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
"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
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
When he was interviewed in early March, he and his American and Inuit colleagues were heading for the
"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
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
As of Easter Sunday, she had 324 miles to go. And warming or no warming, she is feeling the
"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
(By Beth Duff-Brown, Yahoo News,