Inuit hunters are falling through thinning ice and
dying. Dolphins are being spotted for the first time. There's not enough
snow to build igloos for shelter during hunts.
As scientists work to establish the effect of global warming, explorers and
hunters slogging across northern Canada and the Arctic ice cap on sled and
foot are describing the realities they see on the ground.
"This is really ground zero for global warming," said Will Steger, a
62-year-old Minnesotan who has been traveling the region for 43 years and
has witnessed the effect of warming on the 155,000 indigenous people of the
Arctic.
"This is where a culture has lived for 5,000 years, relying on a very
delicate, interconnected ecosystem, and, one by one, small pegs of that
ecosystem are being pulled out," Steger said by satellite phone from a
village outside Iqaluit, about 200 miles south of the Arctic Circle.
Iqaluit is the provincial capital of the Canadian territory of Nunavut.
Steger, who made the first journey to the North Pole by dogsled without
resupply in 1986, is sledding with Inuit guides for three months across
Baffin Island, the northeastern corner of Nunavut, with two teams of
huskies and a cameraman.
He is charting his 1,200-mile adventure on his Will Steger Expedition Journal web site, and making a
documentary about how Inuit hunters are being forced to adapt to a warming
Arctic Ocean and melting polar ice cap. In June, he will testify before a
U.S. Senate committee on climate change.
When he was interviewed in early March, he and his American and Inuit
colleagues were heading for the Clyde River, through the highest polar bear
population in the world. It was still the height of winter in the Arctic,
but the temperature, 11 degrees Fahrenheit, was more typical of spring.
He said hunters he meets on Baffin Island are describing to him creatures
they have no words for in their language, Inuktitut -- robins, finches and
dolphins. He said they all tell him the same thing: Hunting on the thinning
sea ice has become too dangerous.
"All of these villages have lost people on the ice," Steger said. "When you
have a small village of 300 or 400 people, losing three or four of their
senior hunters, it's a big loss."
Meeka Mike says the thinning of the ice became noticeable about 10 years
ago, forcing Arctic animals to migrate farther north.
Now Inuit hunters such as her are finding stranded walrus and seal pups
left to die on floating ice.
"It takes longer now to get out to our hunting areas because we can't
access it by ice," Mike says in her cedar house in Iqaluit, sitting on the
floor with friends as they sew a pair of caribou hunting pants she'll wear
when she next ferries supplies by snowmobile and wooden sled to Steger's
expedition.
"The ice freezes much later, and therefore it's thinner and breaks off
during the full-moon tide," she says, pointing to Frobisher Bay, an inlet
of the Labrador Sea on the southeastern corner of Baffin Island.
To an outsider, the bay in midwinter looks ice-covered. But Mike says
hunters can see the bay rise and fall with the tide.
Life, she says, is "very much out of sync."
She blames Americans for emitting one-fourth of the world's greenhouse
gases, which scientists say are very likely causing the warming. But it is
not in the Inuit culture to be too accusatory, and she says it with a
smile: "Unfortunately, you are the people who cause most of this climate
change," she says to an American journalist.
Farther north is Rosie Stancer, a 47-year-old mother and distant relative
of the British royal family. She set off alone March 6 for a 60-day journey
across 475 miles of the frozen Arctic Ocean to reach the North Pole, using
compass, solar and satellite navigation.
She is carting her own food and fuel on a sled she drags behind her and
carries a shotgun to ward off polar bears.
If she makes it, she will be the first woman to have trekked solo to both
Poles. She was the second woman to trek alone to the South Pole, in 2004.
As of Easter Sunday, she had 324 miles to go. And warming or no warming,
she is feeling the Arctic, with mild frostbite on two toes.
She is examining global-warming effects for a polar research institute at
Cambridge University. "I'll be monitoring the temperatures, wind direction
and comparing the ice conditions to 10 years ago," Stancer said in a
telephone interview from Resolute Bay, where it was minus 45 degrees
Fahrenheit several days before she took off.
"If I can come back as an ordinary person with a firsthand account, that
message will hit home and awaken individual consciences about cleaning up
our own backyard," she said.