April 17, 2007

Inuit know global warming

Inuit hunters getting firsthand look at global climate changeInuit hunters are falling through thinning ice and dying. Dolphins are being spotted for the first time. There's not enough snow to build igloos for shelter during hunts.

"This is really ground zero for global warming," said Will Steger, a 62-year-old Minnesotan who has been traveling the region for 43 years and has witnessed the effect of warming on the 155,000 indigenous people of the Arctic.

"This is where a culture has lived for 5,000 years, relying on a very delicate, interconnected ecosystem, and, one by one, small pegs of that ecosystem are being pulled out," Steger said by satellite phone from a village outside Iqaluit, about 200 miles south of the Arctic Circle. Iqaluit is the provincial capital of the Canadian territory of Nunavut.

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