OTTAWA — With a February thaw coming and the sun shining down just a little longer each day, Ottawans are contemplating a winter when the skateway on the Rideau Canal never opens.

Since it became an official capital attraction in 1971, that has never happened.

The National Capital Commission (NCC) maintains the canal skateway, trails, woodlands and parks and has been worrying about climate change for a while. It’s expecting shorter winters and wetter weather. A trend of shorter skating seasons is already clear.

Shawn Kenny, a Carleton University engineering professor, is leading a four-year research project to help the commission ensure that if 2023 is a skatingless winter, it’s the last one for a long time.

Along the way, the team of four professors and about a dozen students is finding out just how difficult it will be to adapt the capital attraction to climate change. It’s an illustration of a challenge any organization or person who depends on the weather faces as the planet heats up.

Rotten ice: The NCC says the canal skateway ice needs to be 30 centimetres thick to be safe. Kenny told The Logic there’s more to it—the skateway needs 30 centimetres of solid, high-quality ice, not the weak, slushy stuff that forms when snow lands on a thin ice layer and then gets flooded.

“Snow ice is about half the strength of pure ice. That’s the critical issue, really,” he said. Last week, the ice in some spots was 45 centimetres thick, but too much of it is junky and structurally poor.

It also doesn’t hold up well as winter wanes. “It tends to rot or degrade faster,” Kenny said.

Data, data, data: Kenny’s team is studying ice cores from multiple spots along the skateway’s 7.8-kilometre length. A pole loaded with instruments, planted in the canal bed in the fall, is monitoring temperatures in the layers of mud, water, ice, snow and air; wind and precipitation; and the energy flowing in and out of the ice surface.

The idea is to develop precise models: “We can say, ‘OK, for different climate scenarios in the future, what kind of ice-growth conditions do we expect to see?’” Kenny said.

The trials: Though the Rideau Canal is the world’s largest naturally frozen ice rink, a lot else about it is already artificial. Heavy equipment clears insulating snow from the surface. Once the ice is thick enough for people, workers use pumps to flood the ice like a backyard rink.

A previous study of the skateway suggested taking advantage of colder, darker December to extend the season rather than fighting the spring. Kenny’s team has tried kicking off the freezing earlier using a snow fan at the canal’s north end in downtown Ottawa, where bridges and salty road runoff undermine ice formation.

“That really showed the potential—that you could actually at least initiate the cover even in this problem area,” Kenny said.

Mechanical engineers at Carleton are working on an autonomous snowblower, which could clear snow off the ice surface before humans can venture onto it. They’re 3D-printing their own so it can be customized with attachments and sensors.

Next season, the team plans to experiment with thermosiphons, devices used in the Far North to keep melting permafrost from wrecking building foundations.

“We know in a general sense that thermosiphons work, and we know how they work. It’s a question of OK, what kind of benefit are we going to see if we implement that here, and what would potentially be the cost?” Kenny said.

The only constant is change: If the Rideau Canal is going to stay a skateway, the days of shovelling off the snow for a few thousand dollars and declaring it open are over. Just how much effort and money maintaining the long rink will take is not yet clear.

“Our approach has been to not necessarily lock you in to just some strategies that may not be relevant in 10 or 15 years,” Kenny said. The goal is to give the NCC “a dynamic pathway of how you evaluate technologies and how you implement them.”