The hamlet of Tuktoyaktuk in the Northwest Territories, Canada, is seen in August. Seas rising from global warming and land sinking as permafrost thaws are threatening the Arctic community. Rick Bowmer / Associated Press

By CHARLES J. HANLEY, Associated Press TUKTOYAKTUK, Northwest Territories — Caught between rising seas and land melting beneath their mukluk-shod feet, the villagers of Tuktoyaktuk are doing what anyone would do on this windy Arctic coastline. They’re building windmills. That’s wind-power turbines, to be exact — a token first try at “getting rid of this fossil fuel we’re using,” said Mayor Merven Gruben. It’s a token of irony, too: People little to blame, but feeling it most, are doing more to stop global warming than many of “you people in the south,” as Gruben calls the rest of us who fill the skies with greenhouse gases. … Since 1970, temperatures have risen more than 2.5 C (4.5 F) in much of the Arctic, much faster than the global average. People in Tuk say winters are less numbing, with briefer spells of minus-40 C (minus-40 F) temperatures. They sense it in other ways, too, small and large. “The mosquitoes got bigger,” the mayor’s aunt, Tootsie Lugt, 48, told a visitor to her children-filled house overlooking Tuk harbor. … The later fall freeze-up, earlier spring break-up and general weakening of sea ice make snowmobile travel more perilous. A trip to the next island can end in a fatal plunge through thin ice. … Much of the “land” is ice, great wedges of it stuck in the frozen soil of the permafrost. Rising temperatures mean thawing tundra, and that means sinking terrain, making Tuk even more vulnerable to the battering of the sea. Steve Solomon, a government coastal geologist who has long studied Tuktoyaktuk’s predicament, said the combination of land subsidence and seas rising from global warming add up to Tuk’s “sinking” by 3 millimeters (an eighth of an inch) a year. That translates into bigger numbers for shore erosion in key spots, like Tuktoyaktuk Island, whose 10-meter (30-foot) cliffs protect the harbor mouth. “Tuktoyaktuk Island is completely unprotected, exposed,” Solomon said from his Nova Scotia office. “It’s eroding at 2 meters (yards) a year.” Warming ocean waters are undercutting the cliffs’ permafrost base. Solomon believes that at current erosion rates — and they may worsen as warming does — the island will be reduced to a small shoal in 30 or 40 years, exposing the unprotected side of Tuk’s populated peninsula to ocean waves. The heart of town already must deal with permafrost melt, as houses on shallow supports shift and tilt on a slowly liquefying base. … The sturdy, trim great-grandfather Eddie Gruben remembered better, colder times, as he sat on his daughter’s sofa, beneath an enlarged photo of himself a half-century ago, leading a dogsled team on a polar bear hunt. “Even in the ocean today the ice isn’t getting thick like it used to be,” the old hunter said. “Thirty, 40 years ago, in June it was still solid ice. Now the first week in June there’s no ice. It used to be a long winter.” …

Tiny arctic town mans climate’s front line via The Oil Drum