Northman's Fury

An 81-year-old elder and hunter from Igloolik was found alive Thursday, after four weeks of air and ground searches.

Searchers aboard a Twin Otter airplane spotted Enoki Kunuk near a vast fjord Thursday night.

"We found his kamotiq and snowmobile first, and then we found him beside his tent," Kunuk's son, Mathusalah Kunuk, told CBC News late Thursday.

Kunuk said his father waved up at the plane, looking healthy. A helicopter with medical staff picked the elder up later that evening.

This is actually pretty cool.  Anyone who hasn’t had the joy of living or working in the far north might not be able to appreciate just how much of a feat it is to survive on your own for an extended period of time.  In wilderness areas of the south, there is practically a profusion of resources in comparison.  And the fact that the temperature on the ice is so much colder means you need greater amounts of food just to keep your body producing heat to keep you warm and alive.

A couple years ago, a military patrol got cut off just a few miles out of Pangnirtung, a community several hundred miles south of Igloolik.  It wasn’t even twenty-four hours before they got picked up, only one night out on the land on their own.  Three young men in the prime of their lives, and given their military training, one assumes in near peak physical shape to boot, and they were described as being in rough shape.

Now compare that to an 81 year old elder stuck for a month alone on an ice-floe, coming out apparently none the worse for wear.  Local knowledge goes a long way.

I'm reading a report that came out yesterday (pdf file) (news story) regarding the devolution of powers from the federal government to the territorial government of Nunavut. I probably can't comment to much on the report, but one passage in it caught my eye:

Diesel and other fossil fuels are used for all personal, public and private activities in Nunavut. Twenty percent of the GN’s budget is spent on energy. Increases in the cost of oil have a direct impact on the territory’s budget. By contrast, 21% of the GN’s operational spending is allocated to education, and 26% to health care.

One-fifth of all government expenditures go to buying and subsidizing fossil fuels, all of which have to be imported during the short summer sea-lift season. With oil prices climbing, continued use of fossil fuels is going to eat up more and more government resources.

A couple years ago, I came across an article describing a pilot project down in Antarctica, where one of the science stations was planning on using wind power, both for electricity and for the generation of hydrogen to use as back-up power and for fuel in transportation. I found an update on the project here:

Expeditioners working in Australia's remote Antarctic field camps will soon be baking bread, heating their huts and powering their laptops with clean, green hydrogen.

The Australian Government's hydrogen demonstration project, led by the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD), will operate out of Mawson station and a nearby penguin-monitoring field camp at Béchervaise Island, this summer.

The project – the first of its kind in Antarctica – aims to investigate safety and operational aspects of using hydrogen, with a long-term view to running Australia's Antarctic field camps and stations without fossil fuels.

"As the cost of fossil fuels continues to rise, we need to explore renewable energy options to supplement or completely replace them," AAD engineer Peter Magill said.

"We have already reduced our fossil fuel use at Mawson by installing two wind turbines. And we can reduce it further by using any electricity generated by the turbines, in excess of station requirements, to produce hydrogen."

Nunavut is little more than a couple dozen communities scattered across the tundra. So far as I'm aware, there is exactly one windmill for power generation in the entire territory and its poorly maintained and rarely functioning. However, given over two million square miles of very underutilized land, you would think we could set up a considerable number of wind towers and start weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels.

Self-suffientcy for the territory and probably a money-saver in the long-term, and even environmentally friendly. So I expect our government will refuse to even consider it.