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FOR the past four decades, has visited the Arctic to record the lives of the remarkable people who live there, having adapted to winters without sun, temperatures that can fall to -60 °C and winds that howl at 300 kilometres per hour.
Among them are tens of thousands of people scattered across 2 million square kilometres of the Canadian territory of Nunavut – almost one-fifth of the country. Most are , such as Qingaq, shown here, who was photographed by Alexander as he paddled through frost smoke. Qingaq is one of the many extraordinary characters who populate Alexander’s new book, Forty Below: Traditional life in the Arctic, written with his wife Cherry.
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Alexander has witnessed remarkable changes in the Arctic. Many villages and camps are now abandoned and native groups such as the Inuit have switched from eating caribou, polar bear, whale and seal to fried chicken and pizza.
Even so, some cultures – notably in Siberia – maintain the old traditions. These include the , who are herders, and the , by the Bering Strait, who still hunt in the dark of the polar night and eat boiled and fermented walrus.
The environment is changing, too. In the central Arctic the proportion of old, thick sea ice has declined and it now largely consists of thin, one-year-old floes, according to the latest results from .
The extent of the sea ice has still not recovered says Stefan Hendricks at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany. The landfast sea ice, which is used for hunting, has seen a similar loss.
Although the thinner ice is more dangerous for dog sleds and snowmobiles it is not all bad news for hunting peoples, says Alexander. Grey whales now linger longer in the year, providing the indigenous people with more opportunities to hunt: the tongue of the whale is considered a delicacy.