LYUBOV ORLOVA, BAFFIN ISLAND – Besides being a charming cabin-mate with fine taste in contemporary rock music, oceanographer Eric Galbraith is also the casual bearer of terrifying news. “Oh yeah, it’s pretty clear,” he said yesterday. “By 2030 there will be no sea ice in the summers.”
This seems impossible. Just yesterday we plowed through miles of the stuff. The captain – who looks vaguely like Lenin, only less playful, and is quickly becoming a real hero of arctic exploration in my eyes – steered the Lyubov Orlova through enormous ice fields, the ship reverberating alarmingly each time we collided with a large floe. Today we saw polar bears off the coast of Baffin Island, swimming through the water and clambering over the ice pans. We saw groups of walrus, stacked on ice floes like enormous brown sausages. An arctic without sea ice is almost unimaginable – like a desert without sand.
Nevertheless, according to Eric (and, it should be said, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, and just about everyone who’s seriously looked at the numbers) the ice is disappearing. John Streicker, the climate change specialist on board, is even less optimistic. He gives it a decade before summer sea ice in the arctic is a thing of the past.
On a global scale, the consequences of this kind of melting are pretty alarming. Unlike Vegas, what happens in the arctic doesn’t stay in the arctic. Melting sea ice won’t cause sea levels to rise on its own – the ice is already in the ocean, after all – but it will start a pretty brutal chain reaction. White ice, which reflects sunlight back into space with amazing efficiency, will soon be replaced by open ocean, which absorbs sunlight just as efficiently. The result is a deadly positive feedback loop, with more heat creating more melting ice creating more heat and so on until temperatures rise enough to do the serious damage we’ve all heard so much about.
But before all that happens, climate change will hit the arctic and the people that live here. And of course it already has. In Pangnirtung last year, a huge flood washed out the town’s brand-new bridge. Danny, a sweet kid who works at Ayuittuq National Park and lives in Pang, told me the flooding was the event of the season. A heavy rain swelled the river, scouring the edges of the riverbed and exposing the permafrost, which quickly melted. The new bridge had to be abandoned, which meant the town was cut off from its water and waste facilities until a new new bridge could be built, at the cost of a million dollars.
There’s no smoking gun pointing to climate change here – floods do happen – but the flooding in Pang is a good indication of the kinds of problems the Inuit face as the north continues to melt. Northern towns are built on permafrost, northern people hunt on the ice, and temperatures are rising twice as fast here as they are in the south: there are going to be problems, and the Inuit are going to have to once again adapt to some pretty radical changes.
Photos by Nicholas Hune-Brown.
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