Rising temperatures are already threatening Arctic wildlife and the livelihood of indigenous people, writes Doug Struck in Pangnirtung
Thirty miles from the Arctic Circle, hunter Noah Metuq feels the Arctic changing. Its frozen grip is loosening; the people and animals who depend on its icy reign are experiencing a historic reshaping of their world.
Fish and wildlife are following the retreating ice caps northward. Polar bears are losing the floes they need for hunting. Seals, unable to find stable ice, are hauling up on islands to give birth. Robins and barn owls, previously unknown so far north, are arriving in Arctic villages.
The global warming felt by wildlife and increasingly documented by scientists is hitting first and hardest here, where the Inuit people make their home. The hardy Inuit - described by one of their leaders as "sentries for the rest of the world" - say this winter was the worst in a series of warm winters, replete with alarms of the quickening transformation that many scientists expect will spread to the rest of the globe.
The Inuit - with homelands in Alaska, Canada, Greenland and northern Russia - saw the signs of change everywhere. Metuq hauled his fishing shack on to the ice of Cumberland Sound last month, as he has every winter, confident it would stay there for three months. Three days later, he was astonished to see the ice break up, sweeping away his shack and $6,000 (€5,000) of fishing gear.
In Nain, Labrador, hunter Simon Kohlmeister (48) drove his snowmobile on to ocean ice where he had hunted safely for 20 years. The ice flexed. The machine started sinking. He said he was "lucky to get off" and grab his rifle. "Someday we won't have any snow," he said. "We won't be Eskimos."
Villagers say the shrinking ice floes mean they see hungry polar bears more frequently. In the Hudson Bay village of Ivujivik, Lydia Angyiou (41) was walking with her seven-year-old boy last month when she turned to see a polar bear stalking the child. She flailed at the 700-lb bear, which slapped her twice to the ground before a hunter shot it.
In the Russian northernmost territory of Chukotka, the Inuit have drilled wells for water because there is so little snow to melt. Reykjavik had its warmest February in 41 years. In Alaska, water normally sealed by ice is now open, brewing winter storms that lash coastal and river villages. Federal officials say two dozen native villages are threatened. In Pangnirtung, residents were startled by thunder, rain showers and a temperature of 9 degrees in February, a time when their world normally is locked and silent at minus 7 degrees.
"These are things that all of our old oral history has never mentioned," said Enosik Nashalik (87), an elder in this Inuit village.
"We cannot pass on our traditional knowledge, because it is no longer reliable. Before, I could look at cloud patterns or the wind, or even what stars are twinkling, and predict the weather. Now, everything is changed."
Canada's weather service said this month that the country had experienced its warmest winter since measurements began in 1948, with average temperatures 14 degrees above normal.
"That is entirely consistent with the long-range forecasts that indicate the effects of global warming will be most felt in the north," said Douglas Bancroft, director of Oceanography and Climate Science for Canada's federal fisheries department.
"What we see is very clear. We are going to see a reduction in the overall Arctic ice. It doesn't mean it goes away. But it brings profound changes. Weather will get stormier because the more open water you have, the easier it is for storms to brew up."
He says there will also be major changes in the region's ecosystems.
"You have species that adapted over 40,000 years to a certain regime," he said. "Some will make it, and some won't."
Satellites at Nasa have measured a meltdown of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica in the past decade. Scientists in Boulder, Colorado, say the retreat of the ice caps in 2006 may be as large as last year's, which they say was probably the biggest in a century. Grey whales are heading north and walruses are starving, adrift on ice floes in water too deep for feeding. Warmer-water fish such as pollock and salmon are coming in, researchers report.
Off the coast of Nova Scotia, ice on Northumberland Strait was so thin and unstable this winter that thousands of grey seals crawled on unaccustomed islands to give birth. Storms and high tides washed 1,500 newborn seal pups out to sea, said Jerry Conway, a marine mammal expert for the federal fisheries department.
Metuq, the hunter, fears the worst. "The world is slowly disintegrating," he said, inside his heated house in Pangnirtung, a community of 1,200 perched on a dramatic union of mountain and fjord on Baffin Island. Seal skins stretched on canvas dried outside his home. The town remained treacherous. Rain in February had frozen solid, and there had been almost no snow to cover it.
The troubles for the Inuit are ominous for everyone, says Sheila Watt-Cloutier, head of the International Circumpolar Conference, an organisation for the 155,000 Inuit worldwide.
"People have become disconnected from their environment. But the Inuit have remained through this whole dilemma, remained extremely connected to its environment and wildlife," she says.
"They are the early warning. They see what's happening to the planet, and give the message to the rest of the world." - (LA Times-Washington Post service)