Voices from the ice tell of warming signals

By Beth Duff-Brown

updated 11:38 a.m. ET April 16, 2007

IQALUIT, Nunavut - 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 impact 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. Three of them recently spoke to The Associated Press.

“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 impact 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 small 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 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 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.”

Millennia of learning to read the winds, clouds and stars and find the best hunting are being lost, he said. “A lot of the elders will no longer go out on the sea ice because their knowledge will not work anymore. What they’ve learned and passed on for 5,000 years is no longer functional,” Steger said. “They can’t build igloos anymore; everything is just upside down up here.”

Hunter's perspective
Meeka Mike says the thinning of the ice became noticeable about 10 years ago, forcing Arctic animals to migrate farther north.

Now Inuit hunters like herself 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 out to Frobisher Bay, a massive inlet of the Labrador Sea on the southeastern corner of Baffin Island.

To an outsider, the bay in midwinter looks ice covered with wisps of vanilla icing. But Mike says hunters can see the bay rise and fall with the tide.

Kevin Frayer / AP Inuit hunter Meeka Mike drives across the Arctic horizon in search of a polar bear.

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.

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