Ellesmere island
Ellesmere island is one of the largest of Canada with an area of 200,000 sqKm. It is part of the newly created Nunavut territory.
The population of the island was recorded in 2001 as 168.
Conditions there are so harsh and extreme that Jerry Kobalenko, an enthusiastic traveller of the island, titled his travel book “The Horizontal Everest”.
The Inuit people
Almost 83% of the Nunavut territory 26,000 residents (scattered across 2,000,000 of sqKm) are Inuit. This new territory was set up in 1999 following an initiative by the Aboriginal inhabitants of the Territory. Nunavut flag portrays an inuksuk, a stone monument which guides people on the land and marks sacred places.
Taking into account the whole Canada, Alaska and Greenland the total number of indigenes speaking Inuit (or Inupik) dialects is less than 80,000.
The permafrost
Inuit people live on permafrost. Permafrost is defined as a layer of soil or rock in which the temperature has been continuously below 0° for a long period of time (in principle perennial frozen ground). Many of the of the potential impacts of global warming in the Arctic regions are associated with permafrost: raise in mean annual temperatures causes a thaw of permafrost progressing both above (where the so called “active layer”, which is sensible to seasonal variations of temperatures, becomes deeper) and below. Typically, when ice rich permafrost thaws, the ground surface subsides. Such a subsidence does not occur uniformly in space, yielding an irregular ground surface with hills and depressions which poses a serious hazard to buildings and infrastructures.
But the scariest scenario about permafrost and global warming is the so called Carbon sink reversal. Permafrost could contain up to a quarter of all sequestered carbon on Earth in the form of frozen decomposed plant materials. When such material thaws, carbon is exposed to microbial decomposition, resulting in a massive release of carbon dioxide and methane (one of the most efficient greenhouse gases) in the atmosphere.
Download image (996 KB) Grise Fiord, Aujuittuq in Inuit language, is the largest town in Ellesmere island with 141 inhabitants.
Download
image (1014 KB), Pond Inlet, a relatively big
Inuit community (1300 inhabitants), on the North coast of Baffin island.
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