Canadian Press: Scientists suspect that gradual washing-away along thousands of kilometres of gravelly northern shoreline is speeding up. And that steady erosion is already having profound effects on northerners, the majority of whom live along the coast.
'Every single element of the North is going to be affected, right from the engineering side to how the Inuit interact with their environment,' said Wayne Pollard, a McGill University geomorphologist who contributed to the massive, 10-country study...
Much of Canada's northern coast is composed of a kind of frozen goo -- an unconsolidated pile of rubble and mud cemented into place by permafrost. It has always been subject to erosion from wind and waves. The study concludes the vast Beaufort Sea coastline of the western Arctic is retreating faster than any other northern coastline. On average, the sea washes away a metre of it every year. In some places, the erosion reaches eight metres a year...
The study point out that the sea ice is crucial to protecting the shore. And sea ice, in the face of climate change, is undergoing its own retreat. This year's sea ice maximum was tied for the lowest on record... Permafrost is also becoming less stable as temperatures in the North increase...
The changes are already affecting traditional practices such as hunting seals, polar bears and beluga whales. People so attuned to their local environment that they can navigate in fog by the currents affecting their boats can no longer count on the old assumptions... Pollard said the study underlines how interconnected the shoreline is with both the human and natural world.
Image source here.
