- For the past 20 years climatologists and ice and atmosphere
scientists have been working in Alaska studying climate change.
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- Now they have discovered a rich new source of records
extending their knowledge back by decades through the oral history of native
Alaskans.
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- Barrow is the most northerly town in the United States,
lying 300 miles inside the Arctic Circle.
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- And 92-year-old Bertha Leavitt is its oldest inhabitant.
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- "When I was a child", she says, "it was
so much colder and the winds in winter used to be fierce." She remembers
her elders telling in their stories that the weather was going to change.
And since her childhood she believes this has come true.
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- Frozen land
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- In a land where not just the rivers but also the sea
freezes over, it is impossible not to be aware of the seasons.
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- Barrow whaling captain Percy Nusunginya has particular
reason to be alert to change. Each autumn and spring his crew ventures
out on the ice to fish at air holes. He says that working out on the Arctic
Sea has become very dangerous.
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- "Nowadays ice conditions are thinner than in the
1970s and 80s. The ice used to be 20 to 30 feet thick but now it is more
like 10 feet thick. But what can we do? Sometimes I feel sad but we just
have to go with what we have got.
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- "Up here in the Arctic we are definitely warming
up, the polar pack ice has all but gone."
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- Percy says Western nations need to have scientific proof
that the climate is warming rather than believing the word of the native
people but he adds: "The white man, the climatologists are just learning
what we knew was going on."
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- Richard Glenn is a native Alaskan and a member of the
Inupiat people, as well as an ice scientist.
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- He is also president of the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium
which is helping to combine the rich environmental knowledge of the local
people with the scientific study of climate change.
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- There is a real camaraderie, a real sharing, he says,
between the local people and the visiting experts.
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- One of the first to realise the value of local knowledge
was Mike Spindler, a US fish and wildlife refuge manager from the Koyukuk
and Nowitna National Wildlife Refuge several hundred miles away in the
interior of Alaska.
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- He first began collecting environmental observations
from elders when he found that there had been no scientific research carried
out in the area before 1980, when the Wildlife Refuge was created.
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- He says elders have been providing a wealth of information
about their environment which needed documenting.
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- Crazy changes
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- Benedict Jones is an elder who still maintains a subsistence
lifestyle.
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- "I used to have glaciers up at my camp on the Koyukuk
River, where the salmon berries used to grow. But the glaciers have all
melted and the ground is drying up so there are no more salmon berries."
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- Further research projects to tap into elders' knowledge
concerning climate change are under way at the University of Alaska's International
Arctic Research Centre. And the recordings gathered are available to scientists.
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- "In many of the interviews elders make reference
to the 1970s as the time that they began to notice changes in the climate,"
says Mike.
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- An area near Mike's base is referred to as a "drunken
forest". He explains that the spruce trees are falling over because
of thawing permafrost. This could be due to changing climate, he says,
or natural succession.
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- But in the interviews elders have spoken of what they
describe as crazy changes in the climate.
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- Margie Attla, an elder from the village of Galena, says
"The last couple of years has been really crazy. It is kind of scary
when the wind comes up at the wrong time and we have rain in the winter,
the change is really there and I am not very comfortable with it."
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- © BBC MMV
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- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4748287.stm
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