Abraham Ulayuruluk on Climate Change

Abraham Ulayuruluk speaks about climate change.

When it's a very calm morning, in the winter time, you would breath out towards the wind. Your breath, you could hear it in the cold. That's how it was.

I think we had better weather back then. I really noticed in the winter time, when we had a blizzard, it would always last for three days of blowing like crazy. After that, it would always calm down, and stay calm for a long period of time.

Way back then, the sun rose from that direction down there. Today, it's visible longer and goes higher and set much further. Given this, you'd think you'd have more time in a day, but following the clock it's not like that. The days were much shorter and colder compared to now. We didn't realize just how cold it was.

When peeing in winter, it's so cold outside that when your pee lands, it freezes so quickly it makes a cracking sound. This especially happens when the sun returns after our period of twenty-four hour darkness.

When the sun is shining, you can really feel that heat, and this how it's different now compared to the old days.

The north, east, west and south wind directions are no longer in their proper positions because our earth has tilted so much. The warm weather is now reaching further north and is going to melt Resolute Bay. The tilting of the earth makes the difference.

The tilting of the earth is changing the wind patterns. We can tell this by our tongue drifts, which are formed by the north wind, at the first snow. We used to know our directions by observing these old drifts. These drifts were stable for a long time. But now, we're seeing more hump drifts because of changing wind patterns.

My mother's birthplace had large glaciers visible. Now, I've hardly seen any glaciers this summer. Just a few. When the weather would warm up, the caribou used to cool off in the snow near the glaciers. Now there's hardly any glaciers left.

Those multi-year ice no longer exist in this area. It takes a long time for the ice to freeze now. In the spring, at the seal pup hunt, the ice is thinner. The melting is a lot faster now. The ice is not the same as it used to be. The bottom layer of ice is more slushy and it melts all of the ice faster. That's how it is today.

In the winter, we would have a south wind and it would bring a blizzard. But we knew that once we got down to the floe edge and onto the moving ice, the blizzard would stop, and it would only be windy. It would be clear and mild there and we'd start hunting walrus. We had such a beautiful time.