The Arctic's Baffin Island: A Microcosm of the Planet's Ancient Cycles of Climate Change

The last thing David Hempleman-Adams and his team expected to find on their Arctic trek across the Auyuittuq National Park on Baffin Island (the Inuit word Auyuittuq means "the land that never melts") was sludge and open water -alarming signs of climate change. More than 85 per cent of the 8,299-square-mile park is glaciated.

In an interview with Britain's Telegraph Hempleman-Adams said that "as we approached the mouth of the North Pangnirtung Fiord, melting ice literally stopped us in our tracks. I had crossed this park twice in the past, albeit many years before, but had never encountered such a worrying sight."

"Billy Arnaquq," Hempleman-Adams continued, "a local hunter I met in Qikiqtarjuaq at the start of our journey, told me that the sludge was a new phenomenon and said it was a sign of climate change: 'Previously, when the ice was thicker, the high tide would never come through the sea ice. But, because of thinning ice, water flows through, causing a sea of surface water and making it dangerous for hunters and explorers.'"

Weasel Valley, where Hempleman-Adams previously walked, was now open water. These sights seemed to confirm the multitude of scare stories, including one report that the ice is disappearing four times faster around Baffin Island than it is anywhere else in the Arctic.

The weather on Baffin is mercurial -one of the few places in the world where you can experience all four seasons within an hour. Sunshine can swiftly be followed by a blizzard; temperatures can fall from -10C to -40C with wind chills of -50C.

Hempleman-Adams describes Baffin's landscape as raw in its be beauty and more remote than the Himalayas; more people have traveled to Everest and the North and South Poles than have traversed the Auyuittuq National Park in winter.

The team's final day was a 20-mile ski down the Pangnirtung Fiord towards Pangnirtung — "the place of many bull caribou". Today, there are few caribou. The indigenous hunters reported that, given the changing conditions of the ice, they have to travel for days to find any.

Posted by Jason McManus.

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