The Current - Divers are risking their lives to collect algae. Why?

Episode Date: March 4, 2025

Citizen scientists have been diving into Ontario’s frozen lakes to collect algae growing on the underside of the ice. It’s cold and dangerous work — so why are they doing it?

What does a mummified Egyptian child, the Parthenon marbles of Greece and an Irish giant all have in common? They are all stuff the British stole. Maybe. Join me, Mark Fennell, as I travel around the globe uncovering the shocking stories of how some, let's call them ill-gotten, artifacts made it to faraway institutions. Spoiler, it was probably the British. Don't miss a brand new season of Stuff the British Style. Watch it free on CBC Gem. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current Podcast. It's the sound of a scuba diver in some very cold water drilling into the ice above him.

He, the diver, is collecting algae. Algae growing on the underside of ice in a Canadian lake. Not only is this chilly work, it is also dangerous and it's unprecedented. Why exactly, you might ask, would scuba divers plunge into the frigid waters in Northern Ontario to collect seemingly unremarkable greenish bits? In the name of science, of course, and in the name of adventure as well. Andrew Budziak was part of that volunteer ice diving team. He recorded the sound you just heard for a documentary

that he's making about the project and he's with me in studio. Good morning. Good morning, man. I want to talk about the practical elements of this in a moment. Why would you do this? Why, how did, like, why would you end up in the

freezing cold water trying to collect algae? It's almost impossible to convince anyone to go do it. That really, really doesn't want to do it. Cause it sounds awful. You got to go to the middle of the lake. You got to put all this stuff on, you go out there, use a chainsaw, you cut through and then you're under there.

But once you're under there, it's absolutely remarkable. Um, it doesn't like, I've seen photos from the moon and Mars and it doesn't even feel like that. It feels like something completely, almost even more alien. And these are, these are on our lakes. These are the lakes that you, you go to

vacation on in, in the summer. How did you end up doing this? And you always thought, you know what? I wonder what those lakes are like in the dead of winter. I wanted to do it because it seemed like a challenge. I love diving and for me, ice diving really felt like the final frontier. There were so few people that did it. And it's one of these things you, you

mentioned at a party or it comes out and people look at you like, it's like, there's, there's a blank stare. It's hard to, hard to even communicate. So, I mean, I love taking photos and videos and bringing people into that world because it's, it's so exciting and so weird. And so how did you hear about this?

Like a scientist kind of just told you, this is what we're doing. One of the, one of the best things about being a journalist is you can be chatting with whoever you want and you could say, Hey, what's new in your world? So I was talking to Dr. Andy Bromberger, who's a scientist at

environment and climate change, Canada. And we're having this chat about something unrelated and I said, Hey man, like what's new in your world? And he said, well, we're like really seeing how active algae is under, under the ice, but it's, it's super hard to get to. And we're not really sure how to

get to it. And I blurted it out, well, what if I get a team of ice divers together and we go get it for you. And he kind of giggled, he's like, yeah, that that would be wild. And that's what started all of this. The algae part of this is really interesting. I said, what does it say?

Greenish bits or something like that. Yeah, greenish brown. I had read somewhere that algae contributes more than 50% of the oxygen that we breathe. The saying is you take one breath and then take another breath. And one of those breaths was the result of algae. We talk about, you know, we think about the Amazon

and all those things, but it's, it's algae. The lungs of the earth. Exactly. But it's, it's algae that is giving us this oxygen and allowing us to, to exist here on earth. And it also contributes to how beer gets made. So that's also really important. Very important.

Yes. If you wanted to get this algae in the dead of winter, why wouldn't you just get on a snowmobile and go out under the lake and saw a hole and just pull the stuff out? Why do you need to get in the lake? That was my first question before I did this. I'm like, is there an easier way?

But the second you do that, you're destroying these samples. You're destroying this algae. You're exposing it to air, to light. You're really busting it up. And the whole point of this was to get these samples like perfectly intact. So we are getting not just kind of what's a little below the ice, but what's entrained in the ice. This is the ice bottom algae.

This is really, really unique and we have to get it in a very precise way. The wee is interesting here as well. These are all citizen scientists. That's right. These are super highly skilled ice divers who love doing this. This is what we do in the winter just for fun. And when I presented this idea to a group of very, very, very skilled ice divers, everyone was like, yeah, this

is, this is a no brainer. We, we love winter. We love our lakes. We, we love the ice. Of course we're going to do this. And the response has been outstanding. I mean, ice divers get this right away. They're like, yeah, if we can use our skill set

to help, we're, we're going to do it. You're talking about ice diving, like it's something that people do on a regular basis. I know not of ice diving. So walk us through the practicalities here. How do you get into the water to get these samples? You have to put in a lot of labor. So one of the sites that we dove at recently up

in Lake of the Woods, we had to cut through two feet of ice. We have a very, very long chainsaw. So the first thing you're going to shovel some snow, then you're going to use this chainsaw to cut first thing you're going to shovel some snow. Then you're going to use this, this chainsaw to cut through and you're going to make these one by one blocks. We had to pull out.

One by one blocks of two foot thick ice. Each block weighed 300 pounds. Matt, you and I have a similar frame. We are not meant to be pulling 300 pounds out of the water. So thank God I'm kind of generally in the smallest guy on these teams. So we use these ice tongs to pull them out and we have to pull out 36 of these things. So it's a big process and then we kind of clear and prep the site and that's,

that's day one and then day two, we're actually diving. So dumb question, but what are you wearing? I mean, watching the trailer, but like, what are you wearing so that you don't freeze to death? We are wearing a lot of layers and because we're down there for a while, minimum an hour, we have this dry suit on that keeps the water off of our skin, except for our face. We have, looks like this kind of jumpsuit,

it's kind of this pajama material, it's really nice and then these long johns. And we also, some of us wear heated vests and heated gloves. So those are actually electric. And I wouldn't say they keep you warm, but they keep you from noticing the cold longer. And then, so you get into the water and you go

through the hole and you go past the hole under the ice. Correct. What is, what is that like? Describe, describe what it looks like. Some people that have never felt claustrophobia feel it under ice for the first time. People have been diving for 20 years, do their

first ice dive and have a freak out. So. Because you have a ceiling. There's a lid on top of where you are. You can't just come up and I don't care how strong you are, nobody's breaking through two feet of ice. Um, I love it. I have this feeling every time I go under and I

think a lot of people that love ice diving do and just kind of look around, you're like, I'm the only, me and my dive buddy, we're the only, we're the only people here. This is, this is it. This is us. So, you know, if you're, if you're claustrophobic, it's not great, but if you like that kind of thing,

it's a really magical experience. Once you're there, I mean, what's magical about it? Does light come and describe what it looks like? There are two conditions. One is if you're driving in a very clear lake. It's as if somebody has taken a cathedral and turned it on its side, and the ceiling is stained glass, and the light comes through the ice

in a way that is completely surreal, and it's all very calm and very still. And it's got this stillness quality of like driving across the prairies where you could just see forever and the moments just seem to last. The light is extraordinary. And the other conditions are when you're driving and diving in a darker lake, you know, you go up to Muskoka, the lakes are kind of tannic, you're in there. We describe that as cold, dark, and scary. Cold, dark, and scary.

Cold, dark, and scary. So what I'll do is I'll turn around and I'll look back to the hole and we have a line that's attached to us going to the hole. And that line just disappears into nothingness. Sometimes the visibility is like 10, 15 feet and we could be 50 or 100 feet away from the hole. So that line literally is your lifeline to the surface. And that's also this own thing, you know, its own thing, because that's pretty extreme and it feels really remarkable and special to be down there.

And those, yeah. What was the scariest moment that you had? You know, we don't have, I've extremely lucky. I don't generally have scary moments. We, we train. Aside from the whole thing. Well, I mean the whole thing, right. But you know, when you're down there and everything's going great, it's like, this is awesome, but we're constantly checking on each other, we're constantly asking with, with an

okay symbol, you know, little circle with your fingers, are you, are you okay? You know, check your, check your gas, make sure there's enough in your tank, checking to make sure your die, buddy, are you cold? Are you good? Constantly checking, making sure all of this stuff is okay. And we're trained to help each other under there

if something goes wrong. So thankfully I haven't had any truly scary experiences under the ice, but it certainly does happen. What are the scientists hoping to learn from the algae that you scrape off of, the drill there, off of the bottom of the ice? The very first question was can we do it and what's there? And once we proved that we can do it and the scientists were able to look at these things using various kinds of DNA bar coding,

what they realized was what was being collected, what grows on the bottom, the ice bottom, is completely unique from the rest of the water column. So that's its own thing. It's not like parts of the other water column got kicked up and froze up there. That's a unique habitat. So now the questions are coming fast and furious. What does this algae mean for the health of the water for the rest of the season? Does it affect fish?

And now we're getting to this point where researchers are beginning to ask, well, what's the correlation between ice covered winters and non-ice covered winters and harmful algae blooms. So this is a year round thing. And this truly is a race against time because I don't have to tell any of your listeners,

like we're losing lake ice. This is a. I was going to say there's an urgency to this, right? A huge urgency. This winter was particularly cold, which was great for us in our work, but last year it was almost impossible to do any ice diving.

We were constantly smashing records for how poor the ice coverage is on, you know, especially the Great Lakes, but other lakes around Canada. So we don't know how long we have left to do this. So while it's something that we're plowing ahead with, this is constantly in the back of our mind. Like let's go, let's go, let's go. And every time we get out there and every

time we get samples, it feels like something really special. And are the samples, I mean, they're studied, how do they preserve? They come out of this one environment and suddenly it's a good deal warmer. We have researchers around the world asking for these samples because it's so unique what we're

getting. So they go into these little like silvery bags, they go into a little silvery bags, they go into a cooler, and some of them go back to labs. But some of them right now, I think they're either on route or they've arrived at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, and some of these samples are gonna be preserved at minus 160 degrees Celsius.

Like it's kind of like Jurassic Park style stuff. So future researchers can have access to the samples that might not be here in a couple of decades. So some of these they're so so unique they're just being stored away for future researchers to look at. There's a trailer for your documentary in which, I don't know if it's you or

somebody says that it should be Canadians who are doing this work. What do you mean by that? We have more lakes than anybody. If you walk through any Canadian art gallery, you're gonna see a lake. If you're at a hockey game and they play those intros to get you all hyped up, there's a shot of someone

playing hockey on a lake. Like the frozen pond is part of who we are. 100%. And we are, by our very nature, whether you were born here or you came here from elsewhere, we're adventurous people and just spend a winter in Winnipeg. We love winter. This is us. So absolutely it should be Canadians doing this thing. We love our lakes and we should be working hard to understand and protect them. This is just finally, this is part of what you love about the work that you do. I mean, I said when you came in, one of the neat things about this is that you

take me somewhere that I have never been. I don't know that I want to bundle up and go into a hole in the, but I like to know what it looks like. Do you know what I mean? And it's, it's a part of the world that we don't get to see any other way. I feel so special every time, you know, I cherish those moments when I'm under there. Every ice dive is special and magical.

No matter how many times I do it, there's always that moment, whether I'm working or focusing on something else, I always try to turn around and just go, wow, this is truly phenomenal. And I'm really blessed to be down here. What do you do when you get out? Do you get into like a sauna or something like that, like hot toddy? How do you stay warm?

We run, generally, if I do it right, I mean, we just did two dives and it was minus 26 outside. And when we get out, you're wet, so you have to be very careful with how you undress because when you're wet and your hands are wet and your face is wet and that wind hits you and it's minus 26, you don't have long before you can do real damage to yourself.

So it's a matter of getting somewhere, getting undressed and just putting your clothes on and like you said, maybe a hot toddy or something like that after. It's fascinating. It's so interesting and for good as well, not just to be an adventurer, which is a great thing in and of itself, but for science as well. Andrew, thank you. Thank you, Matt. Andrew Budziak is a journalist, photographer and ice diver.

He's making a documentary called Under the Ice about this algae gathering project. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.