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| Albert Lukassen’s world is melting around him. When the 64-year-old Inuit man was young, he could hunt by dogsled on the frozen Uummannaq Fjord, on Greenland’s west coast, until June. This photo shows him there in April. All the photographs for this story were taken on the fjord. |
Climate change is making the economies of the settlements even more precarious. It has lengthened the periods in winter and spring when ice is too thick for boats to leave harbors yet not thick enough to support sleds or snowmobiles. The unsafe ice affects fishing, but it hurts the region’s hunters more.
“In the 1980s we had cold winters,” says Uunartoq Løvstrøm, a lean 72-year-old hunter and one of 200 residents of Saattut, a small island near the head of Uummannaq Fjord. “And ice was this thick,” he says, rising from a sofa and placing his hand even with his hip. We’re in the living room of his blue wood-frame home, a short, slippery walk from Saattut’s harbor. On the low table between us are some polar bear claws, souvenirs from a long-ago hunt. A large flat-screen television is temporarily muted. Sled dogs nap outside in the early gloaming.
At the height of winter in recent years, says Løvstrøm, ice in the fjord might be only a foot thick. Instead of icing over in December or January and melting in June, the sea freezes in February and starts to thaw in April. The loss of ice has shortened the hunting season, in a land where wild meat helps families get by: Seal, reindeer, and whale meat fills freezers for the year. And shooting seals from boats is a poor substitute for the traditional dogsled hunt. A hunter on a sled can get off and stealthily approach his prey. On a noisy boat, he can’t get as close; from a distance he must take a difficult shot at a seal coming up for air in open water.
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