On a dark autumn morning in 2006, environmental geographer James Ford headed out from the small island of Igloolik in Canada’s Nunavut Territory with a young Inuit man to set up fishing nets under the ice of a lake on the mainland. It was shortly after Thanksgiving, a time of year when the ice at this high latitude—nearly 300 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle—was expected to be quite solid. But as the two followed their snowmobile tracks home later in the day, they suddenly came to a dead end—the tracks vanished. Scanning the surface of the frozen Foxe Basin, they found the continuation of their trail 50 meters to the north, indicating they were standing alongside a crack in the ice that had shifted that distance since they’d passed that morning.
“We both looked at each other and said, ‘Yeah, close call,’” recalls Ford, an assistant professor at McGill University. The ice was obviously less stable than they had assumed, and they had not taken the proper precautions. It wasn’t the first time something like this had happened, Ford says. While the Inuit used to depend on solid, safe ice from early fall until late spring, reports of unstable conditions had become more frequent in the past several years.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Adapting to Climate Change | The Scientist
Author: Jef Akst
