Arctic in trouble

In a story published Wednesday in The Washington Post, writer Doug Struck profiles a frozen area of the world known as Pangnirtun, Canada. There, just 30 miles from the Arctic Circle, lives a hunter named Noah Metuq, who can feel the Arctic – long known as an area that senses problems with the Earth before any other area can – changing.

Metuq feels the frozen tundra loosening, and the people and animals who depend on its icy conditions are experiencing a historic reshaping of their world.
The cause is global warming, and mankind’s addiction to fossil fuels is exacerbating the problem at a rapid rate.

According to Struck, fish and wildlife are following the retreating ice caps northward, away from villages that rely on them to survive. Polar bears are losing the floes they need for hunting, which could result in their extinction.

Seals, unable to find stable ice, are hauling up on islands to give birth only to have their pups die after being washed back out to sea. Robins and barn owls and hornets, previously unknown so far north, are arriving in Arctic villages to roost.

The reason this is so alarming is that people who have lived in these areas for countless generations are seeing things that have never been seen before in this part of the world.

Inuits, as they are known, inhabit Alaska, Canada, Greenland and northern Russia and are the keepers of this pristine icy land.

Enosik Nashalik, an 87-year-old resident of Pangnirtung, told The Washington Post that he didn’t know what information he could hand down to younger generations, because everything he had been taught – everything that was taught to him by his elders – was now wrong.

“There are things that all of our old oral history has never mentioned,” he told the Post. “We cannot pass on our traditional knowledge, because it is no longer reliable. Before, I could look at cloud patters, or the wind or even what stars are twinkling, and predict the weather. Now, everything is changed.”

The Inuit’s warnings were once ignored and thought of as odd stories, but now the scientific community is taking note of them. Canada’s federal weather service reported recently that this past winter has been the warmest since it began taking measurements in 1948.

Likewise, NASA has measured a meltdown of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica in the past decade, and they report that many ice sheets may disappear all together in the next few decades.

And what happens when all this ice melts? Coastal cities like New Orleans, Los Angeles, New York, go under water. And perhaps El Dorado will be a coastal city one day.

The fact is our globe is warming at an alarming rate, our arctic region is slowly dying, and no one even knows about it. It’s time we became informed, because unlike other problems our society seems so wrapped up in, this one is far worse than anyone can imagine.