The Decibel - How Labrador Inuit are adapting to a warming world

Episode Date: May 16, 2025

The experiences of Inuit people and scientific data show the impacts of climate change and how it disproportionately affects Canada’s Far North. Arctic sea ice is central to Inuit life – Labrador Inuit communities have more than four dozen Inuttitut terms for sea ice. And the weakening of the ice as a result of climate change poses a tangible threat: stifling access for remote fly-in communities, cutting off essential goods and endangering Inuit peoples’ traditions, including hunting and fishing.Jenn Thornhill Verma, investigative journalist and Pulitzer Ocean Reporting Fellow, takes The Decibel to the northeastern Labrador Inuit community of Nunatsiavut. We hear from Inuk elders on how their communities are innovating and adapting new technology to fight climate change.This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s Ocean Reporting NetworkQuestions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail]

Nunatsiavut is one of four self-governing Inuit regions in Canada, and as people who have been living and traveling on the ice for millennia, the Inuit who live there are on the front lines of climate change. The far north is disproportionately facing the effects of climate change as the planet warms and sea ice recedes. Today we're bringing you a special episode from the shores of northern Labrador. Jen Thornhill-Verma reported this story in partnership with the Pulitzer Center's Ocean Reporting Network. She traveled to Nain, the northernmost

permanent settlement in the region, to find out how the people of Nunatsiavut are adapting to a changing world. I'm Menaka Rammen-Wilms and this is The Decibel from the Globe and Mail. Sikusiyutit means people who live on the sea ice. Flying into Ninatsiavut, this was March of last year, it is otherworldly. For someone from Newfoundland, the island portion of Newfoundland and Labrador to fly to the northernmost reaches of Labrador, the northernmost community on the Labrador coast, was truly remarkable. I mean there's a point at which you're flying from Happy Valley Goose Bay to Nain where you know the mountains and the ice become one and you're not quite sure if you're over sea or over

land and so I mean that in and of itself is remarkable. You've got this tiny shot of a runway that you land on. You wonder how can you do it and I'm accustomed to small airports in Atlantic Canada but this is like nothing else. You land at the airport and you're picked up by a skidoo, a snowmobile. I mean that's your mode of travel. There's no cars at this time of year, there's few cars otherwise and we took a snowmobile and sled to our hotel and so set out for the 10 days that we were in Nain Natsiavod. Nain is such a special place. First of all, it's geographically beautiful. You're nestled in a valley, Unity Bay is, you know, a swath of sea ice. Interestingly, in the harbour, because the way that the sea ice forms, you have these belly-ketters, they call

them, but it's these kind of mounds of ice that form in the bay. Frequently you can see kids skating in the ice there in the bay. It's also the main throughway. It's where you leave to access the ice highway, where you can then connect with all the communities along the Northern Labrador coast. You know, there's a grocery store, there's a post office, community store, convenience store, the restaurants at the hotel. And so, you know, you're bumping into people

everywhere that you go. We're in Nain, down by the dock. My name is Ron Webb. I grew up here, born here, lived here all my life. Ron Webb. Ron Webb is a community elder, very respected, a knowledge keeper who is tremendously giving of his knowledge. And we were fortunate to meet Ron on the sea ice, just in Unity Bay.

Yeah, we're just out on our weekly, we go measuring ice twice, two days a week, through the winter, whenever it freezes until the ice gets bad. He and Gus Dicker were measuring the sea ice, just, you know, old-fashioned instruments using their measuring stick and a notebook. But they do it consistently. I mean the innovation is in the fact that they do it repeatedly throughout the season, year over year. We measure the ice and

there's some ice cracks that we measure the locations that they're there every year and snow depth and this year it's not much ice. Right now it's 31 inches which is compared to years ago is nothing really. And what would you a few few years ago, what would you have seen in terms of the ice thickness? Well three to four feet or more depending on how much snow and how much frost we had. Nobody knows the sea ice conditions better than Uncle Ron as people call him. No, only way I can explain it is we're landlocked. My name is Gus Dicker and I was born here in Dane. I grew up here and I'll never move. Gus Dicker, Gus and Ron go hand in hand.

They're out there doing this work together. Come winter season, this is the job that they do. They do it a couple of times a month. They're out measuring the sea ice in some of the high traffic areas. At this particular time when we met them, they were near where the icebreaker that comes in to service the Voisey's Bay Nickel Mine is about to come in to break the ice. So, you know, because this icebreaker is having to come in twice monthly, it's actually breaking the main highway that

connects Nain, which is the largest community, the northernmost community on the Labrador coast, to all of the other communities along that coastline. For anyone who's not lived around CX, it may not be intuitive, but it is a connector of people. That's Eric Oliver, who's a researcher from the Nazi avid. I am an associate professor in oceanography in the Department of Oceanography at the Ohio State University. I'm a physical oceanographer, which means that I study the physics of the ocean, ocean currents and temperature and that is branched into sea ice. When it forms, it provides this highway that allows people to connect across huge distances

that the open ocean, with its waves and currents and ides, is so much harder to navigate. So the presence of the sea ice is really critical for people. And warmer air, warmer water, and also changing weather patterns mean that the ice is getting thinner, it's freezing up later in the year, it's often melting earlier in the year, so that stable sea ice season is getting shorter. But also changes to the weather mean that a lot of traditional ways of being able to predict how the sea ice might react or might evolve through the seasons are less reliable than they used to be. You can appreciate that the sea ice is losing thickness, right? That it's because of climate

change, it's forming later in the year. What used to form in October, November is now not forming until late January. It used to persist well into the springtime. It's breaking up earlier because it's growing thinner. But a real revelation for us was understanding the Nunatsiavut seasonal calendar. So while many Canadians are accustomed to four seasons in the year, in Nunatsiavut they experience six seasons. So they also have an early spring and an early winter. And the sea ice that once marked four of those seasons now marks closer to two. We're losing months, you know, literally months before we start early winter and then we're losing time in the spring.

So our winter is condensed to a small time compared to years ago, you know, so. And all the traditional things we do is we do it on the ice for most of the year. But to adapt we don't have a choice. We gotta we gotta find other ways to do things a little different and I think one of the biggest things is safety. A bit of snow covering open water. The ice is not frozen. Very dangerous. You don't know it's there until you fall through. I don't know, I guess being a commercial fisherman,

you kind of see it firsthand, right? When you're fishing, all of a sudden we're seeing species that live in not so cold water. We're seeing species that don't usually belong here. So all of a sudden, I mean, it's an indicator that there's something going on, right? Joey Agnetock, I am indebted to. A few years ago, he had rung me up and he said, the ice is forming, but not like it should. And I just said, tell me more. I was deeply curious in what he meant. And that was the beginning of a learning journey

of how the sea ice is forming later and growing weaker and breaking up earlier and the detrimental impact that that has. And he said, when the ice is strong, Inuit are strong. We see these changes, but we didn't create these changes. Joe Yagnataka is also a fisherman, very well respected throughout Newfoundland and Labrador and the country. He is a knowledge keeper in the area.

He is skilled in assessing the sea ice using his harpoon, a traditional method. So the way the harpoon is designed, it has a sharp tip on the end of it. It's a piece of I guess metal about six inches long. So the way it works where I mean it's made for like if you're going seal hunting or whatever but we also use it to gauge I guess the the toughness and the thickness of the ice new ice. C'est quoi new ice forming? So normally when you it depends I guess on the weight of the harpoon too so but I've been using this one now for god I'd say close to 20 years so I know when I hit the safe like when I hit the ice and I do it repeatedly if it goes through on the third dart then I know the

ice is like how thick the ice is and then I can make a decision on what what's the safest route to use whether it's walking or bicycle. Sikulak, new ice that is thick enough to walk on. So if I'm standing here and I'm and I'm using it to check and then all of a sudden say the fourth dart goes through I get a visual of what it looks like all around me so then I'll start walking and then I'll get up say it could be 20 feet could be a hundred feet and it looks different in color so then I would check it again and if it goes through with one real easy dart that's not stop walking where you're walking and look at

the texture of the ice again. It's good if you can get a visual of I guess the the texture and stuff of the ice but sometimes that don't happen because what we're finding now earlier in the season is when the ice forms we're getting snow and that's not a good thing because the snow all of a sudden slows down the process of the thickness for the frost to get through to it so that's why I always try to I guess try to gather as much information whether it's by harpoon by people talking by satellite images to get an idea like later on in the season so if I were to take you out and I get out to say to the outer end of Paul's Island that I know a

month ago was open water I have to be mindful of the possibility of getting in dangerous ice because snow covered right. I'm just getting the gear out now to make a make a hole through the ice so that we can deploy the ice shark through the ice we've iced some algae, some zooplankton, phytoplankton. So I've been told. We had an opportunity while we were up in the Natyava to go out on the sea ice with Joey Agnetak. He drills a hole in the ice. He's got this contraption and looks like a torpedo. They've called it an ice shark after the basking shark because they'll launch it into the hole. And when I say they, it's really Joey. I mean Joey's doing this. He's like a one-man band in this particular case. He's also helped to design this particular instrument and its purpose is to collect the plankton under the ice. So this is the, I guess the...

I always think of this as like a shrimp trawl. So this would be the cod end that would collect the sample. So when we put this inside of the ice shark itself, on the end of the ice shark is a little propeller. So all over the world, you see scientists towing for plankton, they're launching nets in the water to haul plankton off the surface,

or they're using other methods to pull it from the bottom. That's very hard to do under several feet of sea ice. And so it required innovation to think about how to do that. And so the ice shark like the basking shark will filter water through this tube and collect both the plants, the phytoplankton, and the animals, the zooplankton. And that was such a joy to watch because they're doing something completely novel. The reason they're doing it is because Inuit are interested in knowing how the marine environment is changing and what better

way to find that out than starting with the base of the food chain that everything else depends on. And they're also doing something by collecting that plankton right under the sea ice that isn't being done anywhere else in the world. Once a week I come out and my understanding is the whole reasoning behind it is to, they wanna see what, see when the bloom happens, the algae bloom. So, I mean, everybody's aware that, I guess with climate change and everything,

it's getting brighter earlier in the season. So what they wanna to see I think is let's just say once upon a time the bloom happened in May so because it's getting noticeably brighter now earlier in the season does that mean it's happening in March and if it is happening in March what is that actually doing to the I guess to everything that thrive off of the algae because I mean we all know that it starts from from the smallest little things up in the food so that's what we're doing. Well the plankton bloom is

when you know the days are getting longer in the in the spring So of course there's more light going into the ocean and plankton that are basically little plants or algae, well, they start using this sunlight to make photosynthesis and pumping the carbon in order to make cells. Frederick Sear, who is now at the Marine Institute was with Fisheries and Oceans Canada at the time of this reporting. And he is currently one of the only people who has a peer-reviewed scientific article

on the plankton dynamics in a nearby region. And so, you know, his work was also really helpful in being able to connect the dots that if you're trying to understand the cascading effects of a delayed plankton bloom in the north, while his already published scientific work was able to give us a better understanding of what some of the potential ramifications of that are and how plankton in many ways kind of operate as this biological clock for the entirety of the ocean. So when there's a bloom, there's a full, like a complete trophic cascade, what we call, so you know, the, the zooplankton will eat the phytoplankton and then the small fish or larvae will eat the zooplankton and then the,

the cod will come and the marine mammals will eat the capelin. So there's a whole cascade that is, you know, beating on a clock that is determined by the timing of the bloom. So if there's any change to this timing of the bloom, then it can impact the entire ecosystem. This right here is a sensor that senses the brightness. So I got my, say my phone, and I have to turn this on and start the app up to get it started so that it can start measuring how bright it is and then when we put it under the ice it's also doing the same thing down there. You know where we were was such a

picturesque location you're surrounded by mountains you're on the sea ice we're hauling out this plankton you can actually see I mean Joey showed us the zooplankton moving on the ice. I didn't realize you'd be able to see it like that with the naked eye. Good? Yeah. Yeah. So you can see the algae in the ice there now.

That's algae. It's a darker color than the water or the slush and everything underneath. It's no trouble to see it, like as the spring progresses you can see it more and more. Yeah, I mean it's quite... you can cut holes anywhere where there's salt water and you'll see that brown algae. But Wendy, do you see it all year round or do you just see it more now that it's spring? I find throughout the winter as winter gets older yeah or starts getting into springtime that's when you start seeing more and more. So

right here right now is little craters all in amongst this realm I guess living off of the algae. You don't really notice it until you get it in the vial and then you put the vial into the light like you see all the little microorganisms doing what they do water is cold That was going crazy earlier. Huh? See it? Yeah. If you look closely you can see them all swimming around.

See it? Yes, I can't believe you can see it. Johnny you can see them better now on the snow. I was in front of the moose or whatever they harvested. Yeah. Johnny, you can see them better now on the snow. Moose or whatever they harvested. And I went like this, I said, look at me! Zoo Plankton Hunter! My name is Rex Howell. I work with Smartice and I'm the manager of Nunat Chebut Operations.

Fantastic. And where are we? We are in Nain, Nunat Chebut, or other people known as Labrador, and we are currently in my office. Smartice is a not-for-profit organization that started in Nain. Actually, Joey was involved in that as well, as well as Rod Lang, who is the department head for natural resources and Nazi government. And it came after a particularly bad winter.

February 2009 was a year many people who have been on the coast really remember because during that time we had rain at the middle of February towards the end of February and here in Labrador you know historically it's supposed to be you know minus 20 plus the wind chill on top of it so people really knew there's something going on with the climate. We had a lot of rain but on the sea ice we had a pile of water out on the normal which should be just sea ice but then what it led to is led to just a huge everywhere on the sea ice it was just a huge ice rink and it was froze for a couple of

inches but below that it was still liquid so we had water underneath the first layer of ice and then you know we had the regular saltwater ice so a lot of the people who are traveling on the sea ice were actually going through the first layer into the water. A lot of the people weren't actually taking a chance to travel on the sea ice because they were hearing stories about people going through the ice and the problem with what people were encountering is they couldn't use their traditional knowledge to be able to use what they were taught through generations of how to read the ice because

it was conditions that they've never saw before and henceforth they didn't know how to read the ice. So a lot of the experienced hunters, people were going through the ice because there were new conditions that they couldn't read the sea ice. So they were going through, albeit through the first layer, not through the full depth of the ice. It was the exact same thing in 2010.

We had rain again in the middle of February, which at that point people knew there was something really messed up with the environment, with our climate. Since then, the sea ice has persistently weakened, and we've got the weakest sea ice seasons, the warmest ocean conditions, all happening within the last decade or so now. But when that trend had started, and there was a particularly bad year,

this organization really got its feet off the ground. And it said, in the same way that Canadians can wake up and assess their weather and be able to look at Environment Canada and understand what the weather conditions are on a particular day or if they're going out on the ocean to look at ocean conditions well then why can't people access sea ice conditions? So a lot of the local people were again unsure of how to read the sea ice and then the New Nut Shabbat government picked up on it and then they contacted Memorial University of Newfoundland where they found a professor in geology at the time Dr. Trevor Bell and Dr. Trevor Bell helped to found Smart Ice. So Smart Ice we are a not-for-profit enterprise where we focus on helping communities to give them the resiliency

the confidence to be able to measure their own sea ice in their own communities to help keep the people in their communities safe. When you look at weather assets in the north very often they exist at airports. Well people don't hunt or collect wood at airports. They need to be able to know what the weather conditions are, where they're going and the points in between. And Smart Ice is able to do that through a variety of different ways and, you know, essentially they're providing information about what, you know, near real-time and real-time information about sea ice conditions so that people can travel and navigate and

get where they need to go safely. So our two main pieces of technology, one is the Smart Boy. If you can just imagine a nine foot long, 120 pound thermometer that goes into the sea ice, that is our Smart Boy. And again, all of this is just a thermometer, we'll drill a hole in the ice, we'll deploy it into the hole in the ice, into the water,

and then it'll freeze in the ice, and then essentially Throughout the whole nine feet length of the smart boat. We have little individual thermometers Spaced two and a half centimeters apart so we can tell that from the temperature difference between one thermometer to the next if you can imagine we can figure out where the ice starts and where the water is and Then on the top side we can measure from where the ice ends to like the snow and then the others may be sticking up in the atmosphere. So we can tell how thick the ice is just by reading the individual thermometers on the smart boy and it just sits there. It measures the

sea ice two times a day. It'll send out the data where it gets interpreted and then the data gets put out to the web. Smart Ice and other technologies out there, we're not meant to be replacing traditional knowledge, we're meant to augment traditional knowledge, you know. It's just technology that we're going to need because unfortunately the COS season isn't going to extend, it's going to keep getting shorter and shorter, so we have to come up with new technologies within smart ice or anything else out there to help people who use it see us to adapt to travel, how to travel on the sea safely. And that's something that we've always done as people always anyways is to adapt. But you know, we're going to need new technologies to help people adapt to

travel on the sea ice and be to hunt or the fish or to get wood, but more importantly, to help keep our culture alive. Because, you know, without sea ice, you know, when people think of Inuit, they think of people out on the sea ice. So without that sea ice, that's essentially going to be the last of our culture. What's so interesting is there's so many initiatives going on. They are all spearheaded by Nunatsiavut government, including Smart Ice. I mean, Smart Ice is interesting because it started in name, but it now operates across the entirety of the Canadian Arctic and I think has become an

invaluable tool in communities across the Arctic where there have been weather gaps and there have been, you know, environmental condition gaps and information. Traditionally, you know, people would go out on the land, ice, and water, come back to community and share the conditions. And how do they do that now? They do that through social media and Facebook in particular, Meta, I mean, it continues to be along with Sikiu, which is a Inuit-driven social media app, but both of those have become invaluable resources for sharing environmental conditions back with community members through community groups and direct messaging and so forth.

So I think, you know, it really has taken advantage of the best of traditional knowledge in assessing sea ice conditions, the best of technology in assessing those conditions, and also the best in how people are currently communicating in the Far North. Yeah, that's one of the other tools that people are using more and more, because most people are on Facebook. But still, you still have to do what you learned as a kid

and as you grew up with your traditional ways They're still important and hopefully always going to be important but You can those new things coming in as add-ons that a lot of people can use Most of them are good some of them Not so good as a GPS can't tell you that there's a hole in the ice where you're going if you're in a blizzard or something so you're gonna know where the bad ice is beforehand and all that kind of stuff. My name is Brianna Bishop so we've been working with people in all five coastal communities here in New Nazavet to map their knowledge of the ice and ocean

as well as travel routes and how things have been changing over time as well. One of the innovations to help people understand the sea ice routes is actually creating sea ice map booklets and Brianna Bishop's work at Dalhousie University working with Eric Oliver and the Nunatziabit government was instrumental in doing that. And based on feedback from people who contributed knowledge to the maps, they wanted to see that knowledge be shared in their communities in the form of books. So we generated some booklets and printed those, had them all distributed. The research focus that we started with was mapping the ice and ocean, but what people

wanted to talk about was travel safety and access to the land. And so that was really evident while I was reviewing all of the interviews that we'd done. And it seemed really important that if we are producing something to give these results back to community, that it be based on what they're emphasizing and not kind of what we're defining. And so I tried to make sure that the majority of quotes that are in the booklet are either directly describing the conditions that are there or general advice on travel safety of how to kind of check for areas of unsafe ice or things to watch for that were

kind of a rare occurrence but that have happened to some people and put them in potential danger. And the way that they developed these booklets was creating these huge maps that they laid out on the floor, visiting community by community, and working with local elders, knowledge keepers, community members to draw the routes and to keep them, to safeguard them, so that generation over generation they would be able to have and rely on these sea ice maps. Okay, so yeah, we had this big map laid out. We had been asked to include all the way up to Hebron and north of Hebron on the map as

well to make sure that we represented areas that a lot of community members came from and would travel to still. And so, yeah, the map started, I don't know, close to the door, really. We'd have people come in and take their shoes off and climb all over it and went virtually to where the windows are at the other end of the room. Can we walk?

Can we actually just do the walk? Mm-hmm. Like, do the per-curl. Okay, all right. So we'll say it started about here and went all the way across the room by about 32 feet. It's maybe here give or take. And then we didn't go as far inland kind kind of to the extent of the rivers and the brooks, so maybe about here. And then all the way back to south of Nain on this side of the room. Some people would come in and spend hours just sitting and looking and reminiscing and not add too much in terms

of lines on the map, but it was a lot of kind of prompting of memories and experiences. Some they shared out loud and other times they were just sitting in silence. Others would come in and systematically see what was missing from the map and add that in a very kind of rapid-fire way. They're very familiar with the land so knows exactly what needed to be added from their perspective. And many, many stories along the way which depict the conditions that they experienced traveling on dog team all the way to the conditions that they're experiencing now. Sina, edge of the sea ice, shore ice. Toby Kojak, we met at the bar, the restaurant bar at the hotel in Nain, came to find out that he's an announcer.

At the time was an announcer at the local radio station, not sure if he's doing it now, but he is also a translator. He translates English to Inututut and otherwise. I think, again, what's so interesting about Smart Ice is that in addition to having the assets and the knowledge on the ice and relaying back sea ice conditions to community members, is that they have a community elders group. And in name, they've called themselves the Sikiu Siutet, which is people

of the sea ice. And one of the projects that this community group created was to put together a glossary of sea ice terms. And there's more than four dozen terms that local Inuit in Labrador and the Nazi avid are using to describe early sea ice season, when the ice is strong, to travel on and also when it's breaking up. And you know at a time when sea ice conditions are changing because of climate change, that glossary is incredibly important. It's also a way of being able to relay the language, which, you know, for so many people, they didn't have the opportunity to continue to speak their language. I mean, Nain is a community that was created because people were forcibly removed and taken

from their homes further north by church, by state, and also by trade to live in Nain. And as much as that's a beautiful Inuit community I think that one of the relics of that unfortunate history is that people, especially youth, are now having to find their way back to Inuit and to their language and so one of the ways of doing that is at a time when the environment is changing so vastly, so greatly, is to be able to have a glossary of sea ice conditions. And combining that with the audio that Toby Kodjak was able to provide. And actually his narration was also reviewed by the entire committee, the Sea Ice Committee. So just a tremendous group effort that made that possible.

And I think also makes what was an existing resource, the sea ice glassary, all the more accessible. To vake open water after the ice is gone in the harbor. Emocsiko halogun naimut tangetlummi. You know, it's the knowledge keepers like Joey Agnetoc, it's the elders like Ron Webb and Gus Dicker and researchers like Eric Oliver who, they think about this deeply. They've been thinking about it for decades and so their ability to communicate that, you know, it's not lost on me. I think that with a problem as big as climate change in these coastal northern communities, you can't do one thing.

You have to do everything. That's it for today. I'm Maynika Ramon-Wilms. You can find a link to the Sea Ice Glossary in this episode's show notes. This episode was produced by David Crosby. Jen Thornhill-Verma reported this story in partnership with the Pulitzer Center's Ocean Reporting Network. Our intern is Kelsey Howlett. Our associate producer is Aja Souter. Our producers are Madeleine White, Michal Stein, and Ali Graham.

David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.