The Climate Observers/ Climate Change in Northwest Greenland (Swiss Stories 2011, by Markus Bühler) - Swiss Press Award

Sonntags Blick Magazin

Markus Bühler

The Climate Observers I reach the lonely and cold town of Qaanaaq at the end of September 2010. Two days later, winter sets in; it snows, first lightly and thinly, then heavily. This snow, getting heavier every day, will besiege the town until next summer – but the sea, now in October, is still ice-free. Not like it once was – for centuries. "The ice," says Lars Jeremiassen, 62, one of the few professional hunters in Qaanaaq, "the ice is the great unknown." Ten or fifteen years ago, Lars says, he had to cut a hole through two meters of ice to get his line into the water; they even hammered a staircase into the ice to reach the water and thus the fish. "And today the ice is half as thick." The Thule district, with its capital Qaanaaq, is the northernmost inhabited point on Earth. Eight hundred people live in the town and its surroundings, most of them Inuit, a people of hunters, fishermen, and gatherers. Only a few Danes remain here in northwest Greenland. Magssanguaq Jensen spends his old age in front of the harbor window, sitting silently for hours, gazing out at the sea that has become a mystery to him. Magssanguaq, a lifelong hunter, is now eighty-five and no longer understands the world. It hasn't been twenty years since he and his friends crossed the ice on dog sleds, already in October – and now there's nothing out there but lively water. "On October 24th, when the sun sets for the last time for months, the sea was always a solid surface," the man growls, pointing at the beach. "Not even the beach," says Magssanguaq, "freezes anymore." He's never seen anything like it. Crazy. Sometimes Tateraaq Qaerngaq, five years younger, sits next to him. They are silent and talk, gazing out and wondering about the new era, the lost world. Tateraaq, too, is glad to be an old man who no longer goes hunting. In the past, yes, everything was different, simpler, clearer. He used to kayak alone across the sea and understand the winds and waves. "These days, I don't understand the weather anymore," he says quietly, shaking his head. Going hunting alone is now life-threatening. Then he tells how they once traveled nine hundred kilometers south in dog teams, through nothing but ice – unthinkable today. And even in the opposite direction, north, the journey is becoming increasingly difficult. Often, they have to travel over the glaciers of the inland ice because the sea ice is unsafe, brittle, and treacherous. "In Etah, further north," the old man explains, "we would bury our meat supplies under rocks in late summer so we would have an emergency supply when we hunted there in winter. Today, the meat rots before it freezes." Gedion Kristiansen isn't lucky enough to be born early; he's forty-two and, if he wants to survive, he has to go hunting. And that's getting harder and harder. Two years ago, he set off with Angiit Umaq. They spent the night in a hut. But that night, like never before in living memory, a crack suddenly appeared in the ice. Gedion and Angiit ran, urging the dogs on, a life-or-death quest. Gedion was lucky and barely made it to safe ground, but Angiit, along with his dogs, got stuck on the ice floe and drifted out to sea. Back in Qaanaaq, Gedion alerted the police. They dispatched a helicopter. But because the weather was so bad, he soon turned back and tried again the next morning. Angiit and his dogs were discovered near Herbert Island, 35 kilometers from where he had spent the night. There was another storm. And the rescuers only managed to get Angiit out of the ice, but not the dogs and the sled. They were never seen again. Little remains as it once was in the far north: Twenty years ago, the sea froze as early as October and remained solid and solid until the end of July; now it only freezes in December and breaks up again as early as the beginning of June. Traveling across the ice has become unpredictable. Not just for humans. The unfamiliarity is also taking its toll on animals. Until now, seals gave birth to their pups in ice caves, usually along the edges of the pack ice. These caves were covered with snow, offering the pups a certain amount of protection, especially since polar bears could hardly smell them. But now, in times of thin ice, the newborns often break through and drown. Lars Jeremiassen, a professional hunter, has observed seals, deprived of all safety, giving birth to their offspring on bare ice. Certain death. If the young don't freeze during the night, they become easy prey for polar bears, foxes, or ravens, at least near the coast. "Even belugas, small whales," says Lars, "no longer swim here every year. Some birds come earlier than they used to, they also lay their eggs earlier, while others now stay here the entire winter." And yet, he then says, the whole thing is hopefully not so strange, a phase perhaps, a stupid escapade of the climate or the spirits. Because long ago, before Lars was born, musk oxen and reindeer still lived over there in Mellville Bay near Savissivik, but today it's so cold that only polar bears survive. "We will learn to deal with the new. The animals will learn too. We must." What really frightens the hunters of Qaanaaq is politics, or rather the Greenlandic government. The hunters suspect that the government is hoping for sudden wealth, brought about by the many mineral resources that could soon be extracted from Greenland's earth during the melting period. And if Greenland were finally rich, it could become independent from its motherland, Denmark. What frightens the hunters is that the government, precisely because it wants to lead Greenland to independence and is therefore dependent on the goodwill of other states, especially European ones, is, under pressure from these same states, setting hunting quotas so low that hardly any hunter can survive. "There are enough animals here," complains Gedion Kristiansen, "more than enough." Long before Greenpeace brought down the seal fur trade worldwide, Gedion rages, the Inuit never hunted more than necessary. This mentality of exploitation and extermination originates in Europe, where animals are kept captive for their short, painful lives, only to use parts of them and throw away the rest. "That is alien to us." Lars Jeremiassen, Gedion Kristiansen, Magssanguaq Jensen, Tateraaq Qaerngaq: They were and are hunters at the ends of the earth. As boys, guided by their father, they killed their first seal. From the age of fourteen, hunting became their profession. And everyone has a son, or two, or three. But no one will ever be a hunter. No one wants to be a hunter anymore.