Farthest North The End of Ice

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Snow has been falling. Light comes late and goes early – nineteen hours of darkness, but the white ground and white sky brings radiance to this midwinter city. From my high perch in the Captain Cook Hotel the only patch of darkness is Cook Inlet where open water slaps the shore and pancake ice has rotten into gray rounds that drift out as the tide changes.

Arctic Alaska is the first of eight stops on my yearlong circumpolar journey to hear from indigenous Arctic people what they know about climate change and how it is affecting their lives.

Ice cover creates calm wind and calm waters and mirrors the self-discipline and restraint of the Inuit people whose patience and steadfastness in the face of danger has ensured their survival for over 15,000 years. A retreating ice pack in winter is a lid pulled back: open water causes chaotic weather and gives way to storms.

On this same day eighteen years ago I passed through Anchorage. Cook Inlet was completely frozen. In Fairbanks the temperature plummeted from 56 degrees below zero F. to minus 82 degrees F. The town closed down for two weeks, enclosed by frost-fall. When the skies cleared curtains of northern lights whipped over our heads. At the Raven Bar in Gold Stream I met a seal biologist who invited me to visit his spring camp on the ice in Arctic Canada. After, I went on to Greenland where I’ve traveled with Inuit hunters for fourteen years.

In 1991 the seasonal sea ice, even in May, was at least four feet thick. Now it’s all sikuliaq – new ice - often only four inches thick, melting and refreezing erratically.

The journey begins on the Arctic coast of Alaska where retreating sea ice has caused severe coastal erosion to occur. The villages of Shismaref, Kivalina, and Wales are eroding away. The retreat of the pack ice has serious consequences on the entire Arctic ecosystem: walrus, ringed seals, beluga whales, seabirds, and fish are impacted. Open water means more stormy seas, and these erode even more ice and make subsistence hunting for all coastal peoples impossible.

Open water anywhere in the Arctic means there is no albedo effect: solar heat is no longer radiated back into space. The seas warm up. Marine ecosystems are changed. Ice acts like the lid on a pot: it keeps the storm-tormented seas contained. Without ice, the coasts are battered by wind waves and unseasonable storms. The entire villages of Shismaref and Kivalina are being moved.

Accompanied by a renowned Alaskan artist, Joe Sennungetuk, a native of Wales, Alaska, we will stay in his home village, then travel to nearby communities to see and hear how the climate crisis is effecting their subsistence lives and rich cultural traditions. 

Upcoming. We will go on a month long walrus hunting trip with four of Greenland’s best hunters with 57 dogs pulling four freight sleds across dangerous ice between Etah and Moriusak, on the North-west coast of Greenland.

Upcoming. Accompanied by Russian ethnographer Andrei Volkov, we travel on foot with the Nenet people and their reindeer in capricious spring weather from the Arkhangels region on the Kanin Peninsula all the way to the White Sea. 

Upcoming. Traveling by private fixed wing aircraft designed for aerial photography, we will fly from Barrow, Alaska all the way across the polar north, following the northwest passage which was, in fact, the migration route for Inuit hunters as they moved from Siberia to Greenland thousands of years ago.

Not only will we photograph the changing ice from the air, but also, we will make stops at every village between Barrow and Pond Inlet, Nunavut and hear the stories of how their traditional life was disrupted by the Canadian government, and the ways in which spiritual, social, and hunting ways have been kept alive.

In Igloolik, on Baffin Island, the site of the only indigenous Arctic film company, home of the producers of “The Fast Runner.” Here we will visit traditional hunters, village elders, and young filmmakers working to hold onto their traditions using a modern medium.  

Upcoming. Chukotka. North-Eastern Siberia. Traveling again with Andrei Volkov, we will live with coastal marine mammal hunters near Provideniya and Lavrenty, then travel inland and to stay with reindeer herders.

The indigenous people of Siberia were devastated first by Stalin, then by the fall of communist regime and the reversion to capitalism. Traditions have been squelched, and poverty is rampant. But they are struggling to maintain their identity and fighting for their indigenous rights. We will follow one hunter and his family and go to the heart of their struggle to maintain the old and live with the new, and for, simply, survival.