Arctic communities adjust to climate change

Explorers and hunters in northern Canada and the Arctic ice caps are reporting devastating environmental changes due to global warming. Hunters are falling through unseasonably thin ice and dying. Migrating animals have changed their grassing routs and causing a shortage in Inuits food sources. Robins, finches and dolphins have been spotted on Baffin Island; species never seen in the North before.

Will Steger, a 62-year-old Minnesotan, has been exploring the northern tundra for the past 43 years and describes the climate changes he has seen first hand in the past ten years. "This is where a culture has lived for 5,000 years, relying on a very delicate, interconnected ecosystem and, one by one, small pegs of that ecosystem are being pulled out,"

Steger is making a documentary of his 1,200-mile travels to the North pole by dog-sled to capture how Inuit hunters are being forced to adapt to climate change and to show evidence of the melting polar ice caps and the warming Arctic Ocean. Steger's aim is to present his evidence to the US Senat to prompt a stronger stance on global warming.

Hunters on Baffin Island are telling him how hunting on the thinning ice fields has become too dangerous. "All of these villages have lost people on the ice," Steger said. "When you have a small village of 300 or 400 people, losing three or four of their senior hunters, it's a big loss."

The Inuit elders used to read weather patterns to find the best hunting; knowledge that has been passed down for a millennium. "A lot of the elders will no longer go out on the sea ice because their knowledge will not work anymore. What they've learned and passed on for 5,000 years is no longer functional," Steger said. "They can't build igloos anymore; everything is just upside down up here."

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