It's July at a fly-in only diamond mine in the land of the midnight sun. An RCMP murder investigation locks down the facility. No one is allowed to leave. There's nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
And they're coming for her...
My years in the Arctic changed me, and now the Arctic is changing more rapidly than I could ever have imagined.
The far north was the first part of the world to experience the effects of climate change. Many might think rising temperatures are a good thing. However, as permafrost melts, building foundations and roads collapse. Lakes drain and disappear into thawed ground that had been frozen for thousands of years. Severe weather events are more frequent and extreme (and they were pretty bad before). It's more difficult and expensive for ice road truckers to resupply the communities and mines without year-round road access.
The Sea Ice Is Melting
Diminishing Arctic sea ice means, yes, the Northwest passage is opening to shipping and cruise ships. However seals are drowning (no ice floes on which to perch to rest with their young) and polar bears are starving.
"You Don't Know What You've Got Till it's Gone"
Canadian singer/songwriter Joni Mitchell made that line famous. It's from her song Big Yellow Taxi.
Catherine McKenna, Canada’s federal minister of environment and climate change, says in the article How Climate Change is Affecting Canada:
“On a visit last summer to Tallurutiup Imanga – also known as Lancaster Sound – I met a 14-year-old Inuk boy. He sat down beside me and showed me a list of things he observed in his community related to climate change. He told of polar bears that were skinnier. Of his foot getting stuck while hunting in melting permafrost like quicksand, where the ground was once frozen. Of caribou – country food for the Inuit – disappearing. He spoke of his friends’ fathers disappearing, falling through the ice while hunting. These are hunters who for millennia have been able to use traditional knowledge to tell the thickness of the ice.”
Bridge Over Troubled Water
When I returned to Yellowknife on business in the early 2000s, 20 years after living up north, I was shocked that the temperature in mid February was only 5 F (-15 C) instead of the usual -22 F (-30 C). I was doubly shocked to learn that there was no ice road across the Mackenzie River. For more than 50 years, trucks drove over the frozen river from December to April to resupply Yellowknife and its gold mines, and to connect to ice roads to other communities. Going by the weather forecasts on television, the daily temperatures have continued to rise since my last visit in person 15 years ago.
Given that climate warming is irreversible, and subarctic winters will never again be cold enough to create ice of sufficient thickness for an ice road across the mighty Mackenzie River, 2012 marked the completion of a 0.7 mile (1 km) long $200 million bridge.
It's called adapting to climate change. Expensive, eh?
Land of the Midnight Sun – That Won't Change
On the high Arctic coast in the dead of winter the sun barely rises above the horizon. To compensate, the northern lights dazzle. During the short summer the sun never sets: it just moves clockwise around the sky. At midnight it's broad daylight.
Diamond Hunter is set in July, and the sun is a special feature in this novel. Seth, a cop with the RCMP Diamond Protection Unit undercover as a pilot, always has his eye on the weather.
Seth scanned the filmy clouds threaded across the sky. Ten o’clock on an early July evening in Yellowknife and it was as bright as late afternoon in his hometown on the US-Canada border between Washington State and British Columbia. This time of year, the sun merely dipped to paint the horizon a glorious mess of reds and oranges for an hour or two before rising again.
Can't fly up north to see for yourself? Diamond Hunter lets you experience it vicariously!
Madelle
DiamondHunter is a free read in Kindle Unlimited.
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