Pierre Tautu doesn't know whether it's global warming or something else, but over the summer he noticed strange things happening around his Nunavut home in Chesterfield Inlet, at the top of Hudson Bay. "We still have ice year-round, but there's been a little bit of changes,” he said. “Different kinds of insects and different kind of birds that come around our area now.”
His hamlet (population 330) is a prime nesting ground for a variety of birds, but last summer the 44-year-old hunter and guide spotted a type of owl he had never seen that far north. For the first time, he also saw a dragonfly in his Inuit community. “We don't have dragonflies around, but I've seen one,” Mr. Tautu said. “This was just out in our backyard and I was pretty surprised to see one.”
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A consensus has grown in the scientific community that global warming caused by human activity is contributing to the changing face of the Arctic. But experts say it was the peculiar weather Mother Nature offered up last summer – whatever caused it – that is largely to blame for the recent unusual events. There was a high-pressure system that sat over the Arctic for much of the summer. It shooed away clouds, leaving the sun alone to beat down. That created higher ocean temperatures, which in turn accelerated the melt. Son Nghiem, who led that NASA study on sea ice released this week, also pointed to unusual winds, which compressed sea ice, pushing it into the Transpolar Drift Stream and into warmer water where melting happened more quickly.
Scott Lamoureux, a geography professor at Queen's University in Kingston, noticed the summer's odd weather firsthand on Melville Island north of the Arctic Circle where he's studying how climate change is affecting river flow, soil moisture, vegetation and water quality. That far north, the mean temperature has been reported at just under 5 C in July since records were first kept in the 1950s. “What we observed through much of July were temperatures in the 15-to-20 C range. The highest temperature recorded was almost 22 C,” Prof. Lamoureux said. He also noted other weird things he hadn't noticed in his five years working there. While the summer melt usually sinks 50 centimetres into the permafrost, the melt depth was down at least a metre or more this year. That caused land to fracture, as well as large slides and flooding. One piece of land slid down a hill and dammed a river 200 metres across, he said.
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