Source: NSIDC
From the prowlings of narwhals and belugas, to the plight of intrepid grass-eating pikas in St. Elias mountain refuges, to the stunning brown-death of 40 million white spruce in Kluane National Park, senior writer Ed Struzik of the Edmonton Herald takes readers on a journey across the Far North in search of climate change impact.
Appearing as The Big Thaw in the Herald and Arctic in Peril in the Toronto Star, the eight-part series (plus photo galleries, interactive maps and commentary) climaxed this week.
Struzik, a 28-year Arctic journalist, was sponsored by the Atkinson Charitable Foundation, the Beland Honderich Family and the Toronto Star. Beginning in July, he made nine Arctic journeys to report the series, according to an update posted online about the 2007 Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy.
“He travelled by plane, icebreaker, snowmobile, dogsled and skis, making his way from Churchill, Man., to Ellesmere Island, and from the Alaskan border to the coast of Greenland. Struzik saw first-hand evidence that the Arctic is warming almost twice as fast as the rest of the world.”
The multi-media slide show, with audio commentary, are alone worth a few megabytes of time and bandwidth.
For Alaskans and those latitude-challenged Americans in the lower 48 states, reading the series offers a unique Canadian perspective to Arctic warming issues. For instance, Struzik warns Canadians that they need to jumpstart their Arctic research programs and military patrols, in contrast to U.S. and European efforts.
“While the U.S., tiny Belgium and Norway pour millions into polar research, Canada’s scientists barely get by on reduced budgets, inferior infrastructure and shortage of human resources,” he wrote in the final story of the series.
Another intriguing glimpse comes in a story about the how Canada’s Native people are dealing with climate change issues:
AFTER HAVING DINNER with Nirlungayuk and his wife after our trip to Marble Island, I headed to the bed and breakfast where I was staying to make a cup of tea. There in the common room, I listened to a conversation between two Inuit men and an Ottawa-based scientist with the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. While the scientist was telling them why nuclear power is not the environmental threat that it used to be, the two men politely listened.
But after the third or fourth time the scientist referred to Nunavut as Nunavik, Mike Ilnik, an Inuk businessman who had served in the Canadian Forces, broke in.
“You people are always coming up here and telling us what to do, and you can’t even get the name of our territory right,” he said with exasperation. “Nunavik is northern Quebec, this is Nunavut. It’s the same with Iqaluit. The q is not a k. It makes an h kind of sound.”
When I asked Ilnik what he thought about climate change and the impact on Inuit culture, he barely paused to give me an answer.
“Booze and drugs is going to ruin our culture long before climate change will,” he said. Then he cocked his head toward the nuclear safety scientist who had just left the room. “That uranium mine he’s talking about is going to be right in between two caribou calving grounds. We’ve got more than enough things to worry about these days.”
One story described how Beaufort Sea polar bears may be on the on the brink of devasting ecological problems due to sea ice shrinkage. Struzik traveled with bear scientist Ian Stirling, who described how the loss of sea ice in Hudson Bay directly impacted bear health.
“We’ve documented a 22 per cent decline in the western Hudson Bay population between 1987 and 2004,” notes Stirling, the first Canadian to be elected president of the Society for Marine Mammalogy, one of the largest international scientific organizations.
“The animals that we see there now are younger and thinner than the typical bear you’d see 20 or 30 years ago. Martyn Obbard from the Ministry of Natural Resources in Ontario has observed a similar situation in southern Hudson Bay. The reason why is pretty simple. Bears pile on the fat they need to make it through the year by catching seals on the ice. With the ice melting two or three weeks sooner in spring, as has been happening in western and southern Hudson Bay, the animals are spending more time on land and getting less opportunity to put on the reserves they need to successfully reproduce and to make it through the year. It’s a double-edged sword. Less time feeding also means more time burning up stored fat.”
In Beetlemania, Skruzik tracks the brown-out that’s hit Yukon Territory forests in a bitter mirror image of the devastation experience on the Kenai Peninsula and Southcentral Alaska.
The spruce beetle, no longer faced with killer winter cold snaps, is on a destructive rampage that has left at least 40 million trees dead or dying in the Yukon. With temperatures rising, there is no end in sight to the carnage. …
On the flight out, (helicopter pilot) Doug Makkonen continued where he had left off, taking us on a wild ride over more dead forest, increasingly salmon-less streams and sheep-less mountainsides.
“I’ve been flying this country for more than 25 years,” he said as he pointed to a grey forest that stood in sharp contrast to the vibrant, emerald green waters of Kathleen Lake.
“Ten years ago, that was green on green. Look at it now. It’s all kindling waiting to be lit up. It’s really tragic to see what’s happening to this part of the world.”
