Sea ice is disappearing in the North. This is how Inuit are responding

For over 30 years, Reuben Flowers has been documenting the changes unfolding in the North. 

The Inuk life skills teacher from Hopedale has spent decades jotting down daily observations of the weather conditions and ice levels in the capital of Nunatsiavut. 

And his journals are proof that the climate is changing. 

"The ice is definitely thinning,"  Flowers, 57, told Unreserved host Rosanna Deerchild. "When I was a child, it was much thicker then." 

For many communities in the North, ice is present for six to nine months of the year, and is an integral part of the landscape. 

During the winter, when the ferries stop and flights could be disrupted, ice connects communities. They become roads for people to traverse and hunt for food and materials such as arctic char, seal and firewood. 

Climate change, says Flowers, disrupts the land and ice that have sustained Inuit people physically, emotionally, spiritually and mentally since time immemorial. 

"We are Sikumiut," said Flowers. "It means people of the ice." 

As the ice continues to deteriorate, residents of Nunatsiavut, like Flowers, are being forced to adapt to a new reality. 

Rex Holwell, an Inuk from Nain, the northernmost community in Nunatsiavut, is tackling the problem head-on. 

He's the manager of SmartICE operations in Nunatsiavut, a company that combines traditional knowledge with modern technology to monitor Northern ice conditions. He says the increasing demand for their technology is bittersweet. 

"[It's] bad in the sense that everybody's seeing climate change that we really don't want to [see]," Holwell said. 

In the past, Inuit relied on traditional knowledge passed down through generations to assess ice conditions. For safety purposes, elders taught younger generations how to determine its thickness, strength and snow cover. 

But the weather trends used to predict ice levels are no longer the same as what had been used in their traditional knowledge, according to Holwell. The extended periods of rain and warmer temperatures in Nain are "stuff that [they've] never [seen] before," he said.