For more than 1,000 years, sled dogs have pulled hunters and fishers across the Arctic ice, and one man is determined to save those traditions as the ice melts away.
Jørgen Kristensen grew up in northern Greenland, where his stepfather's dogs became his closest companions. At age nine, he took them out on the ice alone to fish. That bond shaped everything.
He went on to become a five-time Greenlandic dog-sled champion and now runs a company bringing tourists into his icy homeland to share its beauty while sounding the alarm about what's disappearing, according to the Associated Press.
Sea ice once acted as a frozen highway, connecting Inuit communities across Greenland, Canada, the United States, and Russia. This past January in Ilulissat, roughly 186 miles north of the Arctic Circle, there was none. Kristensen's sled bounced over bare earth and rock instead, the first time he could remember no snow or ice in the bay in the warmest January on record.
In the 1980s, winter temperatures there regularly hit minus-13 degrees Fahrenheit. Some days now reach 50 degrees Fahrenheit. The Arctic is warming nearly four times faster than the rest of the world — due to human activity — and Greenland's sled dog population has halved over the past 20 years to around 15,000 and is still falling.
But this isn't just a local phenomenon. The nearby Sermeq Kujalleq glacier has retreated 25 miles over Kristensen's lifetime. It is one of the fastest and most active glaciers in the world, according to UNESCO, and it is contributing to rising sea levels from Europe to the Pacific Islands, according to NASA.
Kristensen's response is to teach. On every tour, he explains that Greenland's glaciers are as ecologically vital as the Amazon rainforest. He believes reaching the next generation matters as much as anything.
"If we don't start with the children, we can't really do anything to help nature," Kristensen told the Associated Press. "We can only destroy it."
His work reflects a broader movement across Greenland, where community members and researchers are creating programs to reconnect youth with Inuit traditions before that knowledge disappears.
"If we lose the dog sledding, we have large parts of our culture that we're losing," he said. "That scares me."
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