Canadian village on front line of climate change in Arctic

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.

They're feeling climate change not only in this lonely corner of northwest Canada but in a wide circle at the top of the world, stretching from Alaska through the Siberian tundra, into northern Scandinavia and Greenland, and on to Canada's eastern Arctic islands, a circle of more than 300,000 indigenous people, including Gruben and the 800 other Inuvialuit, or Inuit, of the village they know as "Tuk."

Since 1970, temperatures have risen more than 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 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.

Her father, one-time fur trapper Eddie Gruben, spoke of more outsized interlopers from the south.

"Them killer whales, first time people seen them here in the harbor, three or four of them this summer," said the 89-year-old patriarch of Tuk's biggest family and biggest business, a contracting firm.

But the change runs deeper as well, undermining ways of life.

The later fall freezeup, earlier spring breakup 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.

The unpredictable ice and weather combine with a changing animal world to make hunting and fishing more challenging, and to crimp the traditional diet of "niqituinnaq," "real food" -- caribou, seal and other meat staples.

The resilient Inuit -- Eskimos -- of the past simply moved on to better places. But since the mid-20th century these ex-nomads have been tied to settlements, with all the buildings, utilities, roads and trouble that represents in a warming world.

At Tuk's graveyard, for example, white crosses stand akilter where the permafrost has heaved and sunk below.

"In another 20 years I'll be burying my relatives again," Gus Gruben, 45, the mayor's brother, said sadly as he surveyed the graves of forebears that will someday have to be moved.

A short distance away, the sound of Tuk eroding could be heard: The steel-gray Arctic Ocean crashed against a beach barrier of small boulders.

The hamlet of Tuktoyaktuk grew up in the 20th century on a spit of gravelly land hooking out into the Arctic's Beaufort Sea, at latitude 69 degrees north, 2,500 kilometers (1,500 miles) from the U.S. border, beyond the continent's tree line and amid a tundra landscape of numberless lakes framed by drier land overlaid with moss, lichens and shrubs.

Today's Tuk is a jumble of homely wood-frame houses, in white or pale blue or red, beneath power lines that sag alongside dirt roads leading to the peninsula's tip, "The Point," just past Our Lady of Grace church.

Like much of the western Arctic coast, the land here has been sinking for centuries, an aftereffect of the Ice Age. In recent memory, before stopgap barriers were built, the sea each year was taking away about a meter (3 feet) of Tuk's beach. Gus Gruben remembers waves spraying through classroom windows in the 1970s, before the school was moved from its spot near the graveyard.

Climate change now adds to the problem.

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.

Tuk's troubles are repeated in settlements across the Arctic. Some examples:

• On Alaska's Bering and Chukchi sea coasts, villages may have to be relocated. The U.S. Army and Marines are already helping the 350 people of one hamlet, Newtok, move to higher ground.

• Across the Bering Strait in east Siberia, thawing permafrost has damaged airport runways, cutting off communities from emergency medical evacuations, a representative of the indigenous Yukagir people told an Anchorage conference this May.

• In Pangnirtung, on Canada's Baffin Island, an unusual rush of meltwater this spring eroded the permafrost holding up two bridges, bringing them down.

The mayor hopes Tuk will sit tight for many more winters. That's why he and the hamlet council agreed to the wind-power plan, a government project to test the technology in this harsh environment. Two to four turbines are expected to be operating by 2011, replacing perhaps 20 percent of Tuk's current diesel-generated power, as this little place does its part to reduce emissions blamed for global warming.