Not Considered

source: Agence France-Presse, on MSN France.

author: Clément Sabourini

translation: doxa-louise

Kuujjuarapik, outpost on a thawing Canadian Artic

The Ancients can attest to this, never have polar bears ventured so far south.

But 30 years after the thaw of the tundra, Kuujjuarapiq has learnt that none 

could predict the worst consequences of global warming.

Word rapidly got out: a polar bear, then two, were seen roaming around this 

small settlement on Hudson’s Bay, southerly outpost for the Inuit people some 

1800 kms north of Montreal.

Once the alarm sounded, children were forbidden to go beyond the last houses

 of this village of 1500 souls. In the midsts of a blizzard, the men took to arms and 

snowmobiles and killed one of the two beasts, something unthinkable in earlier times.

‘In the 1920s, when I was a child, polar bears existed only in tales. Now they

 are coming forward, in ever increasing numbers’, tells us Alec Tuckatuck, one of

 the hunters of the village.

The largest carnivores on the planet now meander around Kuujjuarapik for in this early

December, the sea ice, from which they hunt for seal, no longer forms as in times immemorial.

‘The winters are shorter and the summers longer, and we are now seven months 

without snow’, comments Alec, explaining that the Inuit no longer trust the ice cover, 

as they had in the past.

Comfortable in his yellow ski pants, the old hunter remembers that higher temperatures 

were first felt ‘in the middle of the 1980s’, with the thaw of the permafrost layer. ‘This has 

changed the pace at which ice forms, as well as the thaw. (...) Now vegetation grows more quickly’.

A Climate Bomb

If higher temperatures can bring advantages for the local population, such as a greater

abundance of fish in this part of Hudson’s Bay, the lost of permafrost is feared by scientists.

‘This could be a climate bomb’, opines Florent Domine, a rare specialist on permafrost, on 

loan from the CNRS (Centre National de la recherche scinetifique, France) to the nordic

studies research lab Takuvik at Laval University, Quebec.

Crouched in snow at -25C, this French researcher has layed out his measuring instruments i

n peatland, a few minutes by helicopter form the Inuit burg.

At Kuujjuarapiq, as in the High Artic, the biologist commes to the same conclusion: the

ground is heating up inexorably. ‘If permafrost thaws quickly, part of the carbon 

(it contains) will be liberated into the atmosphere in the form of CO2 (carbon dioxide) and

CH4 (methane), through the action of bacteria, thus aggravating considerably the greenhouse effect’.

According to available dayta, there is tow times the carbon present in permafrost that

 there is in air. This phenomena is so little understood and studied that the intergovernmental 

expert group on climate evolution (IPCC) of the UN does not integrate it in climatic models, 

the researcher points out.

The worst case scenario from IPCC evoques temperature increases in the order of 4C or 5C

by 2100. Florient Domine for his part expects an increase of around 8C, once one has factored

in the multiplier effect of the thawing of permafrost.

In order to evaluate the volumes of greenhouse gases emitted during the mineralization

of organic basements during heating, M. Domine and his team follow notably the evolution 

of tens of ponds created by the collapse of thawed tundra. In particular Pascal Bégin, a 

Quebec biologist, follows the spilling over of blocks of tundra into water holes

where they are susequently degraded by bacteria. In the absence of oxygen, the fermentation 

of sediemts creates methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than CO2, 

observes the young woman.

The vicious cycle of global warming thus seems to be accelerating in the Artic and the 

inhabitants of this polar region ‘have no alternative but to to adapt’, remarks the old Inuit 

hunter, Alec Tuckatuck.

Even polar bears, confused by the thawing of the ice shield, seem to have integrated the

new reality: as they adventure further south seeking food, these carnivores have 

been mating with their cousins the Grizzlies. A few years back such hybridization would 

have seemed unnatural.