Farthest North The End of Ice

Last week Gedeon and a friend were out on the ice when an unexpected blizzard hit. The ice all around him broke up, and soon he and his dogsled were adrift. He leapt when the ice under his sled began to break up; his hunting companion to leapt to another. They drifted apart, away from shore, out to sea. The other man’s sled and dogs disappeared when the drift ice broke again. Gedeon was safe but going farther and farther toward Ellesmere Island. Many hours later a helicopter rescued both men. Gedeon’s dogs were saved, but not his sled.

In Siorapaluk, a hunter had tied his dogs to the ice for a moment, ran up to his house to get a drink of water, and when he went back out, the fjord ice had broken up completely. He never saw his dogs again.

Snow filled the schoolhouse and blew into the small doghouses where females with pups find shelter. Eva, the schoolteacher said, “It was a terrible night when no one slept, yet we could not get to each other. A dog’s house flew against my front door and the dog inside died. Every window was blanked out by snow.

Afternoon. We go by dogsled out onto the fjord ice to fish for halibut. It’s unusually windy. As we bump through rough shore ice, I can see open water in every direction. Wind has been plaguing Arctic hunters everywhere. A Greenland winter is usually placid and cold, but for the last five years there have been ground blizzards and unstable ice. Looking west toward Ellesmere Island where the ice edge should be, there’s a blue bruise in the sky, a roll of dark clouds that do not move: this is “sea smoke.” It means open water. The ice used to be 12 to 14 feet thick in February. Now it’s 7 inches thick. Twice the fjord ice at Siorapaluk has gone out completely, and refrozen. “We’ve not seen it do that before.”