Word: inuits
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...released today, were dug out of rock formations on Ellesmere Island, in the Canadian Arctic, by paleontologists from the University of Chicago and several other institutions. Its nickame, for reasons that will become clear, is "fishapod"; it's more formally called Tiktaalik ("large fish in stream," in the local Inuit language). Fishapod dates from about 383 million years ago. It had the scales, teeth and gills of a fish, but also a big, curved rib cage that suggests the creature had lungs as well. The ribs interlock, moreover, unlike a fish's, implying they were able to bear fishapod...
...millennium or so ago, the archipelago from Hudson Bay through Nunavut to northern Greenland was inhabited by nomadic groups we now call the Dorset people. They were, according to Inuit legend, tall and gentle folk, and they hunted from the ice edge, harpooning seals and walruses with tools made of bone and ivory. When a slight warming period hit about 1,000 years ago, the ice receded. Bowhead whales moved in from Alaskan waters, followed by seafaring hunters from the Bering Strait. With their boats, those hunters, the forebears of Canadian Inuit, eventually spread east to Greenland. For reasons still...
...Inuit report the same thing. A hunting, fishing and gathering people, they collect their food from the ice eight months a year. Or at least they try to. The land and sea have become noticeably less predictable in the past five to 10 years, says Sheila Watt-Cloutier, chairwoman of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference. While southern Canadians may bask in unusual winter heat, if ice is too thin to ride over and too thick to take a boat through, it is as if someone closed all the roads to the Inuits' grocery stores. "Ice and snow represent transportation, represent mobility...
...That means food isn't always there even when the Inuit can travel. Wildlife may well be less adaptable to extreme changes than humans are. When polar bears can't find prey, there are few alternatives; the bears burn their own fat, releasing into their systems the contaminants stored there--pesticides and other industrial chemicals that accumulate in cool Arctic waters and build up in the food chain. Other animals are also in trouble. In February, in what should have been midwinter in the far north, Nunavut's capital city, Iqaluit, was a balmy 5*noneC and rainy. When...
...There are other human-health consequences of the shifting biology that accompanies climate variation. Warming may mean that germs reproduce faster, increasing Inuit exposure to animal diseases, such as trichinosis. Warming could probably also damage public-health infrastructure--sewage systems, water pipes and reservoirs--as the permafrost on which it was built melts. And for Inuit communities, already reordering rapidly through modernization, the extra social dislocation brought by a warmer climate may bring stress, mental health problems and increased substance abuse. On the positive side, frostbite may decrease, along with cardiac problems brought on by heavy exertion in extreme cold...