August 14, 2025

The Kitikmeot Sea Science Study (K3S) is a long-term research program focused on understanding ocean mixing, freshwater inputs, and nutrient flows in the Kitikmeot Sea, an ecologically rich yet understudied region of the Canadian Arctic.

Since 2014, the study has brought together Inuit knowledge and scientific research to investigate how physical ocean processes shape marine ecosystems. At the heart of this work is Dr. Kristina Brown, a chemical oceanographer and the study’s co-leader, whose research bridges community priorities with climate and ecosystem science. In this Q&A, Arctic Focus speaks with Dr. Brown about what makes the Kitikmeot Sea so unique and what her team is uncovering beneath the surface.

Arctic Focus: What is the Kitikmeot Sea Science Study?

Dr. Kristina Brown: The Kitikmeot Sea Science Study is a Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada-led program that tries to investigate how the ocean and the ecosystem work in the Kitikmeot region. It involves support from a lot of organizations like Polar Knowledge Canada, the Arctic Research Foundation, and Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

Arctic Focus: What are the main objectives and the key questions within the study?

Dr. Kristina Brown: Before I can answer your question, I have to tell you a little bit about the [Kitikmeot marine] system. There's three main features to the system. The first is that you can think of it as a marine basin that has restricted exchanges with the ocean around it. And these restrictions come from two very shallow sills that are less than 30 meters deep in the North and in the West.

So that first of all, restricts how much ocean water comes into the marine system. And a key thing to remember is the water coming in from the outside is bringing in the nutrients in that will support the marine food web.

The second is that it's surrounded by a drainage basin or a watershed that's over five times the area of the marine system. That means there's a lot of fresh water coming into the system and that fresh water combined with sea ice melt, because it's less dense than the salty ocean water, tends to sit at the top of the ocean and restrict mixing. What that means is that the salty ocean water coming in that has lots of nutrients is sort of stuck in the bottom or in the deeper waters and can't get into the sunlit surface where the plants can use it to grow.

These features combine to sort of contribute to the third aspect of the marine system where there's not enough nutrients to have a highly productive system. So there tends to be low productivity across the sea, and that means that the ecosystem has top predators that are things like char and seals instead of in other regions where you might have polar bears as the top predator.

So what we are trying to understand in this region is how the ecosystem is set up to have this low productivity, but also where are the [more productive] regions within the ecosystem? That could be sites where you could have enhanced primary production or enhanced plant growth that could support the ecosystem. So our main goals with this study are to look at these areas that have higher mixing. So in the shallow tidal straits, the shallow narrow straits around the region where tidal mixing could bring nutrients from depth into the sunlit waters and support the plant growth and the ecosystem to provide places where things like fish and seals can get enough food and support community harvest of those animals.

Arctic Focus: Can you walk me through your specialty is and what your expertise adds to this study?

Dr. Kristina Brown: The area of research that I focus on is looking at fresh water and its role in both stratifying the surface water…[and] what fresh water from land are bringing into the ocean. For example, that large drain area or the large watershed that I talked about, fresh water from that watershed comes into the ocean and it brings with it all these different materials from land. It can bring nutrients from land, it can bring carbon from land. My research tries to understand both what fresh water coming from land is bringing into the ocean, but also how it's impacting how the nutrients and carbon that are in the ocean are being used by the ecosystem as well.

Arctic Focus: Why is important to have team member studying the different aspects of this system within the research team?

Dr. Kristina Brown: When you're studying an ecosystem, there's a lot of parts...they're not just the plants and how they're growing, you have to consider, especially in an ocean system, all the components that bring that ecosystem together.

So we have people on our team that really focus on the mixing aspect, the currents, the physical system, how the ocean is mixing, and what is creating the opportunity to bring nutrients to the surface.

We have people on our team such as myself, who look at the chemistry of the system, where do the nutrients come from? How do they get to the surface and what's using them and drying them down.

And then we have people in our team who are looking at the ecosystem itself and the products of that plant growth that's feeding into the organisms that live on the bottom of the ocean, the fish and zooplankton that are living in the water column.

You need a multidisciplinary team to try to understand all the nuance that comes into the kind of study that's looking at the ecosystem.

Arctic Focus: What is the current state of the Kitikmeot Sea Science Study?

Dr. Kristina Brown: The Kitikmeot Sea Science Study has been ongoing since 2014 when we were able to first go out in the region aboard the research vessel, the R/V Martin Bergmann. This vessel really gave us a neat opportunity to work in a region that has very little charting.

The kind of oceanographic work that I do and my collaborators do generally is staged on really large Coast Guard vessels in the Canadian Arctic. But in the Kitikmeot region, because the charting is so sparse, the Coast Guard vessels will not be able to deviate from their usual tracks. So being able to work on the R/V Martin Bergman allowed us to explore parts of the region that had never had scientific observations collected before.

We've been able to basically investigate different parts of the region every year since 2014, except for a couple missed years more recently. So…we're starting to put together a bigger picture view of this puzzle of a very, very large and very heterogeneous region.

Arctic Focus: How has the project incorporated Indigenous knowledge from?

Dr. Kristina Brown: From the very beginning, the study was premised on investigating information that came from community members in the North. Dr. Bill Williams and Dr. Eddie Carmack through discussions they had with community members in Kugluktuk, Cambridge Bay and Gjoa Haven. Elders were talking about these regions in the ice where the ice was thinner and that they couldn't travel over safely even though it was winter, and the ice pack was thick in a lot of other places.

By identifying these regions that were not safe for ice travel, it also was identifying places where the current flow might be strong enough to be mixing deeper waters up to the surface. So the insights that came from community members that came from some of the elders in the communities really are what formed the premise of this study.

Working with community members and also traditional and local knowledge of the region really set the primary research interests in this region but also have informed the areas that we've gone to look for or essentially do the first investigations in this study. And then we've also continued collaborate and to discuss our findings with the different communities and with knowledge holders in the communities to get more insights on the places that we should keep looking or the regions that are most important to them for better understanding how change in the marine system is impacting their community lives and livelihoods.