Unreserved53:59Shrinking sea ice and the Inuit response to a climate crisis
For over 30 years, Reuben Flowers has been documenting the changes unfolding in the North.
The Inuk life skills teacher from Hopedale has spent decades jotting down daily observations of the weather conditions and ice levels in the capital of Nunatsiavut.
And his journals are proof that the climate is changing.
“The ice is definitely thinning,” Flowers, 57, told Unreserved host Rosanna Deerchild. “When I was a child, it was much thicker then.”
For many communities in the North, ice is present for six to nine months of the year, and is an integral part of the landscape.
During the winter, when the ferries stop and flights could be disrupted, ice connects communities. They become roads for people to traverse and hunt for food and materials such as arctic char, seal and firewood.
Climate change, says Flowers, disrupts the land and ice that have sustained Inuit people physically, emotionally, spiritually and mentally since time immemorial.
“We are Sikumiut,” said Flowers. “It means people of the ice.”
As the ice continues to deteriorate, residents of Nunatsiavut, like Flowers, are being forced to adapt to a new reality.
Adapting to climate change
Rex Holwell, an Inuk from Nain, the northernmost community in Nunatsiavut, is tackling the problem head-on.
He’s the manager of SmartICE operations in Nunatsiavut, a company that combines traditional knowledge with modern technology to monitor Northern ice conditions. He says the increasing demand for their technology is bittersweet.
“[It’s] bad in the sense that everybody’s seeing climate change that we really don’t want to [see],” Holwell said.
In the past, Inuit relied on traditional knowledge passed down through generations to assess ice conditions. For safety purposes, elders taught younger generations how to determine its thickness, strength and snow cover.
But the weather trends used to predict ice levels are no longer the same as what had been used in their traditional knowledge, according to Holwell. The extended periods of rain and warmer temperatures in Nain are “stuff that [they’ve] never [seen] before,” he said.
In response, SmartICE works with communities to make more informed decisions before they travel on ice by retrieving and providing them with data about an area’s ice conditions.
One of SmartICE’s tools, the “smart buoy,” is a tall, tube-like sensor lowered into the ice that can measure ice thickness. Another device, the “smart qamutik,” is a mobile sensor attached to a snowmobile that travels across the ice, collecting data on the ice’s condition as it moves.
Establishing climate resilient infrastructure
Robert Way looks at the thinning of the world’s ice in all its forms, such as glaciers and permafrost. Way is an associate professor and research chair at Queen’s University, and is Kallunângajuk (Nunatsiavummiut) from central Labrador.
He is concerned about the livelihoods of people living in the northern communities.
Recognizing the types of disruptive changes that he’s seen in the Arctic as a climate scientist, he says communities are not only at the peril of climate change. The ongoing housing situation in Nunatsiavut, that’s been called a human rights violation, is exacerbated by the melting ice.
“When you’re doing this type of work, you’re trying to understand climate change, [but] this is all happening in the backdrop of other issues that are at the forefront as well,” he said.
Nunatsiavut residents describe the thinning sea ice, and the toll it’s taking in their communities
One of Way’s current initiatives is to generate maps for the community of Nain that help identify areas that may be unsafe to build on due to changing permafrost conditions.
“When you have a growing community that has all kinds of needs for additional housing … you don’t want to be having to spend extra cost [and] time … dealing with issues associated with [safety] hazards.”
‘It just makes it all worth it’
Flowers continues to pass down the knowledge he’s gathered to the next generation. He says he takes his students out on the land, teaching them to observe and measure the ice, while also passing on traditional knowledge about how to survive in the wilderness.
“It’s a big part of our identity,” he said.
Holwell is also committed to passing on the knowledge.
Through SmartICE, Holwell frequently travels to different communities to train locals on how to use and maintain the equipment. He says the most rewarding aspect of his work is interacting with elders.
“When elders say to me, ‘Rex, thank you for coming and thank you for reaching the people in my community on how to do this so that they’re keeping people in their community safe,’ it makes it worth it,” he said.
“At the core of it, we’re doing what Inuit or Indigenous people [have] really done with anything that we’ve seen in life — we just adapt to it and learn to live with the situation we’re in.”
