An Oasis of Open Water
December 20, 2018 8:25 AM   Subscribe

Inuit in Canada and Greenland want to protect an ecological wonder—a massive Arctic polynya—at the center of their world.

The little auks are hard to spot among the rocky rubble that lines the shore of northwest Greenland. The black-and-white birds—diminutive relatives of the puffin—flicker and bob around the noisy colonies, looking for a mate with which they will lay a single egg. But when a gyrfalcon swoops low over a bouldery slope, the birds take flight en masse, darkening the skies with their numbers. Some 33 million pairs accounting for more than 80 percent of the world’s breeding population come here each spring.

The little auks also come to feast. They spend the nightless days diving between icebergs for tiny crustaceans called copepods to feed their chicks. While most of the northern oceans remain frozen in early summer, this wedge of sea between Greenland and Canada’s Ellesmere Island usually boasts a vast polynya—an opening in the sea ice—that teems with life. European whalers called it the North Water. But the Inuit who live here have long called it the Pikialasorsuaq [peek-yayla-sor-swakh], or the Great Upwelling.


posted by poffin boffin (4 comments total) 17 users marked this as a favorite
 
Very cool. it's hard to imagine that this area won't change, but it's possible that some of the ecological niches might actually grow if there is more open water, if it is still surrounded by the remaining ice. Impossible not to believe that a pristine fishing ground won't be exploited once it's accessible though.

It's nitpicky, but why oh why would they use the ridiculously distorted mercator projection for maps of the area? I think we can handle the actual size of greenland in this modern age.
posted by OHenryPacey at 11:10 AM on December 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


The Mercator projection is a pretty good choice for maps of the area, if for convenience you're looking for a world map projection to zoom in on rather than making a custom map of just this region. It preserves the shape of arctic areas the size of Baffin Bay quite well. It's only larger things that extend a long way in the north-south direction (e.g. North America) that get badly distorted.

Good luck little auks. I was listening to the CBC radio call-in show in Ontario today, and people were arguing about whose responsibility it should be to go out and shoot all the cormorants for "population control" to stop them eating so many of the Great Lakes fish that rightfully belong to sport fishing enthusiasts (there haven't been enough left for much of a commercial fishery for a few decades.) Sea birds the world over have had a hard time of it, the past century or two. Here's hoping the Inuit manage to continue doing a better job at getting along with their wildlife for as long as they can, despite the gradually increasing pressures of global warming and economic development.
posted by sfenders at 1:56 PM on December 20, 2018


Some bad news that deserves attention: plankton biomass drops 50% in 4 years off Labrador
posted by anthill at 5:12 AM on December 25, 2018 [1 favorite]




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