A gold watch presented in 1913 to their local hero by the city of Toronto is part of the Sept. 22 auction trove. Wright seldom used the finicky watch — “the cost of new springs was so high I used my old dollar watch,” he said — “but he never threw it out, so he must have liked it,” Nick Lambourn, director of Exploration and Travel collections at Christie’s, tells the Star.

The collection came by way of Wright’s grandson, Adrian Raeside, whom also wrote a book and filmed a documentary about his grandfather’s incredible experience attempting the pole with Robert Scott. The auction catalog is online as well, and is worth taking a peek at.

Click here to view the embedded video.

But this is about more than just language. The Inughuit language is in danger because their way of life is changing, as climate change endangers the animals they hunt and the environment in which they and those animals live. As Leonard explains,

“It’s a community that’s dependent on the hunting of sea mammals. Because of global warming there are fewer animals to kill and it’s increasingly dangerous to do so using these ancient traditional techniques that they use [dogsled and kayak] and so it looks like now this entire community could be moved further south within 10-15 years. And if that happens, the language, culture, the way of life will all go, will all disappear.”
“If their language dies,” says Leonard, “their heritage and identity will die with it.” Leonard has a head start on the communication front; he’ll be able to get by in his new adopted community by speaking Danish, until he gets the hang of Inukun. But he’ll be rushing toward fluency in his first few months, because all of the good stuff – all of the Inughuit’s most important songs, stories, myths, and spiritual beliefs – live in Inuktun.

via Endangered People: Linguist To Document Dying Greenlandic Dialect | Brave Green World | Big Think.

Archeologists have no immediate plans to raise the ship. Sonar and remotely-operated camera equipment will be used to survey the area and inspect the craft.

CBC News – Technology & Science – Abandoned 1854 ship found in Arctic.

The issue, which features women from northern Canada posing in swimsuits among some of the north’s most threatened landscapes, is generating some controversy. Some feel that a swimsuit issue is too flippant a way of drawing attention to the issue of global warming and that the photos exploit women.

More than just a collection of titillating images, the issue also features testimony from both northerners and scientists concerning the effects of climate change on the Canadian north.

CBC News – Arts – Arctic magazine releases swimsuit edition.

The Economist just posted an interesting article about the scientific research taking place in Ny-Ålesund, a village on the High Arctic island of Spitsbergen

The village logs some 14,000 researcher-days a year: the scientists normally come and go on twice-weekly flights from Longyearbyen, about 110km away, except for those who arrive on research ships, or on the vessels that bring in provisions and fuel to replenish the stocks in the rather rusted tanks that stand up above the jetty. A few dozen of them spend the winter up here. “The midnight sun is one thing,” one of the select few boasts, “but the full moon at noon is rarer and finer.”

The article highlights how this small village, at the near-top of the world, is at once isolated from and connected to the world below, drawing researchers from around the world and generating data that speaks to our shared environment, where no single country or individual is ever truly isolated from the larger world.

The Arctic is the world’s attic: a lot of junk lofted high into the atmosphere farther south ends up there. And the facilities for studying it all, especially those high above the settlement in the laboratory at the summit of Mt Zeppelin, away from any local disturbances, are exquisitely sensitive. Some of these instruments form part of the world’s network for monitoring carbon dioxide levels. Others monitor methane, carbon monoxide, ozone, lead, and all sorts of particles. Some bottle up air for yet more meticulous examination far away, in Britain, or in Boulder, Colorado. Kim Holmen of the Norwegian Polar Institute says some of his equipment could detect a cigarette at 2km. Through their careful monitoring he and his colleagues connect themselves to conflagrations a great deal farther away than that, picking up industrial pollutants and forest fires from all parts of Eurasia.

via Green.view: The connected Arctic | The Economist.

An article in yesterday’s New York times reveals that terns aren’t the only long-distance flyers. And the bar-tailed godwit, which makes an annual pilgrimage south from Alaska to New Zealand, makes non-stop flights of unprecedented length.

In 2006, Biologist Robert E. Gill, curious about why the godwits fattened themselves up for what scientist believed was a migration along food-rich shores, tagged the godwits with transmitters.

The transmitters sent their location to Mr. Gill’s computer, and he sometimes stayed up until 2 in the morning to see the latest signal appear on the Google Earth program running on his laptop. Just as he had suspected, the bar-tailed godwits headed out over the open ocean and flew south through the Pacific. They did not stop at islands along the way. Instead, they traveled up to 7,100 miles in nine days — the longest nonstop flight ever recorded. “I was speechless,” Mr. Gill said.

Since then, scientists have been tagging other migrating birds, revealing feats of endurance no one had expected. Turns out, these birds are biologically adapted to last for long stretches without rest or food.

via Birds That Migrate Thousands of Miles With Nary a Stop – NYTimes.com.

The pieces are already in motion, travelling from Uummannaq toward Baffin Bay. Here’s a video from last month:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Read more:

Statue built on a glacier spotted drifting through the Arctic ocean – Art – io9.

cool (E) motion

A team of three British explorers described as ‘the world’s toughest’ reached the North Geographic Pole today ending a gruelling 60 day scientific survey across the floating sea ice of the Arctic Ocean.

The Catlin Arctic Survey’s headquarters in London was contacted at 2050 hours (BST) by team leader Ann Daniels and her colleagues Martin Hartley and Charlie Paton to say they had completed their survey work as they reached the Pole.

The team has been collecting water and marine life samples from beneath the floating sea ice as part of the expedition’s leading edge science programme which is assessing the impact of CO² absorbtion on the ocean and its marine life – a process known as ocean acidification.

At the North Pole, the taking some final samples took priority over celebration.

“We called it our Hole at the Pole” said Ann Daniels. “Getting the science work done has always been our top priority, but it is absolutely fantastic to reach the Pole as well. We’re ecstatic.”

Speaking from Catlin Arctic Survey’s headquarters in London, the Survey Director and explorer Pen Hadow described the team’s achievement as extraordinary. “It’s not possible to imagine what this team has had to do to pull off this extreme survey. I consider them to be the world’s toughest to have done this. Together they’re the face of modern exploration helping to advance the understanding of scientists and the public alike about how the natural world works.”

The three explorers have travelled over 483 miles (777 kilometres) since March 14th but to reach the Pole have had to increase the amount of trekking time each day. They made it with only hours to spare before a Twin Otter plane was scheduled to land on the ice to collect them.

Commenting on the harsh conditions Ann Daniels said: “It has been an unbelievably hard journey over the ice. Conditions have been unusually tough and at times very frustrating with a frequent southerly drift pushing us backwards every time we camped for the night. On top of that we’ve had to battle into head-winds and swim across large areas of dangerously thin ice and open water.”

Congratulations to the team on making this extraordinary journey!

Turns out, this is nothing new. Recent research into mammoth DNA reveals that these extinct mammals, which share a common ancestor with today’s Asian elephants, developed a range of adaptation to extreme cold, from thick fur to smaller ears a genetic adaptation very similar to that in the fox that allowed their blood to continue delivering oxygen to cells, even in extremely cold conditions.

This doesn’t mean that mammoths and arctic foxes are related. As the article in the New York Times notes,

The DNA changes in the mammoth hemoglobin genes differ from those in other arctic animals, an instance of convergent evolution or attaining the same end by a different genetic route.

Revelations like these, that show how the mammoth’s bodily processes adapted to the cold, give scientists a better understanding of how these animals survived, and even raises the hope that scientists may someday be able to bring mammoths back. According to the New York times,

The suggestion was not as wild as it might seem, given that the idea came from George Church, a leading genome technologist at the Harvard Medical School. The mammoth’s genome differs at about 400,000 sites from that of the African elephant. Dr. Church has been developing a method for altering 50,000 sites at a time, though he is not at present applying it to mammoths. In converting four sites on the elephant genome to the mammoth version, Dr. Campbell has resurrected at least one tiny part of the mammoth.

Reconstructing the whole animal will take a little longer. “I’m 42 years old,” he said, “but I doubt I’ll ever see a living mammoth.”

I’m in my thirties. Maybe, if I start saving now, I’ll be able to afford a mammoth when I retire?

via Mammoth Hemoglobin Offers More Clues to Its Arctic Evolution – NYTimes.com.

Tom Andrews, an archaeologist with the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Center in Yellowknife, describes researchers’ delight in the discovery.

“We’re just like children opening Christmas presents,” said Andrews, the lead researcher of the International Polar Year Ice Patch Study. “I kind of pinch myself.”

The discoveries are giving researchers a glimpse into hunting techniques that were utilized thousands of years ago. Because the specimens are so perfectly preserved, the archeologists are given a complete picture of how the tools were used. As Andrews explains,

“We are talking of complete examples of ancient technology, including arrows with wooden shafts, feathers and sinew hafting. These artifacts are giving us an entirely new appreciation of how ancient hunting tools were made and used,”

Until recently, these artifacts were locked in the ice created by snow patches that persisted year-round. Caribou flocked to these patches in summer to escape heat and bugs, making them a prime target for hunters.

Speaking of ancient hunters: Thomas poses with the harpoon he found in 2009.