For our understanding of the Arctic environment and its fate as the climate changes, one relationship is more important than all the others being studied by scientists aboard the Amundsen, a Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker converted into a floating polar research base.

It's not the complex chemical exchanges between air, snow, ice and water. Not the intricate biology and zoological web which connects plankton to polar bears. Not even the powerful physical forces which power tides and currents through the archipelago.

Nor is it the millions of dollars of sampling and analysis apparatus that reduce the ship's decks to narrow passageways and overflow from a dozen laboratories.

Instead it's hockey or having a few beers together at night or rehashing the day's developments over meals.

It turns out that the critical element for success on the ship is the personal interplay among the scientists. Face time is going to be as important as lab time during the current 10-month expedition which is Canada's main contribution to International Polar Year.

Improving the chances of research success matters a lot because the Arctic is the early warning ecosystem for how climate change will likely affect much of the Earth. If scientists can't unravel the relatively simple environmental tangles of a frozen desert there's little chance they'll get a handle on the much more complicated ecosystems in the temperate and tropical zones.

University of Manitoba ice expert David Barber says some scientists have long believed the magic elixir in Arctic research could be old-fashioned human interaction among scientists from different disciplines. So he and others like Laval University's Louis Fortier set out to deliberately engineer the right conditions.

"Our argument was, we bring people together, including people from overseas as well, and we put them all together to sample in the same place and we provide an environment where they can then sit together, over supper or at a science meeting at night, or in a bar. And let the incubation begin."

Real interdisciplinary research is still the exception rather than the rule in Canada. University presidents often boast about collaboration among scientists on their campuses. Yet most of these are multidisciplinary arrangements with researchers from different fields tackling the same problem but not integrating what they're doing.

Says Barber: "Before we started these programs in Canada we all worked separately. So Louis [Fortier] and his group were in a tent on one part of the sea ice around Resolute and my group was in a tent in another part of the ice around there and some other guys were in some other tents. We'd get together just once a week to share dinner and have a beer.

"And we started thinking wouldn't it be good if we were actually doing this together. Yeah, that would be great, but we can't get a big enough tent to put everybody in."

Thanks for a $56-million investment by four federal bodies plus an innovative and accommodating Canadian Coast Guard, arctic scientists got that big tent in the form of the CGS Franklin, a Gulf of St. Lawrence icebreaker that had been decommissioned and left rusting for eight years.

Renamed after the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen to avoid a conflict over French or English namesakes, the refurbished ship sailed in November 2003 on a major Arctic research project called the Canadian Arctic Shelf Exchange Study (CASES).

Barber already had a harbinger of success the previous fall during a Canadian Arctic Shelf Exchange Study scouting voyage on another icebreaker.

"I remember going down to the bar one night and there was a table there with a physical oceanographer talking to a meteorologist who was talking to a zooplankton guy who was talking to a sediment guy. And they were all talking about what they had been finding and how things were interconnected.

"I thought to myself, this works."

This initial anecdotal observation of serendipity and synthesis has been reinforced.

For example, interdisciplinary research carried out from the Amundsen over several years established that the snow on top of Arctic sea ice exerts a biological impact as well as a physical one.

Algae living on the bottom of the sea ice have evolved to need a Goldilocks zone. Too much snow cover and there's not enough light coming through the ice for the algae to thrive. Too little snow and so much light gets through that the algae burn off.

Since the ice algae sit at the base of the Arctic food chain, any perturbation there cascades upwards through zooplankton, copepods, Arctic cod larvae and – it is believed – probably seals and eventually polar bears.

Scientist David Hik says an interdisciplinary approach was a requirement for all Canadian projects funded during International Polar Year, not just the Amundsen's current Circumpolar Flaw Lead System Study.

A small-mammals researcher at the University of Alberta, Hik is also executive director of the Canadian International Polar Year secretariat in Edmonton. This past week he was co-host for a meeting there which explored how to keep running the observing networks set up during International Polar Year.

"We're going to see the payoff of collaboration and co-ordination on a sustained basis. This is becoming the modus operandi for doing Arctic research all around the world," Hik says.

One powerful force pushing the interdisciplinary approach is data explosion.

When Hik began studying the interplay of plants and the small mammals that eat them in a one square kilometre patch of the Yukon 15 years ago, he had one installation providing readings of ground temperature and snow cover for the whole area. Now he has 500 that record the data every six hours.

"I can now work with people who are trying to model permafrost. In turn that lets me consider permafrost as a factor in marmot hibernation," he says.

Yet all is not smooth sailing with interdisciplinary research, on land or on the Amundsen.

Veteran Arctic researcher Peter Johnson, the former head of the Canadian Polar Commission, points out that the juices really flow when researchers have results they can discuss with colleagues from other disciplines.

But results require analysis of the data collected and most of Canada's Arctic field stations lack anything beyond the most rudimentary laboratory equipment. As a result, many researchers don't have an inkling what they've found until they've carted their samples or readings back to home base.

The Amundsen, by contrast, has sophisticated analytical facilities on board, giving researchers more to talk about. But the icebreaker costs $40,000 a day to operate in summer and as much as $50,000 a day when fuel has to be stocked for operations through the winter and spring.

The heavy use of the icebreaker during the current International Polar Year program and for the Canadian Arctic Shelf Exchange Study is an exception. Although 120 days from May to October annually are earmarked for science activities on the Amundsen, core federal funding supports only about 80 days. That $2 million-plus comes from ArcticNet, a university-led consortium, and ArcticNet's funding isn't guaranteed after March 2011.

"The ship is not being used to maximum capacity," says ArcticNet scientific co-ordinator Martin Fortier. "There's no possibility for long-term planning. We can't say how many days the Amundsen will be operating next year."

Yet a floating Arctic research base is much cheaper than trying to support separate ice camps for 40 researchers, even if they were doubled up, says Dave Barber.

"The benefit we have with the ship is not only do they talk together but they take their samples at exactly the same place at exactly the same time. So it's possible for them to make these inter-comparisons," he says.

And for real scientific cross-pollination to take place.

Star science reporter Peter Calamai recently spent three weeks aboard the Amundsen. His daily blog is at thestar.blogs.com/arctic.