Ice Ice Baby - Part II

Here is a picture of most of Salluit taken from the vantage point of the local Nursing Station, located at the highest point of land in the town. The hills on the other side of the fjord form a narrow penis peninsula with the Hudson Strait on the other side and Baffin Island about 70 miles further on.

Ice is vital to both the traditional and modern way of life here. It forms a highway to hunting and fishing grounds. You can walk on it, drive a dog team or snowmobile on it, drive a truck on it, even land a jet aircraft on it (not here in my experience, but we used to come in on pretty heavy turboprops on the ice strip). In the western arctic, frozen rivers are actually highways and traversed by big rigs bring all manner of consumer goods to the north.

In the picture above, you can see the faint signs of a trail starting in front of the town heading eastward, the first leg of the trip to Deception Bay and a couple of lakes good for ice fishing. And if you look really hard, you will notice the clouds on the horizon are much darker. The elders will tell you that this is a sign of open water, and it makes a lot of sense since the albido of open water is much lower than ice, making the clouds sullen and foreboding.

Areas which stay ice-free all winter long are called polynyas, and are oasis of life with seals, whales, eider ducks and gulls wintering over. Here we don't have a true polynya, but this patch of open water is where people harvest mussels during the winter pictured just about to form at the left. It is not a true polynya because the water around it is sweet - part salt and part fresh, depending on the tide. At high tides during winter, the locals use rakes at low tide to pull up the mussels. You can pick them by hand, but it is pretty cold and your hand muscles seize up in a couple of minutes.

Our local ice-free hole is caused by current - there is a sandbar underneath, and this accelerates the flow to such a degree that ice doesn't form - at least not usually: in one of my 22 years in this town it actually froze over, and was the topic of much conversation at the time. Some years it is only a few metres across, but usually it is a minimum of 100 metres even at the dead of winter.

Inuit knowledge about ice (and snow) could fill volumes, so I am feeling a bit sheepish about exposing my meager understanding of these substances. But something that has always intrigued me is how water, of all substances, actually becomes less dense as it cools beyond 4 C. For this reason, ice floats rather than sinks beneath water. If it were not for this property, much of life on earth could not have survived the series of ice ages visited upon this planet.

Most important, how could we find ice to chill our vodka?

Ice Ice Baby

This week the ice finally closed across the bay. On Saturday we had very high on-shore winds, which pushed the thin strands of broken ice onto our side of the fjord - we all thought it would be at minimum a few more weeks before the waters solidified.

Amazing, we had two subsequent days with cold temperatures (minus 10 - 15 Celsius) with little to no winds, and what for the past five months had been a vista of choppy dark waters rapidly became a smooth light ash gray film of solid state H₂O.

True to the Inuit sense of derring-do, snowmobile and ATV tracks appeared on the incredibly thin ice within 36 hours. In reality, it is safer to go out on uncertain ice with a snowmobile than on foot since the pressure is less per square inch given the surface area of the skis and track.

In previous years, I've seen elders walk tentatively out on the ice, taking a step or two, testing the ice with a harpoon, and then shuffling out a bit further. Now while not admitting to having a yellow streak, there is no way you would ever get me to walk out onto ice for at least the first month after it has formed.

Rationally, I know that sea ice forms differently than freshwater ice, which tends to be more brittle. Indeed, I've heard that freshly formed sea ice is springy and that you can feel it deforming a little under the weight of your foot without cracking like freshwater ice. Moreover, sea ice having changed in colour from dark grey to a much lighter grey is generally deemed safe enough to walk on. But all that knowledge cannot overcome my deep sense that new ice equals danger.

For those of you wanting to research sea ice further, the University of Alaska (Fairbanks) discusses its formation and the scientific rationale behind traditional Inuit knowledge regarding ice.

In the meantime, the only ice I want to be involved with is in cubed form with my scotch. Problem is, I don't have any. Donations will be gratefully accepted.