Arctic Heat Wave.

It's another warm day in Iqaluit, capital of the new semi-sovereign Inuit nation of Nunavit in the Canadian Arctic. The bizarre weather is the talk of the town. The urgency of global warming is on everyone's lips.

While George W. Bush stalls with talk about needing "sound science," the temperature hit 82 degrees Fahrenheit on July 28 in this Baffin Island community that nudges the Arctic Circle. That's thirty-five degrees above the July average of 47, making it comparable to a 115- to 120-degree day in New York City or Chicago.

It is the warmest summer anyone in the area can remember. Swallows, sandflies, and robins are making their debuts, and pine pollen is affecting people as never before. Travelers joke about forgetting their shorts, sunscreen, and mosquito repellant--all now necessary equipment for a globally warmed arctic summer.

In Iqaluit (pronounced "Eehalooeet"), a warm, desiccating westerly wind raises whitecaps on nearby Frobisher Bay and rustles carpets of purple saxifrage flowers as people emerge from their overheated houses (which have been built to absorb every scrap of passive solar energy) with ice cubes wrapped in hand towels. The wind raises eddies of dust on Iqaluit's gravel roads as residents swat at the slow, corpulent mosquitoes.

Welcome to the thawing ice-world of the third millennium. Around the Arctic, in Inuit villages connected by the oral history of traveling hunters as well as by e-mail now, weather watchers are reporting striking evidence that global warming is an unmistakable reality. Sachs Harbour, on Banks Island, above the Arctic Circle, is sinking into the permafrost. Shishmaref, an Inuit village on the far-western lip of Alaska sixty miles north of Nome, is being washed into the newly liquid (and often stormy) Arctic Ocean as its permafrost base dissolves.

In the Arctic, a world based on ice and snow is melting away.

"We have never seen anything like this. It's scary, very scary," says Ben Kovic, Nunavut's chief wildlife manager. "It's not every summer that we run around in our T-shirts for weeks at a time."

At 11:30 A.M. on a Saturday, Kovic is sitting in his backyard, repairing his fishing boat, wearing a T-shirt and blue jeans in the warm wind, with many hours of Baffin's eighteen-hour July daylight remaining. On a nearby beach, Inuit children are building sand castles with plastic shovels and buckets, occasionally dipping their toes in the still-frigid sea water.

"The glaciers are turning brown," he says, speculating that melting ice may be exposing debris and that air pollution may be a factor. Some ringed seals have been caught with little or no hair, he reports, though he doesn't have an explanation for this. "That is a big question that someone has to answer," he says. Rivers have dried up that used to be spawning grounds for Arctic char.

Other changes are more menacing. During Iqaluit's weeks of record heat in July, two tourists were hospitalized after they were mauled by a polar bear in a park south of town. On July 20, a similar confrontation occurred in northern Labrador as a polar bear tried to claw its way into a tent occupied by a group of Dutch tourists, according to the Toronto Globe and Mail. That time, the tourists escaped injury but the bear was shot to death.

The bears are "often becoming shore dwellers rather than ice dwellers," says Kovic. The harbor ice at Iqaluit did not form last year until late December, five or six weeks later than usual. The ice also breaks up earlier in the spring, sometimes in May in places that once were icebound into early July. Polar bears usually obtain their food (seals, for example) from the ice. Without it, they can become hungry, miserable creatures, especially in unaccustomed warmth.

"The bears are looking for a cooler place," says Kovic.

On Hudson Bay in Manitoba, polar bears waking from their winter's slumber have found the ice melted earlier than usual. Instead of making their way onto the ice in search of seals, the bears walk along the coast until they get to towns like Churchill, where they block motor traffic and pillage the dump. Churchill now has a holding tank for wayward polar bears that is larger than its human jail.

Canadian Wildlife Service scientists reported in 1998 that polar bears around Hudson Bay were 90 to 220 pounds lighter than thirty years ago, apparently because earlier ice-melting has given them less time to feed on seal pups. When sea ice fails to reach a particular area, the entire ecological cycle is disrupted. When the ice melts prematurely, the polar bears can no longer use it to hunt for ring seals, many of which also have died, having had no ice to haul out on.

The offshore, ice-based ecosystem is sustained by upwelling nutrients, which feed the plankton, shrimp, and other small organisms, which feed the fish, which feed the seals, which feed the bears. Many Native people, who fish and hunt for their sustenance, are also deprived of a way of life. When the ice is not present, the entire cycle collapses.

Ice in many areas now melts earlier, sometimes as early as March, when the seals are having their pups. Because the ice breaks up too early, the pups often have not been fully weaned. Many of them starve or grow up in a weakened state. Warmer average temperatures may mean that the Arctic Ocean will become ice-free much of the year, imperiling populations of walrus and seal that feed on creatures living on the ice.

The Arctic's rapid thaw has made hunting, never a safe or easy way of life, even more difficult and dangerous. Last winter, Simon Nattaq, an Inuit hunter, fell through unusually thin ice and became mired in icy water long enough to lose both his legs to hypothermia, one of several injuries and deaths reported around the Arctic recently due to thinning ice.

Pitseolak Alainga, another Iqaluit-based hunter, said that climate change compels caution. One must never hunt alone, he said (Nattaq had been hunting by himself).

Alainga knows the value of safety on the water. His father and five other men died during late October 1994, after an unexpected storm swamped their hunting boat. The younger Alainga and one other companion barely escaped death in the same storm.

Within two or three generations, many Inuit have become urbanized as the tendrils of industrial life extend to the Arctic. Where visitors once arrived by dog sled or sailing ship, they now stream into Iqaluit's busy airport on Boeing 727s in which half the passenger cabin has been sequestered for freight. With no land-surface connections to the outside, freight as large as automobiles is sometimes shipped to Iqaluit by air.

The population of Iqaluit has jumped from about 3,500 to 6,500 in less than three years. Substantial suburban-style houses with mortgages worth hundreds of thousands of dollars have sprung up around town, rising on stakes sunk into the permafrost and granite hillsides. In other areas, ranks of walk-up apartments march along the high ridges above Frobisher Bay. Every ounce of building material has been imported from thousands of miles away.

People in Iqaluit subscribe to the same cable television services available in "the South." Bart Simpson and Tom Brokaw are well-known personages in Iqaluit, where some homes have sprouted satellite dishes. Iqaluit also now hosts a large supermarket of a size that matches stores in larger urban areas, except that the prices are three to four times higher than in Ottawa or Omaha. If one can afford the bill, mango-grapefruit juice and ready-cooked buffalo wings (as well as many other items of standard "southern" fare) are readily available.

Climate change has been rapid, and easily detectable within a single human lifetime. "When I was a child," said Sheila Watt-Cloutier, Canadian president of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, "we never swam in the river [Kuujjuaq] where I was born [Nunavik, Northern Quebec], and now kids swim in there all of the time." Cloutier does not remember even having worn short pants as a child.

Gunter Weller, director of the Center for Global Change and Arctic System Research at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, says mean temperatures in the state have increased by five degrees Fahrenheit in the summer and ten degrees in the winter over the last thirty years. Moreover, the Arctic ice field has shrunk by 40 percent to 50 percent over the last few decades and has lost 10 percent of its thickness, studies show.

"These are pretty large signals, and they've had an effect on the entire physical environment," Weller says.

Six hundred Native people in the village of Shishmaref are watching their village erode into the sea. The permafrost that had reinforced Shishmaref's waterfront is thawing. "We stand on the island's edge and see the remains of houses fallen into the sea," wrote Anton Antonowicz in the London Daily Mirror last year. "They are the homes of poor people. Half-torn rooms with few luxuries. A few photographs, some abandoned cooking pots. Some battered suitcases."

Percy Nayokpuk, a village elder, runs the local store, which now perches dangerously close to the edge of the advancing sea. "When I was a teenager, the beach stretched at least fifty yards further out," Percy told the Daily Mirror. As each year passes, the sea's approach seems faster. Five houses have washed into the sea; the U.S. Army has moved or jacked up others. The villagers have been told they will soon have to move. Year by year, the hunting season, which depends on the arrival of the ice, starts later and ends earlier.

"Instead of dog mushing, we have dog slushing." Clifford Weyiouanna told the paper.

In the Canadian Inuit town of Inuvik, ninety miles south of the Arctic Ocean near the mouth of the Mackenzie River, the temperature rose to 91 degrees on June 18, 1999.

"We were down to our T-shirts and hoping for a breeze," says Richard Binder, a local whaler and hunter. Along the Mackenzie River, according to Binder, "Hillsides have moved even though you've got trees on them. The thaw is going deeper because of the higher temperatures and longer periods of exposure."

In some places near Binder's village, the thawing earth has exposed ancestral graves, and the remains have had to be reburied.

Some Alaskan forests have been drowning and turning gray as thawing ground sinks under them. Trees and roadside utility poles, destabilized by thawing, lean at crazy angles. The warming has contributed a new phrase to the English language in Alaska: "the drunken forest."

Born in an igloo, Rosmary Kuptana grew up in Sachs Harbour. Now forty-seven, she has been an Inuit weather watcher for much of her life. Her job was to scan the morning clouds and test the wind's direction to help the hunters decide whether to go out, and what everyone should wear.

"We can't read the weather like we used to," says Kuptana. "The permafrost is melting at an alarming rate." Foundations of homes in Sachs Harbour are cracking and shifting. Kuptana says at least three experienced hunters recently fell to their deaths through unusually thin ice.

In the fall, storms have become more frequent and more violent, making boating difficult. Thunder and lightning have been seen for the first time, arriving with another type of weather that is new to the area: dousing summer rainstorms.

At Sachs Harbour, mosquitoes and beetles are now common sights; they were unknown a generation ago. Sea-ice is thinner and now drifts far away during the summer, taking with it the seals and polar bears the village's Inuit residents rely on for food.

"We have no other sources of food; the people in my community are completely dependent on hunting, trapping, and fishing," says Kuptana. "We don't know when to travel on the ice, and our food sources are getting farther and farther away. Our way of life is being permanently altered."

Bruce E. Johansen, Robert T. Reilly Professor of Communication and Native American Studies at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, is the author of "The Global Warming Desk Reference" (Greenwood Press, 2001).