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Arctic Heat Wave Bruce E. Johansen october 2001 It’s another warm day in Iqaluit, capital of the new semi-sovereign Inuit nation of Nunavut in the Canadian Arctic. The bizarre weather is the talk of the town. The urgency of global warming is on everyone’s lips. The temperature hit 82 degrees Fahrenheit on July 28 in this Baªn Island community that nudges the Arctic Circle. That’s thirty-Wve degrees above the July average of 47, making it comparable to a 115- to 120-degree day in New York City or Chicago. It is the warmest summer anyone in the area can remember. Swallows, sand Xies, and robins are making their debuts, and pine pollen is a¤ecting people as never before. Travelers joke about forgetting their shorts, sunscreen, and mosquito repellent—all now necessary equipment for a globally warmed Arctic summer. In Iqaluit (pronounced “Eehalooeet”), a warm, desiccating westerly wind raises whitecaps on nearby Frobisher Bay and rustles carpets of purple saxifrage Xowers as people emerge from their overheated houses (which have been built to absorb every scrap of passive solar energy) with ice cubes wrapped in hand towels. The wind raises eddies of dust on Iqaluit’s gravel roads as residents swat at the slow, corpulent mosquitoes. Welcome to the thawing ice-world of the third millennium. Around the Arctic, in Inuit villages connected by the oral history of traveling hunters as well as by e-mail now, weather watchers are reporting striking evidence that global warming is an unmistakable reality. Sachs Harbour, on Banks Island, above the Arctic Circle, is sinking into the permafrost. Shishmaref, an Inuit village on the far-western lip of Alaska sixty miles north of Nome, is being washed into the newly liquid (and often stormy) Arctic Ocean as its permafrost base dissolves. A world based on ice and snow is melting away. “We have never seen anything like this. It’s scary, very scary,” says Ben Kovic, Nunavut’s chief wildlife manager. “It’s not every summer that we run around in our T-shirts for weeks at a time.” “The glaciers are turning brown,” he says, speculating that melting ice may be exposing debris and that air pollution may be a factor. Rivers have dried up that used to be spawning grounds for Arctic char. Other changes are more menacing. During Iqaluit’s weeks of record heat in July, two tourists were hospitalized after they were mauled by a polar bear in a park south of town. The bears are “often becoming shore dwellers rather than ice dwellers,” says Kovic. The harbor ice at Iqaluit did not form last year until late December, Wve or six weeks later than usual. The ice also breaks up earlier in the spring, sometimes in May in places that once were icebound into early July. Polar bears usually obtain their 162 part 7 defending the environment food (seals, for example) from the ice. Without it, they can become hungry, miserable creatures, especially in unaccustomed warmth. “The bears are looking for a cooler place,” says Kovic. On Hudson Bay in Manitoba, polar bears waking from their winter’s slumber have found the ice melted earlier than usual. Instead of making their way onto the ice in search of seals, the bears walk along the coast until they get to towns like Churchill, where they block motor traªc and pillage the dump. Churchill now has a holding tank for wayward polar bears that is larger than its human jail. Canadian Wildlife Service scientists reported in 1998 that polar bears around Hudson Bay were 90 to 220 pounds lighter than thirty years ago, apparently because earlier ice-melting has given them less time to feed on seal pups. When sea ice fails to reach a particular area, the entire ecological cycle is disrupted. When the ice melts prematurely , the polar bears can no longer use it to hunt for ring seals, many of which also have died, having had no ice to haul out on. The o¤shore, ice-based ecosystem is sustained by upwelling nutrients, which feed the plankton, shrimp, and other small organisms, which feed the Wsh, which feed the seals, which feed the bears. Many Native people, who Wsh and hunt for their sustenance , are also deprived of a way of life. When the ice is not present, the entire cycle collapses. Ice in many areas now melts earlier, sometimes as early as March, when the seals are having their pups...

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