Cracks open unexpectedly in sea-ice routes the Inuit rely on to track polar bears, caribou and other animals. Each year, the ice melts earlier and freezes later, forcing a shift from dog sleds to boats that require costly fuel.
Elders' once-reliable predictions, based in part on touching and tasting sea ice, increasingly fail.
Today the scientists, led by climate-modeling veteran Glen Liston, are installing a super-sensitive network of weather stations near an isolated community on Baffin Island in northeast Canada called Kangiqtugaapik (pop. 1,000).
They have launched an $800,000 project, backed by the National Science Foundation, aimed at understanding environmental change from an Inuit perspective.
The Inuit "don't talk much about how cold it is. They talk about the wind. It affects how they navigate," said Liston, 51, a senior research scientist at Colorado State University's Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere.
Liston has devoted decades to studying how wind courses over rock and glaciers, developing intricate meteorological models of the polar world. He's passionate about traversing Earth's most frigid snowfields and fjords to collect data for honing his models. Read the full report here.
Source: by Bruce Finley, The Denver Post.
