The Attacking Ocean Read Online Free PDF Page A

place where they’ve hunted for many centuries.
    Sea level changes have a long history in the North American Arctic. In about 2500 B.C.E., sea level rise around the Bering Sea slowed, formingbeaches along its coastlines. Fishing and sea mammal hunting thrived in the following centuries, as human settlement spread gradually across the far north into what is now eastern Canada. Around the northern shores of Hudson Bay and the southern Canadian Arctic archipelago, some groups settled in areas where game, fish, and sea mammals abounded. As sea levels receded owing to a combination of geological factors, the people moved their camps to stay close to the water’s edge. Sea levels declined locally from sixty meters down to four meters above modern sea level. 1 Much of local subsistence came from seal hunting from the ice edge and at winter breathing holes. The hunters would crouch for hours, waiting for the moment when the seal came up to breathe. A quick harpoon thrust, then frantic chiseling with the butt of the weapon to widen the hole in the ice, so they could drag the seal onto the ice before it carried the harpoon, and perhaps the hunter, into the water.
    As far as we can discern, coastal populations along the northern shore and islands were extremely sparse, except where caribou herds abounded. After about 700 B.C.E., advances in sea mammal hunting technology, including much more effective harpoons, revolutionized coastal life throughout the Arctic. In the words of archaeologist Owen Mason, life throughout the Bering Strait region was “a welter of small villages with divided and shifting loyalties, multiple origins, and limited spans of occupation.” 2 Many communities settled on barrier islands and along low-lying estuaries, where they exploited the seasonal migrations of fish and sea mammals.
    Around 1300 C.E., during the warmer centuries of the Medieval Warm Period, groups of highly mobile hunters with kayaks and larger hide boats ranged from the Bering Strait along the Arctic Ocean coast. Their watercraft enabled them to move over wider territories, following seal migration routes through narrow defiles in the ice far from their bases. Ice conditions were less severe during the warmer centuries, so they could also prey on whale migrations that moved eastward in spring, westward in fall, following ice-free leads close to shore. This may have been the time when the ancestors of modern-day Eskimo communities along the Chukchi Sea coast north of the Bering Strait used summer camps on the low barrier islands that protected much of the shore.Their descendants still hunt on the ice and along the coast, but with a significant difference. Temporary camps have become permanent villages, at a time when global warming melts the ice ever earlier each year.
    ACCORDING TO A succinct definition on the web, a barrier island is “a long, relatively narrow island running parallel to the mainland, built up by the action of waves and currents and serving to protect the coast from erosion by surf and tidal surges.” 3 Barrier islands often develop in the mouths of flooded river valleys as the sea levels rise, or at river mouths where sediment accumulates and forms a delta. Local geology, sea level changes, vegetation, and wave activity are but a few of the factors that can affect such islands. Over the past five thousand years, rising sea levels have created a plethora of barrier islands, especially in the Arctic and North Atlantic. They are rarer in the Southern Hemisphere, where sea levels have tended to be more stable. Over two thousand barrier islands are known, many of them identified from high quality satellite imagery. They most typically form along geologically stable coasts with shallow estuaries, like those along much of the eastern United States. About three quarters of the world’s barrier islands are in the Northern Hemisphere, most of them in the high-latitude Arctic, where sea levels are rising faster than anywhere