Inuit hunters say global warming is thinning ice.

By: Beth Duff-Brown

Inuit 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.

As scientists work to establish the effect of global warming, explorers and hunters slogging across northern Canada and the Arctic ice cap on sled and foot are describing the realities they see on the ground.

"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.

Steger, who made the first journey to the North Pole by dogsled without resupply in 1986, is sledding with Inuit guides for three months across Baffin Island, the northeastern corner of Nunavut, with two teams of huskies and a cameraman.

He is charting his 1,200-mile adventure on his Will Steger Expedition Journal web site, and making a documentary about how Inuit hunters are being forced to adapt to a warming Arctic Ocean and melting polar ice cap. In June, he will testify before a U.S. Senate committee on climate change.

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