Sixty Years of Polar Research and Teaching: The McGill Subarctic Research Station + Supplementary File (See Article Tools)

opened in 1954, when the railroad from the new port of Sept Iles reached Knob Lake (later Schefferville), Quebec, to open up the massive iron mines of that region. “The Lab” was an outpost of McGill University, Montreal, staffed by a faculty member (the director), graduate students, and a senior meteorological observer. McGill had the contract to run the new mining town’s aviation weather station. It did this by training four graduate students a year to work as weather observers while taking courses from the director, conducting local year-round Lab research projects, and preparing field-based thesis research of their own. Typ ically, the students spent 12 months at the Lab plus an additional summer working on their own field research before returning to McGill to complete their degrees. The Lab also acted as a field base for visiting students and researchers from Canada and overseas, as field stations do today. The Lab, situated at the end of the newly built railroad (“an expedition at the head of steel,” according to the late F.K. Hare), was a pioneering university enterprise at a time when there was a great need to train Canadian polar researchers, and when the huge Quebec-Labrador peninsula was still remarkably unknown (Fig. 1). The Lab operated in this fashion until 1971, when it became the McGill Subarctic Research Station that it is today. It produced a stream of polar scholars and a wealth of research publications.