It has been raining all day. One of those steady, never letting off, rains. It actually has been raining on and off since Sunday. My fault really, we washed the truck for the first time since last fall. Arctic Bay is part of the High Arctic desert, averaging less than 6 inches of precipitation a year. About half of that falls as rain, the rest as snow. Or at least that is how it is supposed to be.
Global warming, that engine of climate change, has been having its surly way with our weather up here. For three years now we haven’t had any summer to speak of. The temperature the last two years hasn’t gotten above 8 degrees C. Normally we see 12 degrees at least and occassionly as high as 14. Its amazing what you aclimatize yourself to, when it gets to be 12 here, everyone complains of the heat. I believe the record high temperature for us has been 18 degrees C. A veritable tropical heat wave.
But for the last two summers, it has rained, and rained, and rained. I hope this rain isn’t a harbinger of this years season. The creeks and drainages are swollen right now. Because of our permafrost, nothing soaks into the ground here. During the spring snow melt, and with any rain, whatever moisture hits the ground fairly quickly makes its way to the ocean. The permafrost ensures that nothing, save what can soak into about the first five inches of soil, stays in the ground. It is this, coupled with the fact that there isn’t a whole lot of evaporation going on, that enables plants to survive the desert climate here.
Everything is changing now, and even the elders say they can’t tell what the weather is going to do now. The effects of global warming are being profoundly felt in the Arctic. Sea ice is more unpredictable, and that effects many things here from travel to hunting and the ability to feed ones family. Most animals here are adapted to life on the ice and in places like Hudson Bay the effects are already being felt in Polar Bear populations. Our population of Ivory Gulls, which relies on sea ice and floe edges for survival, is quickly disappearing. In some areas in the west the permafrost is melting, causing the pilings that houses are built on to shift and damaging homes.
Who knows what changes are in store for Arctic Bay as this climate change continues. For right now though, its raining, and personally I prefer the desert.
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What a great blog! I can’t wait to read on regularly, and especially be the first to wonder why you moved to the Artic.
I tried to look up Artic Bay on Baffin Island in my crappy atlas but had no luck — where is it?
Travis is Adorable. And I have to tell you that cilantro is my favourite herb as well; right now, while I have the chance, there are a good 200 plants of it sprouting in our garden because it never shows up in our grocery store. Richter’s Herbs (they’re online) has a ‘pot’ cilantro that we grow year round just to get our fix.