in a way that photos might not be able to,” he said.
Last month, the project won “Best in Category: Visualize” in the XR Prize Challenge: Fight Climate Change at the Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara, California. The competition included projects from around the world using augmented and virtual reality to combat climate change.
Myers-Smith said the project has been shared with community members in Aklavik, NWT, to get feedback and make plans to release it later this year or next spring.
This report from The Canadian Press was first published on July 11, 2023.
This story was produced with the financial support of the Meta and Canadian Press News Fellowship.
