Free In the Empire of Ice by Gretel Ehrlich Page A

from the scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have failed to give us accurate predictions, then where do we look? Winton says there’s nothing for him to do except observe. “We don’t have theories about ice and weather and climate. We have experience,” he says.
    I ask him to describe the ice we are seeing: “ Tugayak means ‘shore ice breaking up and separating from the beach—ice going away.’” He has to yell over the wind. “Now the ivu, the pressure ridge, comes in fast and gets shoved up on the beach when the wind is strong like it is now, and the tide is high. Pressure ridges form where it just starts to get shallow. They aren’t as big as they used to be and they break up more easily. The pressure ridges act as a barrier allowing the ice to stay. It makes our world calm. It gives us nice weather. Wales was a place where winter once came easily. Now it’s stormier. Now winter may not come at all, or maybe too much of it will come. Either way, I think we are not going to prosper.”
    Back in the multi, Joe, Winton, and I scrounge around in the nearly empty cupboards for tea bags and cookies. Even a brief foray out into the deep cold brings on hunger. I ask Winton how many generations of Weyapuks have lived in Wales. He says it goes too far back to count. “For as long as humans have lived on the Bering Strait. Maybe 10,000 years or more.” He was brought into the world by a village midwife, as those before him were. “The women helped each other. Now they send mothers-to-be to Nome a month before the delivery date. The village doesn’t participate anymore, and the women come home with little strangers in their arms.”
    There’s a scratching sound on the side of the building, and we go to the window to see if it’s a bear. In Kivalina, one of the villages now slated to be moved because of coastal erosion, a young man tried to save his pregnant wife from a polar bear. “The bear attacked her” Winton says, “and the husband got the bear to chase him and let go of his wife. He was killed by that bear. The wife and baby live still.”
    Joe and Winton’s conversations go round and round as if driven by a circular wind, from talk of the old days in Wales to the new poverty of modern times to climate and weather.
    Winton says that in the last years a lot of beach has eroded, at least a hundred feet since 1990. “There used to be two rows of sand dunes, and both of them got washed away,” he says. The first row of houses is now in danger. They’re built on the beach, and if big storms keep coming, the way they have been, those houses will wash away.
    “Maybe a seawall will be built. I don’t know if that will help. Up the coast Shishmaref and Kivalina will soon have to move because of coastal erosion. There are more storms, worse storms, moving in more often. And now we have the warming ocean going against us. Wait until the sea level rises. We’ll all have to move.”
    “The hunter follows the ice,” Winton says. “In the spring we look for a smooth, low place to chop a trail through the pressure ice. We use pick axes and shovels and chop off clumps of ice and smooth them out to make a place to drag our boats out and wait for the whales. We do this in mid-March before whaling season begins.”
    This year, he tells me, the pressure ridge was out farther than normal, and since 2000 the whales have gone by much faster. “The leads in the ice used to close up, and that temporarily halted the migration. Now they are open all the time. We used to see whales for a month; now it’s down to two weeks. Same way with the walrus. They used to get up on ice floes that moved north for a whole month. Now that kind of ice lasts for only a few weeks, then it’s gone.”
    Summers they hunted geese and ducks and fished for salmon at the mouths of small rivers. In late August they went north of Shishmaref to hunt caribou. “In the old days we walked up the coast. Everyone had