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10 st / May 2016 www.sea-technology.com the federal government and the government of Quebec that permitted the completion of the second phase of the James Bay Project. The massive hydroelectric venture, begun in the 1970s, was already one of the largest hydropower systems in the world. By the end of construction on phase two, it would include eight hydroelectric generating plants and di- vert many of the rivers in eastern Canada to drain through the mouths of the Rupert River and the La Grande—just off the Belcher Islands. What's more, the dam releases that drive the hydroelec- tric turbines don't follow the ebb and fow of the region's normal hydrological cycle. "Electrical demand is highest in the winter," Heath ex- plained. "Usually we'd have fooding, our highest fows, in the spring. The hydrological cycle has been reversed. Riv- ers have been rerouted, and it all comes over to southeast Hudson Bay." Freshwater freezes at a higher temperature than saltwater does. The ice it forms is clear and brittle, which means fresh- T he hunters recognized the changes. A shot seal would usually foat, buoyed by its blub- ber atop the dense saltwater of Canada's Hudson Bay. Now the seals were sinking below the surface before the hunters could reach them. Polynyas, the open patches of sea surrounded by ice, were freezing over with brittle, clear ice, often with little warn- ing. Beluga whales were being trapped beneath the foes, cut off from their surfacing holes. Arctic eiders, the diving ducks whose down is a source of warmth and commerce for the Inuit, were trapped on the ice, dying like fies. Joel Heath began traveling to the isolated Belcher Islands of eastern Hudson Bay in 2002, when he arrived to begin his Ph.D. research on how animals survive on winter ice. Eiders, which stay in the area all winter long and serve as an indicator species for the health of the ecosystem, quickly captured his attention. Then the people who have been linked for generations to the eiders did, too. "I became interested in the cultural story," said Heath. "That got me interested in doing the documentary 'People of a Feather'. I went from the more pure academic interest to concern for the communities." What Heath saw concerned him deeply. Hudson Bay wa- ter is typically about as saline as seawater, with 30 parts per thousand (ppt) salinity. However, a massive plume of fresh- water was fowing beneath the ice, lowering the salinity of the upper 25 m of Bay water to 25 to 26 ppt. The hunters of Sanikiluaq and their neighbors in the small communities ringing the southeastern Hudson Bay had front row seats to a massive ecological disturbance—quite literally, a sea change. Reversed Cycle Heath's frst winter on the ice in 2002 coincided with a landmark agreement between the Cree people of Quebec, A New Kind Of Hunt Inuit Hunters Use CastAway CTDs to Gather Data Under Hudson Bay Ice By Steve Werblow Inuit hunters check data on the built-in LCD screen of a SonTek CastAway-CTD on the ice in Hudson Bay.