"People of the Sea Ice See Cracks Forming"

"One of Canada’s most northerly communities reinvents its relationship with a thawing landscape."

"Jim Andersen was returning home on his snowmobile from a day of ice fishing in May 2014 when he saw the ice coating the river’s mouth break beneath a snowmobile ahead of him. Two villagers were aboard the sinking vehicle, which came to rest more than two meters deep in the frigid water. Andersen circled his snowmobile onto the shore to help. A man, almost fully submerged, was standing on top of the sunken snowmobile, struggling to keep himself and his companion above water and alive. “He was holding the lady up against the ice so she wouldn’t go under,” Andersen says.

Andersen threw the woman a rope, “but she was too weak to haul herself up,” he recalls. So from his snowmobile he unhooked a qamutik (sled) and pushed it onto the ice toward the rupture and climbed on. He pulled the pair, minutes from hypothermia, onto the qamutik, and then onto land and built a fire. The pair huddled close to the flames, warming up as they changed into dry clothes provided by their rescuer. Andersen told me this story last winter as we sat in his kitchen, the soft crackling in the woodstove punctuating the tale. He showed me the plaque that the town’s search and rescue group had awarded him. Late last year, the Canadian government awarded him the governor general’s Medal of Bravery.

In Arctic coastal towns like Nain, such unnerving scenes are common as the ice surrounding the villages steadily vanishes. The giant but shrinking expanse of sea ice that forms in the middle of the Arctic Ocean gets the bulk of global attention. But here along the coast, the sea ice that fastens to the land’s edge is the fabric of the Inuit world—and its melting affects lives."

Eli Kintisch reports for Hakai magazine January 24, 2017.