Residents of Baffin Island are getting ready to celebrate one of Canada's most unique festivals: the unpacking of the sealift delivery. For days the air in towns like Iqaluit will be filled with the sounds of banging hammers and ripping cardboard as the goods they ordered from southern Canada finally arrive by ship.
Environment Canada is forecasting
During the long winter months food supplies can only arrive by airplane. Food can cost from twice to three times what it does down south.
Northerners are used to paying more than two dollars for a can of pop, more than a dollar for an apple and three dollars for a litre of milk. Believe it or not, a simple head of wilted lettuce can cost five dollars.
But large, heavy items cannot be transported by airplane. So northern residents order what they need by catalogue or telephone or the Internet, and wait for the ships to arrive in the spring.
"El Nino as you know lasted well into the winter last year, and we've had above normal temperatures the whole winter in the eastern Arctic and Hudson Bay," says Rick Power, a spokesman for the Canadian Ice Service. "So the ice didn't thicken as much as normal in most areas, and it started to clear a little earlier.
"And of course we've had a very mild spring as well."
Environment Canada's outlook for ice break-up and clearing patterns predicts smooth sailing in much of James Bay, Hudson Bay and Hudson Strait by the first week of July - a month earlier than normal . Across the Arctic, ice break-up is expected to be three weeks early, on average.
"I have been involved in shipping in the Arctic since 1969 and certainly nobody I've talked to who had been up there for decades before had ever seen anything like this," he says. "Five years ago, if we had said we were going to Iqaluit June 25 people would say, 'you're crazy.'"
1. Whom or what is Environment Canada forecasting as shippers prepare to carry out the annual resupply of building materials, non-perishable food, cars, snowmobiles and boats?