Word spread
quickly: a polar bear, then two, were spotted near this remote Inuit village on
the shores of Hudson Bay, about 1,800 kilometers north of Montreal.
Children
were whisked indoors. Hunters armed with rifles set out from Kuujjuarapik on
snowmobiles in a blizzard to kill the intruders, before the bears could get
close enough to take a bite out of any of the town’s 1,500 residents.
Clashes
between bears and people so far south of the Arctic were unheard of a century
ago.
“Polar Bears
were just stories when I was growing up in the 1920s,” said elder Alec
Tuckatuck.
But there
have been more and more sightings of late, he said, as warming forces the
world’s largest carnivore to abandon its traditional ice-covered hunting
grounds and migrate further south.
As of early
December, stable ice had not yet formed on Hudson Bay, where the bears would
traditionally feast on seals, adding layers of fat that would carry them
through the next summer.
The summers
in Kuujjuarapik are getting longer and winters are relatively “very short,”
Tuckatuck commented. “We now have [only] seven months of snow,” he lamented.
This is
having a dramatic impact on the lives of Inuit and bears alike — and leading to
more unwanted clashes between them, some even further south than Kuujjuarapik.
A polar bear
was spotted in 2010 in Shamattawa, Manitoba, about 400 kilometers south of
Hudson Bay.
In the
Nunavut hamlet of Taloyoak, six intrepid polar bears had to be put down in the
past three months after wandering into the community.
“They’re not
cuddly little Coca-Cola bears,” Bob Lyall, of the local Hunters and Trappers
Organization, told Canadian media. “They’re hungry bears coming through town
and looking for food.”
In Kuujjuarapik,
Inuit hunters have also had to search elsewhere than ice floes for food.
The bay ice,
Tuckatuck said, “can break up [underfoot] at any time.”
Hunters
cannot safely venture onto the ice in search of seals or beluga whales, and so
they have turned their sights inland on caribou — marking a major cultural
shift away from the ice that long sustained their people.
‘Climate
bomb’
In his
bright yellow ski pants and parka, Tuckatuck recalls the effects of global
warming started to be felt here in the 1980s, long before nations began
negotiations to cut greenhouse gas emissions linked to the phenomena.
That’s when
people here started noticing a change in “the timing of the ice [forming], the
timing of melting,” said Tuckatuck.
Scientists
are now worried that the thinning permafrost — perennially frozen ground
covering 24 percent of exposed land in the Northern Hemisphere — could trigger
catastrophic climate change.
“This could
be a climate bomb,” said Florent Domine, part of a joint research team formed
by France’s National Center for Scientific Research and Laval University in
Quebec to study Arctic ecosystems.
Squatting in
deep snow in minus 25 degrees Celsius, the French researcher deploys his
instruments in a peat bog a short helicopter trip from Kuujjuarapik.
“If the
permafrost thaws quickly, the carbon dioxide and methane it contains will be
released into the atmosphere, exacerbating global warming,” he explained.
It is a not
yet fully understood threat. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s
climate projections do not include permafrost emissions.
But Domine
said CO2 released from thawing permafrost could double the increase in average
global temperatures, which are forecast by the IPCC to rise by four degrees by
the end of the century.
He and his
team are monitoring the decomposition of ancient plant matter, which are
releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere from an increasing number of
ponds created by thawing permafrost.
With little
to be done to forestall this climate anomaly, polar residents see “no choice
but to adapt to the changes,” according to Tuckatuck.
The upside,
he said with a grin, is that Arctic fish stocks are more plentiful.
Polar bears,
meanwhile, are finding love in new places, mating with their cousins the
Grizzly.
DNA testing
confirmed the existence of hybrids in 2006, after a strange-looking bear was
shot by a hunter in the Northwest Territories.
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