For the past decade or so, respected elders of the American Inuit tribe have been telling the rest of us – including the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) that the planet is undergoing some unusual changes worthy of our attention.
Although many people grew up calling them Eskimos, Inuit is the proper name of the people native to the icy tundra near the far-northern Arctic Circle at the “top” of the world. As you may recall from science class, the Earth spins on a rotational axis that can’t be seen directly that passes through the North and South Poles. We describe its movement by the positions of the stars in the night sky which change as the planet spins on its axis and revolves around the Sun.
Star-gazers learn to recognize the constellations as they appear overhead, marking the beginning of the four seasons. Mariners rely on up-to-date star charts that map stellar positions to aid navigation. Over long periods of time (thousands of years), star positions change regularly and predictably. Polaris (the Pole Star at the North Pole) travels in a leisurely circle around True North. Its movement is well-understood.
The Inuit have a spiritual culture that teaches oneness with nature. This means paying attention to what’s going on in the environment and responding accordingly. Some folks call this “going with the flow.” A fan of Charles Darwin might say, “Adapt or die.”
According to the Inuit, who are sun-watchers and keen observers who note changes in star positions throughout the days and nights, sunlight now strikes the Earth from a higher angle, producing more hours of daylight. Wind and drift patterns are also changing.
Elder Inuits have been around the racetrack quite a few times. They revealed some ten years ago that the night sky had become different. It was altered – the stars’ positions had been shifted by the higher angle of sunlight. This finding was confirmed by other Arctic Inuit groups who had made similar observations.
NASA didn’t deny what the Inuit were claiming – which was Big News about the planet. One has to wonder why the American federal agency that receives billions of taxpayer dollars to fund its scientific research and space exploration didn’t catch on to something as obvious as shifting star positions as the “primitive” natives to the north?
The NASA explanation from September 2018 involved the known wobble of the planetary spin-axis called polar motion. The scientists came up with three supposed causes for the radical change in recent, accelerated sun and star positions. One of them was “melting of the global cryosphere (especially Greenland) over the course of the 20th century is one of them.”
A 2018 study from the University of California, San Diego, that compiled data on the Greenland ice sheet concluded that the area has lost ice mass over the past 46 years (from 1972 to 2018) with “a sixfold increase in mass loss from the 1980s.”
NASA published similar findings:
“The mass of the Greenland ice sheet has rapidly declined in the last several years due to surface melting and iceberg calving. Between 2002 and 2016, Greenland shed approximately 280 gigatons of ice per year, causing global sea level to rise by 0.03 inches (0.8 millimeters) per year.”
NASA then built a theory to wed the United Nations’ global warming scam with a known astronomical cycle:
“In general, the redistribution of mass on and within Earth-like changes to land, ice sheets, oceans, and mantle flow – affects the planet’s rotation.” Waxing prosaic, the federal space agency said that “the weight of more than 20 million Empire State Buildings” melted into the surrounding seas, causing sea levels to rise.
Taking their guess further, NASA pronounced:
“This makes Greenland one of the top contributors of mass being transferred to the oceans, causing sea level to rise and, consequently, a drift in Earth’s spin axis.”
Bear in mind that nobody really knows what’s behind most planetary phenomena and behavior. NASA is speculating, which is good science. But assigning causality based on merely a correlation (things that happen together) is bad science.
The Inuits have their own ideas on the matter. They set out to warn NASA that these planetary changes were a natural process, a by-product of a shifting Earth.
Celebrated Nunavut filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk confirmed that survival in the Arctic depends “from childhood on their knowledge of the most minute details of the Arctic land and skies.”
Speaking about another mainstream scientific explanation that warming Arctic air is producing temperature inversions that make the light of the setting sun bend (refract) which creates an optical illusion that the sun is setting miles from its true position. Kunuk said the non-natives discount the Inuit’s credibility and expertise where nature is concerned:
“There is so much garbage in the air, it’s refraction that’s causing our elders to think our world has tilted.”
Not so, according to the people who live near the North Pole. The Inuits understand that humans are incapable of taming the powerful forces of Mother Nature and it is we who must adapt – or die:
“We have to. We have no choice,” said Kunuk, echoing the native elders.