Frostbites

During a 1979 research cruise in the Bering Sea, Conrad Oozeva, a Native hunter from St. Lawrence Island, shared dozens of Yupik words for sea ice (Fig. 12.1). I recently looked at my notebook from that period and realized that some of those terms—such as tagneghneq (thick, dark, weathered ice)—refer to types of sea ice that are rare or non-existent today. That some of those Yupik terms—probably in use for thousands of years—would become obsolete in just a few decades attests to the rapid pace of change in the Arctic and to the impacts on indigenous peoples (Berman 2004; Oozeva et al. 2004; Ford and Pearce 2010).

Community-based monitoring (CBM) is a broad set of approaches that engage the capacity of community residents in observing and monitoring of a region, e.g., the Arctic (Arctic Council 2015; Johnson et al. 2015). CBM encompasses a continuum of approaches from community-based observing network systems (CBONS), citizen science and observer blogs (Table 11.1).

Ice loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet (see Fig. 3.4 in the essay on the Greenland Ice Sheet) is a principal source of sea level rise. During 2009-2012, the Greenland Ice Sheet lost ~380 Gt of ice per year, contributing ~1.05 mm yr-¹ to sea level rise (Enderlin et al. 2014), compared with a global mean sea level rise of ~3.2 mm yr-¹ during 1993-2010 (IPCC 2013). Ice loss occurs through two primary processes: (1) surface melt and runoff from across the ice sheet, and (2) calving of icebergs into the ocean from marine-terminating outlet glaciers.