REIA / The Arctic
Inuit Nunangat covers forty percent of Canada's land area and seventy-two percent of its coastline. The ice, the ground and the shore are all moving, and the monitoring infrastructure is thinner here than anywhere else in Canada.
No Inuit organisation has partnered with us yet. This page is the case we would bring to one. Where this stands
A thaw slump. As ice-rich permafrost thaws, the ground collapses and the exposed face retreats a little further every summer.
What is happening
Each of these would be a serious problem alone. Together they change what is possible to build, to travel on, and to eat.
Bylot Island, Nunavut
The September low point of Arctic sea ice has shrunk by about 12 percent per decade since satellite records began in 1979. The nineteen lowest minimums ever measured have all occurred in the last nineteen years.
The Canadian record says the same thing closer to home. Between 1968 and 2024, summer sea ice in northern Canadian waters shrank by about 7 percent per decade, from around 2 percent a decade in Kane Basin to 15 percent in the northern Labrador Sea. For every additional degree of global warming, Arctic waters that freeze seasonally are projected to stay ice-free about a month longer each year.
For a community, that is not an abstraction about polar bears. Sea ice is road, hunting platform and highway. Freeze-up arriving later and break-up earlier shortens the season when travel between places is possible at all, and ice that behaves differently than it did a generation ago makes inherited knowledge about where it is safe to cross less reliable exactly when it is most needed.
Dawson City, Yukon
The Canadian Arctic has warmed three times as fast as the global average since 1970. Ground that has been frozen for millennia is thawing, and it does not settle evenly. It slumps, opens sinkholes, and drains lakes.
Northern buildings, roads, airstrips, tank farms and water lines are all engineered on the assumption that the ground stays frozen. When that assumption fails, foundations crack, roads collapse in sections, and the damage often falls outside what insurance covers. Community members in Nunavik describe drywall splitting around windows and stretches of road giving way.
Some of this is already counted from space. On Banks Island, researchers working through thirty years of satellite images found active thaw slumps multiplying sixty-fold, from 63 in 1984 to 4,077 in 2013. In Iqaluit, runways and taxiways cracked and warped by thawing ground had to be dug up and rebuilt as part of the airport's upgrade.
Qikiqtaruk (Herschel Island), Yukon
Less sea ice means more open water, which means bigger waves reaching a coastline made partly of ice. Some communities in the Northwest Territories already see more than four and a half metres of coast lost a year, among the fastest rates in the Arctic. Tuktoyaktuk is the best known case in Canada, but it is not alone.
What erodes is not empty land. It is houses, cemeteries, archaeological sites and the ground communities were built on, at a rate that outpaces any planning cycle designed for the south.
What is actually needed
Almost everything built for environmental monitoring assumes reliable power, reliable bandwidth, road access and a technician who can drive out. None of those hold in Inuit Nunangat, where most communities have no road connection at all.
Offline first, genuinely. Field capture that works with no signal for days and syncs when it can, on a device that survives being cold.
Built for satellite bandwidth. Interfaces measured in kilobytes, not megabytes, that degrade to text rather than failing to load.
Radar over optical. Through polar darkness and near-permanent cloud, SAR is often the only instrument that works. Most monitoring platforms treat it as an afterthought.
Ground stability, not just temperature. Interferometry can detect ground moving under a building before anyone inside notices a crack.
Ice travel information owned locally. Ice conditions are safety information. Where it lives, who can see it, and who is liable for it are community decisions, not vendor settings.
Operated by people who live there. A monitoring program that depends on somebody flying in is a monitoring program that stops.
The communities
Inuit Nunangat spans the Inuvialuit Settlement Region in the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Nunavik in northern Quebec, and Nunatsiavut in Labrador. Fifty-one communities in total, home to about 48,700 Inuit, including about 30,900 in Nunavut.
The population is young. Inuit in Nunavut and Nunavik have a median age of about twenty-two, roughly twenty years younger than non-Indigenous people in Canada. That is the single most important fact on this page for anyone thinking about how technology should be introduced here.
It means training and employment are not a nice addition to a monitoring program. They are the program. A generation is coming up right now that will spend its working life managing this change, and the useful thing to build is their capacity to do it, not a service they rent.
Where this stands
We want to be straight about that. REIA has one active deployment and it is in Saskatchewan.
Everything on this page is drawn from the public record and from what northern communities and researchers have already said publicly. None of it is our finding, and no Inuit organisation has partnered with us on it.
We are publishing it because the technical case is strong, the need is documented, and the tools we are building for the prairies apply almost directly to the North with different inputs. What is missing is a community that wants it and the funding to do it properly.
If you work for an Inuit organisation, a regional government, a northern research institute or a funder with a northern mandate, that is precisely the conversation we are looking for. We would rather be told this framing is wrong by people who live there than be right on a website.
What a first step could look like. Something small and time-limited, shaped by the community from the start and aimed at whichever question matters most locally. The data would be owned and held by the community, and local people would be trained to run the work. Scope, timing and partners would be worked out together, not brought in finished.
Photos: sea ice, "Drift ice in Hudson Strait" by Doc Searls, CC BY 2.0. Sea ice travel, Bylot Island, by Ansgar Walk, CC BY-SA 2.5. "Dilapidated in Dawson" by Bo Mertz, CC BY-SA 2.0. Herschel Island coast by Boris Radosavljevic (Alfred Wegener Institute), CC BY 2.0. All via Wikimedia Commons. Maps as credited in their captions, NASA and Government of Canada material used under public domain and the Open Government Licence – Canada.
Further reading: Kenyon Wallace, "Beyond Frozen", Toronto Star, July 4, 2019. Source of the Iqaluit airport account above.