Far North Feels Worst Effects of Global Warming
Pastor Dale Morgan
Apr 15, 12:10 PM EDT
*Far North Feels Worst Effects of Global Warming*
By BETH DUFF-BROWN
Associated Press Writer
IQALUIT, Nunavut (AP) -- 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 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."
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."
---
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.
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 on 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 back yard," said Stancer.
Her biggest obstacle, she says, is time - the period in which the ice is
safe enough for a plane to land and pick her up shrinks every year as
the ice cap melts. Pilots say she has only 60 days to arrive at the
North Pole, though most teams typically take longer.
"You know, everyone is going ooh-la-la and being indignant about our
climate change. But what did they expect?" Stancer says of those who are
just waking up to global warming. "Why are people surprised that this is
a living, breathing planet?"
Why leave her banker husband and young son back in Britain for isolation
at the top of the world?
"There is very little between you and nature and God," she says. "All
your layers of materialistic crud just drop away and your life and its
priorities are distilled down to pure survival."
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On the Net:
Steger's site: http://www.globalwarming101.com
Stancer's Site: http://www.rosiestancermarsnorthpolesolo.co.uk