"Inuit groups spent decades hosting researchers from far away to study the ice and animals. Now they’re taking up the tools and reshaping the science."
"In a normal year, November is the month when frozen water reconnects friends and families on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. In the Inuktitut language, the word for November—Tusaqtuut—means “time to hear the news.”
In the hamlet of Pond Inlet, each day the sun appears a bit heavier until it barely heaves itself above the horizon, and then it doesn’t appear at all. Through long hours of twilight and then night, the ice stretches, thickens, and hardens, sealing the ocean beneath. A glacial highway emerges, linking a handful of Arctic communities otherwise kept apart by the harsh terrain of mountains and fjords with no roads in between. Virtually every aspect of life—food, clothing, art, and language—exists because of the ice.
But 2021 has been too wet and warm. All through October, Baffin Island languished beneath a heat dome. Children wore spring jackets with their Halloween costumes instead of parkas. The water stayed open around Pond Inlet. By mid-November people still can’t hunt or travel on the ice, and Andrew Arreak can’t go out to measure it."
Danielle Bochove reports for Bloomberg Green March 23, 2022.
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