The Great Thaw

Amid all the debate over climate change, one thing is incontravertable.

The Arctic is melting. Fast. In fact, the rate of melt shows signs of accelerating.

According to the international Panel on Climate Change, warming is occurring at the poles ten times faster than it is in temperature regions.

The Arctic ICCE project is an initiative to gather traditional knowledge about the dramatic transformation underway in Greenland's vast, northwestern Thule region. Though bigger than the country of Germany, the Thule region is home to just 1,000 people, almost all of them Inuit.

I've visited Greenland repeatedly since 2002 and began this project in 2004.   I started it because my attempts to describe the dramatic and virtually overnight changes taking place on the world's largest island sounded like exxagerations. Besides, no matter how many times I visit Greenland, I'll  never possess the traditional knowledge of the people who live there. For that reason, I thought it was best for the Inuit to characterize the Arctic warming phenomenon in their own words. I began collecting interviews with the hunters in 2004. These interviews are recorded verbatim, with both the questions and answers and are located in the Ethnographies section of this website.

In addition to the verbatim interviews, I provide details about each hunter, his background and surroundings. Obviously, selecting descriptive details is highly subjective, especially for someone like myself with no anthropology training. But I used Knud Rasmussen's famous ethnographies collected during his trek across Greenland, Canada and Alaska as a guide and did my best to give readers a more complete sense of each hunter as an individual and the way he lived.

My hope is that this project will serve as a conduit to the traditional knowledge of the Thule hunters and their wives. Their understanding of the ice, marine mammals and changes to their environment is unequalled and is essential to a comprehensive understanding how climate change is affecting the Arctic. At a minimum, I hope the Arctic ICCE Project will give the outside world a glimpse into how some  the last full-time Greenlandic hunters lived through a period of unprecedentedly fast warming.