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'Everything is changing' North coast residents worry about loss of thick sea ice as NASA announces record Laura Busch Northern News Services Published Monday, Sept 03, 2012 "Every year, the sea ice is getting thinner," said David Kuptana, an avid hunter who has lived in the hamlet of Ulukhaktok for all of his life. "Also, it's breaking up earlier. Every year we get spring earlier."
People who live in the region rely on Arctic sea ice for seal hunting, polar bear hunting and trap lines. They also use the ice to travel in the winter, for everything from hunting to going on the land for a weekend, said Kuptana.
"If the ice is not going to come anymore, it's scary for us because we've been living on ice for many years and doing our hunting and surviving on the ice for our native food, and also, you know, for travelling," he said.
"If we get no more ice, then what are we going to do?"
In Tuktoyaktuk, Mayor Merven Gruben has also noticed the change in ice. Residents are used to going out on the ice in the winter to hunt polar bears, he said. "It's really gotten dangerous - young ice is dangerous," said Gruben. "I personally wouldn't go out there."
On Aug. 26, the amount of sea ice on the Arctic cap was at an all-time low at 4.1 million sq. km, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center that measures Arctic sea ice for NASA. The amount of ice on the Arctic cap was 70,000 sq. km less than the previous record low, which was recorded on Sept. 18, 2007.
Sea ice is expected to keep melting until late September, which should put it even farther below the previous record, said Julienne Stroeve, a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center based in Boulder, Col.
While the reduction in the amount of sea covered by ice in the Arctic during the summer is significant in itself, what is more striking is the thinning of overall ice in the Arctic, said Stroeve.
Where most Arctic cap ice used to survive for many years, now much of the ice is what is called "first-year ice."
First-year ice tends to be about one-and-a-half metres thick throughout the winter, much thinner than older ice, said Stroeve.
"Definitely, the proportion of what is first-year ice is going up," she said. "I think that's really been the key thing toward these continued ice losses. You just have more thin ice, so it's just going to melt away every summer a lot easier than it used to."
Kuptana has also noted the thinning of the ice. He says that he can tell first-year ice by sight - it is darker than the ice he is used to seeing in the winter.
"My son used to do deep measurements on the ice. He was doing that for many years and we noticed we were losing three to four feet of ice, from the way it used to be long ago," he said. "That is a big difference. That is a really big difference right now."
Including the new record low and the previous record low recorded in 2007, the six smallest amounts of ice observed in the Arctic have occurred during the last six years, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
The thinner, darker ice is only one of the changes Kuptana has noticed in recent years.
The summer is much hotter and longer than he remembers, with heavy rain falling in the fall instead of the spring, he said. Also, animals that used to be rare around Ulukhaktok, such as grizzly bears and bald eagles, are now seen fairly regularly.
"Everything is changing," he said.
Kuptana also worries about what his grandchildren and other youth growing up in the community will do if the traditional ways of hunting can no longer be used.
Caribou and muskox use the ice to travel between the mainland and Victoria Island, where Ulukhaktok is situated. They cross over from the mainland in the spring, summer on the island and then cross back onto mainland in the fall, said Kuptana. If the ice is not strong enough at the right time of year, the animals will either become stranded or change their migration.
"If the caribou migrate to the mainland and don't come back for many years, we're going to have a hard time for our food," said Kuptana. "We count on the ice for us to do our living."
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