Tracing the Effects of Global Warming

March 16, 2007— -- Educators and explorers Will Steger, John Stetson, Elizabeth Andre and Abby Fenton have joined four Inuit hunters on a 1,200-mile, four-month-long dog-sled expedition across the Canadian Arctic's Baffin Island.

The expedition is traveling with four Inuit dog teams over traditional hunting paths, up frozen rivers, through steep-sided fjords, over glaciers and ice caps and across the sea ice to reach some of the most remote Inuit villages in the world.

Nowhere on Earth is the climate changing more rapidly or more dramatically than in the Arctic's Baffin Island. Will Steger's Global Warming 101 Expedition team witnessed first-hand some impacts of global warming as they traveled by dog team from Iqaluit to Pangnirtung.

Warmer-than-normal temperatures made it difficult to simply walk from the land onto the sea ice in Frobisher Bay. The tidal overflow along the shore was not refreezing. Instead the water remained liquid or slushy. The expedition members had to pick their way across the more solidly frozen sections. Even so, however, the team members' feet sank into the slush, which soaked their moose-hide mukluk boots.

During pretrip planning the team assumed only the American members would sleep in tents. The Inuit members planned to make an igloo every night. Because of differences in the normal snow conditions, however, making igloos was impossible. In many places there was simply not enough snow.

In other places, the snow had weak and soft layers that made blocks cut from it collapse instead of stand up. Living conditions are much warmer inside an igloo than inside a tent, so it was a disappointment to the Inuit members to not be able to build igloos.

On the Hall Peninsula, as the dog teams made their way overland from Iqlauit, the team crossed a small flowing creek that was completely open, unfrozen water. Theo Ikummaq, the Inuit team leader, said that at this time of year the creek should be frozen solid. The temperatures on South Baffin Island have been, however, as much as 40 degrees above normal during the weeks before the expedition's departure.

The 60-mile-wide Cumberland Sound stretches between the Hall Peninsula and Pangnirtung, the expedition's second village. Inuit elders recall a time when they could dog sled and snowmobile straight across Cumberland Sound to ice fish for turbot and seals, and to reach hunting camps on the other side. This year, however, the team heard reports of the worst ice conditions ever; even seal pups were reported to be falling through the ice.