Franklin’s ships would have had to fight through the castled pack ice that had built up over decades.Īnd yet the expedition managed to travel as far south as the northern tip of King William Island. Conditions would have been unusually harsh for an Arctic expedition. Alt and her colleagues examined ice cores taken from glaciers and concluded that the Arctic was in a cooling phase during Franklin’s time. This variability probably held true in Franklin’s time as well. Manasie Maniapik, resident - Pangnirtung, Nunavutįrom the Inuit Siku Atlas (Atlas of Inuit Sea Ice Knowledge and Use) It’s very, very important to Inuit, because it’s our ‘qaujiti,’ which means we were born to it and we’ve always lived in it…If the sea ice doesn’t form anymore, although we still get snow, our life would drastically change.

Even today, there are summers when the Northwest Passage can have a fair amount of ice. To the men of Franklin’s expedition, an ice-free journey would have been a beachside dream.īut the tricky thing about climate change is that within large-scale trends, you find small-scale variations. In some years, starting in 2012, the sea ice coverage in the Northwest Passage goes down to zero.Īt this rate, some experts predict that the Northwest Passage will be generally ice-free in the summers by 2030. Sea ice coverage, for example, is shrinking at a rate not seen in the last 1400 years.Īccording to the Canadian Ice Service, summer sea ice coverage in the Northwest Passage has been declining generally since scientists starting taking measurements in 1968. Today, more than 170 years later, we know that climate change has taken its toll on the Arctic. The human influence on climate had just begun. Industry was generating small amounts of greenhouse gases compared to now. At that time, civilization had just started to use fossil fuels on a large scale. The Arctic of John Franklin’s time was not the Arctic of today.įranklin and his men set out for the Northwest Passage in 1845. The Franklin Expedition and climate change Federal Heritage Buildings Review Office.Directory of federal heritage designations.National marine conservation areas system.

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