YANRAKYNNOT, Russia - The native elders have no explanation. Scientists are perplexed as well. The icy realm of the Eskimo - the tundra and ice of Russia, Alaska, Canada and Greenland - has started to thaw.
Strange portents are everywhere.
Thunder and lightning, once rare, have become commonplace. An eerie warm wind blows in from the south. Hunters who prided themselves on their ability to read the sky say they no longer can predict the sudden blizzards. "The Earth," one hunter concludes, "is turning faster."
In recent years, seabirds have washed up dead by the thousands and deformed seal pups have become a common sight. Whales appear sick and undernourished. The walrus, a mainstay of the local diet, is becoming scarce, as are tundra rabbits.
The elders, who keep thousands of years of history and legend without writing it down, have long told children this story: If the ice that freezes thick over the sea each winter breaks up before summer, the entire village could perish.
The children always laugh. Here in the Russian Arctic, the ground is frozen nearly year-round. The ice blanketing the winter seas around the Bering Strait is thick enough to support men dragging sleds loaded with whale carcasses.
Even Zoya Telpina, the schoolteacher in this outpost of 350 Chukchi reindeer herders and marine mammal hunters, says that a winter sea without ice seemed like "a fairy tale."
But last winter, when Telpina looked from her kitchen window toward the Bering Sea, she saw something she had never seen in her 38 years: the dark swell of the open ocean. Water where ice had always been.
Telpina's husband, Mikhail, a 38-year-old dog-sled musher, has seen mushrooms on the tundra shrivel and whole herds of reindeer starve. He has cut open the bellies of salmon to find strange insects inside. He has seen willows rise where he has never seen trees before.
The changes are so widespread that they have spawned changes in the Eskimo languages, which so precisely describe ice and snow. In Chukotka, where the natives speak Siberian Yupik, they use new words such as misullijuq - rainy snow - and are less likely to use words such as umughagek- ice that is safe to walk on. In Nunavet, Canada, the Inuit people say the weather is uggianaqtuq - like a familiar friend acting strangely.
What the residents of the Arctic are reporting fits convincingly with powerful computer models, satellite images and recently declassified ice measurements taken by Russian submarines.
